Museum of Science Mural project

Over the past few months I’ve been working on a super neat project for the Discovery Center at the Museum of Science, working with the staff members to develop a 16 – foot – long mural of New England Forest Animals.  Here’s a bunch of the progress work, with some color comps, one linework variation (we’re still moving some stuff around, so the final won’t…

Snow Trudge: Sketches and Roughs

Inspired by our crazy amounts of snow, I’m working on a new little animation. So far have some rough animation and sketches, backgrounds generously provided by the 7-foot snowbanks in front of our house. I’ve taken a bit of a break from animation since I finished up my thesis back in December – it’s super fun to get back into it.  Next steps include…

purple bird sketch

Another quick post! Here’s a 1/2 hour color sketch of a purple finchy bird that I did last week, been trying to get back into color. Also posted nine more sketch pages – lots more birds, but also echidnas! Alpacas! Shoebill cranes (those guys are five feet tall)! …And many more assorted animals. Check them out, let me know what you think.

Thesis Update: Scenes 43-47

Another quick post with a few updated scenes. Gargantua is really fun to animate, he is so big and meaty. I’ll need to add more splashes and after some feedback from my instructor, I realize that I need to  update  that camera move so that it follows rather than anticipates the action.

Thesis update: Scenes 38-42

Since the summer semester at the Academy of Art University is double-time (with two modules per week rather than one), I am trying to blast through the remainder of my rough animation. There’s a total of 58 scenes in the film (I count it as a scene each time the camera direction changes) and as of now I’m up in the forties, hooray! Here’s…

Effects: Splash

This one was daunting at first – it’s said that water is one of the most difficult things to animate effectively. However, once I found a method of attack (envisioning an ellipse in perspective, and a path for the overall form of the splash) it felt a lot more comfortable.

Effects: Vortex

This effect was one of the hardest for me to grasp – we studied vortexes, including water vortexes, tornados, fire whirls, etc. I do like the way this turned out, although my instructor pointed out that it has a sort of “spinning plates” feel to it.  Here’s a page of exploratory sketches: I almost chickened out in favor of a jellyfish animation, with little…

Effects: Wispy Smoke

This one is an exploratory version of a monster for my thesis: a smoking, hooker-esque fish. It’s based off a real animal, the red-lipped batfish (which does not, to my knowledge, actually smoke). I think the smoke’s going to have to go way slower, maybe need to inbetween all the frames here. Here are some of the sketches I made of the smoke from blown-out…

Dog Monster Transformation

For the past couple weeks I’ve been working on a scene from my thesis, where the dog that’s been swimming around in the lake during the lake monster auditions actually transforms into a monster. I’ve been working on the character animation for my directed study and on the effects for my fx final.  I recorded the super-awesome sound effects to help with the timing….

Demo Reel 2013

Quick post – I updated my demo reel! https://vimeo.com/80044825 There are some fx clips included that haven’t been shared before – I’ll try to get the exploratory designs for those posted within the next couple weeks.