Author: flipper01

Pearl Quest

Our first theme park ride! Jason and I creative directed this ride at Framestore for Wanda Group.

The ride is in Qingdao, China and is based on an ancient legend about a young god called Nezha and his battle with the 4 dragons of the oceans.

It was a 3 year project, during which the team at Framestore designed all of the characters and environments, wrote the script, created many storyboards and pre-vis iterations, commissioned the original musical score and sound effects, and created all of the animation and VFX.

More information here: https://www.framestore.com/work/wanda-group

Trick or Treat 2016: Toxic Ooze

We created a toxic ooze factory theme this time, and by handing out Chromadepth glasses to the kids all the crazy colours we used appeared to go a bit loopy in 3D depth. It took us months to paint all the scenic and props, and LOTS of luminous paint. Our garage was left looking a bit weird.

The whole thing was an intense impact on the sense, with industrial alarms going of, a ton of strobe lights and disorientating 3D effects. Fun for all!

We also collected for Cancer Research this year and found everybody really keen to donate, so a huge thank you for everybody who came along and dug deep.

The Time Portal

This was a surprise project… Some people came to our time machine show in our garage all those years ago, years later they work at an agency and want to replicate the show for a larger audience to promote Stella Artois’ sponsorship of the the Wimbledon tournament. So they asked us if we could that.

We said sure (but this time got to collaborate with the immersive theater company Les Enfants Terribles to make this happen). It was quite a huge task to plan our an immersive experience that runs across multiple builds on multiple floors with timed audiences that think they are the only group in the show. It was all themed around a whimsical version of old London, with a blend of real and fiction characters including Jack the Ripper, Scrooge, Faggin, Queen Victoria and a whole host of circus performers, street traders and mischievous young scamps.

Read more here.

Immersive Cult: Voodoo

Friends of ours, Immersive Cult (an immersive/experiential/theatrical company), asked us to help come up with some concepts for a Voodoo themed event in a very exclusive London venue for Halloween. We had free reign to change every room in the venue, so we drew up a master concept that transformed the swanky club into a mix of a decaying New Orleans Voodoo underground, with a bit of a hot and steamy backstreet Blues bar.

 

The night had a cast of characters roaming the floor, which were part of an unfolding story. As the night drew on, Marie Laveau (The Voodoo Queen) summoned the Voodoo priest Baron Samedi from his grave. He slowly possessed the night dwellers, and led them all into a voodoo dance frenzy.

 

We laid all of this out into a presentation along with sketches and mood boards, and then (due to other commitments) left it in Immersive Cult’s hands to bring to life. What we experienced when we finally arrived on Halloween was amazing. They utterly surpassed any expectations. The set was spot on. The performers were eerily authentic. The story was effortlessly weaved into the night… and on top of that, everyone seemed to have a blast.

 

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Immersive Cult is led by two brilliant dudes we met on a few Secret Cinema projects – Francesco Pastori and Garrett Moore. These guys know their stuff, please throw all of your immersive project briefs in their general direction, you won’t be disappointed.

 

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Fiat: VR Dynamo, The Power of X

 
Our first project at Framestore – A virtual reality experience with Dynamo and the new Fiat 500X.

 
Above is a short teaser of what you see inside the experience, to see the real thing you’ll need to see it in an Oculus Rift at one of the many car shows or dealerships it’s being demonstrated in across 19 regions of Europe. Or just download the Google Cardboard version here.

 
The full Oculus Rift experience includes maybe the world’s first illusion in VR, as well as 4D seat rumbling effects. I can’t tell you what the actual trick is, that would spoil it the magic, but we worked with Dynamo to make sure he was happy with the trick we designed.

 
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Dynamo was shot as live action, but everything else is computer generated imagery, including a completely photo real car. Creating the CG for this was a monstrous task. To work in VR, we had to make 2 videos (one for each eye), each at extremely high resolution (4K) and running at 60fps. To render this we used Framestore’s render farm at full capacity, each frame of footage taking 90% of the processing power as Gravity did. Rending it on a single computer would take 184 years.

 
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EE- The Big Mobile Network Race

 
For just over a year EE was the only provider of 4G in the UK. As the other networks finally released their 4G services we needed to show how EE’s 4G was faster and bigger than all the others.

 
This was my last project while working at Poke, while Framestore handled the production and effects, which made my job transition from one company to the other eerily smooth.

 


Trick or Treat 2014: The Dungeon

As is always the case, we decided to up our game a bit for the Trick or Treaters this Halloween so we built a proper haunted house walk through maze in the front garden. I doubt any of the kids got the story of a journey through an old haunted mansion, out through the graveyard, a brief encounter with the ghostly family that haunt the place, and then into the secret hidden dungeon out the back (watch out for the mad monk!), but they seemed to enjoy it anyway. Except for the kids that either ran away or burst into tears – the sign of a job well done right?.
Halloween seems to have become a bit of a thing in our town of Collier Row, with families driving from all over to wander the streets in costumes looking for the many houses that make a real effort, and even build small haunts like ours. We had over 400 kids come through our doors alone.
Now… what to do next year?








A few more photos here.