Portoflio

The portfolio that helped get me the internship at Disney, soon to be updated.

Please click images for a larger view

My Dad the Giant work

Greetings everyone! Here are some quick images from my senior thesis film. I'll just show the father for now and run through some of the processes I did to get him where he is now.

This is a more refined face for the father. After working through some of the construction and trying some different styles in cheek and jaw design I arrived at this. For the father to soften in his demeanor I had to make his face more expressive.
A quick bone study. Taking what I know about skulls I then applied it with the necessary adjustments to fit the father's head structure. I left the jaw unhinged so that he can really open that mouth.
This is my favorite of his smiles. A mirror really helps when doing expressions.

Various facial expressions I made using a mirror as reference.

Exaggerating some of the facial features, perhaps too much.

Can you see the Disney influence? Here I tried out some simple construction, an egg for the body, circles and tubes for most everything else. He's a bit toned down in the proportions here so that he is easier to animate.
I did some tight construction on his face to feel out the forms and shapes that make up his brows, nose, and jowls. It's not a very appealing design, but this got the job done as far as breaking down the complex construction into more digestible pieces. Later I softened some of his features to make him more pliable.

More construction at work, you can see that when I work really tight it tends to get plastic and stiff.

More of the same. It works, but it's not as far as I can go.


A silhouette I worked up to try and make his hands more manageable. I'm not too happy with how thin he came out looking, and I think I'll stick with the thicker arm designs.
The first drawing of him as the artist type. A mix of Leonardo Da Vinci, Michelangelo, Beethoven and even some Edgar Allen Po went into the design, as well as the mouth from my father.

Here the final design is with more meaty hands. I think I'll stick to the jowls in the surprised expression page, overall though, this is the design I am working with. Maybe smaller hands, we'll see.

Till next time, best a luck!

Kilted Animator: First Video!

Greetings everyone! Long time no see. I'll try and keep this short and sweet. I've finally gotten around to uploading one of my instructional videos. This one is about character construction. I hope you all enjoy!

Epiphany

I think I have finally found out why I do what I do, or at least where to take it from here. With the website almost done, and plenty of illustrations left to finish before I head back to school, I've been pretty busy this break. I finally decided to take a break and sit down with my new Pixar DVD. In the 2nd disc of Wall-e, special features, I found a wonderful film called "The Pixar Story." About halfway into it, something hit me, like running into a brick wall. I paused the film and sat up straight, uttering to myself. "What am I doing!?"

All this time I have been so concerned about learning new tricks and processes. I've been focused on the physics and the technical aspect of animation, and all this while I had forgotten why I was at art school, why I draw. It's because I love it! Animation isn't just about making things move, about how they move, it's about telling stories and getting emotion and empathy from your art. I feel great now. I know what I have to do, what I want to do, and what will make me happy.

I don't need to move the character perfectly if I can still get an emotion from it, to make the audience feel for the character. Learning tricks is for when I get into the industry, now is the time for me to focus on telling stories, on acting and getting emotion out of my artwork. This is why I have felt my art lacked that extra punch all this time, now I finally know!

Just wanted to share that with you. The website is going well. Tomorrow I will head out to my old elementary play ground and film myself climbing and acting out scenes for my film. Wish me luck.

The new Title for my film scheduled to release around April 2009. I'll probably finish production by May, but it's always nice to have some elbow room, just in case. The story will follow 4 year old Aiden as he scales a huge mountain into the stratosphere!

In other news, I have a website in production. Hurrah! I am honored to say that I have with me two very talented artists who I will be sharing the site, and the costs, with. Mel Miller, a friend of mine as well as an amazing Illustrator and Animator. Even with work as good as hers, her happy and professional attitude leave most surprised when they find out her age. Niles Bontrager (hope I spelled that right) is the other artist on board, who's art always holds some sort of back story to it. Sometimes his work really engages me, even in just doodles, that and he has an amazing ability to work out interesting timing. It takes all my effort to keep up with these two, and I am really eager to start a site with them both.

Previews and links to the website will be available in future posts once I nail everything down.

With finals out of the way, and my Animatic finished for 'Because it's There' I can now focus on prip and preening much of my artwork for presentation, as well as flesh out a few character scenes from my film.

Sorry for the slow posts everyone, I'll try and be more regular from now on.

Sketches, Animations, little Children, oh my!

Man oh man, it's been awhile eh? Well CCS has been keeping me busy. So, here's the lowdown.

I've been working on an independent film 'This Way up'. It's a short piece that stars a young eight year old boy and his adventure up and down an impossibly large slide. It's basically a story about loss of fear. Aiden, the protagonist, loses his fear of heights by overcoming this obstacle. I'm toying around with ways to accomplish this project, one of which includes making 3d backgrounds with transparent planes in maya and rendering them, then overlapping animation onto it. But anyhoo, I bet you guys are eager for pictures, so here's a nice one. Aiden, the little Irish boy who fears slides.

While that keeps me awefully busy, I also have projects from my Tech 2 class. 2D traditional tech is a class that basically gives you lots of simple animation projects and works on furthering your knowledge of simple physics in 2d to acting. I know that sounds rather officious, but you know, gotta be politically correct and all. Well ok, I don't, but I'm not that good with words, so...
Anyhoo! Because I want to make leaps and bounds in my animation I am tackling each project with ambition and the hardest work ethic I can muster. I lose lots of sleep, don't eat too much, and I am aquiring an odd funk, but my work is crammin out like I've never seen before. I recommend you check out my youtube section at the bottom of this blog and let me know what ya think.

Ok, onto the Sketchbook! Well, I could explain all the ideas behind these drawings, but I think it better that you just view and decide for yourself. Enjoy.










Some final tid-bits before I go. I got my new kilt! I am very excited, and I wear it often. I will upload pics of it eventually, until now you just gotta use your imagination.

Animation, Concepts, and Kilts! Oh my!

Well its seems this week is off to a good start. Not only do I have my financial stuff falling into place, but I have also been getting allot of work done animation and film wise. I finally think that my Concept is working well with my new film 'Slide' which will tell the story of peer pressure from both the people giving the pressure, and the one receiving it. It's very similar to my old film 'Art Bots' but with a slight twist.

My animation tech 2 class is going well, I have some general ideas of what I want to animate, and I'm glad it's so open. For this week we need to simply time our sheets out and get our shots laid out.

I've started an animation group that will be held every wedensday for students like myself to meet and help each other out on assignments and such, hope it goes through well. And of course, pizza will be served.

In other news, I just scored a free Utilikilt! How you ask? Well last year I worked by rump off making a large acrylic painting for the people at Utilikilts, I enjoy their products very much (don't know if you can tell) and so I went above and beyond to make a gift for them. Then someone put it into my mind that 'hey, maybe they would give me something back in return for this painting I had worked so hard on'. So I asked as nicely as I could, and they agreed to trade me a kilt up to the Survivalist Model. I agreed, and here is the model I am getting in the mail sometime soon.
This baby is made of a tough fabric with huuuuuge pockets. I mean huge, and many too! This sucker can hold up to twenty, count em twenty, bottles of beer! Oh man, I cannot wait to get that package in the mail.

So that's the weekly update, stay tuned for more!