Art by KRISTIAN CARSTENSEN
ANIMATION
SHOWREEL
A selection of shots containing professional work from films and video games I've worked on as well as personal work.
Shot Breakdown:
Shot 1-4 - Avengers: Infinity War - Keyframe animation - Cinesite VFX
Shot 5 - Avatar Frontiers Of Pandora - Motion Capture and Keyframe - Ubisoft Massive
Shot 6 - Avengers: Infinity War - Keyframe animation - Cinesite VFX
Shot 7 - Dozer and Blip, done while at the Animation Mentor Creature Locomotion Course.
Shot 8-9 - Avengers: Infinity War - Keyframe Animation - Cinesite VFX
Shot 10 - Horse test - Personal work
Shot 11-13 - Avengers: Infinity War, Ebony Maw and mechanical arms - Keyframe Animation - Cinesite VFX Shot 14 - Personal work - Maya - Rig by Kiel Figgins.
Shot 15 - Personal work - Maya - Rig and Model by Perry Leijten/Julien Desroy.
Shot 16 - Dozer, Fuzzbot and Dragon, done while at the Animation Mentor Creature Locomotion Course. Shot 17 - Chimp walk cycle for Zoo Tycoon - Frontier Developments.
Shot 18 - Avengers: Infinity War - Keyframe animation - Cinesite VFX
Music: Believe In Yourself by Beat Mekanik Free Music Archive - CC BY
CHARACTER REEL
A reel featuring mainly cartoony or bipedal character work that didn't make it into my main showreel which is more creature/ VFX oriented.
Shot breakdown:
Shot 1 - Personal work - Maya - Model & Rig by Andrew Conroy.
Shot 2 - Disneyland Adventures - 3DS Max - Frontier Developments.
Shot 3 - Space Monkeys - Maya - Short film by Jan rahbeck
Shot 4 - Animation test - Maya - Frontier Developments.
Shot 5 - Disneyland Adventures - 3DS Max - Frontier Developments.
Shot 6 - Animation test - 3DS Max - Frontier Developments.
Shot 7 - Personal work - Maya - Model & Rig by Ramtin.
Shot 8 - Dozer and Blip, done while at the Animation Mentor Creature Locomotion Course.
AVATAR:Frontiers of Pandora Reel
A greatest hits showreel of some of the cut-scenes I made for the game Avatar: Frontiers Of Pandora in my position as Cinematic Animator at Massive Entertainment - a Ubisoft Studio.
This reel could have been well over 20 minutes long, but who has time for that!!??
Elite Dangerous Previs Reel
The Elite Dangerous Previs Reel is a making of of the launch trailer for the game. I wrote the initial pitch for the trailer, and the video includes my ballpoint pen storyboards, my rough, grey, 3D pre-vis, and the final beautifully animated and rendered trailer by Realtime.
Trailer directed by: Chris Gregory
Pre-vis produced by: Kristian Carstensen
Final rendered and animated trailer by Realtime.
RIGS: Mechanized Combat Reel
Here's a selection of some of the sequences I was responsible for on RIGS: Mechanized Combat League for PlayStation VR .
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My main responsibility, when I joined Guerrilla was to find the best, most efficient way to build and maintain the very heavy pits sequence of the game. The sequence consisted of a 1st person player character and two team mates that were interacting in front of you as you all get placed in your rig by a flying drone. Each class, of which there were four, had five acting variants per team mate (10 unique animations per rig class) and a female variant for all of those. Besides the human pilot characters, we had drones flying around, rigs powering up, elevators, trucks driving around and engineers going about their business.
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I was left to work out the choreography of the sequence, timing and finding workarounds for all the particular challenges that VR represents. True and tested cinematic style camera wisdom does not apply directly to VR as we quickly learned.
For the team huddles I co-directed Motion Capture sessions along with the Lead animator and even donned the Mocap suit for several of them. The sequence got complex very fast as all the variations was added in, however I think the result was an exciting, busy environment that players won’t mind revisiting before every match. -
Besides the Pitt sequence I did all the set up and animation for the Tutorial sequence (minus the Chief character). The sequence starts in a big open space that needed to be populated with dozens of engineers, trucks, rigs and drones. The timing and choreography of this sequence was largely dependent on the Chief character who instructs the player. We then move into a section that teaches you how to move and fire at targets. I worked closely with the Game Designer to set up and animate the target drones in that sequence.
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The tunnel the Player walks through was largely left up to me to populate, with the Art director giving regular feedback.
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I also populated the Front End Garage sequence where I had to find a quick way to have as many characters as possible climb escalators and walk hallways without crippling the frame rate. For the chief character who instructs the player in how to interact with the game menus, I did Mocap clean up and retargeting in Motion Builder. I created male and female variants of everything. Some editing in Morpheme was also involved.
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I captured and directed Motion Capture for the post match airplane sequence as well as cleaning up and retargeting a whole lot of the Podium celebrations you see when you’ve won a match and finished as the top of your team.
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The final month of the project was spent animating cameras showing Pilots celebrations intended for marketing purposes.
Lead animator on Rigs was Darren Hyland.
Lucy Webb taught me everything I know about Motion Builder.
Adam Turnbull, Danny Wong and James Bown drank a lot of tea as well as being a kick-ass animation team.
The Outsider
Previs Reel
Here's a selection of scenes from The Outsider, a cancelled game for the PS3 and Xbox 360 produced at Frontier Developments. I was given the audio recordings of the actors performing their lines as well as a rough block-out of the stage where the action takes place. Otherwise I had complete freedom to stage the performance and place the camera as I saw fit. Sadly the game never got to the Motion Capture stage, and we never got to see the finished performance.