We were happy to see Karen David-Green in front of our camera, having worked with her at Weatherford in Texas in her role as Senior Vice President. Karen is now Chief Communications, Stakeholder and Sustainability Officer at Expro and we were working with her to shoot several pieces to camera.
An added bonus was the location for the shoot on the London South Bank inside the Lyaness Cocktail bar - the flagship bar from the award-winning Mr Lyan and his team, set within the iconic Sea Containers London. Awarded World’s Best Bar & Best International Hotel Bar at the Tales of Cocktail Spirited Awards. Rebecca from Oakwood having brilliantly arranged to use the premises for the whole day before they opened for the evening, the bar providing an ideal location to shoot Karen framed with a perfect view of the Thames and St Pauls Cathedral behind.
Cheers!
Virtually Star Wars in miniature
Spurred-on by our recent successes in developing our macro virtual production system, we have big plans for using it with our toy clients. And what better place to test the concept than recreating scenes from the Disney's Star Wars Mandalorian series - the show that pioneered the use of virtual video production on screen.
Utilising toys from Hasbro's line of Star Wars Vintage Collection, including Haslab's extraordinary crowd-funded recreation of the Razorcrest spaceship, we placed them into a simple sand set on an mdf board, shot against an Unreal Engine environment that Andy built by referencing some of the iconic desert scenes from the Mandalorian's first series.
Take a look at the results
With Valentine’s day coming up in the calendar, we thought we’d share some unusual cinematic facts about some of the greatest romance movies. Here are some interesting 'did-you-know's' to whisper in the the ear of your Valentine...
When Leonardo DiCaprio climbed onto the bow of the ship in Titanic, he improvised the line, “I'm the king of the world!” Director James Cameron liked the line so much that he kept it in the movie. It became the #100 on the American Film Institute's list of the greatest movie quotes.
she feared that the audience would be too disgusted to laugh. With those concerns in mind, another version of the scene was shot without anything in her hair. Once the viewers at a test screening laughed loudly at the scene with Ted’s product in Mary’s hair, Diaz was okay with it.
“No stunt coordinators. No elaborate choreography,” writer Denise Martin recalled. “Just a perfectly realised wimp brawl between two upper-middle-class Englishmen coming to awkward fisticuffs in front of a Greek restaurant.”
Following her success in the starring role of’ Pretty Woman' Julia Roberts could have cornered the romantic comedy market all by herself, but she turned down roles in 'Sleepless in Seattle', 'Shakespeare in Love' and 'While You Were Sleeping'.
The footage of passengers being welcomed and embraced by loved ones at Heathrow Airport that opens and closes Love Actually was shot on location with hidden cameras for a week. Writer-director Richard Curtis explained that when something special was caught on camera, a crew member would race out to have people sign a waiver so the moment might be included in the film.
Curtis said that watching the love expressed at the arrival gate of LAX is what inspired him to write the romance in the first place.
She also went on to became a pioneer for other actresses by being the first female lead to demand the same salary, benefits and billing as her male counterparts. After the $200 million domestic gross of Ghost, Demi Moore hit box office gold with a trio of other massive film hits: 1992’s A Few Good Men ($141,340,178), 1993’s Indecent Proposal ($106,614,059), and 1994’s Disclosure ($83,015,089). If you add up all of Demi’s film grosses, it comes out to more than $1 billion. In 1995, she was paid an unprecedented $12.5 million to take her clothes off in the critically scorned Striptease.
We at Olaus Roe have had our own fair share of film and video relating to topics of the heart, albeit of the medical kind rather than the emotional! We have made several animations not just for broadcast but for surgical professionals.
In the a decade ago our camera crew travelled across France as they documented a charity London to Paris bicycle ride organised by Action Medical, many of the riders having raised sponsorship for life-saving heart organisations.
In the latter part of 2023 we filmed with the British Society for Haematology (BSH) and CSL Vifor organised by Bright Event Management. This was a discussion between healthcare professionals hosted by Cardiologist Professor John Cleland.
In this video a an old gentleman recalls how his dental check-up helped him avoid a heart attack.
And here some of our heart and blood pressure graphics produced for a C4 TV programme can be seen along with some of our other science and technology graphics And not just the heart, we can produce animation for any part of the human body in realistic detail or in a graphic style for those of of a queasy disposition!
After two years working alongside Steve Nicholl's fantastic production team, we are all justly proud of the 3-part natural history series that was the end result. Especially when considering the testing circumstances of such a production during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The team built some ingenious sets on which insect wranglers gathered their six-legged talent to perform in front of state-of-the-art camera technology, capturing some unique and innovative scenarios never seen before in a natural history programme. At Olaus Roe we enjoyed helping make many of these scenes come to life through our CGI modelling and shot compositing. The finished series is available to view on Curiosity Stream and has been rather appropriately narrated by Star Trek's Kate Mulgrew, revealing some jaw-dropping facts about the Earth being inhabited by alien worlds right under our nose - insects.
View the trailer for Planet Insect here
Seasons greetings from our Bristol Clifton Studio
We hope you enjoy our animated winter dash around Bristol in this year’s Christmas video. Wishing you joy at Christmas and prosperity in the coming year.
