jest

Guess which one I own.

don't cry over spilt milk

Not everyone catches this little gag in our film, it goes by pretty fast, but you can catch it at 1:14.  I did the lighting in this shot, Uri did the comp, and then I painted the milk residue and drop animation in photoshop to layer back on top and finish off the shot.  Since Blue is really the only thing that moves in the shot we were able to simply layer it on instead of having to map it or anything.  For consistency, the drop residue was painted in and then duplicated and erased as I animated.  Also, her refraction in the mug is a total cheat, which let us get it to look the way we wanted.

red bull kluge

Recently I had the pleasure of working with the fine fellows of Syyn Labs on the Red Bull Kluge, a giant Rube Goldberg Machine combined with some wonderfully talented athletes (check it out, it's an awesome video!)  My main role in this was creating storyboards to help communicate what was going to happen and help plan the path of the main camera capturing it all (which by the way was an ultimate arm, the sickest camera rig I've ever seen)  There were lots and lots of other cameras on set too, including a small army of go pros.  When I wasn't doing drawings I was helping out however I could with the machine.  A lot of people worked really hard to make this all happen and it was great to be able to be a part of it.  On shoot day I didn't have a fancy camera phone like these guys, but I did enough foresight to bring along my sketchbook. (:

Drew Bezanson on BMX

The Skaters, Ryan Sheckler and Joey Brezinski, were tougher to catch in action but I was able to get a couple of decent sketches of them and some of the other guys around set.

Danny MacAskill up on Fowler's green.  You couldn't stop that guy, he was a true artist with a bike.  He rode on just about everything around the site including Brezinski's manual path, the skate/BMX ramps, and even the forklift.

Danny & Clay, chatting on bikes.

Things that fly!

(Red Bull helicopter and a Black Phoebe who I caught darting around our corner of the air hangar.)

We did this shoot out in Irvine and had some really beautiful scenery around us.  On shoot day there was a 40% chance of rain for the morning but fortunately not a drop fell.  Instead we got the great combination of lots of fluffy white clouds and bright sun.

And at the end of the day when we could all finally breathe and had dinner under the light of the jennys.

around town

e pieribus omnom

So you know how in our film we had that coin?

 

 

Well, it was one of my favorite props to work on!  I came up with the basic design and painted the displacement maps for it.  This is the only shot where you get a good look at it, and the only side you really see - but thanks to the internet you can now look at both sides!  At the same time!  Try doing that with your Susan B!

 

beaches are the best

Beaches are the best.  They've got all the best things, like little girls with afros and footballs

birds!

folding chairs

and lots and lots and lots of water - even waves!

relic

I was poking around some zdrive backups and found this.  I'm not sure, but I've come to think it's a really angry cat.  Timestamp reads 1/6/2012 12:44 AM and my foggy memory tells me that I was in the 24 hour labs using ms paint.

Now that I've got my desktop back up and working, things scanned, and pictures dumped there will probably be some updates on here as I start sifting through things.

orange shirt, blue sky

Looking at books by Lois Ehlert and working outside under the bright sun of Irvine.

dragons

d is for dragons all up in dis manuscript.

35%

 

In the first semester of my senior year I took Serigraphy (screen printing).  I'm glad I managed to hit three out of the four major printmaking classes (lithography will have to wait), but it was a bit of a strain trying to manage this along with thesis.  Thesis of course was paramount, especially since I was on a team, so unfortunately whenever I encountered a hitch in my work I did not have the time resources to go back, redo, fix, or properly test ideas I was trying out - time was so limited as it was.  As result, I wasn't technically satisfied with most of these projects in the end and not all of the them will make it to the blog.  My first print went of without a hitch though!  It was a three color print on paper, edition of 10.  Below is a bit of explanation of the elements.

 

 Being in senior year where everything is about polished 3D work I was really dying to use 3D in a "wrong" way.  It was one part me not wanting to follow the conventions of that department for once and part sheer fascination with how 3D programs are set up to operate.  The starting point here was a poly plane that I skewed around the insides of and edited in an straight view.

 

I've also been fascinated with dither patterns, especially more recently.  They're very simple, but their occasional irregularities produce interesting patterns when tiled that in a way become a recognizable alphabet of gray scale.  There's also a kind of fondness associated with them thanks to computer graphics of the 90s.  This is the pattern for 35% black.

 

yeah, tiled.

 

The next step for me was to apply the dither as an image texture to my poly plane.  Normally that would be boring - but I didn't touch the UVs on it so they were still all messed up from me dragging verts around and screwing up the topology.  Consequently, I ended up with a pretty interesting landscape of pattern.

 

Running with those elements I came up with this mock-up in photoshop from which I made my transparencies.  The rest is process!