Been crazy busy the past couple of months, finally getting a chance to update. I directed/designed/animated this Meals on Wheels spot. Thanks to Cale Ajoika for storyboards/concept. Some more new projects to share on the way!
January 25, 2012
Just got back from Hawaii last week, feelin fresh and renewed. Had a good/much needed 7 day detox from the computer. Had an amazing time kickin it with my friend Aaron Lynton and enjoying Maui’s insanely beautiful scenery. Back in LA though, and straight to business, but fortunately it was a pretty cool project. I was asked to illustrate an alphabet for Peoria Emporium, an eccentric women’s boutique based out of NYC. Also did a few cell animated Gif’s to be used as buttons which brought me back to the old days. Had a blast drawing everything, hand typography is one of my favorite things to do, so it was a nice break before I get back into more broadcast work. Click the image above to see more.
October 4, 2011Well I leave today for Hawaii and with just a couple of hours to spare I built this 360 timelapse rig. I got the idea from the GoPro forums. Essentially its just a 2 hours sprinkler timer with some holes drilled in it and then mounting the GoPro on top using the GoPro tripod mount. I cut off the side spickets with a dremmel. The timer spins in small increments over the course of two hours allowing for a 360 timelapse. I did some quick testing in Venice, but the real test will be with some awesome surroundings in Maui. Gotta thank my roommate Bill Swano for helping me with assembly. When I get back I’ll hopefully have some sweet footage to share!
September 19, 2011Just added this to my latest work. I was approached to do a chalkboard style animation for Weight Watchers Lose for Good campaign. Wish I could of done the whole thing the OG way (stop motion) but time didn’t permit so I combined some traditional cell animation, 3d, and 2d into a after effects smoothie, blended that shit up and came up with this. I got a chance to do a little cell animation using flash, which was a first for me. As much as I like to stay true to pen and paper, flash made it super quick and its VECTOR. Thanks to Cale Ajoka for help on concept and design. Also thanks to Eddie Moreno and Phillip Vose for beasting out on the cell animation. And thanks to Jennifer Hudson for pronouncing the word “hungry” in a such a unique way…
September 15, 2011
I know all my VFX homies would shun me for repping Cinema 4d but I must say, it kills it sometimes. On a recent job I had to recreate hand drawn boards so that they could be animated. I knew it’d be insane to do it the real (cool) way a.k.a frame by frame cell animation, so I opted to use a 3d route. My homie Cale Ajoka drew up the initial sketch and then I set out to rebuild it in 3d. It was a fun process that kind of trips out your head a little because 3d is all about grids and accurate perspective, but drawing stuff by hand always creates those imperfections and physically inaccurate perspective that we all love. To get the hand drawn look, I used Cinema 4d’s sketch and toon renderer. I had no prior experience with Sketch and Toon but after some tweaking and tests I was able to get a line quality I was happy with.
July 29, 2011
I’ve been seeing a bunch of cool stuff done with the microsoft kinect, outside of gaming, so I finally got one for myself to start hacking. In June Microsoft released an official SDK beta for the kinect. I first tried my hacking with the SDK and while there is some documentation on getting started with getting simple depth data or skeletal data out of the kinect, it seemed to lack some experimental examples that a beginner could work off of. After doing some research I decided to try out an open source library from openkinect.org. Besides OpenNI from primsense (another library/drivers that I haven’t tried) openkinect seems pretty popular with the hacking community. After going through their example codes and playing around, I really liked the point cloud, created using depth data from the kinect. So I decided to make a trippy/glitchy ass video (above).
I quickly realized that my c++/c# knowledge is non-existent so I did more research… trying to bring the kinect data to something I’m a little more familiar with. Thanks to Hardik Pandya I found a great processing library for the Kinect. Once I got it working, I was able to use javascript to hack the kinect. Since I’ve got a little web dev knowledge the javascript was much easier to understand than the previous c++/c#. Soooooooo, thats where I am now, I got a lot more to learn. Hopefully more experiments coming soon.
June 27, 2011Damn I need to get an RC plane like this guy. Even with recent injuries its hard to be bummed when this is what surrounds me (just wish I could skate right now). Sometimes I guess I don’t realize how fortunate I am to be living in such a beautiful place, I’m stoked that life was kind enough to let me live here.
June 13, 2011
design