Carolyn Grace, former Spitfire pilot passes away
Sad to hear of the passing of one of the figureheads of the aviation world, Carolyn Grace who once gave us at Olaus Roe the amazing privilege of allowing us exclusive access to follow the family's flying season for a programme pilot we had for Channel 4 (who then unbelievably passed on it!)
An announcement was made by Daisy Grace, Carolyn’s daughter-in-law: “It is with great sadness that we must announce that Carolyn Grace has been killed in a car accident on Friday the 2nd of December 2022. This is a traumatic, and unexpected, loss to all of us and at this time we would like to request that you respect the family’s privacy.”
Carolyn had taken on the incredibly onerous task of operating and flying the Grace Spitfire, ML407, after her husband Nick Grace was killed in a car accident in 1988. Nick, an engineer as well as a pilot, rebuilt the Spitfire over five years and first flew it in 1985. ML407 is an historically important aircraft, flying more than 176 operational missions during WWII including combat on D-Day over Normandy.
Carolyn had told the BBC in 2011, ” To keep our Spitfire operational and keep it for the embodiment of my husband I had to learn to fly it. There had to be another Grace in the cockpit.”Carolyn made her first solo flight in the Spitfire in 1990 and went on to earn her Display Authorisation and flew the aircraft at airshows and flypasts. A thrid Grace got into the cockpit when her Son Richard Grace learnt to fly the Spitifre and has since gone on to become one of the world's most respected warbird pilots. He continues to fly ML407 where it is currently operated by 'Ultimate Warbirds'. Our thoughts are with Richard and his family at this difficult time.
A Halloween look at our haunted past in visual effects
At Halloween we are reminded of the scary (and often gruesome) effects our clients have challenged us with in the past. These have included eerie floating spirit balls illuminating caves as they make their ghostly way through the passages. Dimensional rifts tearing gateways into the afterlife, peeks at burning scenes of hell, ghosts, vengeful zombies, demons and demonic door knockers, death by various sharp implements and the accompanying blood. Oh the blood...
We enjoy working with the film producers in the challenge of making these scenes believable within what is quite often a modest budget, and they are always a lot of fun to make if you're not too squeamish about the outcome. It's also always great to later see these vfx shots in context in the finished film, when they really make their proper impact within the final edit complete with the popcorn-dropping jump-scare sound effects added in!
Virtually on track
Inspired by the successes of the use of LED backscreens used for some of the shots in the Planet Insect television series, we have invested in the latest camera tracking hardware and software to take this a step further and allow us to produce our own virtual productions at our studio in Clifton.
This is a technical demo that we set up in collaboration with camera operator Kevin Flay and television producer Steve Nicholls, in which we are looking at the possibilities of the technology when utilising the set-up for macro shots.
We're capturing in-camera visual effects on an LED screen not only to get final shots on set in camera from the creative perspective, but also to get dynamic lighting reflections and interaction onto the subject matter themselves - be it animals or acting talent.
There's many additional benefits over shooting on green: first off all shots are final in-camera, and the talent can react naturally to the environment as they cannot against a greenscreen. Second you don't have green spill, instead you get dynamic interactive lighting on the talent. And lastly the creative decisions are being made on location instead of months down the road in post production.
In order to effectively track the position of a camera in the virtual environment, we have several virtual tracking sensors around the studio space and on the camera sending geographic coordinates to the pc. An unreal engine background environment is generated to drop seamlessly into the background on the LED screens.
Mr Bond, we've been expecting you...
This year sees a multitude of events, tv programmes and products celebrating the 60th anniversary of the 1st James Bond film Dr No.
Back in 2010 we were helping EON films celebrate an earlier anniversary with their release of a series of hardback books. We produced a short animated promo that was rather appropriately 007 seconds long.
CGI Trucking with Goodyear
We have enjoyed filming OTR (off the road) vehicles for Goodyear in the past, including the huge haul trucks that run Goodyear tyres. Haul trucks are gigantic off-road, rigid dump trucks specifically engineered for use in high-production mining and heavy-duty construction environments. In the past we have filmed these in their natural environment in a quarry, each loaded with 100 tonnes of limestone. With giant trucks and rocks the size of cars on the move, this dangerous environment is a no-go zone for pedestrians, and so our drone cameras, go-pros and telephoto lens were ideal tools here.
This time around, the kit wouldn't need a deep cleaning from quarry dust afterwards, as we were asked to help out from the comfort of our studio with some CGI modelling. Tyres for these trucks are very, very expensive and are constantly monitored remotely using special Goodyear technology inside the truck to keep each truck running at maximum efficiency. Each hour a truck is down during maintenance is money lost in the quarry, and so monitoring can head-off potentially expensive problems. Fitting this kit to different types of OTR vehicle for use in such a hazardous environment needs to very secure, and so we worked with the Otrovez Agency in Bristol to supply intricate yet clear CGI instructional imagery to help engineers fit this monitoring equipment. An interesting CGI challenge for us, and having now been through the intricate technical side of producing these images, could probably confidently fit these sytems to the real truck ourselves!