Recently completed a series of videos for Waitrose TV featuring some ideas for side dishes to accompany their ‘Menu From Waitrose’ range of ready meals. The idea for the videos is that while the main dish is cooking in the oven or microwave, you have time to prepare the perfect side dish with simple ingredients to make the dish your own.

The videos were produced by Stepping Stone Media with editing, grading and graphics from the Mike Afford Media Village.

Here is an example of a Beef Goulash with a squash and sweet potato mash. Yum!

More examples from Waitrose on their YouTube Channel or over at Waitrose TV

Following on from our Waitrose TV Christmas graphics I’ve recently completed a little Easter sting for Waitrose TV produced by our good friends at Stepping Stone Media.

The graphics were once again created from some live action footage with graphical elements added from the current Waitrose Easter branding. Built from two SD frames – a wide shot and close-up of flowers – stuck together in faux-3D in After Effects with some depth-mapped defocussing, lighting effects and camera wobble added.

You can watch a short and sweet video of the title sting, below.
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All of my Weather Icon Packs are now available to buy at the World Weather Online Developer site.

World Weather Online have recently launched their new Developer Portal and have moved all their API management and execution on to the Mashery developer platform.

Better still, they have have very kindly listed all of the Icon Packs from my store on their own site. This includes the brand new Symbol Set 12 which is based closely on their own icon set and comes bundled with a special extended 96 icon version.

I recently completed a set of Moon Phase icons to match my classic TV-Style Weather Symbols for a site that’s launching soon.

I’ve also put the whole set of Moon Icons available for sale in my store. Each set comes in 3 sizes 64×64, 128×128 and 256×256 pixels. PNG format with 3 different backgrounds (including transparent).

You get the standard icons for New Moon, Waxing Crescent, 1st Quarter, Waxing Gibbous, Full Moon, Waning Gibbous, 3rd (Last) Quarter, Waning Crescent plus the additional THREE icons between each.
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Recently completed some graphics for Waitrose TV.

Waitrose TV Live was the first ever live streamed online show for Waitrose and was produced by our good friends over at Stepping Stone Media. The show came live from the Waitrose Cookery School in north London and could be watched live via Waitrose TV and Facebook.

The graphics were created from some HD footage specially shot at the Cookery School using Christmas trees that had been decorated in line with Waitrose Xmas branding. I created a single super high-res environment that I could pan around in After Effects and added some extra twinkling lights in the background using particles in 3D space.

You can watch a short and sweet video of the title sting, and a trail, below.
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Last night saw the first outing of my latest virtual studio set for Setanta Sports. It’s once again based on the ‘white’ set I built for the Premier league and GAA programmes, but tweaked slightly to accommodate Setanta’s swanky new desk.
As usual it is rendered in real-time with full camera tracking thanks to the awesome power of RT Software’s tOG 3D system.

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I’m always interested to see how my weather symbols are being used, so I was delighted to get these cool photos from Kati at boysandgirlsshop.com featuring some familiar looking weather icons and some cute children wearing cool organic kids clothes.

I like the fact that they use (quote) “just normal kids (not models) for their marketing images to allow their individual personalities to shine through”.

Designed for Urban Living and Created with Care, Boys&Girls is a bright and brilliant combination of stylish, practical and affordable kids clothes made from fairly traded and organic cotton.

Launched in March 2011, the Boys&Girls team wanted to create a kidswear brand that was ethical, cool and accessible. Each garment is created with care using GOTS certified organic cotton and organic dying processes for extra feel-good factor and with a view to reducing the impact of manufacturing on the environment and the people that come into contact with the cotton all the way through the supply chain – not just the consumer.

Here are a few more images, but you can see more over at www.boysandgirlsshop.com
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Here’s the latest addition to our royalty free weather symbol sets.

This time it’s a complete set of weather icons in a single colour – black versions for light backgrounds and white versions for dark backgrounds.

This pack includes 42 icons as transparent PNGs – one set black, one set white, each at 2 sizes (64×64 and 512×512 pixels).

