An Owl-Free Guardians Movie Trailer

Hey everyone, For the last several months I've been working on a new project at DreamWorks Animation called "Rise of the Guardians".  Despite the title, the movie features classic childhood characters such as Santa, the Easter Bunny, Sandman, the ToothFairy and of course, the Boogeyman aka "Pitch" (and no owls).  Today we officially released the first trailer, and it looks something like this.  Enjoy!

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!

Meanwhile, on YouTube...

Amidst my random sketching I'm doing (which will be uploaded here soon), I thought I would share a random discovery. So I've been intentionally avoiding posting Jungle Gym to youtube because I was waiting for the festival run to end, and even then was a bit hesitant to share it on the online-video nebula. However, recently I was at a friends apartment and wanted to show them something silly that I had recently saved to my channel favorites. So in order to find this, my sub-intelligent brain thought the best way would be to search for my user account name and maybe it would show up in the listing. Yet instead, when I did this, what came up but my very own film, Jungle Gym, apparently posted 6 months ago now by someone else!!



Almost 100,000 hits, over 100 comments, 300 favorites, ridiculous! All of this happening without my knowledge. I suppose I am happy for the added exposure, but a bit blindsided that this could occur under the radar. I of course realized that in my contract with Aniboom, they reserve the right to re-distribute / re-encode my film in any medium they got their hands on, so theres not much I can do about it, but I suppose this is a cautionary example of what happens when you don't think about what the fine print actually means. Anyhow, I promise more drawings soon.

Summer begins

Well, May has begun and summer has arrived. For me this is a very big summer since I have several weddings to attend, and possibly several projects to help complete. I'm sure some of these projects I'll be posting things about here, but in the meantime I find myself occupied with all kinds of fun and recreational events! Besides getting some continued use out of my Disneyland annual pass, the South Park crew visited Las Vegas this past week to both celebrate the end of the run and to spend some quality intoxicated time with a beloved member of the crew who will be leaving us. Upon return, I decided to take a moment to practice some typography and do a title treatment, since I hadn't designed one in a while.

This is what came out. Clearly it has been some time since I've designed title treatments, but I suppose that's what practice is for. Anyhow, hopefully more artwork to come in the near future!

"Yup", it's official!

The end of my second week at South Park Studios has a much anticipated and fitting ending. Everyone at south park, from the PAs to the Animators to Matt and Trey themselves, has a nametag with a South Park character of their choice depicted on it. There can be no repeat characters, so everyones tag is unique. In the first week I was asked to write down a desired character for nametag purposes. And then today at the end of the day, as if reward for surviving the first two weeks and making it to the official run, the Production Assistants came around with all the new tags and affixed them to the appropriate cubicles. I attempted to take a picture with my sucky cameraphone, as seen here:


As you can (sort of) see, I chose Thad Jarvis from season 11's "Guitar Queer-o" episode. This choice made because it was not only an episode I had watched a particularly huge amount of times before going in for my interview, but was coincidentally the animation file that was shown to me in my interview, while I was being explained the production process to. So yes, seeing this outside of my cubicle just makes me even more excited for the run to begin, and to knuckle down and make some South Park!!