Dah dah dah daaaah!!!! I've updated and polished my website which you can have a look at here:

www.timholleyman.com

If you have any work opportunities please let me know!

Its a noble man - but is it a good man? Guess you'll have to wait to play the game to find out!

Our Kickstarter has gone live!!

You can find more info out here:

http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/229423802/death-inc

and here:

http://www.ambientstudios.co.uk/

Here is a sneak peek of the comic/graphic novel (it can't be a novel its too short! so what do I call it!?) for Death Inc.
We aim to release the work in three parts, its been written by one of the other directors at the studio, Jonny Hopper. The aim being to fill everyone in on Grim's back story and how he became the Reaper. This shot shows him working in the Ministry of Mortality - he's pretty easy to spot as he doesn't exactly fit in.

Anyway hope you like it - less than a week until the project goes live on Kickstarter!!

I thought I would post an image from my past life today! Here is one of the only matte paintings that I worked on for Prometheus that made it to the final film. I was one of the first crew on the project at MPC - and this was one of the first shots to be completed. The matte painting was 8k and based on a concept from MPC's previs department. It took a while to do as a lot of the smaller detail had to be painted by hand. I'm glad it made it to the film though. I left the company a few months before the end of the project - the team did an amazing job and really deserve more credit. I don't think many people know that pretty much the whole planet surface was CG and it was an epic job to get it all done in time.

I'll try and dig some Pirates stuff out at some point too as there is an interesting technical breakdown of one of the shots I did.

Here is a sneak peek at the final section of gameplay we plan to present on Kickstarter. Its the castle siege! I decided to paint something at dawn, to create a more dramatic mood than the other images you've seen so far. The castle is based on Corfe Castle in Dorset. Its an amazing place - in a state of ruin unfortunately thanks to the civil war, but I found a great reference image from the model village near the real castle that shows what it might have looked like. I've obviously taken a whole bucket load of artistic liberty to fit it into 'Death Inc', but I hope that people who know the castle might recognise it. I'm going to do another version that shows what happens when you and your infected buddies take over!

Hi,

Here's a quick sketch I did at the weekend of Oak Hurst cottage. Its just around the corner from our house and is an amazingly well preserved 16th Century building. Its an ideal ear for the game and this image also shows how I use the reference to create a 'Death Inc' house.

Today was the day! We finally announced our company and our new game: Death Inc. Its been a long time coming, Jonny Hopper, Daniel Leaver, Mike Pang and myself set up Ambient Studios over a year ago now, we were working with publisher for nearly all that time before the project with them was cancelled. It was a bit of a shock as the game was coming together, but for various reasons it wasn't to be. However we've bounced back and Death Inc is the result of lots of hard work over the past couple of months to begin developing a brand new title. You can read the details of the game over at our website: http://www.ambientstudios.co.uk/deathinc.php

I'm doing the art direction for the game and so have been responsible for all the 2D concepts seen here and on the site. My colleague and super talented artist Jon Eckersley created the 3d assets and used Unity to set up our first test level. 

Here are some samples of the concepts + a few more characters that aren't on the website. 

We're also working on a separate mobile title that will be announced soon so watch this space!

Its been ages and ages since I last posted! Loads has been going on in that time. To end the drought of images I have some exciting news: On Monday the public announcement of our new company, Ambient Studios is going out. We set up the company a while back and have been working away in secret on lots of cool stuff. Over the next few weeks I'm going to be sharing some concepts and arty images that I have been working on. For now here is an image of the poster for our first game, 'Death Inc.':

Dark sky doodle

City sketch

Plate:

Plate:

Here are some matte paintings I did for the film 'Robin Hood'. MPC did a large amount of the VFX work on the film, most of which was done for the battle sequence at the end. I was involved in creating a number of paintings of the cliffs for that sequence. A 3D master scene was created and used as the basis of the location and angle of the cliff in various shots. The matte paintings were then projected onto the geometry. All images are copyright Universal Studios

Here are some concept paintings I did for the mist monster at the end of Narnia: Voyage of the Dawn Treader. The actual shape of the monster was pre-defined so these were more lighting and atmosphere studies than creature design. All images are copyright Walden Media.

Here is some work I did a while back for a company called Supermassive games. I was creating concept art for a new game called Tumble that has just come out with the Sony Motion Controller. I worked on the early development for the game so it looks a bit different now. I've got some more stuff somewhere that I'll try and dig out. The idea for the game was to stack blocks in various ways, with the blocks providing some kind of interaction as you played with them.

I managed to get some time to paint after a long long break. Here are a few that I did on holiday

I've decided to do a colour scrip and to start developing some feature animation based work (thanks to the students at AIB for the inspiration!) At the moment I have no real story which isn't a great start, but I have a idea about a forest fire. No furry animals or talking squirrels but a story about nature. These quick studies are just three frames from the sequence that will serve as starting point for development, I want there to be a clear distinction in colour, composition and mood to each section. Over the next few days/weeks I will try and stay disciplined and keep this going.

I've been learning Nuke in a bit more depth over the past few days and have set up a DMP to test the work flow for multiple projections. The bottom image gave me a starting point and the rest was put together from various photo's I took in Devon. I'm in the process of putting a camera move on this and will post it when I've fixed all the little problems. Nuke is amazing, really easy to use and is really efficient so hopefully we'll use it more on the next production.

Noh Theatre performer concept. Thought it might be nice to paint a character again. I'd like do some more figures as I don't get to do them very much these days!

Its been insanely busy at work doing lots of DMP for the new Robin Hood film, but today I actually had some down time. All the work I've been doing has been great fun, but its all been manipulating photos and creating projections, not much actual painting with brushes to speak of. This afternoon I was stitching some of my sky ref together and I thought I'd paint an extension. Its done for no other reason than for the fun of painting. The photo did all the work, but it was just great to have the time to do some painting. Next step real paint! ....if I can remember to work a brush.