Tuesday, December 13, 2005

ARIGATO EVENT, JAPAN (Visuals)



After a huge year at the 2005 World Expo in Japan, the 'top three' rated Australian Pavilion has just claimed a Silver Medal for its efforts.

To commemorate its success and as a thank you to our Japanese hosts, a huge concert was staged in the massive Expo Dome that saw a diverse range of Australian acts performing in front of a huge live crowd. Featuring popular Australian artists, Amiel and Christine Anu alongside Tetrafide, ARC, Saffire and the Nagoya Children's Choir the event was hugely successful.

Chroma was commissioned by Jack Morton Worldwide to provide a unique visual show for each of the 5 acts, presented on a huge Komaden LED screen that dominated the stage. All content was created specifically for the event (in NTSC) with Scott Zero travelling to Nagoya to perform the visuals live on stage.

Wednesday, October 5, 2005

LET LOOSE LIVE (TV Series)



Featuring some of Australia's best known comedians and produced by the same team that brought you Fast Forward, Seven's new late night comedy series "Let Loose LIVE" is performed live in front of a studio audience and features opening titles, bumpers and program inserts produced by Chroma.

In addition to the broadcast identification and brand development, Chroma were also responsible for the creation of physical set pieces, neon signage and graphic panels to create an integrated visual packaging for the show that shares elements of the opening titles.

Due to the very short time line, specific program features and sheer size of the featured cast, a concept was developed that conveyed all of the requested show features while still retaining a late night feel and comedy flavor.

Working closely with director Ted Emery and the shows producers, production designers and composer, Yuri Worontshak - Chroma's understanding and experience of broadcast television resulted in a smooth, flawless delivery of, not only the titles and post production components, but of signage, set pieces, graphic panels and even crew apparel.

A studio shoot was organized , where the 12 cast members were shot against a green-screen key in two takes to create the 'big head' characters. Work on the 3D set and the cartoon backgrounds began as soon as boards had been approved, working ahead of the acquisition.

Overall, the completed opening titles were delivered with the various breakers, bumpers and program inserts along with the physical set deliverables in only 2 weeks from brief.

Famously, the show was cancelled after only 2 episodes... that's gotta be a record!

Tuesday, April 19, 2005

WE CAN BE HEROES (Mini Series)



Chris Lillie's new mini-series, ' We Can Be Heroes' is due to hit screens later this year.

With all characters played by Chris and Matt Saville directing, Chroma produced a series of VFX shots where a 'bouncing castle' has broken free of its moorings and sails high above the city, with Chris' character trapped inside. We went out and shot some DV 'shakycam' footage similar to a UFO sighting and tracked in the tumbling castle which we built from photo references.

Tuesday, February 22, 2005

WORLD EXPO 2005, JAPAN (Visuals)



After a years work, the think!OTS team have successfully completed construction of the Australian Pavilion in Aichi, Japan.

The project was quickly hailed as Australia's most innovative and crowd pleasing pavilion yet, with Prime Minister John Howard praising it as the best yet.

The centre-piece for the pavilion, the Data Forest, was developed as a huge, high-resolution 'forest' of vertical video totems made up of over 80 plasma panels. These totems presented a digitally driven, tesselated show where the 80 screens overlap and fragment to create huge, three dimensional imagery. These animations were produced as massive 'superbitmaps', or single completed scenes that were then diced up into the 80 separate feeds, resulting in a 360 degree display, far exceeding the HD format or even iMAX film with a total resolution of 36 Megapixels running at 25 fps - making it the world's largest single moving image to date.

The final act also required character animation of the official mascot (originally designed by Nathan Jurevicus) to appear in various projected videos.

I was commissioned by think!OTS in late 2004 to produce the animated content for all three acts of the Australian pavilion. Working alongside fellow creators David White and Martin Buchhorn, the Data Forest team were also involved in the development of the overall concept which included all acquisition and creation of hundreds of original design and animation components. Operating as a separate unit out of Chroma's Sandilands office the team worked tirelessly to produce the 13 minute presentation, making use of 3D visualization tools and a scaled-down 'Mini Totem' to present work to the client in this unique vertical format.

The project was completed on budget and schedule in December of 2004.