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.

The Journey Towards Illustration Greatness: An Observation

     Part of the experience of being an artist is constantly being motivated to improve and aspiring to expand your abilities and craftsmanship. I personally feel like I didn't really start to improve as an illustrator until I entered Graduate School and was able to not just practice my skills under incredible instruction, but also have the added bonus of being in an environment now saturated with fellow artists, all with different styles and skill levels.

     After being in the program for about two years, and pulling my draftsmanship out of the world of embarrassing and into somewhat-acceptable, it was then that I could see just how much further I really had to go, and started to observe a general pattern of stepping stones for really great illustration. I say observation only, since not only is this just my own thoughts and opinions, but also if I knew exactly how to become great, I would probably be closer to getting there myself. At any rate, I like to think of these phases as three general stages:

Stage 1: Static, Flat and Constrained

We've all been here before. This is the phase when the artist will be interested in illustration, and making valiant efforts to render the images in their mind, but lack the knowledge of anatomy, composition, silhouette, and directionality, let alone the ability to push the forms into 3D space. The result then, is work that generally comes out flat, constricted, and generally unappealing. Though, in the artists defense, they are making a valiant effort to improve. Or even if they aren't, they are at the very least putting in some good mileage towards improvement though experience.

Stage 2: Good Yet Boring

At this phase, the artist has now become instructed in the ways of form, composition, anatomy, and their illustrations are now starting to resemble the shapes and images they are attempting to communicate. The problem here is, the illustrations in this phase are usually rather stale and end up looking the same. They may be well-constructed, but the artist is still roaming around within their comfort-zone, and are focusing mostly on the technical and academia aspects of constructing the image, rather than variation in style or experimentation in different ways to communicate visual ideas. In short, the illustrations become good, but not particularly interesting.

Stage 3: Dynamic and visually interesting

Finally at this phase, the artist has achieved a level of illustration prowess where issues like form, shape, and line are no longer technical concerns or problems for the artist. The focus at this level can now be purely on the communication, adapting whatever style or technique is necessary to properly render the image in a way that it will be most effective.
Usually at this stage, the artist's work consists of a large variety of styles and experimentation, ranging from the realistic (above) to cartoony (below)...
...to flat graphic and highly stylized.
All of these stage-3 illustrations were done by the same artist. An extremely wide range of style but yet all with extreme confidence and deliberate line work, definitely a product of proper foundation and lots and lots of mileage/practice.

I think it's also worth mentioning that not everyone needs to go through these 3 stages in order to be a successful illustrator or artist. It's possible to jump straight from stage 1 to stage 3, and develop an interesting style that doesn't necessarily rely on form or shape to communicate ideas. Of course, by doing this the artist risks not only limiting their style to only one possible look, but also risks that style being appealing to only a very select audience.
Squidbillies is a perfect example of what this kind of style might look like. Of course, the Squidbillies animation team can actually draw incredibly beautifully and just happened to design this particular look for the series (which I personally find very unappealing), but exemplifies that it is possible to make that jump without being a master draftsman; even though it might be very limiting for that artist in the future.

So, there are my idle thoughts on the journey towards becoming a great illustrator. I know I've certainly got a long way to go myself, and my next blog post will probably be yet another boring illustration from my amateur wrist, but I hope this article provided an interesting read, and in terms of how to get there, all I can do is quote my brilliant drawing instructor: "Draw! Draw, Draw, Draw!"

How NOT to animate

This week's post is a piece of humor for all you 3D animators out there currently fighting with splines. A friend of mine recently had the super-fun duty of cleaning up keyframes on some of his animators shots for a project he was involved with. Apparently some stuff was very clean and required little fixing, but some stuff well, he sent me a screenshot of one of the animators Graph Editors just to get a taste of the horror. Those of you with weak stomachs may want to shield your eyes.


Yes, ladies and gentlemen, this is not motion capture data you are looking at, it is keyframe data. I don't even know how something ends up looking like that. A colleague of mine said "maybe he thought he had to key the hell out of it to keep the spline looking straight". At any rate, hilarious and hideous. If you're ever feeling bad about your own GE looking dirty, you can now have a piece of schadenfreude to look upon and feel better. Enjoy.

Mouse Lady

Recently on my way back from a trip to Washington D.C. my plane was grounded on the runway for an hour or so, so I decided to sketch some random junk. I started doodling a mouse head and it turned into this mouse-in-dress thing. I imagined that she had won some bet against a fellow companion and was requesting that she get her fair pay. So anyhow, I decided to ink it up in Flash since I hadn't tried that before and throw some color on it, and here it is. Wee.

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.