Interactive Buildings

This was a small interactive exercise which I created in flash. I designed all of the elements in Adobe Flash and coded it in the ActionScript programming language. Hover and click on the buildings!

Here is the link to the source page in case the html embedding does not work.

The song is a Butch Clancy dubstep cover of Foster the People's "Pumped Up Kicks".

Recent Projects

Midnight Snack

This was a stop-motion project I created using paper cutouts. It was shot on 24fps using a downshooter. My favorite part about this piece was the background designs and the animation of the main crow.  While animating the crow, I kept imagining it as having wings that sort of worked like leaves, but the body of the crow being where all of the weight was. Whenever its wings begin to falter and not flap quickly enough, its body begins to bob up and down in the air.

The puppets were constructed out of paper connected by a string and tape skeleton . Each crow puppet ended up being about 1 inch in length.

The Human Text-Based Game!

This was a site specific, interactive piece. I created cards with scenarios on them, volunteers would pull the cards, and I was supposed to act out the scenarios. This piece is intended to be reminiscent of a "Choose-Your-Own-Adventure Game".  the site was important because it was shot in a game room.

Recent Work

Lizard in Maya

Here is a lizard I modeled in Autodesk Maya for my Intro to 3D/Computer Animation class. I modeled it by importing an image of the lizard into the grid and by tracing it with the Create Poly tool. I then cut the faces of the geometry and pulled the vertices away from the grid to give the model some depth. I then used the "duplicate special" tool to duplicate the other half into a mirror image.



String Animation

This is my stop motion string assignment for my Intro to Animation class. The assignment was to use string to create movements. I used the Dragon Stop Motion software and down-shooters/line testing station. I painted the background in acrylic paint.

Recent Work

Here is our first animation project in my Intro to Animation class. The assignment was to create a stop-motion ball bounce animation using paper cut outs and animating them in the Dragon Stop-motion software.

Hardware

Nikon Camera + Line-testing machine

Software

Dragon Stop motion

Previously, on Battlestar Galactica....

Interesting quotes

"People are who they are by the way they react to things."

-Glen Keane, animator

"In this class, we aren't just going to sit at the animation desk and wait for inspiration to come and hit us. We are going to animate from life!"

- Ismael Sanz-Pena, Intro to Animation instructor

Concept Art: Environment

Concept art I made for the front of "Cafe Esotera", a woodland cafe. The front of the cafe counter is integrated into a hollow tree trunk.  The whole image is intended to be a background image layer for a short animation involving hipster woodland critters.

The images above are proposed model sheets for some of the characters.

Journal log

I have quite a few favorite films--too many to name individually. But I will say that throughout my life I have gone through phases where the work of certain director's and animators have caught my interest. Instead of these interests going away, I would just incorporate these interests into my lists of favorite things and move on to another obsession.

For example, in the 1990s, when I was 7 and 8 years old, I went through a "Tim Burton" phase. I loved Burton's direction and art direction on Peewee Herman and the Beetlejuice films as well as the Beetlejuice animated series.

When I was older, I began reading about some of my favorite artists and I discovered that shortly after Burton graduated from Cal Arts, he made a short film called Vincent, a stop-motion film about a child who believed he was Vincent Price. Although I was at a phase in my life when I was more obsessed with recent Disney films and short student films, my initial interest in Burton led me to looking up the film. After watching Vincent, I realized that many of the stylistic touches that I appreciated from Burton's films were the very things that he had been developing as an artist and a student for quite some time.

Another example was my interest in Tom Warburton's cartoon show, Codename Kids Next Door.

I had always wondered why some of the character designs and overall style of the show looked familiar, and after watching and reading interviews of Warburton, I realized it was because he had worked on character designs and in-betweens for shows such as Doug and Pepper Ann.  These all happened to be shows that I loved as a child!

Recent Work

"Tech Tree Frog"

 Illustration. Penciled in sketchbook with graphite pencil, inked in Autodesk Sketchbook, and colored in photoshop.

"Dancing Hippo"

 

Keyframes from the "Dancing Hippo" mini-segment of Disney's Fantasia. Adapted from Preston Blair's Cartoon Animation. I chose this exercise to focus on consistency and perspective.

Slouch/Walk cycle

Slouch cycle and walk cycle adapted from Preston Blair's Cartoon Animation.

Lip Synch Practice

                                               

Lip synching exercise adapted from Preston Blair's Cartoon Animation.



Maya Human Figure

A human figure made in Maya. I used a joint skeleton and "skin bound" it to the model. This was intended to just be a practice in using only a joint skeleton rather than using muscles with the joints. Since I did not use any muscle constraints, the joints were not weighted to the skin. I modeled the figure using polygons and extruded faces. I made the polygons smooth by using the hotkeys.