Thank you for everything, you useless reptile

After 9 months of very challenging and very rewarding work, my employment on "How To Train Your Dragon" has come to an end. I am officially off the show, and am now gearing up for my next DreamWorks endeavor. The experience has been indescribable, and as recently mentioned here, I'm sure I will attempt to pass along some of the artistic knowledge I have gained through this journey.

This was a privileged opportunity to work with some of the most talented feature animation artists working today in all departments. Personally in my department, I got to work with layout veterans James Ryan Peterson of Kung Fu Panda, JC Alvarez of Shark Tale and Bee Movie among others, and our head of layout, Gil Zimmerman. Learning from these three gents was always a simultaneously humbling and empowering experience, both making me realize my bad habits, and yet showing me how to utilize my strengths. You can find an interview here on the official How To Train Your Dragon blog with Gil, where he briefly answers some questions about himself and the movie. Also, a brief clip in which he discusses the challenges and process that went into Romantic Flight, the first sequence I worked on in this film.



Tomorrow, I get to meet with the director of the next project I am starting on, where we will discuss the set dressing for one of the large landscapes we'll be using. Always new and challenging work to be done at DreamWorks! More to come!

Welcome to Dragon Training

Hello readers! Much time has passed since the last post, for many things have been occupying my time. The purchase of a Condo being one of the biggest time consumers, but also because in the past year I've been enjoying a position as a Final Layout Artist at DreamWorks Animation working on the next upcoming film "How To Train Your Dragon".


The experience has been incredible to say the least. It has been a continuous challenge, both in artistry and stamina, but the rewards have been invaluable. The amount of things I am learning about stereo, cinemetography, camerawork, staging, and visual storytelling make the job well worth the efforts alone, besides of course all the fantastic benefits that the company itself provides us. It is awesome to get to work at a union shop and experience what The Animation Guild has to offer. I'm nearly finished with my dues, I'm sure I'll have a celebratory post when that day arrives!

There is simply too much to say about the amazing things I've been able to experience, accomplish, see and learn in the past year in just one post, and I'm sure I'll be posting more updates that are relevant to the adventures in layout, but in the meantime I shall say that this movie may be the most amazing things I ever get to work on in my entire professional career. Seeing final renders from this movie are astounding to absolutely everyone on the show across the board. I truly think people are in store for images they have never seen anything like before. Check it out everyone!! Just 2 months away!

Dragons on the Mind

Working with Dragons all day will definitely have its influence on idle sketch time. Drew this in an airport recently using one of our nifty Dragon Sketchbooks they have at work.

Sparty On, Cat!

My friend applied to Michigan State University for the Music Education Grad Program this summer and recently just found out she was accepted! So I drew this as a gift for her, a faux movie poster to get her excited about her adventures-to-come this summer! Congratulations, Cat!!

Faux Movie Production Logo Animatic

So earlier in the summer, I had the idea to do an arrangement of the Super Mario World "You defeated a koopa kid" victory song, and the more I thought about it, I started to get the idea that it might work perfectly as a movie production logo, if Nintendo ever had some sort of in-house movie studio or something.  So, I decided to do a MIDI version of the arrangement, and put together a quick animatic of what it might look like (watch in High Quality if possible):

So there it is!  Turned out allright, I think.  The next phase, if I decide to keep going with it, will be 3D layout/previs to see how the camera animation will play out in full 3D.  Hope y'all dig it so far.

Cheetah DS Crash Drawing

Over the years, my DS has gotten more fragile especially when playing games off my M3 Lite, and sometimes it will just randomly crash in the middle of a game, evoking this momentary feeling of "wtf!" This drawing started out as just a head-sketch I was doing at work, which then evolved into this upper body image, which I decided to splash color on. Overall, a boring pose, but I thought I'd post it anyway!

Happy Birthday, Cat!

This past Wednesday was my friend Cat's birthday.  She's a music teacher at several schools in the area, and in addition, every so often she does music performance gigs.  The week of her birthday, she's going to be doing percussion with the Beach City Symphony, which is sweet, but also means she has to spend her evenings at rehearsal all week, even on the night of her birthday.  When she told me this, this image came to mind.  At any rate, Happy Birthday Cat!

"Lights Out" animation clip

Towards the end of the summer this year, I was part of a small animation team whose purpose was creating a short film for the Project 21 Film Festival; a Festival that challenges filmakers to produce a film in 21 days.  A friend of mine, Simon Stahl, was the director on the project, which is how I got involved in the first place.  He's a member of the popular online animation school Animation Mentor, and so most of the team consisted of AM members, with a few outsiders including myself.  I served as an animator, technical director, lighting TD, and render wrangler for the duration of the project.  The story is basically a neurotic guy who has a clap-activated light in his bedroom, and a noisy neighbor whose television is causing complications with his sleeping arrangements.  Below is my shot from the film.



We had about 2 weeks for animation, and an additional week for lighting, rendering, and working out miscellaneous problems.  I'm not completely satisfied with my shot, but I think it turned out allright for the purposes of the film.  Which, by the way, ended up winning Best Animation in the festival, so how about that!  So there you have it, actual new animation to show on my blog!  Goodness!  If I'm not careful I might just actually post new drawings here too!! That would be something!

LA Times Article

Hey y'all! I know it's sacrilegious for my first blog post in a long time to be not-artwork, but I promise some is coming very soon. In the meantime, I wanted to share a piece of microscopic publicity. I was interviewed relatively recently by the LA Times about my university art school experience, and the article came out a few days ago with my name mentioned briefly. Click below to see the full article image.

They got my educational info a little wrong, but still a cool mention. Which also reminds me, new season of South Park has started up again, so I'm sure my art-dedication time will be limited. But, new posts coming in the next few days I promise.