Our animated video for dance act Eyeopener's new release, Hungry Eyes, has topped the Box chart after only two weeks. The video chart is voted for by viewers who call in to choose their favourite songs. The single is due for general release in early November.
The video is Eyeopeners second release, a cover version of the hit song from Dirty Dancing. We began by taking another look at Dirty Dancing, the hit movies from the eighties. This gave us some good ideas to work with, all we had to do now was build a forest and two fairies and animate them!
First a storyboard was made, this would be the template for the action.
The video was broken up into distinctive sequences and each one assigned to one of five animators. Each animator was responsible for completing their sequence and ensuring it flowed into the next sequence seamlessly. Gradually a rough animatic was refined until animation was completed.
At the same time work was underway on the complex background environment. Forests, plants and water are notoriously difficult to create in 3D, the amount of geometry and information required is huge. This meant we had to break up the scenes into multiple layers and render separate elements that were them composited back together to create the final image. Although this created a massive amount of date and storage requirements it also gave us greater control over the final image. The video is enhanced by depth-of-field, camera focus, glows and particle effects.
The video was produced in four weeks by a team of seven artists.
The release of Blake's 7 on DVD has won a prestigious award at this years Cult TV awards. The boxed set was awarded the DVD Presentation of The Year prize. The mammoth task of producing & authoring the DVD's was completed by the Dysfunction Group.
Mark Spencer from Dysfunction was on hand to receive the award at the event held earlier this month. As part of the project Qurios Entertainment was asked to provide an up-to-date recreation of the classic Blakes 7 spaceship, the Liberator. Animation Director Niel Bushnell said, “It was a great challenge and a childhood dream to get to play with such an iconic ship. The trick was to try to stay faithful to the original model work while bringing it into the 21st century. We studied the original footage and sourced as many pictures of the model as possible to help us recreate the Liberator.”
Blakes 7 originally aired in the UK on BBC 1 between 1978 and 1981. All of the original special effects were produced with a number of different sized models and shot on film. The new sequence, which shows the Liberator flying through space, was created digitally.
Qurios Entertainment has continued its involvement with Blakes 7 and has provided new material for each of the four planned DVD releases. Almost every memorable spaceship from the original series has been recreated as a computer model for the DVD’s.
Qurios is pleased to announce the recent recruitment of Aled Lloyd as our senior Architectural & Environment artist.
Aled originally trained as an architect before moving into computer games development. In his 7 years in the business Aled has worked on 10 game titles for several major game developers including Broadsword, Runecraft, Acclaim and Brat Designs.
Aled brings a unique approach to environment model building for computer games and television production; his architectural training gives functionality and reality to his fantastic designs. Already Aled has overseen the design of futuristic cities and asteroid bases for two pop videos.
He is also creating tools and procedures that will be of great use to our game development clients.
Qurios Entertainment is proud to have recently worked on the comedy short ‘Blake’s Junction 7’. As well as supplying an animated star field for the opening sequence we also created a movie-style poster to help promote the film at various festivals. Blake's Junction 7 is written by Tim Plester and directed by Ben Gregor, the commercials & music video director. It follows a collection of familiar characters as they visit a motorway service station.
Spaced and Brass Eye actor Mark Heap stars alongside Shooting Stars' Johnny Vegas, The Office's Martin Freeman & Mackenzie Crook, Teachers' Raquel Cassidy, Captain V's Justin Edwards and Hardware's Susan Earl. Plester and Gregor previously created the 2002 short film Ant Muzak, which starred Nick Moran, Mackenzie Crook and Mark Heap, and featured cult 80’s pop band Adam and the Ants doing a late-night supermarket shop.
The celebrated short film won the Audience Award at the 2003 Sydney Film Festival. Gregor describes Blake's Junction 7 as, "the second part of a trilogy about flamboyant British 80s characters in modern, mundane situations." He terms the project "an unfunded labour of love," filming it over two-and-a-half nights at Newport Pagnell service station in February.
The cast and crew stayed at The Welcome Break hotel at the service station, leading to an unusual incident when a teenage party at the venue was exposed to top British comedy stars dressed as science fiction characters. "It was pretty surreal getting Mackenzie Crook (Gareth in The Office) across the dance-floor un-noticed, considering he was in drag, dressed as Servelan. In the end we put his peacock feather cape over his head."
