Recently I had the great opportunity to work over at Method Studios with a great team to bring life to some robots for an upcoming short film entitled “I’m Here” from Spike Jonze.
Here’s the trailer!
I’ll do a more in depth post once the film becomes more public. It just made its debut at Sundance. I guess the film will make a world premiere at the film’s website in March. But you can see it if you happen to be at the Berlin film festival in Feb!
The last few months I’ve been working at a company called yU+co trying to breathe some life into some characters. I lucked out and got to animate the teenage mutant ninja turtles! It was a fun experience being a lead animator with such a great crew.
There’s plenty of applause to go around, but first and foremost, its definitely hats off to Garson Yu and yU+co for securing this project and allowing all of us creatives to be as imaginative as we could be. The production team of Gordon Bellamy and Dan Mascarelli were top notch in taking care of us artists and making sure we hit our milestones. Working with our intial braintrust of director Jim Sonzero and fight choreographer Reuben Langdon was both inspirational and very educational. Just observing their thought processes on motion, camera, action, and narrative was worth being on the project for. Our CG supe was also fun to work for, Stephen Fedasz, or the ” Fedaszzler” as we would call him. Definitely a good guy to have around to pull stuff together at the zero hour of a project but still keep things relatively sane.
Our modeling team was great and was headed up by the ever so talented and hard working Nghia Lam. It was fun to have such robust environments to animate within so thanks Josh, and of course Kye Wan’s one and two.
Big shout out to the Eric Smith and Stephen Delala for all the awesome lighting work they did. Stephen was also our rigger and overall generalist problem solver, definitely couldn’t have done it without him. And last but not least, a big huge congratulations to our small animation team of Alessandro Ceglia, Conner LaBella and myself. It was great to work with such inciteful, talented and self motivated animators. There wasn’t a moment where I felt we couldn’t meet our various milestones and deadlines, and not only that, meeting the deadlines with animation that was appealing and entertaining.
Our last minute addition of Steve Viola was also great. A very talented overall artist who made both the intro and ending title sequences come to life. Not only did he have little time to do it all, he finished it and ended up helping on other aspects of the commercial as well.
Here is a more recent cut of my short film. Its not really past stepped key and blocking plus, but i’ve been really going back and forth combing for better poses and beats overall for the short. My peers and my mentor have been leaving me great feedback and for once I’m starting to see stuff coming together. Even though I have a long long way to go.
Not as much work as I’d like to put it in, but when is there EVER enough time? =P Most Blocking plus work done to the first 2/3 rds of the film. Trying to keeping performance at a decent level.
I haven’t had as much time as I would like for my planning and blocking. But with what time I’ve had to work with I’m happy with the way its moving along. I’m going to have put that much more into blocking plus and try to fix things as they come along. Ideally it would be nice to go back and fix things more proper like, but that’s just not going to happen. Ha.With anything else in life, wishing you had more time to do a few things or wanting things to pan out differently won’t fix whats going on now. So i’ve opted to move forward.
But definitely some valuable lessons learned from my current mentor, Greg Whittaker on initial blocking. I think i’ve done an ok job selling my main beats to the audience. Theres some confusion here and there..but that’ll all be cleaned up soon.
For now I’m going to pay close attention to tightening poses, continue to look at clarity, and making sure I have some good arcs and spacing put in early.
Here is another installment of my short film. I think the story is tighter and much more readable than it has been in past versions. I’m going to have to think of an interesting way to get the mask to become more paper like and less like a real mask. Since he just kinda crafted one ” on the spot” to cheer up the girlfriend. And of course the ever crazy battle of trying to shorten the length of the short overall. But things are looking up as we near the end of the 5th class.
First 1/3rd of the my short film has been put through 3d for layout purposes. And I’ve done a few changes to the story to tighten the ending. I was a bit up against the wall as far as ideas went to get everything readable for the audience. My mentor threw some great suggestions out there and I broke out the wacom and decided to go with them. Hope it reads well.
