Projects

To ring in the new year, we built a life sized, projection mapped version of the classic flash game, Line Rider, and invited our favorite illustrator to come play. It was a live jam session between a traditional artist and a creative technologist, and the final result was a ton of fun!

Projects

UPDATE: WAKE was picked up by The Creator’s Project! ———— A live video installation, made using TouchDesigner. All of the graphics were generated in real-time, based on the talented models’ dancing. More information and a photo gallery at lightbeast.net CREDITS: Creators: Moses Journey & David Glicksman Cinematographer: Cindy “Mimi” Phan Producer: Lizet Lopez Assoc. Producer: Javier Lopez Model/Makeup: Liz Gideon Model: Emma Gregg Model: Renée Gunter Camera Asst.: Shauna Brown Camera Asst.: Magali Lozano Gaffer: Paul Cannon Studio Owner: Marco Campobasso Costume Design: Edna Vogel Dressmaker: Dinora Ibanez Music and Sound Design: Calvin Markus

Projects

This jobs was an unexpected challenge, and was unexpectedly rewarding. After coming on board to do previz for a toy commercial at Laundry! Design, I ended up acting as CG supervisor, TD, and production VFX consultant. Our team was incredibly small relative to the production quality we were able to pull off, and it was a joy to see my exotic technical ideas turn into reality. More details soon – for now, enjoy Anki DRIVE – The Battle Begins!

Projects

Ok, not quite sentient, but still really cool.

Projects

I had been stalling for a while on getting caught up with Maya, especially for VFX work, but Wolf & Crow gave me the perfect opportunity.  W&C let me join the team for The Avengers: Battle For Earth even though none of my VFX experience had been with Maya, and within a month I was up to speed – smashing cars, lighting things on fire, throwing around debris, and eventually simulating superheroes’ hair. Here is the finished piece.  It’s the culmination of months of work by some of the most talented artists I have ever worked with.  It was a great experience and I’m glad I had the chance to do it. [jwplayer mediaid=”546″]

Projects

Ad Infinitum is a kinetic sculpture that my good friend Moses Journey and I designed for the 2012 Infiniti Digital Art Competition. I made this video as part of our proposal and, with any luck, I’ll be building the real thing as well.

Projects

Wolf & Crow asked me to be CG Supervisor on this job and, perhaps foolishly, I jumped at the opportunity. I worked as CG Supervisor, pipeline developer, VFX Artist, and cheerleader. We accomplished the Herculean task of finishing two months worth of work in something like three weeks, and nobody died in the process.

Considering how little time we had, I think it came out rather well!

Projects

So I have this niece, Julie, who’s 3 years old and super cute, and who loves puppets. The first time I picked up one of her bears (or was it a dolphin or something?) and had it say “Hi Julie!” she said Hi right back and went on talking to him. She wasn’t excited, or surprised or anything – it was just that Mr. Bear-Dolphin had some stuff to say to her and she had plenty to say back. It’s been sort of a running theme for a while now, so this Christmas Hilary and I decided to make her a puppet theater. We designed the thing in Adobe Illustrator, modeled it all in 3D Studio Max to help visualize everything, cut all the pieces out on the CNC Router, sanded, painted and glued it all up, then finished it off with red curtains. I can tell she loved it because, just like the first time Mr. Dolphin said hello, she just sat right down and got to it. There was no question of what a puppet theater was, or how to play with it or anything. She walked right up to her new stage and got ready for a show – and five minutes later she was putting on a puppet show herself! The theater is essentially a flatpack kit, cut from a single sheet of 1/4″ birch plywood. It could easily be made of MDF or even cardboard, and the design should scale up or down pretty well (within reason). For what it’s worth, I plan to release the design into the Public Domain, but my files aren’t very clean at the moment. Should anyone be interested in building a puppet theater from my plans, drop me a line and I’ll clean up the files and post ’em here. Let me know what format(s) would be the most helpful – I’ve sort of cobbled together my own workflow, and I have no idea whether or not my files would work for a stranger. Enjoy the photos below. I wish I’d taken better shots, but when a 3 year old gets involved the night tends to veer off track pretty quickly.

Projects

I worked on this Yahoo Mail spot for over at SDF-1 and had a blast. Cel animators drew all of the characters, so I was tasked with building a toon-shaded CG world to put them in. I especially enjoyed making the fake hand-drawn fireworks in the fake hand-drawn stadium at the end.

Projects

About a year ago I had the great fortune to work on the opening titles for John Carpenter’s The Ward – and it’s finally released! The job was at my favorite now-defunct design shop, Shadowplay Studio. Working as the sole fx artist on an already tiny team, I had total creative freedom and I loved it. The main concept and the overall design were by the brilliant Gareth Smith and Jenny Lee (now of Smith Lee Design, congrats you two!), and the rendering and shader dev, comping, and general technical bad-assery were handled by the inimitable VFX Sup, Ari Sachter-Zeltzer. That left actually breaking all the damned glass (and figuring out how to do it) up to me! With countless hours of hand-drawing crack patterns, running physics sims, debugging (cursing at) massive cache files and weird technical anomalies, developing particle systems and geometry tweaks and minute details – all while staying sensitive to composition and storytelling – it was a hell of a job. And I think we pulled it off beautifully. For extra credit, head on over to Art Of The Title for an in-depth interview with Gareth. I’m the one referred to as “our vfx artist”. [jwplayer width=1280 height=544 image=”http://appliedesoterics.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/WardSplash.png” file=”http://www.appliedesoterics.com/goodies/ward_720p.mp4″] download mp4 (48Mb) And here’s a brief shot breakdown, courtesy of Ari: [jwplayer width=640 height=360 image=”http://appliedesoterics.com/wp-content/uploads/2011/07/WardBreakDownSplash.png” file=”http://www.appliedesoterics.com/goodies/w_sh150_breakdown2.mp4″] download mp4 (21.4Mb)