At last! Another Post!

Since the last time I posted...my intro...it has quite simply been manic. 13 1 minute 2D Flash animated episodes all to be comped, edited and posted, averaging 4 episodes a month. Never mind having to manage the production process. Of course we are talking about the First Supa Strikas series for local television. A test run if you will for more ambitious undertakings, hopefully to follow. Anyway, enough of that, here are some before and afters from the post stages:

This is a 3D scene, done in Softimage XSI, showing comp and final treatment.

Shakes here "in the zone". Layer passes from Flash go into After Effects, background plates created in XSI are tweaked & animated, background layers toned and some particle effects from 3D Max added and all is then subtly "graded" in the edit stage, to give the whole program a unified overall feel.

From one of my favourite episodes. Pretty much the same senario as above.

The scoreboard. Background with scoreboard frame & croud compliments of XSI, scoreboard (no frills) done in Photoshop, some replay material from the previous episode, put it all in a pre-comp in front of a 35mm camera in After Effects and animate.

Shakes on his way to sporting victory as dusk falls over the stadium.

More to follow, including some before and afters from the "Trailer" we produced for this years Mipcom in France, which I believe was very well recieved.

Introduction

Welcome to my blog!

Well, I guess this was inevitable. Tried to stay in the shadows, just content to be carefully carving away at whatever came my way, but I guess I gotta show face at some point, so here I am.

My name is Gregan Tarlton and I am a Digital Video Editor & Compositor by trade. I also do the odd spot of camerawork from time to time, just to keep me supple.

I started in the Video Production game about 7 years ago after studying Video Production for two and a half years. Before that I had studied Electronic Engineering, but that was full of formulae and rules, so after 2 years I packed it up for a life in media.

I started out doing mostly camerawork and I really enjoyed it, as I still do, but about 6 years ago, just around the time that non-linear digital editing started becoming accessible to mere mortals, I decided I had to get into Post Production. Of course, back then we did not have the processing power we have today and needless to say, things were painfully slow and unless you were on a R500 000 Avid, also woefully unpredictable.

Non-the-less it was far better than spinning A-B rolls on a Betacam Edit Suite and so the post bug bit me and the journey began.

Today that journey has brought me to a very interesting point in my post career. Having worked for an awesome animation studio, Wicked Pixels, for two and a half years as an animation editor and motion graphic artist/compositor, I am now working on a short-form 2D Flash Animation series for Strika Entertainment, as Animation Editor and VFX Artist alongside Animation Director & Lead 2D Animator, Hennie Blaauw and 5 very talented and eager young Flash animators.

The series is based on the popular Soccer comic "Supa Strikas", by the same name and comprises of 13 one minute vignettes for distribution for Television Broadcast across 7 African countries. Needless to say we hope to make this into a very successful series.

Well, enough for now. Part of the reason for this blog is to hopefully get in touch with more like-minded post-folk such as myself, so if you stumbled across this blog via the Strika links, or however and you'd dig to know more about how we do things here in the "veld', drop us a note!

Cheers for now...