Levin Mowing Grass

I was too nice on my last assignment, had to step it up.

Ringling Commercial

This was a project for camera and sound class where we collaborated with the intro to advertising class. In my group the film students were me, Chris Darden, and Gena Morgese and the ad students were Mike Decker and Emma Clark. On the project I helped out with some refining of the concept and previz and directed and edited it as well. I'm fairly happy with how it came out. We had a really rough start and had to reshoot a lot (fifty five total minutes of footage for a thirty second commercial...), but hit a huge break though in editing and went with a much more non linear approach collaging visuals and reactions with music.

Since I can't figure out how to embed the video without blogspot cutting off a fifth of the frame here's the youtube link http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EdTZUo5TDU,
and here you can see the other commercials the classes made http://www.youtube.com/user/RinglingDigitalFilm.

Take that!

Assignment for class where we had to have our character do a take. The beginning isn't inbetweened and there's a bit that's just on keys. I realized after starting that starting at the beginning wasn't the best idea and that I should animate the part that constituted the actual assignment first and do the rest if I had time. I'm going to have to remember to stick to that from now on and keep the story setup bits on keys.

No Mushrooms Here...

The next project in traditional involves animal based characters and I drew badger. He's got quite a thing for books and literature and is inspired by the greatest bibliophile I know and shares his namesake.



And here are the development silhouettes we had to do. Fun stuff.

Flour Sack

Drawing that zoom was annoying as could be, and there's still some stuff to fix, but thankfully it's time to move on to bigger and badger things.

Leftover Figures

These are a couple of 10s from figure that I didn't get a hold of until recently. They're some of my favorites from that semester.

I ran out of paper...

...so I screwed around at the shooting station.

Having a Ball

It's the second semester, and you know what that means, ANIMATION! We got started with ball bounces and this is my final one.

Film & Figure

Man am I bad about updating this thing...  Well here's a couple of sequences for film class, the first dealing with graphic elements and the second with point of view.

And here are some quick figures.

Toy & Company

So, I've kind of been too busy to update lately...  Mostly thanks to my toy project for 3D design, which sucked up so much of my time.  With this project I had to design a toy and it's packaging.  At first I was clueless as to what I wanted to do other than the fact that I wanted to use magnets; they're just plain cool after all.  So I figured magnets would work well with detachable parts, and what would have detachable parts?  Why, a zombie of course!  So this guy below is Greg, a pencil pusher zombie from a theoretical interchangeable set.  He's made out of initially half baked sculpy and carved with small flathead screwdrivers, 1/4" diameter rare earth magnet discs in each side of his points of attachment and feet, spray primer, and acrylics.

He's rather fun to play with and mess up.  And he'll probably end up being my fridge magnets.  He took a lot of time to make and get put together properly, but what really took a long time was making silicon molds of all six parts.  At first I wanted to turn in plastic casts of the sculpy prototype, but due to time that goal flew out the window not long after I dragged it in.  I still wanted to follow through and learn the mold making/casting process, it's just plain cool after all.  So below are some photos of the mold making.  I used a brush on silicon rubber from smooth-on and applied four coats along with two for building up the individual cut seams.  The last two pictures are for when I made the plastic support shell for the molds so that they keep their shape during casting, and hold them to make things a bit easier.  I haven't made any actual casts yet, I've still got to work out a kink with the molds, not to mention catch my breath after all this.  It may be a while before I actually see how the molds perform... like December, maybe.  It took so long to make these molds though, you have to wait for each coat to dry, mix each batch for each coat separately and everything, and working out side in 90 degree isn't nice either, especially since it cuts your pot life from fifteen minutes to eight.  A lot of work, but so cool.  If the casts turn out well I may even make some other toys in my free time (ha!), simpler toys.

This here is an earlier project where the assignment was to to make sequential wire gestures showing an action.  I chose to show a handspring.  I'm pretty glad with how they came out (not to mention they all balance on their own!)

The next project in 3D is to make a perching vulture out of metal with emphasis on plane and edge, so these are some of my sketches of the american black vulture down at jungle gardens.  I'm so excited to weld, it looks like so much fun!

The last project in film language dealt with the juxtaposition of images, the principle that two (or any other number) of neutral images, when juxtaposed against each other, form more complex ideas.  For example, a picture of a man's face next to a picture of empty bowl leads to the idea of hunger and even raises the question of wether not he will be able to eat, etc.  This works especially well when the viewer is in a situation where they are expecting a story (like at the movies!) and those eager beavers will just fill in all the obvious gaps for you.  The following sequence was my favorite from the project.

We wrapped up perspective in drawing class with an invented space project.  Pretty straightforward stuff.

Figure's kind of straightforward too.  Gestures and some long poses at the end.  I've got to watch my line quality more...

And here's a few drawings from fews.  I need to stop being so literal all the time... it's hard though.

Believe it or not, at art school I don't actually draw that much (figure drawing and classwork doesn't count).  Honestly, this is pretty much the only stuff I've actually drawn in the past month (and I did it while I was supposed to be doing homework, oops).  We had a caricature night in our hall and our RA had a bunch of irresistible 11x17 paper and this is the fun nonsense that ensued over the course of that evening.  It's mostly garbage but it sure was fun and totally worth doing despite my consequent mild midterm panic.