My talk about ‘The Earth and I’ project I worked on with Taschen is now up online!
ojovivo
will byers stan first human second

Discoholic 🪩

⁂
No title available
Claire Keane

titsay
Aqua Utopia|海の底で記憶を紡ぐ
Cosmic Funnies

Origami Around
Game of Thrones Daily

oozey mess

izzy's playlists!
I'd rather be in outer space 🛸

shark vs the universe

Andulka

JBB: An Artblog!
trying on a metaphor

Janaina Medeiros
d e v o n

seen from France

seen from United Kingdom
seen from Germany
seen from United States
seen from United States
seen from Türkiye

seen from United States

seen from T1
seen from United Kingdom
seen from United States

seen from Malaysia

seen from United Kingdom

seen from United Kingdom

seen from United States
seen from United States

seen from Türkiye

seen from Canada

seen from United States

seen from Italy
seen from United States
@jack-hudson
My talk about ‘The Earth and I’ project I worked on with Taschen is now up online!
The Earth and I
“Much as the Gaia theory considers our earth as an integrated whole of living systems, The Earth and I encourages holistic understanding. Across 12 chapters, we take in both the intricate details and immense structures of our species and our planet, from our ever-expanding universe to our minuscule but mighty cells. We see stellar explosions and the layers of life beneath our feet, delve into the neuroscience of decision-making, get to grips with our climate, and contemplate our increasing intimacy with technology.”
A collaboration spanning over the last three years with myself, Marlene Taschen and scientific visionary James Lovelock. I’m super excited to have art directed and illustrated the entire book which will be out in October!
You can read more about it all here on Taschens website and find out more about the story of this book from Marlene’s point of view here.
Rowntrees - The Smile Factory (Directors Grade)
Directed by Jack Hudson and Major Briggs
Blinkink X Blink Art collaboration
Agency - JWT
Rowntrees- The Smile Factory
Making of - Part 2
So the work began in Jan 2016 and after a long ol’ wait, it finally came out of research. Major Briggs and I then began working with the Blink Ink team to bring this baby to life!
Above are two development sketches of the interiors within the jelly tot and the fruit pastille factory. The jelly tot was a slight issue when it came out of research as 1.People didn’t quite understand that this factory was meant to be tiny compared to all the others and 2. The lasers seemed a bit intoxicating and inappropriate (I personally loved the sci-fi vibe but it wasn’t quite right) So I tried out a few different options to present to the client, involving a giant magnifying glass and some squashing arm mechanisms, which in the end is the design they went for.
The characters within this jelly tot factory needed to look confined but comfortable so we threw in a couple of armchairs and levers to help the little guys out. These renders show the factories in full CG which I was completely psyched to see but they still lacked some of that 1950s texture and charm we were looking for.
Our producer Janet Smith then installed the help of matte painting wizard Mike Shorten to directly paint over the black and white 3D render in Photoshop. When these versions came back, we couldn’t believe our luck, genius! The first one on the top left was a Frank Soltesz inspired paint over but we wanted to keep the colours nice and bright to suit both the Rowntrees branding and my own work, so we commissioned Mike to do a full paint over using my original sketched colour references.
There was also a request from the agency to make the characters appear more realistic, this was difficult for me to do personally and detach myself from my own working process so Mike also worked up a few shaded versions of my characters for the agency to see.
The difficult task then for the 2D animation team was to work out how to animate the fully shaded character versions. Joe Sparrow worked on these brilliant step by step instructions for animators to use that involved three layers to every frame; colour, shadow and highlights. These layers were then overlaid, slightly blurred and softened in comp to embed them into their environment.
Rather than creating the exterior of the sweet in CG Major Briggs, Blinkink and I decided that it would be amazing to drop the 3D interior into an actual sweet so that it would have a slight stop motion feel and still remain tactile. However we found that actual Rowntrees sweets just melted under the studio lighting so we enlisted the help of a model maker to build giant versions of all three sweets... awesome! The doors of the sweets were then shot opening and closing at Clapham Road studios with director of photography Toby Howell on a big beast of a camera.
