work – DEATH TO THE FLIPPERS

Lionsgate Entertainment World: Environmental Media

Lionsgate Entertainment World in Zhuia, China, is a very high tech theme park. It’s brand and general experience is futuristic with a very modern architectural look. To help bring this to life Framestore created screen installations all around the park, this floor to ceiling screen media wrapped pillars, curved media walls, and the centerpiece to the park; a chandelier of huge curved LED walls.

All of these screens play bespoke, high resolution, high frame-rate animated sequences based on the 6 film IPs in the park which Gavin wrote and directed.

Read more here.

Gods of Egypt: Battle for Eternity

The world’s first purpose built VR roller coaster. Directed by Gavin and based in Lionsgate Entertainment World in Zhuhai, China. Working alongside Thinkwell Group.

This roller coaster ride takes in the whole movie, including sneaking through the city and night to break into the vault, weaving past giant fire breathing cobras in underground tunnels and blasting the evil god Set into a giant spire that explodes to bring light back to the land… it’s all in there.

As we were building this roller coaster from scratch to be a VR experience we chose to have a powered vehicle that we could control to mimic the movement in the VR visuals. This enabled us to traverse the whole track twice giving a very different feel on each lap without the guests realizing, and fitting a what seems like a huge rides into a relatively small space.

Read more here.

The Twilight Saga: Bella’s Journey

The Twilight Saga: Bella’s Journey is a dark ride that (as the name suggests) attempts to tell the take in the entire story of the Twilight Saga franchise. The ride is in Lionsgate Entertainment World, in Zhuhai, China. All of the ride’s visual and audio media was directed by Gavin, alongside the creative team at Thinkwell group.

Featuring animatronics, rich scenic design and perspective warped media screens, guests take on the role of Bella Swan, and experience her emotional journey throughout the Twilight Saga. From falling in love to a huge vampire vampire and tumbling down an icy mountain.

The team at Framestore built digital doubles of the movie characters and used a blend of hand animation and motion capture to bring them to life. We commissioned a full cinematic score for the ride which was performed by a one hundred piece orchestra, and we also directed all of the sound design and voice over performance.

Read more here.

The Twilight Saga: Midnight Ride

Gavin directed this VR motorbike ride for Lionsgate Entertainment world in Zhuhai, China, working alongside Thinkwell Group. The ride is loosely based on the events of Twilight: Eclipse, which has the riders teaming up with Jacob Black, as they race through the forest with the black pack of werewolves drawing out the evil newborn vampire army.

The ride won a Thea award for outstanding achievement and was one of the first full scale high throughput VR attraction in the world which gives riders agency of thier actions. Riders have full control of thier bikes, being able to seek out different paths through the forest, discovering hidden jumps and tunnels, and choose how to avoid the attacking vampires.

Artists and developers across Framestore’s London, New York and Montreal studies were involved in this major project.

Read more here.

Pearl Quest

Our first theme park ride! Jason and I creative directed this ride at Framestore for Wanda Group.

The ride is in Qingdao, China and is based on an ancient legend about a young god called Nezha and his battle with the 4 dragons of the oceans.

It was a 3 year project, during which the team at Framestore designed all of the characters and environments, wrote the script, created many storyboards and pre-vis iterations, commissioned the original musical score and sound effects, and created all of the animation and VFX.

More information here: https://www.framestore.com/work/wanda-group

The Time Portal

This was a surprise project… Some people came to our time machine show in our garage all those years ago, years later they work at an agency and want to replicate the show for a larger audience to promote Stella Artois’ sponsorship of the the Wimbledon tournament. So they asked us if we could that.

We said sure (but this time got to collaborate with the immersive theater company Les Enfants Terribles to make this happen). It was quite a huge task to plan our an immersive experience that runs across multiple builds on multiple floors with timed audiences that think they are the only group in the show. It was all themed around a whimsical version of old London, with a blend of real and fiction characters including Jack the Ripper, Scrooge, Faggin, Queen Victoria and a whole host of circus performers, street traders and mischievous young scamps.

Read more here.

Immersive Cult: Voodoo

Friends of ours, Immersive Cult (an immersive/experiential/theatrical company), asked us to help come up with some concepts for a Voodoo themed event in a very exclusive London venue for Halloween. We had free reign to change every room in the venue, so we drew up a master concept that transformed the swanky club into a mix of a decaying New Orleans Voodoo underground, with a bit of a hot and steamy backstreet Blues bar.

The night had a cast of characters roaming the floor, which were part of an unfolding story. As the night drew on, Marie Laveau (The Voodoo Queen) summoned the Voodoo priest Baron Samedi from his grave. He slowly possessed the night dwellers, and led them all into a voodoo dance frenzy.

We laid all of this out into a presentation along with sketches and mood boards, and then (due to other commitments) left it in Immersive Cult’s hands to bring to life. What we experienced when we finally arrived on Halloween was amazing. They utterly surpassed any expectations. The set was spot on. The performers were eerily authentic. The story was effortlessly weaved into the night… and on top of that, everyone seemed to have a blast.

Immersive Cult is led by two brilliant dudes we met on a few Secret Cinema projects – Francesco Pastori and Garrett Moore. These guys know their stuff, please throw all of your immersive project briefs in their general direction, you won’t be disappointed.

Fiat: VR Dynamo, The Power of X

Our first project at Framestore – A virtual reality experience with Dynamo and the new Fiat 500X.

Above is a short teaser of what you see inside the experience, to see the real thing you’ll need to see it in an Oculus Rift at one of the many car shows or dealerships it’s being demonstrated in across 19 regions of Europe. Or just download the Google Cardboard version here.

The full Oculus Rift experience includes maybe the world’s first illusion in VR, as well as 4D seat rumbling effects. I can’t tell you what the actual trick is, that would spoil it the magic, but we worked with Dynamo to make sure he was happy with the trick we designed.

Dynamo was shot as live action, but everything else is computer generated imagery, including a completely photo real car. Creating the CG for this was a monstrous task. To work in VR, we had to make 2 videos (one for each eye), each at extremely high resolution (4K) and running at 60fps. To render this we used Framestore’s render farm at full capacity, each frame of footage taking 90% of the processing power as Gravity did. Rending it on a single computer would take 184 years.

EE- The Big Mobile Network Race

For just over a year EE was the only provider of 4G in the UK. As the other networks finally released their 4G services we needed to show how EE’s 4G was faster and bigger than all the others.

This was my last project while working at Poke, while Framestore handled the production and effects, which made my job transition from one company to the other eerily smooth.

Secret Cinema: The Grand Budapest Hotel

When Secret Cinema recreated Wes Anderson’s The Grand Budepest Hotel inside a disused warehouse, we took care of the outside. Working with projection designer Nina Dunn, we re-created the hotel frontage from the film and projected it over the warehouse.

To bring it to life we added live action of characters in the windows, a snow storm, ZZ banners blowing in the wind and lights turning on and off in various rooms.

This frontage served as an introduction to the amazing rich world Secret Cinema had created inside the building.