First up was the animation for Stand By Me working with Director Chris Curtis and ace collage artist Mia Angioy on Art Direction duties. The overall theme was that of an emotive scrapbook-esque journey through old family photos and Mia supplied some beautifully collaged style frames for me to begin structuring the animation around. The format was super-wide with space on the outer edges for live band video feeds so I designed moving textured backgrounds based on blocks of flats and unfolding paper effects to suit the collage style and content. The hefty After Effects project evolved as Mia supplied further collaged material, photos and some lovely stop motion unfolding imagery to work with. The majority of photos featured came from the family albums of the production team, including some of mine, and it was a joy to animate and design the camera movement through them all. Really happy with the final animation and it was unbelievable to watch (and video) it live at Wembley with the huge crowd singing along.
The second animation for Champagne Supernova had originally taken shape as a visualiser to appear on Youtube along with Stop Crying Your Heart Out and other recently remastered releases. I'd created the original animation with Director Chris Curtis and super talented Art Director Mario Wagner and was really proud of it so when I heard it would be graduating to the big concert screen I was elated. The concept for this was a continual upward looping journey through epic vistas that would gradually become stranger and increasingly psychedelic as the song progressed. Taking Mario's really strong style frames as a starting point I developed the After Effects journey through volcanic lakes, cloud cities, underwater kingdoms and space canyons and loved making every frame of it. For the tour visuals I needed to expand the original 4k 16:9 frame to fill the super wide tour format and make a few tweaks and changes to improve it's impact at that scale. I don't mind saying that it's probably my favourite Oasis song so it was overwhelming to watch it at the end of an amazing show at Wembley followed by a huge fireworks display. A proper career highlight and very grateful to have had the opportunity to work on it.