The set also includes vector artwork in Illustrator (CS5) and EPS8 formats.

A special bonus Photoshop file has every single symbol in a separate layer as a Vector Smart Object, so it’s easy enough to resize the entire set to any resolution you like. I’ve opened the Photoshop file in CS3 to CS6 and it works fine – probably earlier versions too.

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By now, I hope, plenty of lucky viewers* will have seen my latest virtual studio set in action for Euro 2012. It’s for Setanta Sports and as usual is running on Setanta’s tOG system from RT Software

 
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I’ve had enough people now (mainly teachers and schools) asking about printable versions of our TV-style weather symbols that I thought it was about time I made some printable vector versions available for download.

So here is the ‘School Pack’ – designed for anyone who wants simply to print out some weather symbols for kids, or perhaps use them as illustrations for children’s weather worksheets. I figured that a set of symbols as individual PDF files might be the most versatile and useful – they can be scaled up and printed poster-size if you want, or easily embedded as illustrations in other documents. …read more

I recently came across an article (albeit from last year I think) by Takamasa Matsumoto concerning the Apple ‘iCloud’ icon and the Golden Ratio. He explains that the basic shape of the cloud icon is based on four circles and both pairs of diameters are in the ratio 1:1.6. The ratio of height to length of the whole cloud shape is also 1.6 – which is ‘close to’ the Golden Ratio.

I’m someone with more than a passing interest in cloud icons, so this got me wondering…

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It’s always nice to see my BBC weather graphics getting an outing with a new presenter.

Yes, somewhat bizarrely, that’s Prince Charles weather presenter extraordinaire during a visit to the BBC in Scotland yesterday.

Seems he did a pretty good job – you can judge his efforts for yourself over here on the BBC site. By all accounts it’s also causing quite a stir on YouTube.
 

Saturday saw the launch of two new virtual studios for Setanta Sports. They are the latest in a number of planned new looks rolling out this year – both are based around a single new VR set with a backdrop of seamless virtual screens. I’ll probably do a separate post outlining some of the design process – which might be quite interesting as I now have a much more accurate way of determining what section of the virtual screen appears behind each camera shot. I have also built a single After Effects project that automatically outputs a combination of five HD and SD seamlessly looping animations for the screens as well as a number of special texture maps for various surfaces of the surrounding 3D model.

Premier League Studio

Here’s the new set for the Premier League. The imagery features a couple of super-hi-resolution 3D renders of the premier league trophy (kindly supplied by David Phelan at Mode Vision Ltd), mixed with a load of additional layers to provide a little gentle (and seamlessly looping) animation. And finally lens flare effects using Video Copilot’s Optical Flares plug-in of course.

 

GAA Allianz Leagues Studio

And here’s the new GAA set.

It uses the same 3D studio model as the studio above, but with a new set of animating screens inspired by stadium floodlights (which figure prominently in the title sequence). I built an HD looping crowd animation and used it to fill up a high-resolution daytime (empty) stadium shot, before giving the whole thing a dusky twilight feel, replacing the original sky with one taken from outside my studio in Leitrim. And finally, of course, plenty of optical flares.

Once again, the screens and additional textures have all been built within, and output from, one mighty After Effects project.

 

One of my old BBC chums e-mailed me out of the blue to say she’d spotted my name in one of this year’s A-Level exams!

I pop up in one of the externally set assignments for A-level Art and Design. [thanks for the copy Sue!]

It says: ‘When making your response, refer to appropriate examples that might include the work of Mike Afford …’.

I wonder how many students will choose that question and arrive here looking for appropriate examples..?

Seriously though, if there are any students reading this, please feel free to drop me a line with any questions you may have. I do get quite a few student enquiries, and although it may take a little while getting back to you, I do try my best to answer every one.

Just a quick note to say that a brand new set of weather icons (transparent PNGs AND vector artwork) is available to download from the store. As always, these weather symbols are royalty free for personal and commercial use.

 
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