On Saturday, the 9th of May we are back on our favourite little side street off Brixton Road by @crown_anchorsw9 a lovely boozer right next to Slade Gardens.
We will be rolling out our funktion one sound system and inviting some of our bestest DJ pals to bring a selection of music to bring out the sunshine and happy smiling dancing people.
With sets from @larry_plays_records@coulson._@falulu.fm@colossal_squid
Kicking off at 2 and going until 9pm this is a free, all welcome ,family friendly event with a playground just across the park, so feel free to bring kids, dogs, grandparents, goldfish, but preferably no snakes đ
#brixton #streetparty #djs #dayparty #freeevents
A still from a music video I shot a while ago and never finished .. shot lots of high speed with a cross bow and some glass hearts filled with ink.. this was a test with an empty one but love this image .. would make a great album cover I reckon đ„ was a miracle I didnât get a cross bow bolt to the head after one particularly bad ricochet but you have to suffer for ur art ! (The way the bolt menacingly reappeared travelling the opposite direction in that outtake was kinda funny but a flight case lid / makeshift shield saved the day!)
One of 2025s highlights! #bbcwinterolympics directed by @yannisandfriends and shot by @howell.toby had the pleasure of working on it and providing some motion control and camera kit.. lots of long exposures of burning wire wool and 3d printed replacements for the athlete puppets .. just goes to show in camera practical FX reign supreme in a world where AI is a threat to our creative endeavours.. super lovely job all round !
Holy moly .. as if two British arrow nominations wasnât enough. #BBC #winterolympics has a #bafta nomination too.. couldnât be prouder of the work we did in 2022, hands down some of the most technically challenging and rewarding to date... @notbalasz is a force of nature and Im super blessed to have had the chance to make some amazing work with him and @blink_ink .. everything he directed in his debut year there has been cleaning up at the awards and I have everything crossed for some more wins.. đ€đ»đđ€đ»
One of my first full move tests with the lighting in any kind of programmed state.. lots of pops and errors in there as I made edits every time I had to stop and change the gels in the can. We used a can with a dotted grid that would tell us when we had the placement of the can and LED within correct as the lines would map the edges of each facet .. although I wasnât paying a lot of attention to the alignment whilst I was programming the colour changes and general levels you get the idea!
This is the LED - nema 8 hollow shaft motor - slip ring combination that we arrived at after considerable R & D that made green king possible.. notice the foil that covers most of the actual LED.. this was due to the fact that despite being <1mm across, it was still not small enough to produce sharp projections on the wall due to the proximity of the gobo / can wall and the distance to the set wall.. anyone who has played around with shadow puppets as a kid knows your hand needs to either be close to the wall or the light source needs to be far away from your hand to make sharp shadows .. the opposite was true for us.. the light source was very close to the can / gobo and the wall was relatively far away.. hence the source needed to be INCREDIBLY small to create sharp shadows / projections.. I think the aperture in the foil tape is <0.2mm! Then of course in order to be able to spin the led every frame without wired becoming increasingly twisted up, a MINUTE 5.5mm diameter âslip ringâ had to be introduced below the LED with the wires being fed down the hollow shaft of the motor. (A slip ring is like a gyro on a bmx - the thing that allows you to spin the handle bars without the brake cables becoming twisted) then the next challenge was placing the source in the precise spot within the can, and also relative to the axis of Rotation so that the source was static in space as it turned and was placed correctly so that the animation was projected in the correct place on the set .. there are parts where the animation on the set wall and the front of the can interact so this was all critical!! So some precision engineering was required for the LED mount and a rig that allowed movement in X , Y and Z was produced by Andy Spradbury, our expert rigger , that would make all of this possible ! We used a special âcalibrationâ can with dotted lines that mapped the sets geometry to ensure all the light source was in the exact right place.. if those lines didnât match the set or the dotted line was blurry , we knew we had to try harder! The result looks clean and simple but the execution was no small feat!
Hereâs the BTS for the Green King commercial I posted recently .. shot by @joe.eckworth - making of extraordinaire. Captures nicely the development from the CGI world into the real world .. one thing it doesnât show is the insanely dense #dragonframe5 project! In particular the motion control and cinematography features. Although itâs all in camera, the final result is actually a composite of 10 separate exposures .due to the fact the LED had to rotate, I ended up needing to âindexâ ( a secondary position for an axis on another exposure) the leds direction so that the animator could see the most crucial part of the projection for line up. Then we had the go motion on X2 , X3 was 2 & 1/2 stops under to preserve the highlights / info in cutout parts of the can directly facing camera , then we had the BG lights only on X4 and a stop over on X5 (basically for the opposite reason as X3 but for dark areas for safety) then we had those 5 exposures replicated with the FOCUS indexed so that for certain moments, we could keep the can and the projections in focus without having to shoot at such a deep stop that the live view was unusable and the exposure time wasnât unreasonably long! We were already having issues with light leaking into the set and severely affecting the exposure at 3s / 32000 ISO! Even with capture blackout on the stray light from the monitor looked like someone had switched on the house lights! The motion control window was also pretty impressive as well as the FBX move file from maya and the indexed focus and LED axis which meant double graphs for those axis, I also had to calibrate the LED motor to the STEP so that I could program it to travel exactly 360 degrees per frame or it would have needed a key frame on every frame or risk it drifting out over the course of the shoot. The tolerances across this job were as good as zero! đ but yeh.. despite it ending up being a gargantuan program, dragon performed flawlessly! TLDR: Complicated as fuck! đ€đ
Here it is! The green king spot that we toiled over for 11 straight days!! Super proud of what we all achieved ! Directed by @notbalasz produced by @samigoddard for @blink_ink and lit by myself with @elliot_be gaffing.. it takes a few viewings to really comprehend the madness! laser cutting by @lasercutworks , each frame is projected and mapped to the geometry of the perfectly constructed set by @mattesandminiatures_ltd so that from the cameras angle it forms a coherent image thanks to the incredibly detailed calculations done in 3D with the light source, motion of the can and camera and the set all perfectly arranged and mapped beforehand. In order to create a sharp image on the wall that covers 360 degrees, an incredibly bright LED had to be perfectly aligned on a tiny stepper motor with slip rings so it could continuously turn and was shot âgo motionâ over a 3 second exposure at 32000 ISO (thanks to the #eosR6 - incredible camera!) partly because, despite the led being bright, I had to have the laser cutters burn a tiny hole into adhesive foil tape to cover most of the 1mm LED in order to get the source small enough to keep the projections sharp! Even the foil had to be 0.07mm thick because any thicker would cut the width of the beam down too much! On top of that we were using the ENTIRE envelope of the #volo #motioncontrol rig and I mean itâs entirety , using the swing of the arm to extend its reach which meant the placement of the rig was critical to within <1degree , 120 channels of DMX programming which took two solid days and the fact that if the placement of the can, the light source, the rig, the set and their relationship to each other was out by a knats whisker then none of it worked and you start to get a picture of jsut how insanely difficult this was to pull off!! Despite it being âreplacement animationâ there was actually a hell of a lot of skill required from the animators @andyrbiddle , Tobias fouracre, @chris.ullens due to the fact that the cans has to be registered absolutely perfectly and they were working in almost complete darkness... anyway, very proud of the result! Outstanding work from everyone have run out of space to sorry if I
