This blog was originally started to keep track of my progress through Animation Mentor and my progression as both an artist and an animator. I’ve since graduated from AM and its been a good NINE MONTHS since my grad back in January of this year. I finished the program around September of 09 and I have nothing but good things to say about the program. All my mentors were there to chip and mold me into a better animator and I have nothing but praise for each and everyone.

Special thanks to Bobby, Carlos and Shawn. My classmates and my mentors:

Class 1. Martin Hopkins

Class 2. David Breaux

Class 3. Nick Bruno

Class 4. Jason Martinsen

Class 5. Jed Diffenderfer

Class 6. Greg Whittaker

It’s a special thank you to all the men and women who comprise AM mostly because after freelancing for 6 years in Los Angeles I have finally landed a gig at Sony Pictures Imageworks. I tell a lot of people that before AM I had been rejected from Sony on numerous occasions. But each lesson, critique, encouraging moment from classmates, inspiring clip from a peer, video lecture and finished assignment all added up to my overall improvement. I still feel like I have a lot more to learn, but I definitely feel more confident and poised when I receive my shots now than I ever did in the past.

From here on out I’m going to utilize this blog as a progression of my animation career along with an intended return to more 2d projects. If time permits I’d definitely like to delve more into digital painting and sketching a ton more. Also keep a look at my attempt to finish my AM student film along with a few new clips to continually progress.

Stay posted.

Its come to my attention that a  slew of articles are popping up across the internet attempting to take a closer look at how the visual effects industry functions.  It’s definitely interesting to witness, since most of the general public is just interested with our ” sexy ” final product in film, television, and games.

As artists in this industry we’ve always sat down to numerous gatherings with co-workers, friends,  and relatives discussing some harsh truths of the industry. To see however, some of the same stories being covered by Time magazine or letters to high profile directors like James Cameron is quite refreshing.  Do I need shoulder to cry on? Do I need a pair of ears to whine to? Not quite. But having some people know what the contrasts are between the different levels of production is a great start for our industry.

Good start here.

Time Magazine article.

Open letter to James Cameron here.

Here is the latest commercial spot I was able to do with yU+co. It’s an interesting piece done with Turkish Telecom celebrating both the opening of a soccer stadium, Children’s day and Marvel’s superheroes.My contribution was the second to last shot with Iron Man landing within the stadium. I also helped with the kids being held by Hulk as he galloped towards and away camera and helped out with polish on the blocked out Hulk. It was a fun project and a mini reunion with the great Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle team from last summer, not to mention some new faces that were a fresh and welcome addition.

So it’s been a long while since I’ve put up any posts concerning new personal work since Animation Mentor. But since I’ve graduated I’ve been itching to take on a new shot with acting and lip sync.

The clip I chose comes from ‘40 year old virgin’ and has Steve Carrell saying the following line:

‘ You know the thing about relationships. Is. That. They. Make one person go. Blah Blah Blah Blah Blah. And the other person go. What ARE YOU TALKING ABOUT?! And then the other person goes. blah blah blah blah blah.”

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.

Very memorable project indeed.

http://wii.ign.com/dor/objects/14305526/tmnt-fighters/videos/tmnt_brawl_trl_tv60_91009.html

 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.

Let me know what you think!

 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.