#include work
Some notable projects include Google Spotlight Stories ‘HELP’, a double Gold Cannes Lion-winning, immersive 360-degree short film directed by Justin Lin.
Directed creative technology efforts on Mill Stitch, The Mill Blackbird Car Rig and Reeps One ‘Does Not Exist’, the first immersive music video of its kind, AI style development for APEX legends cinematic trailers which went on to feature a LIVE streamed performance bringing game character Mirage to life at ‘The Game Awards’ and first ever realtime produced music video for Cashmere Cat's 'EMOTIONS'
./bugs
A creative technology installation by TOM KUNTZ + DAN DEACON
From the imagination of filmmaker Tom Kuntz and in collaboration with electronic musician Dan Deacon; "Bugs" is a perpetually changing realtime/ interactive/ visual/music artwork featuring musical-kooky-alien-like insects. Standing erect, each bug form a standing stone performing for you at center of the henge.
A case study in real-time interactive installation that leverage user input and midi events to drive perpetual animations and audio scapes.
role_
Creative developer / Technical Innovations Manager
./help
A 360° immersive film by JUSTIN LIN + GOOGLE
Targeting mobile phones we aided google on exploration for what the future of entertainment might look like.
Finished at highest visual effects and production quality it was a bold leap that propelled confidence in spherical video for mobile and virtual reality consumption.
role_
Shoot Supervision
/ Technical Product/Innovations Manager
recognition_
Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity:
Digital Craft Lion Gold - Virtual Reality
Digital Craft Lion Gold - Innovative Use of Technology
Communication Arts Awards:
Award of Excellence
./millStitch
Millstitch was the first ever industry acclaimed real-time 360° video stitching Directors Tool .
role_
Technical Product Manager/ Innovations Manager
recognition_
Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity:
Digital Craft Lion Gold | Innovative Use of Technology
SXSW:
Innovation Gold Award | AR/VR breakthrough
Technicolor:
Recognition for outstanding technology contribution and the impact on business and operations.
./mule
We collaborated with Director Guy Shelmerdine of Dark Corner to create a provocative, thrilling, first-of-its-kind VR journey through the final moments of a man’s life. Watch the trailer here for an up close and personal look at Mule.
role_
Technical Director/ Innovations Manager
./blackBird
The worlds first fully adjustable car rig that serves as motion capture acquisition for premium photo-realistic computer generated cars.
A study on dynamic image based lighting, computer vision for cinema lens calibration/ object tracking, lidar scanning with realtime localization and mapping with the end goal being able to do realtime cg replacement.
role_
Technical Product Manager / Innovations Manager
recognition_
Cannes Lions International Festival of Creativity:
Innovation Gold Award | Pioneering Technological Creativity
Hollywood Post Alliance:
The Judges Award for Creativity and Innovation
./theHumanRace
The Mill joined forces with Epic Games and chevrolet to revolutionize the conventions of digital filmmaking with “The Human Race,” a short film that debuted at GDC 2017. Combining an advanced implementation of Epic’s Unreal Engine with The Mill’s proprietary virtual production toolkit, Mill Cyclops™, “The Human Race” merges real-time visual effects and live-action storytelling.
role_
Technical Innovations Manager
recognition_
Siggraph:
Realtime Live | Best in Graphics and Real-time interactivity
./acura “DNA”
The Mill blackbird transforms into Acura NSX, RLX and MDX
role_
Technical Innovations Manager/ Shoot supervisor
./doesNotExist
360° Beatboxing film with 3D sound featuring world champion beatboxer Reeps One.
This was a study on producing compelling 360degree content at lower cost.
Reeps One: Does Not Exist" drops you into the center of beatboxer Reeps One’s first virtual reality performance. In this 360 music video, Aurelia Soundworks partnered with Creative Director Gawain Liddiard and Creative Technologist Tawfeeq Martin to consider how VR could encompass not only changing environments and hearing how those different environments affect the sonic qualities, but also play around with the concept of where you’re hearing the sounds from. The track was composed to fully utilize the 360 sonic and visual space, creating a totally new style of music video.
role_
Technical Innovations Manager/ 1st AC
./theRaid
A 360° immersive film produced for SAMSUNG.
A study on realtime nodally layered camera compositing through a stitching system triggered by motion control.
A 360 video prequel to 24: Legacy leveraging the latest Oculus/Samsung VR app and Samsung Gear VR. The experience puts you in the middle of a special forces military raid choreographed with uninterrupted action viewable from any direction.
For this production I developed a motion control viewer that tightly integrated with programmed moves in real-time to layer and composite translated and angular camera offsets into a single domed image for in context 360 degree viewing on set.
role_
Technical Innovations Manager
./insects
An interactive benchmark tool released as partner launch alongside Microsoft for XBOX ONE X console.
We partnered with Microsoft to create ‘Insects’, Launched alongside the Xbox One X this piece served as a real-time interactive showcase leveraging the cutting-edge hardware and software features which included HDR, Dolby spatial audio, 4k display output.
role_
Technical Innovations Manager
recognition_
Webby Award:
Best Visual Design, most innovative, and effective or creative use of VR or 360 video to facilitate an interactive experience for users in a game or real-time setting on behalf of a brand or product.
./welcomeToMarwenAr
Welcome to Marwen, the groundbreaking, genre-defying new film from visionary Academy Award winning filmmaker Robert Zemeckis (Forrest Gump, Back the Future trilogy, Cast Away) starring Steve Carrell, The Mill's emerging technology team has partnered with Universal Pictures to build an Augmented Reality mobile device app that will, for the first time, transport users into the movie itself.