These are the final results - a mixture of 2D illustration/animation, model making, 3D rendering, matte painting, 100s of emails, 2 brain melts, many meetings, 20 headaches and a thousand high fives. Thanks team, it was a joy to be a part of and if you look closely I even managed to sneak in a tiny award of excellence or (bad) health and safety onto the wall of the Jelly tot factory to act as a little pat on the back to us all :)
Click here to see the finished advert with all the credits.
Rowntrees- The Smile Factory
Making Of - Part 1 - The Pitch
In July 2015 Major Briggs and I were tasked with the challenge of co-directing and storyboarding a commercial for Rowntrees sweets through our agents in a Blink Ink x Blink Art collaboration.
All I know is that as soon as I saw the phrase ‘1950s style cutaway style illustration inside a fruit pastille’ I was completely sold! Not knowing whether the project would ever take off at this stage I began with this rather elaborate sketch.
This sketch was for the randoms sweet factory which of course had a completely ‘random’ theme, unicycling workers catching tropical fruits from a vibrating tree (then later to find out that absolutely no fruits could be shown within the factory... of course!)
Major Briggs then started to build the factories bit by bit in CG, which blew my tiny 2D mind, it was so awesome to see a plain old sketch turn into three dimensions!
We then worked together to try and reach the right balance of intricacy meets bold. I’d provide various notes on Major Briggs’ designs and then we’d tweak away until all was looking great. Once we were happy, it was time to add some colour based on a few palette options I’d suggested.
We dropped the interiors into a photograph Blink Ink had taken on a macro scale. I then dropped all my little character designs into the factory in PS and added shadows to bring it to life. At this point we wanted it to feel tactile, like these little guys and items would rattle around if you were to pick the sweet up and shake it. It took me back to owning my beloved Mighty Max toys when I was a kid.
We were then hit with the bombshell that every sweet would be on screen for around 6 seconds, therefore the mock up we had produced thus far was too intense to even focus on for that amount of time. We had a rethink and began to simplify, the agency wanted to see the juice flowing around the entire sweet with clarity.
We then decided to tackle the fruit pastille factory, which had a theme and emphasis on all things chewy, so chomping teeth machines were of course essential! The MB guys then built this beautiful looking model from my sketch, which I once again dropped my little workers dudes into and did some animation tests with the guys over at Blink Ink
It worked!! After months and months of back and forth before even finding out if the job was ever going to surface and then sitting and waiting through 2 months of market research... Just when I though it was never going to happen, in January 2017 we got the call, it was a go go!
See my next post for how the next part went down in the Making of Part 2
Lose your head!
© 2016 Jack Hudson
Digital Witness
My Contribution to the amazing Secret 7″ show at Somerset House this year inspired by St Vincent’s ‘Digital Witness’ record.
Keep dreamin’ robots you’ll never be a carnivorous caveman!
8 Covers based on 8 different poems produced over 2 years, lovely to receive them in the post the other day and see the whole set next to each other!
The Poetry School- Summer 2015
Pet Portrait- Cover
Anti-gravity takes over in this surreal EP cover I put together for my pals Pet Portrait. You can hear their music here, and also watch their amazing new puppet fuelled music video created by Joe Bichard here!
Bare Bones Pizza- T Design
My friends over at Bare Bones own a wood fired pizza oven in the back of their van. I designed this tee for them towards the end of last year and included all the family who are having one big PIZZA PARTY!
Code Red Magazine - Editorial
I've rearranged this editorial about the challenges for new start-ups in business into a more interesting repeat pattern style format, look out for that burglar lad!
Wall Street Journal
Editorial illustration about using wireless speakers around your home
WIRED Germany
I drew the famous alien Alf crashing into a house for WIRED, that is all you need to know about this commission...
It's here, let us venture into the unknown...
HOHE LUFT
Some quick spot illustrations from the November issue of the brilliant Hohe Luft magazine from Germany. Working with some really challenging issues, the titles of which in order below:
Power to the Girl / Can you speak ill of the dead?
Data vs Knowledge / The Taboo of Suicide
The Wrapping Gallery - Vitamin Water Event
Just before Christmas I produced around 30 metres of handmade wrapping paper which was painted, stamped and then wrapped at a pop-up shop titled The Wrapping paper Gallery in Soho.
I produced four different stamp designs exclusively for the gallery in which people could walk in daily, choose their desired paper and have their Christmas presents wrapped up for no cost at all!!
Always nice to be involved with something totally different!