Happy Birthday Mom!

This goes out to you mom. Today is kind of an important day for an important lady in my life. I owe so much to my mother and as I get older I am discovering my mother's wisdom has been, how you say, right. Thanks for all you have done and still do in my life and the lives of others. Enjoy your day!

Jimmy Rig!

This is a new dialog asset I have been working on.


I personally felt I needed to practice more dialog. I also wanted to spend more time and development on thought-driven animation and considered acting choices. It's pretty safe to say I just wanted to spend more time animating.

Riffling through different audio websites left me with a number of really solid audio files. I hope I can attempt to do justice to the other files someday soon but with the help of my mentor we narrowed it down to the renowned talent of Jimmy Stewart. By no means was I trying to recreate Mr. Stewart but you can't help but take inspiration from his great acting and well delivered lines.

Researching mouth shapes and listening for nuances in the audio was challenging but illuminating. I couldn't help but watch mouth shapes everywhere! A very fun piece to fight, learn, and grow on.

Belated but Elated Update!

I have been quite unpunctual. I can't believe it has taken me so long to share a great experience that began back in October. Time has stunningly flown by. October 19 I began my internship at Magnetic Dreams! So far there has been fun but challenging projects and great people who I am obliged to have met. I hope to soon share with you the projects of the internship past but that will have to wait. I have enjoyed seeing my small feats develop along side the studio's artists. It's hard to explain how I felt when my first shot got approved but I liked it. A great chapter this is turning out to be and I hope to let you read some more pages soon.

Zambia's Song

There are times in life where people get to be apart of something greater than themselves. Incidents you get to partake in that you hope change the world but you never expect how it affects you.

Zambia’s Song was such a project. The illuminating opportunity, to work on this documentary, came earlier this year. Its purpose is to raise awareness about the water crisis in Zambia, Africa. It is also designed to raise support for bio-sand filters and the positive effect its purification process can have on a family, a school, or a community.

I played a minor roll in this project but I definitely gained a great deal of perspective. It is so easy to take for granted clean water and how effortlessly it comes by us in America. One of our largest markets is the bottled water industry, yet fellow humans walk miles to bathe, wash clothes, and drink from water we would never consider washing our cars in.

A non-for-profit organization, entitled CIY (Christ in Youth), contacted me to see if I would be willing to aid them with this project. With the helpful assistance of a good friend of mine, Josh Cote, we were able to build a few CG shots that hopefully give a visual reference about how the bio-sand filter process works. Here is just a short snippet from the full documentary with the shots I got to work on.


It's a great thing they are doing.
If you want to see more or learn more about CIY and/or this project, I encourage you to please stop by:

For CIY - http://www.ciy.com/
For MOVE - http://www.ciy.com/move/
Zambia’s Song Documentary -
http://secure.ciy.com/store/pc-195-16-zambias-song-dvd.aspx

Breakdown Project

This was such a great exercise for me in so many aspects of animation, workflow, and thought. This endeavor came from my internship at Full Sail University. The task was to take a few key poses then break them down to achieve a different end product. The goal was not to have finalized, finished animations but to take a simple thought and challenge yourself to figure out the motion and attitude of your breakdowns so they tell a story.

Working with my mentor and a very talented, inspiring group of other interns really made this assignment, and the internship, a motivating calamity of animation and fun!

We were given the option to do a few of each shot so I got a few of mine together to share.

Clowning Around

Being class clown is a laughing matter.


This character design was inspired by a good friend, Isaiah Basye, and his story driven imagination. Isaiah's mind is ever churning over new characters, stories, and riddles which captivate adults and children alike. When he purposed doing a character illustration for a poem about a kid who literally took on the roll of class clown, I was eager to begin sketching.

Check out http://www.kidzpoetry.com/ for more of Isaiah's works.

Busted.

Sly creatures...