Wednesday 22 March 2023

Ultramassive Black Holes


Here's a new cover animation and illustration for BBC Science Focus on the Hunt for Ultramassive Black Holes. I'd worked on a black hole cover illustration for Focus a few years ago and was keen to differentiate this one in terms of look and scale. The brief mentioned the term 'galaxy-eater' - so not something you could lose down the back of the sofa then. I went about creating a Nolan-esque black hole in Cinema 4d to create the first visuals and have something ready for animating later in the process. Initial ideas included a space ship and an earthbound observatory as seen above but the final design would be all about the black hole. I added galaxy textures, meteors and collapsing planets for detail and made room for the central strap line. For the spread illustration I moved the 3d camera around to get a wider perspective shot and fill the space. 

Once the print version was complete I created a forward camera move in Cinema 4d for the Apple News edition and rendered out the black hole, meteor and planet passes for compositing in After Effects. The title was animated to complement the camera move and to create the loop I designed a brief black hole interior abstract light tunnel effect. Another enjoyable project for Science Focus, you can see further work here.

Tuesday 14 March 2023

Tech At The Edge

Here's a very welcome commission for an MIT Sloan Management Review feature looking at emerging tech tools entitled Tech At The Edge. The brief required a cover and three spot illustrations for the related articles with the cover focusing on a figure surveying a technological scene. I used Cinema 4d to build a 3d wireframe landscape and  layered tablet screens to comp with the photographic figure and digital textures in Photoshop. I maintained the stylings and electric blue/gold palette throughout the spot illustrations that were based on Web3, Quantum Computing and AI Tool integrity. A really enjoyable job overall. You can also see an animated commission for MIT's McGovern Institute here.

Tuesday 7 March 2023

Loose Connection

Here's my latest illustration for a Car And Driver magazine feature called Loose Connection. It's a look at the history of vehicle fuelling from the kerosene era of the 1880s to modern EVs and some of the problems encountered along the way. See more work for Car And Driver here.