Greyhound and Fast and Furious 9 Trailers

So over the past few months TWO trailers have been released featuring shows I have worked on over the past 18 months as Layout Supervisor at DNEG. Both feature heavy amounts of full digital cinematography, camera blends, camera and environment layout. I can proudly say they are two of the best projects I have worked on in my career to date in terms of scale, pushing work artistically and the final output promises to be even better as we head into final delivery.

Greyhound

Lucky to be on the same show with one of the actors who got me into film - as a kid watching Big and Splash all the way through Saving Private Ryan and Catch Me If You Can, to more recent output such as Sully and Captain Phillips, Tom Hanks.

On a personal level this film meant a lot, as my own Grandfather (another Hanks) trained as a navigator in the Fleet Air Arm to provide air cover for transport ships on shipping routes in the North Sea, so it brought it even closer to home the stakes that merchant ships and naval service crew faced heading to the front lines.

 

Fast and Furious 9

My third time working on this franchise (after Fast and Furious 6 and the Universal Studios ride Fast and Furious: Supercharged), and it's still getting bigger and badder with each instalment:-

 

Independence Day: Resurgence VFX Breakdown

Cinesite have released a showreel, most of it shows a lot of the layout work I lead on Independence Day: Resurgence in London. This involved a large of full CG cam moves, matchmove camera, animation, environment and set dressing layout. Looking at the reel it was an incredible turnaround on such a short schedule!

Cinesite Independence Day: Resurgence VFX Showreel from Cinesite Studios on Vimeo.

Latest VFX Showreel

Here's my latest VFX reel, containing shots from work I helped on at Cinesite on Fantastic Beasts, Independence Day: Resurgence, Gods of Egypt and the Revenant that have been released on trailers.

Password is Keymaster

Nick Hanks VFX Showreel June 2016 from Nick Hanks on Vimeo.

Alien: Isolation Cutscenes

So what seems a long time ago I did some work for the great team at Axis Animation up in Glasgow on Alien: Isolation. It involved producing cutscenes from mocap animation they'd shot on set with actors, producing a sequence of shots almost as a digital DOP, as a result I spent a lot of time watching the original Ridley Scott film and David Fincher's Alien 3 for composition and angles on shots.

Unfortunately a lot of sequences I worked on were cut due to story/directional changes in the game, but here's a few shots from some of the sequences cut together with some of the original score for added atmosphere!

Alien: Isolation Cinematics from Nick Hanks on Vimeo.

Password is Ripley

Guardians of the Galaxy show reel

Here's my latest reel featuring some of the work on Guardians of the Galaxy where I was a lead artist for the first time at MPC. One of the best projects I've been lucky to have worked on, at the time we had no idea how big it and Chris Pratt would be!


Nick Hanks VFX Showreel March 2015 from Nick Hanks on Vimeo.

Showreels March 2014

So it's been about 18 months since I cut a reel, and I decided to break my work into two reels, one for film visual effects and one for my cinematics and broadcast work.

VFX Showreel


Cinematics and Broadcast Showreel

Need For Speed Rivals Gamescom Trailer

Just finished four/five weeks of intense work at EA on Need for Speed the Rivals cinematics team - producing this trailer for gamescom. I ended up working the animation, layout and cameras for the Ferrari FF and Pagani Huayra highway duel (from 25 seconds in). Cool section to work on as we were seeing how many cars the game engine could handle and render, and loads of Michael Bay style action in there!


Also been working a few marketing screenshots for magazines that have been published too!

Need for Speed Rivals teaser trailer

Been working at Electronic Arts now for a few weeks now, working on some cool stuff with the team. Got the teaser trailer out a couple of weeks back, here it is:-

Prometheus Shots Showreel

Prometheus is now out on DVD/Blu Ray which means new shots for my reel. Most of my work on Prometheus at MPC was environment layout, with some effects and vehicle layout for timing and speeds in the "sandstorm" and "engineer ship launch" scenes. I also did a lot of the layout for after the engineers ship crashes, so quite a bit of working it into shots and setting up composition in line with the VFX supervisor and Ridley Scott's vision.

Nick Hanks VFX Showreel 2012 from Spangles on Vimeo.

It was a great welcome back to VFX in London, which could do with a boost right now! Fingers crossed '13 is luckier for British-based effects teams!

PS - Apologies for the poor quality, but I'm trapped in Scotland and all of my regular showreel files are down in London, so I've had to rip my own showreel from the vimeo and recompress using Sorenson. Hopefully I'll be able to sort this out when I'm home at Christmas and can put out a showreel that looks less Sega Master System res wise.

New Showreel

Here's my new showreel containing the comic con trailer shot I worked on at MPC for "Man of Steel" and a few more shots I worked on from "Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists" which is now out on DVD and Blu-ray!


Nick Hanks Showreel 2012 from Spangles on Vimeo.

Superman - Man of Steel Trailer

I'm currently in Cambodia, doing a bit of backpacking between jobs after finishing 6 months at MPC London. I actually did a bit of film research this morning at Ta Prohm Temple in Siem Reap, which was used as a set on Tomb Raider with Angelina Jolie who it seems is a bit of legend round these parts!

I also found out the comic con trailer for Man of Steel was released which has possibly the coolest shot I've worked on in it (it kicks in after 1 min 11 seconds on the video below). MPC was great fun working on Prometheus and then with the big guy with a red cape, which quite frankly is a dream come true since I saw Clark Kent and Superman duke it out in a junkyard as a kid.



Anyhow this shot got "daily of the week" from Zack Snyder himself which was pretty damn cool. Layout's a great role, you really feel you're part of the film making process, working with the CG Supervisors on cameras, animation and environment layout, building clouds layers on top of scaled earth below to make the setup as realistic as possible.

