I’ll admit this is mostly because of I spent the previous 6 weeks freelancing at a Kinetic – Design agency where they are quite enthusiastic about bicycles. And, designers being designers… they had really cool looking bikes. I got sucked in – but I wasn’t going to spend over SGD$1000 for a Tokyobike, or fixie or something else.
I found Green Fünz online and saw the amazing bikes Chin (the guy who runs Green Fünz) had customised. And he had this Dutch model for an amazing price of SGD$320 – with frills. I went down to his workshop to take a look and was in love!
Now that I have some time in between freelance gigs, I cycle on the Park Connector just behind my home and it’s, quite lovely. The last time I owned a bicycle, I was living in Berlin. And cycling around was easy because they had designated bike lanes. I am not sure about venturing further than park connectors at the moment… maybe to nearby places on the pavement.
I stumbled upon this by accident recently. This was a while ago in 2006 but I can actually say I’ve worked with Stefan Sagmeister. It was one of those days when you hear a superstar designer is in town and you go, “Wah! Wow!” He was here on a MDA programme so only important and official suits got to meet him.
It was a Saturday and I was about to leave work. My producer came to me saying, “We need your help with a project…” And I was like, “Oh… okay.” And then I stepped into the editing suite and, had to contain myself. Stefan Sagmiester held his hand out, “Hi, I’m Stefan!”
The rest is all fan girl mush. I got to work with the very lovely Stefan Sagmeister
It’s Happy Birthday Bread Day again for my Dad. I’ve been wanting to try to make something with Quinoa and found a recipe for Whole-Wheat Quinoa Bread.
I modified some parts of the recipe in include some Pumpernickel meal and used honey in place of agave syrup and molasses. Hearty, healthy, moist and very tasty!
One of the most fun little bits I got create while working on The Kitchen Muscial, was this sequence. The director CheeK‘s brief was “Like CSI, with notes from the Chef’s notebook…”
I hadn’t used Mocha AE Tracker very often so, it was a huge learning curve I had to figure out in a few hours. It was a lot of fun to work on, the director gave us a lot of creative license and the result was great! I used Illustrator and Trapcode 3D Stroke for the write-on effects.
For Christmas last year, I worked on a video for ION the shopping mall – as part of their digital Christmas campaign, linked to a YouTube page to be played in your iPhone as well as screens in the malls.
I needed a distraction today and I’ve been wanting to try to roast duck so I did just that. A friend at work sent me this amazing recipe and it turned out quite delicious if I say so myself. It’s quite simple to create, but you need a decent 4-5 hours to roast this bird, make the glaze and pancakes.
The instructions from the recipe was were quite detailed so it was very easy. One of the early golden moments was the bubbling duck fat that was collecting at the bottom… Oooo
So you are meant to roast this on a low heat at 150°C and flipping it over every hour for 4 hours. At the end of the fourth hour, turn up the heat to about 180°C and brush on the glaze.
And this is what it looks like. The skin was so good. I was wondering how I should carve the duck, but as soon as I stuck my knife in everything just fell off the bone! It was quite amazing. I was quite pleased and happy with myself. The distraction duck worked.
Work is winding down and now I have time to bake again. I had some leftover pizza dough in the freezer and thought I’d try to use that as Biga for my Ciabatta experiment. I used Peter Reinhardt’s recipe and added some Basil infused olive oil my friend Pin got me.
Unfortunately, it didn’t turn out as I hoped. The yeast (Phoon Huat brand) I used was useless. Didn’t get gorgeous big holes. But, the aroma of the basil infused olive oil and the flavour from my biga left a beautiful lingering flavour. Will definitely try it again with better yeast next time.
Since June of this year I’ve been crazy busy working on a TV series, The Kitchen Musical. It’s currently aired in several Asian cities on AXN and Tweens seem to like it.
One of the things I never really got around to do in my career as a motion graphics designer all these years, was Karaoke graphics. It’s a lot more painstaking than it appears… animating to the syllable is tedious. But I got lucky with REO Speedwagon
I did a separate bouncy ball version – I totally love it but it was used only as a reprise because the ball was too distracting.
This was for a prepaid mobile simcard in Malaysia. The idea was that the features of the prepaid plan would fill the city up. The original icons didn’t quite fit into the lookbook of the commercial so I came up with some icons.
I decided to go with triangle pixels as a base theme referencing it back on the Celcom logo. I also created pre-visualisations for how the icons would flow within the commercial.
This was a interesting project for South African condom campaign. This was shot on green screen. There are three version: Eden, Savannah and Oasis. We were to create a fantasy worlds for these three different spots.
I designed and created the look of the environments.
One of the more stressful and challenging projects. We had no time to get this done (what’s new?) from previs to finish. It was fun, colourful and youthful. And that was what happened.
The awesome original wormy designs were from homegrown superstars Phunk Studios. My role was pre-visualising and designing some of the other elements as well as animating the particles.
Thought I might start posting some of my reel life projects. This is a TVC I worked on in March this year. It’s a commercial for Hp featuring Singer JJ Lin.
Although we had only 3 weeks to finish this commercial. The treatment was so much fun to work on. We were to create a landscape made of musical instruments. I had so much fun designing and art directing all the different elements from Punk Guitars, the Drum House, Palm Tree microphones, etc. You’ll spot something different every time you view it.
Left my long awaited dream holiday just over two weeks ago. But it feels like it’s been a year. Mabul/ Sipadan was just pure bliss. All I did was eat, sleep and dive. And went to bed latest by 10pm.
Amazing stuff. That’s me with a Frogfish. Had Facetime with turtles and had a school of Barracuda swim around me. It was just out of this world. Maybe because it was slightly overcast that day but the blue of Sipadan was a mysterious one, it just draws you in. It was just a different experience diving there, knowing the depth goes down to 500m.
Back to reality and to my 14 hour days. Been working on a new TV series called The Kitchen Musical. Premiers in October on AXN. See you in November when the project ends.
2011 started and it’s been crazy at work. Fortunately, it’s been interesting projects. Currently working on a commercial that’s actually right up my alley. Can’t really talk about it too much but, it’s fun, colourful and crafted. Been handcrafting elements that will be used in the scene.
I’m really enjoying this. I’m getting paid for bringing my hobby into work!
One of my closest friends became a Mum recently and now I am Aunty E! I’m thrilled for her and her little baby girl is now my latest project! Her 1 month party’s this afternoon and I made this happy baby mobile as a gift (among others – I’m already spoiling her).
The thing about crafting as a hobby is that a majority of Crafters are also Stay Home Mums. There are lots of kiddie and baby projects online and I usually just skip past them. But now, everything looks too cute and I want to stuff for little baby Mira. I’m still debating with myself if these are actual maternal instincts kicking in or if I’m excited that I have a new project.
Freelance Art Director & Motion Graphics Designer for hire in Singapore. When I'm not making commercials and other projects that require moving pixels, I make my own projects like the ones featured here in this blog.
.
