A lot of the shots of the dog are head-only. Did you not film the dog at all?

The dog is there, you just can’t see him for the mask. The original idea was to get the dog to actually wear a mask! Funnily enough the dog wasn’t too keen on the idea.

What are you working on at the moment?

We have a ridiculous amount of work on right now. The next few months are going to be crazy. Its pretty much confidential when the job hasn’t been aired yet, but there are at least 10 jobs in production right now.

Do you like the music by the Gorillaz?

Its okay - I like the concept better. The Gorillaz videos were good to work on, and they are great to have on the show reel.

Were you involved with the Gorillaz stuff?

Well that was a long time ago now. I was involved in all of them, although not really on the first one — Clint Eastwood. At the time of Clint Eastwood we were also doing the Robbie Williams Let Love Be Your Energy video, and I was pretty much completely on that. Once that finished the Gorillaz onslaught began. :)

Tell me more about what Point Oven is for and what it does.

Point Oven has emerged from custom tools I have written for Passion. A couple of years ago when we used Messiah1.5 and LightWave 6.5, basically during the Gorillaz productions, we had large memory problems. The memory was being eaten up by having very complex character rigs driving high resolution models. The solution at the time was to scan the objects into MDD files using the MDScan plug-in. This process worked but was incredibly painful and slow, mainly because MDScan isn’t really designed to be doing this.

So that was the presented problem, and after learning how to program in C I started writing our own tools for vertex baking. The ideas behind these tools are what formed Point Oven. Point Oven allows you to bake your animation into MDD files very quickly and efficiently. It reduces memory usage by only loading the necessary frames into ram for rendering. Point Oven supports LW, Messiah, and Maya and I hope to add a few more apps to that list. On top of all that baking Point Oven has a tool for editing MDD files in modeler which is ideal for fixing bad deformations caused by joint compression or simulation intersections.

The current release is just the beginning for Point Oven though. I am currently implementing Motion support between applications for cameras and nulls etc, plus I am looking at improving the motion blur interpolation from linear to spline and much more.

What was your inspiration for getting into CG?

Well, I love what WETA, Pixar, ILM and DD are doing now. But that’s a bit obvious for anyone working in CGI I guess. The thing that got me into CG in the first place was probably T2. I still rate the effects in T2 and it's a great film that I’ve seen a million times.  I wouldn’t say I’m particularly inspired now though. All of my CG is done at work, I only ever really code and produce concepts at home. It's funny how things change.

Good luck with Passion projects for this year and here's to hoping we get to see a version of LineFX you're happy with... :) You can see more of Passion Picture's work at their website.