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Technical Innovations Manager
./apexLegends
Directors David and Lisha invited our creative technology team to collaborate on a fun challenge here -- the brief called for mammoth amounts of independent elements including structures, landscape, vegetation, and water to be treated with hand painted look. Our objective was to leverage machine intelligence and state of the art stylization algorithms offering laborsaving execution without compromising artistry.
We looked to convolution neural networks to compliment earliest look exploration. Fueled by Nvidia's latest AI enhanced RTX boards we fed the network its weight in mood paintings, style references and game assets to produce artistic images of high perceptual quality - all within minutes! Synthesized texture maps that respected edge boundaries was a novel way of addressing temporal incoherence over image sequences. In the end this method was invaluable for character and overall style inspiration.
Once we met creative approval we reproduced the look into an anisotropic kuwahara filter for even more coherent abstraction. Derivative's Touchdesigner was used as a prototyping platform and real-time sequence review tool before finally porting the algorithm into distributed Nuke instances that offered artists more familiar creative control.
A great collaborative effort by artists and technologists trading high doses of curiosity!
role_
R&D lead / Innovations Manager
./Nike “dream further”
Nike uses this dramatization to remind girls that they should never change their dreams but rather dream further in order to change the world.
If you look closely you might spot some cool shots produced using motion capture and unreal engine.
role_
Motion Capture Supervisor / Innovations Manager
./Cashmere Cat + Jake Schreier “Emotions” and “For your eyes only”
The Mill has collaborated with Norwegian musician Cashmere Cat and renowned Director Jake Schreier on the groundbreaking music video series ‘Emotions’ followed by ‘For your eyes Only’ The result is not only a visually stunning promo for Cashmere album release ‘Princess CATGIRL’
A study proving efficiency and accessibility of virtual production leveraging motion capture, real-time visualization(unreal engine) applied to popular music and choreography. The result a fun music video advancing application of real-time technology pushing boundaries of creativity and innovation.
role_
Technical Innovations Manager
recognition_
Featured on shots: link here
./Louis Vuitton Spring-Summer 2020 Fashion Show
The Mill + Epic Games helped bring to life background visual/music video for Louis Vuitton Spring-Summer 2020 show. Lighting up the Louvre with 10112x2308 pixels invited a innovative approach of capturing 12+ minutes of final pixels through camera.
Performance set against real-time(unreal engine) backgrounds displayed on Lux Maxhina’s ROE led wall. Key beautification touches and comp to achieve this fashion forward result.
role_
Technical Director/ Innovations Manager
./10-Year Anniversary Celebration Film - League of Legends
The Mill collaborated with Riot Games to craft a celebration of ten years of League of Legends and its community. The collaborative nature of Riot Games and the players flowed seamlessly into this project. This important chapter in Riot Games’ history required international shoots, large-scale practical on-set builds and creative visual effects to construct the surprising narrative.
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Set / Technical Supervision/ Innovations Manager
./RESPAWN ENTERTAINMENT live from Mirage’s Holo-Day Bash | The Game Awards
The Game Awards took place at the Microsoft Theater on Thursday 12th December and was broadcast live on YouTube, among other channels. The highly anticipated annual awards ceremony honors achievements in the video game industry.
In true Mirage fashion he interrupted the main event presenting himself as the main event — we served as his creatives and technologists orchestrating performance capture devices and game engines to help bring life to one the largest personalities to hit the stage.
A study on bringing the beloved character, Mirage, to life in an unimaginable way; on stage, live and ‘in person’ at The Game Awards.
This involved system design and integration for full body optical performance/motion capture, facial capture, realtime visualization, in-game and practically triggered action events and output to live broadcast!
role_
Technical Director/ Innovations Manager
recognition_
Adweek Experiential Awards:
The best use of video in an experiential activation.
./OREO ‘TROLLS WORLD TOUR’ Augmented Reality Experience
Worked with The Martin Agency and OREO to bring to life an augmented reality experience on Instagram to celebrate Universal’s first ever STREAM-TO-HOME release of the Trolls World Tour movie. The team crafted an experience enabling fans to use limited edition OREO Trolls World Tour packs and cookies to trigger an exclusive Queen Poppy performance. The filter showcases a special dance to the new track, “Just Sing (Trolls World Tour)”
A great study on improving Spark AR beta features on tracking, production quality animation and shaders to produce a compelling augmented reality show true to the style of the film.
role_
Technical Director/ Innovations Manager
recognition_
Webby Awards Honoree:
Advertising, Media & PR Augmented Reality 2021
./HOLLYWOOD ROYALE: OUT OF THE SCHOOL OF LOS ANGELES VIRTUAL REALITY GALLERY
From Michael Jackson to Madonna, from Prince to George Michael, Cyndi Lauper and many more, the portraits of Hollywood Royale comprise a literal ‘who’s-who’ of ‘80s pop culture, commissioned largely for Andy Warhol’s Interview magazine and Jann Wenner’s Rolling Stone. Matthew Rolston’s influential photographic approach was displayed in a hyper-realistic three-dimensional virtual gallery space. Guests donned Oculus headsets for an intimate ‘journey’ through Rolston’s photographs, curated and guided by the artist himself, as he narrates some of the personal stories behind these timeless images.
role_
Technical Director/ Innovations Manager