Watch Lumen Soup's 'The Catipoce!' Recorded version

Here is a recorded performance of our animated theatre adaption of 'The Catipoce' by James Reeves.
This will be part of a show performed (slightly better than us!) to audiences of children later this year.
Expect to see some new content in the near future...


Don't forget you can watch this in full HD.

Jack Norris Showreel

Background complete...

As always, click over to Vimeo to see it in HD :)

Untitled from Livvy Brewer on Vimeo.

Animatics - New sounds.

Here are the two animatics with better voice-overs on them, these voice-overs are still not the final ones as we have some voice actors booked into do some recording for us in essex but could only do it in the new year.

Lumen Soup: Millers' End Animatic from Livvy Brewer on Vimeo.

Lumen Soup: The Catipoce Animatic from Livvy Brewer on Vimeo.

Lumen Soup: Tests and Animatics compilation

Here's a massive compilation of (most of) the videos we have produced in the first 5 months of our projection animation theatre project. This includes several different visual tests and also the first rough edit of the two poems we will be performing (The first time you have seen anything of the stories here on the blog!).

We hope you enjoy seeing our imperfections, mistakes and laughs, and hearing our hilariously bad American accent placeholder voices - there'll be many more to come before we nail it!


Remember to click that lovely little HD button to see the whole video in high definition.




Tests include:

Watering can
Rabbit in the headlights
One eighty degree burn
Millers' door
Floating hands
Rebel shadows

Animatics include:

Millers' End
The Catipoce!

Live-action hands and font test

In our quest for interesting illusions and nice little visuals for our Joiner scenes, we found inspiration in this video for the song Neon Bible by The Arcade Fire. It's obviously not some kind of live performance, but it may be possible for us to achieve something similar if we use a black enough screen...

So, for our latest test we recorded our hands in a green screen setup, and we are quite pleased with the results. The keying worked perfectly, so at least we know we can use a setup as simple as this for our actual production, providing it's only hands that need to be captured:

Luckily I've got enough green paper to cover a whole wall if needed, so plenty of chance to try a bigger setup next time!

After filming our hands, they were used to create an After Effects composition against a completely black background. This image was added to the composition and also put at the beginning of the exported video for size and position reference, as stupid as it looks:

At the same time we wanted to start testing pieces of typographic animation to be sync'd to things that we say. We dug out the lightbox and did a bit of traditional animation to create a speech bubble and the word 'JACK.' These were then captured and Fo' shopped into some tidy little animations which were then added to the After Effects Composition. 

Here's a video showing a couple of the green screen hand recordings, and then a few of the tests on the screen. Notice the reference photo at the beginning of each test, and my terrible timing at saying my name in time with the typography. Also, I disabled the audio track on the green screen recording, because at the time I was listening to Meat Loaf.  

Aside from the tests, we are currently working on the animatic for our project. Expect to see some animatic clips soon!

Millers' End: Video Test 1

Here's a quick video test demonstrating some basic interactivity in the context of a story we are using. We actually did this artwork and made the source video months ago - it was one of the first things we put through the projector! But this is the first time we have filmed it.

Non-HD Video: Test 4

In our opinion a successful test, even if we can't see it in the HD we'd like - our only current computer is kinda buckling under the strain of 1GB per 10 sec video...

Anyway, using the 180 degree digital painting, the idea was to simply pan the background whist the actor sort of spins around smoothly and slides across a bit. Now, this is considerably more difficult than it sounds, and we got the first idea of what a huge task it would be to rehearse a complete show made up of shots like this. After many takes and lols, we got a few that we were pleased with, including the one below.



Also this video is a bit strange in that the timeline believes it is 22 minutes long. I assure you it will be a very long time until we post a video that is actually 22 minutes long...

Visual Test 4: 180 Degree Pan from Livvy Brewer on Vimeo.

Things to improve for next time: reshape the actor's light spot, increase size of orange spot, decrease contrast, make back of actor's spot black instead of brown and perhaps add another reference point such as a near-closeup object that moves at a different speed to the background.

Also, we made cookies today, full of M&Ms. Jack even time-lapse filmed them. But, we baked them for too long and they ended up as biscuits. And the time-lapse didn't come out very good because they didn't change at all. We better stick to brownies next time.

HD Video: Test Visuals 1&2

Here's a short video of 3 selected tests, including white background watering can from test 1, black background watering can from test 2, and headlights on the wall from test 2. Please ignore our random mumblings...


First Projector Tests from Livvy Brewer on Vimeo.