How many people work for Darkside?

There are 14 people at Darkside now, though two are freelance.

What are you working on?

We are starting on some special effects for a new BBC TV show called Powers (working title: Jason 4). This TV show is the first BBC series for years to have such heavy CGI work that isn't natural history-based. We think the show will air on British TV in December/January, we wrap CGI in September/October. We also have some films going into production as well, two are the negotiation stage at one of the big Hollywood film companies, the third though is currently giving us the most fun.

Spaced Invaders started life as a short and has basically got bigger and bigger and we have been asked to develop the project into a full-length film. Its kind of fun... stupid but fun. We will let you know more if it works out and comes off. Whichever film project comes off first will be our ninth movie and hopefully our biggest, but unlike a lot of the films we have done in the past, these three will be all ours.

Your Range Rover images are very well-known. Did you build the whole car in LightWave?

The Range rover was initially scanned, though it needed extensive remodelling and cleaning up, all the details were hand-modelled. But the thing that makes it look so real are a combination of texturing and lighting. Both Simon Percy and Bob Twitcher worked extensively on these elements. The client was asked to choose which image laid in front of him was real and which one was CG... he chose the CG pictures as real!

You have quite a mix of work from architectural visualisation to special effects. Any favourite jobs?

Most jobs offer unique good points, working on a cartoon-type animation is always fun, where a photo real building or car is significantly more difficult, it has the reward of pulling off something that people think is real. So really there are no specific favourites, we do tend to except jobs we wont to do ahead of something bland. That said, working on a TV show or film has to be the most fun, if only for the ego... though the work that has the lowest money is often a TV show.

Tell me more about the Houseboat project.

Bob Twitcher was the guy most in charge of that, so I'll let him speak for himself:

"Diesel Films approached Darkside Animation for the title sequence to 'Houseboat', a Discovery Channel series concerning the design and building of a luxury floating home.

Because the series focuses on the design and structure of the vessel, I thought it would be interesting to develop the boat growing from the blueprints. Showing the ribbed structure and other forms growing from the plan was quite a challenge, needing dozens of transparency sequences running over the surfaces.

After setting up the camera moves over and through the ship, I then created a simple black and white wipe sequence which I applied to the relevant surfaces on the colour channel (so I could see the wipe in layout before applying it on to the transparency channel). Duplicating the wipe sequence and offsetting the start frames and frames per second allowed me to reveal certain surfaces at the right moment. I had to separate many surfaces into their X, Y and Z axes so the wipe would run across them correctly. With some effort, I managed to get all the wipes working, then it was a simple matter of applying the wipe to the transparency channel and switching off the wipe in the colour channel and voilà! A houseboat was born."

(mpg - 1.9 MB)

What about our gift to the readers?

We did an explosion shot for a British TV series called The Bill a while back and we'd be pleased to offer your readers the scene file, all objects and a tutorial as to how we did it...

Wow! Thanks for this Andy and we look forward to talking to you again when Powers is ready to air!