Callum Austin

This was our second Penny advert at Glassworks. Following a similar theme as the first one, we see the world through a child and his playful imagination.

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This ad was directed by Ruediger Kaltenhauser, Darren McPherson, Kyle Obly and Hugo Rodriguez. I contributed to many different aspects of the pipeline - from animation to modeling, texturing, lookdev, lighting, rendering and rigging. In the end I got a credit as an animator but in reality I was much more of a generalist on this project.

There are also many jobs that go unnnoticed such as the creation of the animatic. Many of these animatic shots get tweaked, removed, replaced or swapped. Some of the concepting of the props and architecture can take quite a bit of research and sketching. Preproduction took up almost half of the entire project.

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Asset build is another huge task. All the buildings, trees, propes and characters were carefully crafted and often more than once because of design changes. All the backgound characters had to be modeled, rigged, textures and animated. Without them, the scenes would look quite lifeless and dull. It's little things like this that often go unnoticed but end up being a huge amount of work.

The rendering side of things also required a lot of careful consideration. When working with four directors, compositors, an agency and a client, there is so much feedback to deal with. Rendering was a constant iterative process of taking animation updates, caching the characters, setting up correct lighting, AOVs and textures. At one point the updates to textures became so frequent that many of my shots I ended up texturing in screenspace and projecting onto the mesh through the render camera. This actually helped create a illustrative feel and was particularly useful for lock-offs.

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You can see the making of below and some more images that I worked on. 

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There's a full credit list available at the bottom of this page.