Gregor continues, ”I wanted the title sequence to be quite retro, in the style of the old BBC computer game ELITE, and Niel Bushnell from Qurios did a brilliant star field for us. He also did all the 3D work on the Blake's 7 DVD, which was brought out recently, so it was cool to have him on board. Everybody involved in this film was extremely dedicated and passionate.”
"All the props and costumes were made from scratch," reports Gregor. "We got a Royal College of Art graduate called Mr Gammon to make all our costumes. The props were made by Central School of Speech and Drama as their graduation project. We built a working Orac and then we blew him up."
Blake's Junction 7 is an unofficial project, without affiliation to the rights-holders of the BBC series Blake's 7, which was created by the late Terry Nation. "People keep asking what we’re going to do with this mini-flick. We’re just going to show it to people and hope they enjoy it. We don’t have any commercial plans for it whatsoever."
Looking beyond plans for a third and final instalment in the planned trilogy, which involves wrestling, Gregor says, "The Universe is just about ready for our full length feature film..."
Qurios has just completed its second video, a 3 minute extravaganza for top UK dance act N-Trance. The video includes the three main members of N-Trance as 3D characters. The adventure starts in a run-down part of town before it leaps into space and a police chase through the asteroid belt. The video ends at an illegal rave inside one of the asteroids where N-Trance perform to the waiting crowds
The video was produced by Qurios in five weeks by a team of seven artists. To see a clip form the video go to our showreel section, or watch out for the full video on a music channel near you soon.
We have just completed work on a 3-minuted animated pop promo for dance act Flip & Fill. The video accompanies Flip & Fill’s new release entitled ‘Discoland’.
Record company AATW Records, working with Graham Hector Video Productions commissioned Qurios Entertainment to create the computer generated promo in just over four weeks. Early work concentrated on devising a storyboard for the video and defining the look of the characters and environments. The video follows the female vocalist, Karen Parry, as she makes her way through a futuristic city to Discoland, a nightclub like no other. The city is populated with a variety of robots that share Karen’s journey. When she arrives at Discoland she meets Flip & Fill who are entertaining a crowd of 15,000 dancing robots.
In order to achieve the massive crowd sequences Qurios used its in-house crowd simulation system, ‘Chocka’. Lead animator Ciarán Wright explains, “Chocka allowed us to create thousands of dancing robots in very little time, we couldn’t have done those shots without it.”
Qurios Entertainment’s Managing Director Niel Bushnell said, “We’re very pleased with this video, a lot of effort went into designing the look of the city and its unique architecture. Creating the characters was great fun too!”
A team of six people worked around the clock to meet the tight deadline. All animation and model building was produced using 3DS Max 6. Niel Bushnell continues, "We worked hard to meet the deadline. We were very ambitious with what we could achieve in the time but I think the results speak for themselves."
The video is already showing on cable channel The Box and has jumped to number 5 in their charts after only two days. The single is due for release at the beginning of July. Coincidently Graham Hector, noted commercial and video director who oversaw the project, is also originally from Hartlepool. Now based in Manchester Graham has worked as a live-action director for many years. Recently he has also completed the video for The Farm's re-release of their single 'All Together Now' for Euro 2004.
Hot on the heels of our work for the DVD release of Blakes 7 comes another sci-fi classic, John's Carpenter's Dark Star. The 30th Anniversary boxed set will be released in the UK on 19th April 2004.
Qurios Entertainment produced a series of animated intros based around the Dark Star space ship and its famous bombs.
At an awards dinner held at the Middlesbrough Football Club on the 19th of February Qurios Entertainment was named as the winning entrant in the Technology, Innovation & Design category
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The awards recognise excellence in new businesses based in the Tees Valley region. This year saw over 150 companies submit entries into the nine categories.
Qurios Entertainments Managing Director Niel Bushnell said, “ We are delighted to have won this award. We’ve worked hard in the last two years to establish Qurios and I think this award recognises that effort. “ The Technology Award was sponsored by the Virtual Reality Centre and presented by Tim Dear, Business Development Manager.
