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3DTotal: Can you tell us a little about your background and how you came to be where you are now?
Wiek: For me it all started as a kid. I had a grandfather who was a very talented painter and founder of an art academy, a mother who loves art and used to draw with us all the time, and a father with a more technical background, but at the same time creative. My parents had their own business at home, so I had access to computers, a copier, a printer, plotter, paper, traditional drawing table, etc., and a mother and father who always encouraged me to explore and be creative.When I went to university to study Industrial Design Engineering, in 1991, I was already capable of making complicated technical drawings in AutoCAD and had been making images with raytracers for a while (DKBtrace, Polyray and later Povray). At university I got my hands on 3D Studio 1, and in my first year I was working for the university as an illustrator, providing images for certain courses. By the second year I was teaching 3D to older students on a course for third year students, on ‘Electrogig 3D-GO’. Also, at university, we got introduced to drawing with markers, fine-liners, pastels and so on. I absolutely loved that! We got very thorough lessons in drawing properly in perspective and without using rulers. After hours I was also teaching some other students the finer points of drawing by hand.During those university years, I was active as a freelancer creating various artworks to make some extra money. Together, with two other students, I started my own company in 1995 which was based in my living room for a year, and was filled with 7 artists and coders working on an Internet golf game and a documentary. We had no reason to be bored: my old freelance contacts made sure we were filled to the brim with paying work, leaving no time whatsoever to be a student.
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The business thrived and I spent day and night creating artwork, teaching employees and managing production. After five years of creating animation for game cinematics half the time, and technical animation for the oil industry and ship builders for the rest of the time, I decided to sell the business and get my Master of Science degree by designing, developing, and prototyping a low cost, real time facial capture system on my own. So, after 10 years as a student, I finally finished. A big Dutch games company hired me as their animation director, setting up the animation division with the plan of working on commercials, TV series, as well as game cinematics. The company was about 250 people big, but soon the cracks began to show; 100 people were made redundant, then more followed, including my team. I ended up in the final group of 20 people left creating cinematics in LW, in-game animation, and so on, in 3d Studio Max. From there I moved to Sheffield with my wife where I got a job for Particle Systems, part of Argonaut games. That was great; I met so many talented people there and got to work on a cool games project. A year later we returned to the Netherlands where I joined Guerrilla Games as Lead Cinematics, and within months I was Lead Artist responsible for a team of 30 talented artists. |
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This involved not just creative but also management and planning tasks, which I was very familiar with from my earlier experience. After two years of that I decided to leave and get into cinematics and more high end 3D again. I got offered a job at Axis Animation in Glasgow as head of production, a more management oriented job at a company that does amazing artwork for commercials, game cinematics and short films, amongst other things. Having been on the production side of things for a year, it was too tempting not to get involved creatively, and I am now officially an Animation Director again. Amongst other things I’ve directed the Colin McRae Dirt, Race Driver: GRID and Operation Flashpoint 2 cinematic trailers for Codemasters, which you can see on the Axis Animation website or on Gametrailers.com. Directing is so much my thing, it's great to have finally found the thing I really, really like doing. It allows me to combine creativity and management, working with great teams on cool projects, and every single project challenges me in new and different ways. |
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3DTotal: You mention getting involved creatively again as an Animation Director. Can you talk about your role on the recent Operation Flashpoint 2 trailer and explain what the job entails, exactly?
Wiek: My role was basically to do the directing of the trailer. Codemasters supplied Axis Animation with a briefing which contained the basic parameters to which we could write a creative pitch. I wrote the initial script and from that, all the way to final grading, I was responsible for the look and feel of the piece – pretty much like a movie director, just on a smaller scale. For the pre-production, my tasks were to create 2D and 3D animatics, to do research for the team, and so on. Once we had a storyboard, I took that into Premiere to make a 2D animatic to get a better feel for the pace and flow of the trailer. This was then combined with the previz sequences to create a mix of 2D and 3D animatics. Later on, directing camera motion and animation was the obvious big task to look at, in combination with art direction for the environments and assets. A lot of the animation in the sequence was based on motion capture, which I directed at Audiomotion. The great thing was that some of the motion capture actors had a background in the military. One of them in particular had years of experience as a paratrooper/pathfinder and he was able to advise on the moves, the tactical decisions, but also how to hold and aim the various weapons. These are very important things to get right – not being based on watching Hollywood movies/fantasy, but on real life. During the motion capture I also worked as the camera man, holding a camera which was also tracked in 3D space, allowing us to get a real camera into the animation and heightening the sense of realism. It is just the greatest thing to have a sequence in your head, only to see it come to life with actors who know their business. The cinematic was also very FX heavy, for which we were able to use a very experienced VFX artist who has tonnes of experience working for big Hollywood blockbusters. It is great to work with true professionals who can really deliver the goods, despite short deadlines. To be honest, I had a kick ass team to work with, and I like to give artists the creative leeway to make things look as good as they can within the initial vision I’ve laid out. The guys did an amazing job that didn’t need much in the way of meddling from my end at all.
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3DTotal: So what is all this you do besides your work as a director?
Wiek: Well, basically I love aviation art. I have spent the last 10 years or so steadily growing as an aviation artist. At this point in time I've been lucky enough to have featured in an exhibition, a calendar, and several books. A lot of my free time goes into improving myself as an aviation artist, which is a great outlet for my need to do art of my own, besides working as a director with a team. In the last few years I've opened my own online aviation art gallery which features the work of great artists that don’t get a chance in the existing traditional big galleries. Also, I've had my first real art exhibition, which was a big digital aviation art exhibition in the Militaire Luchtvaart Museum in Soesterberg, The Netherlands. As far as I know, it was the first in the world featuring digital aviation art, specifically. After that I worked on a calendar about the Dutch Airforces with John Wallin Liberto and Gareth Hector. For a while now I've also been running a forum which caters for people who are interested in military artwork, be it 3D, 2D or scale models – it doesn't matter. We have a great group of very talented guys visiting there, sharing their passion for the same hobby. The forum is based at http://www.mil-art.com. Please take time to visit and you'll see very high quality models and artwork on your screen.
One of my current big projects is an aviation book which will feature a lot of artwork, but also photographs and texts, again with friends. Definitely a long term project, but great fun! |
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