It is my great great pleasure to share the trailer of a short film I am so proud to have been apart of: Adam and Dog. The film was directed and concieved by the extremely talented Minkyu Lee. It is up for an Annie Nomination for best short film. This film, to me, is what I got into the film industry to do and quite honestly I haven't worked on anything anywhere near this good. In the future I plan to post more about it but consider this a teaser post for now :) Enjoy, and vote for Adam and Dog!

So I can finally show some animation I did at on this short! This short was a real pleasure to work on, partly due to the generosity of Mr. Ken Duncan giving me a lot of control over these characters. I wasn't a lead but I kinda felt like one in terms of having ownership and a definite opinion about the characters. It was good casting for me. Plus I only focused on the Wu sisters, which was fine by me because before we started I wanted to do those characters anyway! Unfortunately in terms of the story the characters aren't terrible textured or dimensional. But that left it up to us to try and add as much as we could with what we had to work with.

My general idea about them was to base them on ballet dancers. I had other acting ideas about them but there was really no where to put the ideas in the context of this story. The director wanted something slightly sexy as well, and being cats I could see how that would fit. But mostly I saw them as really graceful beings. But I wanted a flip side and stark contrast in that when they fought all of the sofistication and poise you once saw was gone and they became more primal. They're eyes changed to cat slit eyes and they're general graphic shape changed as well.

These aren't all of the shots I did but it is most of them. Quite a few of these got cut from the film unfortunately. I was slated to do a lot more acting but I got so front loaded with the action stuff that there was no way for me to get it all done in time. Fortunately the talented Mr. Jared Beckstrand did a lot of the acting shots as well as Mr. Ken Duncan.

Hope you enjoy these. It was a real pleasure to work on!

I've been lovin' me some Wolverine! Not much, just a reason to post something on the blog. When all you do is work on things you can't show it can be tough to keep a blog alive. Been having fun with this though, no great ambitions with it. Just having fun, trying to get better at drawing. These drawings are only a few days old, so if the disappear suddenly it's because they turned to crap overnight. Which tends to happen ;) I hope all 3 of you enjoy!

In honor of the new Peanuts Special coming out on DVD next Tuesday I thought I'd post some MetLife animation I did a year or so ago! Animating this stuff needs to be approached so differently than animating in the more "traditional" feature style way. Too much animation on these characters looks weird, so it's an exercise in simplicity. But simplicity without being boring... these were done for MetLife and I believe are being used on MegaTron screens at sporting events.

Back in April I worked at Ken Duncan's studio on the Lengend of the Boneknapper for the How to Train Your Dragon DVD. It was a very intense and fast project, but fun too! Got to work with a lot of old friends, and make some new ones as well. The short's, at least the 2D parts, were really fast paced and didn't allow for a lot of longer acting shots so most of what you'll see here are pretty quick shots (plus it's not every single shot I did). Ken and Sandro (our awesome animation supervisor) were really cool to give me what is probably the longest shot in the short (the shot directly below). I have to say too I was very impressed with the clean-up crew on this project! I have worked on films where, for whatever reason, you have no contact with clean-up folk and sometimes the results are less than desireable. On this project they sought the animators out to run stuff by us which I was found amazing, and I truly feel like my work actually ended up on screen. It's the way it should be but hardly ever is anymore.

We are all about to go back to start animating a 21 minute short film (ALL 2D) for the Kung Fu Panda 2 DVD. I am really looking forward to this one!

About 2 years ago I did some design work for an untitled feature for Laika. I don't think it's getting made so I thought I'd post'em here...

Please continue to you cast your votes in the post below! I will end the vote as of THIS Friday (the 25th), so if you have an opinion on the matter be sure to vote in time! Until then enjoy this ruff bit of experimental animation I did for my short film. Often when I have a design getting "close" to what I want it to FEEL like, I take it for a "test drive" which always reveals a lot of it's successes and flaws. In this particular case I animated this to ultimately be used for an eventual color test as well. I animated this in about a day, and in a fairly more ruff way than I typically do. Obviously the end is just posed out, however I do intend to finish it. Also, the beard and floppy bits of hair will be animated in After Effects once the ruff animation is complete. So, no, it won't look like a bit moppy beard in the final product. So enjoy this ruff rascal--

So from time to time I get e-mails and comments asking about continuing tutorials on this blog. While I would love to be able to continue to do the same volume of tutorials that i once did, I have to be realistic with myself. When I started this blog my time was much more free and open, now, not so much as I am sure all of you have noticed.

Was at the Burger King on Victory Blvd. yesterday meeting someone for work. Did you know that that is the same Burger King in the first Back To The Future when Marty realizes he's late for school and hitches a ride on a truck? I dunno, I love that stuff. Anyway, while I was waiting I was noticing how distinct some of the people there were. This gal had a sorta confident business type look but was totally dressed down. Kinda a muscular build too, like a swimmer. Anyway, it gave me an idea for a quick design so I scribbled it down when I got home on my Cintiq. Kept trying to tie this down but I just kept losing the energy and charm, so enjoy this fairly lose doodle!

I went to the Skeet Range with my brother while he was in town this past week. Say some pretty hilarious people while I was there. This is Ling Ling-- from the moment she walked out onto the range she had this humongous smile on her face. It only melted off when she decided to kick some Skeet Shooting Butt! This girl hit everything man, EVERYTHING! And that's saying something for someone who's gun is bigger than they are! All in all, a pretty entertaining thing to behold...