NSPCC – Preventing Child Sexual Abuse

An ambitious project earlier this winter done under the Aardman umbrella, which involved 2 of us (me and Ben Foley, whom I also worked with under Buckloop on the Sing Ultimate Acapella project) working with director Magda Oskinska on the piece, where we ended up – shooting, editing & keying footage from the studio floor – dropping in a barrel-load of Flash character animations – animating Magda’s PSD’s and bringing them to life – working out how to make the folding & moving mechanisms look the part – building the whole lot into a pop-up book in After Effects through Element 3D. Ben rigged the book for the page turns in Element (yep, I shit you not!), adding pre-rendered footage for the individual pages and dropped it in to the live footage at the end. – compositing & timing the whole thing to the VO in AE. This was a technically demanding project which needed a ton of expertise and experience from a ton of various previous jobs to get this job done, dusted and looking fresh. Bizarrely, using AE’s now mothballed Raytraced 3D rendering, we managed to get our pop-up style PSD layers pretty quickly looking photo-real – not that I would’ve expected it to work, but work it did. Fortunately on this one, we had the might of the Aardman juggernaut behind us to help with shooting well-lit footage, tech support and a crew of skilled individuals collaborating together.