I’ve wanted to write this for a while but needed to gain enough separation and perspective to approach it the right way. The following paragraphs contain no advice or solutions, only experiences. I recently did an audio interview with Joey Korenman over at School Of Motion and we touched on the subject, but the brevity and my awkward delivery possibly undermined the severity of the topic. The visible response to that section I think overshadowed everything else so I think there’s room for me to expand here.
SCHOOL OF MOTION INTERVIEW
http://www.schoolofmotion.com/matt-frodsham/
For some reason I was invited to chat to School of Motion a few weeks ago (apparently a listener requested me specifically... I will find you!). We get a bit weird and real in places but it’s potentially a fun listen on the whole. Amongst the extensive geek talk and experiences/fears of freelance life I touch briefly on the subject of work-life balance and burnout, which I'll expand on soon; I think I probably write better than I speak and it's an important topic that we should all talk about more.
I can recommend listening to Joey's other interviews with Nejc Polovsak (Twisted Poly) and Rich Nosworthy, they're at least twice as good as mine!
Thanks to Joey Korenman for asking great questions for me to answer awkwardly, and thanks also for the badass Keyframe Warrior tshirt designed by the incredible Lucas Brooking
GOODBYE BERLIN
After almost five wonderful years living in Berlin the time has come to relocate to England.
I've had the best time of my life and made incredible friends, I feel truly privileged to have shared the company of such inspiring people in an amazing city.
I got invited to intern at Zeitguised in 2010 and have worked on a wealth of amazing projects since then, the help and patience everybody showed me can never be repaid. I'm sure return visits and future projects will be frequent! So to all my friends in Berlin, thank you for everything.
From March 2015 I will be based just outside Manchester, UK and available for remote or onsite projects anywhere in the world. Although it was a heavy feeling to leave for that last plane to England without a return ticket, I'm also really excited to start this new chapter of my life.
I've given the site a bit of a spring clean and tried to streamline the content, hopefully it's a bit easier to navigate. I threw together a new reel for Spring 2015 which you can find just below...
I'm also now the director of MATT FRODSHAM Ltd which sounds very serious, but I only make the tea.
PHILLIPS / CANDY
I recently worked on this massive candy explosion with Zeitguised, 6k! For now here's a photo of it being used by Phillips at the show.
MERRY CHRISTMAS
Thanks to everyone I've had the pleasure of working with and meeting over the past year for making it one of the best I can remember. Here's to an even better 2015!
Stay safe and have a great holiday season.
BIRDS - MAKING OF / INTERVIEW
Earlier this year Zeitguised & I released our Birds into the wild. The reception was great, we received so many lovely comments and it even won an honorary mention at Ars Electronica! It's one of the most fun projects I've ever had the pleasure of working on.
A couple of weeks ago, Der Spiegel came to interview Henrik about how the project was made. They asked me to show them round some of the technical aspects and demonstrate some of the Cinema 4D scene files. Luckily they didn't use too much of my rambling, and they dubbed my voice into German... but you can see the Zeitguised studio, and look at some interesting stuff. Watch it HERE.
In preparation for this I made a quick edit of our early concept material, some dailies and behind the scenes stuff which you can watch below. I also wrote a slightly more in depth case study which you can read here.
UNUSED BOARDS
A small selection of boards from a narrative animated music video that didn't get made in late 2013. I just found them lying around on my hard drive so thought I'd post them up!
RECORDING
Today I spent the day with Marian Pramberger putting the final touches on the sound design for our new film, should be out really soon!
Playing slide ukulele with a tiny bottle is a hard look to pull off.
UPDATED THOUGHTS ON OCTANE
Spoiler: I still like it! I've been working with Octane a lot more this year, my blog last year were based on a pretty early build. Since then it's seen it's 1.0 release, and is constantly improving, now Octane 2.0 has been announced it seems like there aren't many features left to add to compete with the more traditional render engines.
ST HELENS COLLEGE C4D WORKSHOP
I spent three days this week introducing Cinema 4D to the graphic design students at St Helens College. I'm not much of a teacher; I usually prefer to just leave a trail of breadcrumbs online and try to show some interesting processes for most projects I work on (see: CASE STUDIES). I enjoyed my time at St Helens, without a doubt the two most valuable years of my education, so when I was invited to talk about my work and do a bit of software training I didn't really hesitate.
It was pretty interesting going back to basics, three short days isn't really enough to even scratch the surface of such a multifaceted piece of software so I had to cherry pick a few tools and processes that could be put into context right away and achieve some kind of result. Ignoring modelling, lighting and traditional shading, I demonstrated a few ways of creating objects into 3D space and animating them using simple keyframes, deformers and effectors, as well as showing how dynamics can be useful for more than dropping a bunch of shapes on the ground!
As much as some students wanted to jump ahead and start adding wood textures to shiny materials I tried my best to restrict everyone to flat 2D shading and create a collection of little motion tests, concentrating on composition and colour (mainly inspired by my friends at Zeitguised's recent music video for Mouse On Mars)
It was a fairly big group with no real experience of 3D or animation software so I was really pleased with how interested most people seemed and how quickly some students were able to get into the software in such a short time. A lot seemed really keen to learn more independently, so I wish them all the best in learning more!
