2012 Animation Demo Reel

College was fun. But it was only the beginning. :)

Final Thesis Animation - Glacé

I'm done.
I'M DONE.
SO VERY VERY DONE.
THIS THING WAS A MONSTER...

Next thing to learn in Maya: particle effects. I tried to put some water splashes in there, but I could never figure out how. Oh well. Use your imagination, I guess?

Thesis Assignment 5 - Allegretto

Five days to relearn Maya AND make an animation with it. The challenge was accepted.

Glacé - ice bear walk cycle

Took Mr Bear for a walk yesterday. He still has a mild case of butt-wiggle, but we're training it out of him. Now I have to build him some friends to play with...

Vimeo has disabled embedding (why???) so just click on the picture:

Final Thesis Project - Polar Bear Model

My first fully modeled, textured, and rigged character. Good lord. It's happened. It's finally happened. Break out the cider! Two years from now I will realize how bad it is, but I don't care right now. I have a model!

My teachers are so impressed by a tiny number of polygons and a simple rig. Haha. Makes my life a little bit easier. ;)

Final Thesis Project – Fire and Ice

My first project this semester was a Maya animation that I need to clean up a little more, so I'll be posting that a bit later than normal. But it went very well and was very well received. I'll actually be working in Maya all this semester.

But the first one was small beans compared to the next project – the final project. THE LAST ONE BEFORE I AM FREE.

I wanted to find a theme that would translate well to greenhorn-level Maya, but would also allow for some neat imagery and interesting symbolism. So... how about some animals made out of ice? The next week will be spent modeling and rigging and texturing, and then the real fun begins. I have the basics of a story, but I'll come up with the details as I move along.

Chimaera (Extended Version!)

For my final project this semester I added about 20 more (very creepy) seconds onto Chimaera. I'll be adding more as time goes on. Hopefully after Christmas break this will be my next festival-worthy piece!

Senior Thesis Animation 3 - Audubon

Here comes number three!

The assignment this time was to 'work really quickly based on impulse.' Not knowing what to do, I just started drawing, and birds came out. So I went with birds. Lots and lots of color-changing birds. And admittedly, a lot of headaches, too...

Frame-by-frame in Flash, colored in Flash, RECOLORED in Photoshop to make it more 'painterly' at the request of my teachers.
32 seconds.
Two weeks.
28 cups of coffee.

Senior Thesis Animation 2 - Chimaera

Senior Thesis Project #2 is complete! And just in time for Halloween. :) This was a way of forcing myself to get more familiar with anatomy and moving volumes around in space. Adding the sound changed it from beautiful to gross in no time flat. Ew...

27 seconds, 10 days.
Frame-by-frame in Flash.

Thesis Anatomy Sketches 1

Next thesis project is going to be a forced attempt to get better at anatomy. Will I succeed?? ...Who knows, but here, have some skeletons. This is gonna be a very Halloween-y project.

 

Senior Thesis Animation 1 - Remedy

The Remedios illustrations led to this. I simplified the story and took out some major characters, just to streamline the process and make it less of a literal interpretation. And the art style became a little messier and more gestural than in my original illustrations.

I wasn't sure how it would be received in critique. It's bright, colorful, and bouncy... everything the book isn't. Would it be 'artsy' enough? I mean, animating a naked lady should give me some artsy points, right?

They liked it a lot more than I thought they would. :)

51 seconds, 5 days.
Animated in Flash, each frame painted in Photoshop.
Lute music from freesound.org.

Remedy - Illustrations and Sketches

Our first project for senior thesis was inspired by Gabriel García Márquez's novel One Hundred Years of Solitude. We read it during the summer and had to incorporate some sort of theme/character/scene from the book into our first project.

It's such a dark and unhappy book... so I used happy and bright colors for my illustrations. Makes sense to me!

I decided to focus on the story of one character, Remedios the Beauty. She's the most beautiful woman in her town, probably in the whole world, and just being in her presence makes men go nuts. She's incredibly naïve, though, and doesn't realize the power she has. She doesn't care about social conventions — she runs around naked because she hates clothing, she cuts her hair so she doesn't have to comb it every day, and she uses her excrement to paint little animals on the wall in her house. She's a bit of a wild child, and that makes her even more tantalizing to the opposite sex.

One day, without any warning, she is lifted up into the sky along with the laundry, never to be seen again. Maybe heaven wanted her back?

I first thought I wouldn't have enough time to do an animation based on this art style. I had just come back from the Ottawa International Animation Festival and had less than two weeks to animate something. I was going to keep it to just a series of illustrations, and that would be fine.

...Couldn't resist. I did an animation in five days!