Back to Basics

A while back, a friend of mine from school, Todd Dejong, needed some traditional animation done.  I grabbed this scene from his Senior Film, shown here in storyboard animatic:

I took these keys and animated them, first by timing them, breaking them down, testing, and finally inbetweening them.  The result is the following pencil test:

The finished scene is actually two scenes; Scene 18 and Scene 20.  As Scene 20 is based off the business of Scene 18, I animated them as a single sequence.  Todd then took the pencil test and, with the help of animators Liz Skaggs and Karina Gazizova, inked and colored them.  I believe he may have altered the timing a bit as well, but since he's the director, let's not hold it against him.  These are the finished scenes:

It was very nice to flip some paper again.  The opportunity doesn't arise very often, and it was a pleasure to go Old School once more!  Thanks Todd!

Character Designs

Here are some character designs I did for a Flash Test. The idea was to have kids who turn into movie monsters. I designed them first in pencil, then imported and finalized them in Flash. Click the image to enlarge:

Flash Animation

The following 2 clips are short sequences of a documentary that I did recently. This represents my earliest work using Flash, and they were done in CS3. I was responsible for all production aspects for these clips, including concept and story, storyboards, character design, and animation. Both clips feature the escapades of a real person and his dating stories. The narration is the man himself!

The first clip was done from start to finish, concept to animated, in about two weeks. The second one was done in half that time.

The Deal:



The Bailout:




Higher Quality samples of these clips are available upon request.

Storyboard Animatic - TV/Film

This storyboard animatic was done for a producer looking to pitch a kid's educational/adventure show. The original boards were done traditionally, then cut up in Photoshop, and shot in Final Cut Pro. I also do all the sound editing for my animatics, and, in this case, the voices too!

Storyboard Animatic - Games

Much of my freelance work has been for pitches and presentations. This sequence was boarded out and shot for a video game producer looking to pitch the ideas to game makers. It was intended to give the feeling of a gameplay demo. Given the constantly shifting cinematic nature of 1st and 3rd person shooters, I modelled and shot the backgrounds in Maya, using rough, low poly geometry. I then made clean character drawings from the original storyboards, and cut them up in Photoshop. I spliced everything together in Final Cut Pro.

Storyboard Animatic - TV/Film

This is the storyboard animatic from my personal film, which is still a work in progress. The original boards were drawn, then cut up in photoshop. Then they were shot and timed in Final Cut Pro. You will also see several scenes that have been replaced by pencil test animation. These scenes were animated traditionally, and rendered in Digicell, before being spliced into the animatic in Final Cut Pro.

Video Pitch

This isn't a storyboard animatic. This was done for a pitch treatment for a director who was putting a bid on a music video. He needed some visual representation of his ideas for the video. While ultimately the vision was not what the band and producers went with, it did help his pitch immensely.