The brief on the shot was that we were flying in a jet tracking superman about to break the speed of sound, the only material to work with were some framings from a previs sequence. We realised we were gonna be having to use some big camera lens sizes of 200mm to 400mm to achieve the shot, with Superman hitting speeds of over 800 mph (I love stats!). Still seeing this on the actual comic con trailer is one of the highlights of my career so far, along with working with the MPC layout crew.

New Showreel

Here's a new reel containing trailer shots I've worked on for Pirates! and the Jellyfish advert I animated for Virgin. There's a ton more material I've got from Pirates that hopefully I'll get permission to ad to the reel. I also had the luck to see the Prometheus IMAX screening the other day in London. Another great film I have been privileged enough to have worked on, it was pretty awesome seeing shots I helped produce in layout at MPC on the biggest screen in Europe!

Virgin Media Ad

A commercial I did a bit of animation got released in the UK this week. More technical animation than I've done before, playing around with different hair and cloth settings in Maya to make the jellyfish work.

Pirates! in an Adventure with Scientists Trailer

Here's the latest trailer for "Pirates in an Adventure with Scientists". I spent a good year previs-ing sequences on this with Peter Lord (aka the nicest director in the world) before heading into VFX animation. There are a few shots of the CG Pirate Captains ship that I animated in here too, so nice to see some of my work already up on the big screen.

A friend of mine also had the luck to catch an advanced screening of this last night in Leicester Square, and the good news is it got a heaaaaarrrggghty thumbs up. Can't wait to see it finally!

Showreel Including "Wonders of the Solar System" and "How Earth Made Us"

Here's a new reel containing some shots I previsualised and animated on "Wonders of the Solar System" and "How Earth Made Us" at Prime Focus World for the BBC.

Wonders of the Solar System

Here's a few clips of VFX shots I did the camera and asset animation on for Wonders of the Solar System at Prime Focus London for the BBC.



The shots only look so good though thanks to a great VFX team including Simon Clarke, Melody Woodford, Stephen Waugh, Jon Keene, Andre Hitsoy, John Hasted, Christopher Anthony, Prodeep Ghosh, Goolzar Buchia, Karan Juara, Seema Schere, Sajeel Shukla, Nick Hanks, Peter Forsythe, Keith Devlin, Bruno Fernandes, Graham Stott, Safiya Ravat, Mark Corpus, Jeevan Singaram, Ryan Locke & Milan Schere (breathes out).

In case you're wondering the music is from Daft Punk's "Tron Legacy" soundtrack, well worth checking out (I bought the CD straight after watching - commercial sucker)!

Note:- Well 5 minutes after upload they took down the audio, it's that good - seriously!

Shorter Reel

On the advice from workmates I've chopped my reel down.



I was hoping to get some of the shots I worked on last/early this year for "Wonders of the Solar System" and "How Earth Made Us" on the BBC but haven't had a reply from Prime Focus World yet!

Busy times at Aardman

For those who don't know (ie my non facebook buddies) I've been at Aardman Animation now for over 4 months working on their next stop motion picture, so sorry for the delay (and thanks to old Uni mates for kicking my ass into saying what I've been up to in the last year or so) in updating, but I've been pretty busy working.

All I can say is it's been awesome so far, working with some seriously cool people who really know what they're doing in the film making process, enough so that Matt Groening and Miyazaki send there own personal drawings to them to say how much they love their films too! And I get to hang out with Wallace and Gromit in the flesh / plasticine sometimes.

Since then the two BBC series I worked on at Prime Focus "How Earth Made Us" and "Wonders of the Solar System" have both been aired, and gained record viewing figures. Here's the trailer for Brian Cox's "Wonders of the Solar System"(he's a bit of a secret hero of mine, watch the extras on "Sunshine" - he gives a great commentary on how he worked with Danny Boyle on making a fictional film as real as possible):-

Nominated for the British Animation Awards

I found out this week that I've been nominated as part of Lipsync Post Graphics Team in the top three entries for the British Animation Industry Awards (BAA's) in the Best TV/Film Graphics category.

Here's a link to the news and sequence for Animal Planets rebranding where I animated the dog, meerkat and shark (which you can also see on my reel):-

News Item


Sequence

January 2009 Showreel

Here's the new showreel then for January, on my work colleague Milan's advice I'm shifting out the old student character animation, which is after all over a year old, and putting on the Squirrels that I've done in the past week or so. Not much of a change as I think I'll be waiting a while for clearance on showing stuff I've done at Prime Focus World.



Shots 1-6 Solomon Kane Mirror Sequence - All Demon Character Animation and Roto Animation of stunt performers interacting with CG.

Shots 7-10 Hellboy 2 - Weapon Replacement and Particle Animation, as well as Roto Animation of Hellboy character for shading and lighting.

Shot 11 Animal Planet Ident Dog - All character animation and lighting setup.

Shot 12-13 Jungle Book Test Nag - All character animation including lipsync and basic lighting setup

Shot 14 Animal Planet Meerkat - All character animation and lighting setup.

Shot 15 Jungle Book Test Kaa - All character animation and lighting setup.

Shot 16 The Sting - Personal Character Animation (squirrel rigs provided by highend3d).

Shot 17 Solomon Kane Castle - Crow Background Animation

Shot 18-22 Hellboy 2 - Weapon Replacement and Particle Animation, as well as Roto Animation of Hellboy character for shading and lighting.

Shot 23 Keepy Uppy - Personal animation, Max Rig supplied by highend3d.

Show 24 Cartoon - Personal Character Animation, Max Rig supplied by highend3d.