My background
* Studied painting at art school. Then went on to study 3D animation at TAFE.
* Software - Is usually used for making computer games, or animations and special effects for movies or TV shows.
Concept
* Recently I've been thinking about the notion of "still life" and taking the meaning of it literally.
So "still life" a moment frozen in time.
*As well as conceptually, this is also important visually; I am very interested in the basics of making a picture. Composition, relationships, colour, mood, etc.
* The works are about death. What we leave behind after we die. The phsyical remnants, the marks we've made, the things we've created.
* The idea that the objects we own will outlive us. They will exist longer than we will, and how this also relates to a still life, in the more traditional sense. - To visualise all the stuff I own, and where it might all end up in 100 years.
* Taking these thoughts further - ghosts. Sheets. Items of clothing, the absence of the body.
* Trying to evoke a sense of mystery.
* In terms of the visual, I'm interested in making impossible things look photorealistic.
Basic Explanation of How it Works
* My starting point is a plane - a flat shape like a piece of paper (though I usually work with an oval shape)
* I tell the computer to treat this like cloth, and the computer makes calculations which simulate the physics of the real world
* I drop the plane on to another object, usually a sphere. I will end up with about 500 frames of the cloth falling and then wrapping around the sphere, and then I go back and choose the one I like the best.
* I rotate and manipulate this new object, then get a new plane to drop on to it.
* I repeat this process, constantly deleting and recreating, until I am happy.
* I am looking for visually interesting shapes and folds.
* I use a lot of variations on the basic process - for example the shapeshifters have about 17 pieces of cloth all falling at once.
While going through this process, I am also making decisions about lighting, texture, colours etc. And testing them out as I go. I can't see any of the photorealistic detail as I work - it's too much for the computer to handle - so I will render draft versions as I go.
While I am working, I use a mode called 'wireframe' where all the objects appear at a very basic level. So during this process I can't actually see the colours, and lighting etc. It is basically grey outlines.
* I then render the final image - the computer makes calculations to create photo-realistic colour, tone, lighting, shadows, etc. Depending on the size of the image, this can take hours. For the animations it can take days.
* I am limited by what the computer can handle. Lights, shadows, transparencies take up a lot of memory, and if I push it too far the software will crash.
