totoro busts a move

I walked outside yesterday, and there happened to be a strange bear setting up some cardboard flat on the ground in front of my house. Then, this bear (he told me his name was totoro) started to do the running man dance on top of the cardboard. I had to get this on video, so I went inside, got my camera, and this is what I saw.

As you can see in the short clip, he's got pretty good dance moves, so don't be scared if you see a dancing bear outside your home.

(P.S. This was created for a camera matching / tracking assignment).

totoro goes to antarctica

I created this scene for a particle system assignment. I threw totoro into a blizzard and added some music to make it more dramatic! Not sure I'll take this setting/scenario anywhere else, but it would make for a cool short animation.

Demo Reels

Here are my most current demo reels. The first one is the most current, for March. The second is from February. Both were created for different portfolio reviews. I like finding a song to fit the reel, it's fun to edit the reel to match the song. I'll have another demo reel up for April and hopefully more work done. Also need to get working on a design portfolio and try to get an 11secondclub submission for April. April will be very busy.

March Reel


February Reel

Totoro Commercial

Here's what I've been working on lately. It's a 30 second commercial spot where we are have to go through all of the production process ourselves. It started out by selecting a toy to be your character in the commercial. From there came the model, then a fully textured model, then a rigged model, then a walk cycle for the character. In between all of this, I also created a script for the commercial and storyboards based off that script. It's a lot of work creating everything in this way, but really makes you appreciate what goes into each step of the production process. Next up is creating an animatic, and then start animating for the final commercial.

I'm using Totoro for my commercial, and it's for an energy drink. Only Totoro will be 3D, everything else will be video footage, and then they will be composited together.

Here's the initial sketch for the character.



Here's a 360 of the textured model.



This is the walk cycle for the character.



And finally, this is the storyboard for the commercial.





High quality versions of these videos and more videos for this project can be found on my youtube page here.

More to come soon.

SIGGRAPH Student Exhibition

Back in December, students pitched ideas for a short animation that would play to advertise the upcoming SIGGRAPH Student Exhibition. Out of all the ideas pitched, three finalists were chosen to create an animation based on their ideas. I've been working on this for about 3-4 weeks and just finished it the other night.

I'm pretty happy with how it turned out, especially within a fairly short period of time to make it. My animation won, but any of the three could have been chosen for the exhibition, all were really professional looking.

Zeb Wood's animation can be found here. Justin Hannah did the last animation, and I'll link to his animation once I find where he posts it online.

Here's my animation, all done in Flash.



You can click through on the YouTube video to go to see it on its YouTube page, in HD!!!! They finally added HD to YouTube, and it looks really good. Just click "Watch in HD" under the video on its page.

Character Walk Cycle

Here is the final version of my character walk cycle. It was my first time animating a character in Flash, but I liked working on this. Seeing your character go from early sketch to actually moving around took a lot of steps, but it was worth it in the end.



Higher quality version can be seen by clicking on through to the youtube page.

Acting Lessons

This was my final project for cgt 341.  Had to animate a scene to a given sound clip.  The sound clip is from 30 Rock.



Higher quality version can be seen on the video's youtube page.