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.

Thesis work

Hey y'all. My apologies for how silent I have been on this blog, I have recently been getting back to my thesis production again, so that means drawing lots and lots of boards like the one seen above. I imagine that I'll probably have close to 550-600 boards by the time I'm done with the whole thing, and I have 238 boards drawn so far. I hesitate to post them here, so just snippets of it will have to do for now. Below are a few other shots from the scene I recently completed.

Basil Birthday Card

Last year, for a friend of mine's birthday, I decided to create this card for them. They're a big The Great Mouse Detective Fan needless to say, and they're in college, so this comic was the convergence of those two worlds I suppose. Click images for full size.

Learning how to draw Basil and Dawson quickly was a headache, and as you can see it wasn't a complete success, but it was a fun attempt nonetheless. The inside panel originally had the little mouse girl leaping out of the way of the falling table, but somehow it didn't seem right to involve her in a college drinking party. Anyhow I hope this doesn't ruin your taste for The Great Mouse Detective forever!

Shorttakes 2007

Last night, Jungle Gym grabbed the Best Animation award at the 14th Annual Shorttakes Festival at UCLA. This year's festival felt more like an animation festival than a general film festival, since approximately half of all entries were animation. As mentioned in an earlier post, they were basically all CalArts entries, and then Raul and I. Some really nice CalArts stuff, I particularly enjoyed Jose y Maria by Edward Juan, and Word Fisher's Secret Piano by Wenchung Lu. Of course, it was awesome to see Raul's Fly on the big screen again. His films always have such great character appeal, and seem to always have epic title sequences, which I adore. So anyhow, Jungle Gym wins it. Incredible. I guess there are people out there who still have love for the purple hippo!

P.S. Sorry this is another "informative" post. Stay tuned for artwork.

ShortTakes Ahoy!

The official entries have been announced for the 14th annual UCLA Shorttakes Student Film Festival. The entire animation category for this years competition apparently consists of my film "Jungle Gym", my fellow colleague Raul Cardenas' film "Fly", and then a million entries from our friendly neighbor CalArts. I'm really interested in seeing it this year since I rarely get to see the films from the CalArts kids. I'm sure they're totally awesome, but Raul and I will be rooting of course for the home team underdogs!

Something Rotten in Westwood...

Today the School of Theater, Film and Television at UCLA released the nominees for the 2007 Directors Spotlight award. There were a lot of brilliant animation pieces submitted this year along with the live action pieces from the production program in our film school. However, for some reason this year, zero animations were accepted.

Normally I wouldn't be bothered by this result because I want to believe in fairness and I think it is possible that there was enough high-quality live-action pieces to drown out the inevitability of an animated nominee. However, two things bother me. One is that I know two of the pieces submitted this year have gone on to compete in the 2008 Student Oscars competition (congrats Michelle), and one of them has even made it to the national finals (congrats Brian and Robyn)! The other of course, is that Spotlight has a category for outstanding animated short!

So, none of this seems to add up. I've seen some of the pieces that win Spotlight, and my feeling is that any short that can make it to national finals for the Student Oscar, can easily get accepted to UCLA Spotlight. Something is fishy. Could tensions have ran high enough between the live action and animation programs that they decided to eliminate us from Spotlight altogether? Are there some new rules in place that the animation department has not been made aware of? Which live-action piece will end up winning the UCLA Spotlight award for animation I wonder? Well, at least there are still non-bias venues such as Slamdance, Austin, and apparently the Oscars for us bruin animators to submit to. I just hope future generations of the UCLA Animation Workshop will not have to suffer this crime.