Demo Reel

My 2012 animation demo reel

Personal Business Card

Yesterday night I was working on a simple business card design to have on hand. Once they're done I'll make a new design. Keep it fresh.

Class of 2012 DVD Menu

Jake and Judy, from Box Forts, and Chip and Flint, from Flower Story.

This is the image you'll be greeted when watching if you purchased a DVD at the UCF Visual Language Premiere tonight (https://www.facebook.com/events/370831486278430/). Both animated shorts Box Forts and Flower Story, along with some extra content, are being offered for a small donation that goes towards the funding of our program.

Flower Story DVD Menu

Flower Story main menu image

Submenu image

VL Class of 2012

It's I guess a new tradition last year's graduating class kick-started (whether the meant to or not), to have a group photo. I did one of them, the one that was chosen to be our class shirt. Flower Story team on the left, and Box Forts team on the right.
See if you can name everyone correctly.

Flower Story's Flower Design

I was mostly in charge of design for the Flower Story flower and it's seed. This was a tough job. We wanted a flower that looked exotic, but not completely alien looking, something mystifying and elegant. 

Because our movie revolved around a variety of Celtic motifs, tri-s and knots played a part in it's design as well.

An image I made nearing the end of my junior year with the intentions of compositing over floating pollen effects with Maya. I wasn't particularly happy with the outcome, but I'm still happy with the still image.

The flower in the back is based off of Flower Story's original flower design, everything else is meant to emulate the style of Alphonse Mucha.

Early Flower Story Environment

Originally when Flower Story was first conceptualized it was in an abandoned yet still lush looking forest. Above was a quick painting I did prior to our environment exploration outside of a forest and green environment.

 These are a few sketch paintings I did for the "Island Team" which I was a part of to get an idea of how would "Flower Story" be like if we had relocated from the forest to a desolate, rocky beach.

And thumbnail sketches of the island environment.

Early Flower Story Character Development

 So during the first month of my time in the Visual Language program (now being called simply the Animation program), me and a small team of 3 other guys had to expand upon a story we chose in class. As part of the assignment, we also started sketching out ideas of how our characters would look.

Our team, which changed from simply "Untitled Story", to "Flower Story", to the short-lived "Life's a bloom" later on, and back to simply "Flower Story", knew from the get-go we wanted charming little rock creatures. These are some early sketches for the original 5 characters we wished to include in our short.

 Eventually, the "twins" got nixed entirely, and the "big guy" and "middle guy" (labeled as the leader above) eventually morphed into what would be just Flint, and the "little guy" into Chip.

We went through a stage of a complete visual overhaul on the characters and made maquettes from the resulting sketches. Above was my revised version of Chip, still not quite the Chip in our movie.

Intro to VL!

First post to the blog. Figured I'd start with a sharing a few old pieces from my "junior" year at UCF's Visual Language program. First semester dealt a lot with familiarizing with all the software we were going to use for the next two years (and later on when we graduate, of course). These are a few old digital paintings I did.

The above three were more focused on technicality and precision for the benefit of matte painting. All three are drawn from photo references.

These final three were more geared towards overall environment and atmosphere. There're roughly an hour or two of work, a lot less time dedicated to these than the previous three.