Some new work online. Krypton and Toyota's Thin Ice

Some work I had a hand in went online recently.  The first the the syfy Krypton TV show. I worked on a desgin of a cold icy environment and spaceship. Great to see it finally out.

The other is a spot we did for the Olympics. Toyota's Thin Ice. This one is particularly fun as Ashley Wagner was never near a frozen lake. The the frozen lake we did shoot was covered in a couple feet of snow. The magic of visual effects.

January update - painting

I'm going to try and post a little more regularly on here. I'm still making good progress on Roko 3. Only a few chapters left before editing starts. The worldbuilding on this one is pretty interesting and I dug out my acrylic paints to visually play around with what it might look like. I'm about halfway done this painting:

Messing around with acrylics and the setting of my current WIP. Boats frozen into the ice. pic.twitter.com/yyYfOxDzzI

— Michael Blackbourn (@mikeblackbourn) January 7, 2018

It's a ship, suspended over a crack in the ice of a frozen ocean of a flooded world.  I have lots of details to add but I'm happy with the progress so far, considering I so rarely paint with real paints these days.

The Dabbing Mentos Yeti

So a few months ago we wrapped up this commercial for Mentos, I was a co-director and visual effects supervisor for the work:

It's rocked up to ten million views on youtube. Which is pretty awesome. And even if the dabbing yeti isn't your thing, the fact that people were talking about it, sharing it, and even mocking or hating on it meant a lot of people saw it.

I hope we get to do more with these little critters.

Promo for Krypton online

I was the CG supervisor for a few sequences of this show. Looks great to see it all finished and the promo seems to tease a pretty good show. Good job to everyone involved.

See 00:56 and 00:59 for some of the work I was involved with. The small hovercraft ship.

EDIT: Looks like the promo was leaked and it has been taken down for now. As soon as an official link goes up I'll add it back here.

New Short story Released! Cursor Blink

It's a short tale about the dangers of communicating with a super intelligent AI. I tried to hilight the vast difference in scale between our thought processes and how quickly a machine intelligence might think.

It's loosely connected to my other Roko books and could be considered Roko Zero.

Check it out!

https://www.amazon.com/Cursor-Blink-Roko-Book-0-ebook/dp/B06XJ8S329/

Stunning Behind-the-scenes look at our Nissan Snowmen commercial

Wow. Check this out. Here is the commercial we did for Nissan:

Nissan Rogue - Return of the Snowman from The Embassy on Vimeo.

And here is the making-of version. Shot in August in hot weather on a parking lot full of salt we transformed the footage into something to send chills down your spine. Fantastic work from everyone on the team, I'm very proud to have been a part of this.

Nissan Return of the Snowman: Behind the Scenes from The Embassy on Vimeo.

Killer Nissan commercial I worked on.

The footage for this spot was shot in August in a parking lot with a little bit of Salt on the ground to stand in for snow.

We replaced most of the environment in every shot, added more cars, and created the snowmen.

One of the best commercials that Ive been fortunate enough to work on. The entire team did an amazing job.

https://www.youtube.com/shared?ci=PJVe4O4uFp0