Demo Reel Update

Crank that baby up to 1080p!

Squid Shot Comped!

The squid I animated has now been composited by director Joe Daniels, amplifying its awesome-ness levels ten-fold. 





All Starfish Ninja work is copyrighted by Joseph Daniels. I do not own any of the characters, assets, or story.

Demo Reel Update: Squid Shot

Here's an animation update on the squid shot from my demo reel. The director had told me there wasn't enough weight behind the squid in the previous version, so I ended up deleting a bunch of keys and redoing most of it. The first time around took me about 1 1/2 weeks, whereas this took me about 5 days. It feels good to see the speed of my workflow steadily rising.

Old version:


New version:


Update 2/15: After repositioning the tentacles, adding more offset and overlap to tentacles, adjusting the beak, mantle, and fins, and fine-tuning the timing all around, this shot has finally been approved!



Man this squid was a pain in the neck, but I learned a lot from it. Creatures are no easy task, but with the help of Joe Daniels, the director, I was able to really push my animation farther. With that said, I hope I never have to work with tentacles again.

All Starfish Ninja work is copyrighted by Joseph Daniels. I do not own any of the characters, assets, or story.

Graduation

First post of the new year. Can't believe how long it has been since my last one. I'll definitely try to remember to update more often this year.

Well, I finally graduated from Expression College for Digital Arts this last Thursday. After 2 1/2 years being in the same place, around the same friends every day, it sort of feels surreal knowing I am done with school for what is hopefully the rest of my life. The only way to get better is to keep practicing your craft, so my primary goal right now is to simply stay busy. With Starfish Ninja, the Cinemagic "Olympics" project, personal work, and an upcoming interview, it seems I'll be doing just that. 

Testing out the Malcolm rig

Just got the Malcolm rig up and running earlier today and began watching the 2 hour video on how to use it. Here's a test pose of him running for dear life (along with his picker open to show just how many controls this guy has (and the picker doesn't even cover all of them!):

Some old stuff pt.2

More old stuff for your viewing pleasure:


Another version of the pip-boy from Printmaking. This time there's a mushroom cloud.

Now we're getting into work I've done during my time at Ex'pression College for Digital Arts. It was a lot of fun drawing the model with a sharpie, where I had to really pay attention to the contour and negative space before making a stroke. My heads always end up small...

Took that pose and turned her into an Egyptian chick. Sweet.

Went for a very stylized look here. This time she's in prison!

A creature I designed as a sort of alien mount akin to horses, except with a trunk, tusks, horns, and two legs. After realizing the legs would never support a heavy creature on top of this one's back, I redesigned them to be crazy buff.

Just a few quick sketches I did to get the brain storming.

Some old stuff pt.1

Here's a bunch of stuff I did from a Cartooning class at the community college I used to go to. I was pretty proud of the work I turned and received a lot of inspiration from my teacher, Diana Coco-Russell. She's an amazing artist who worked for many years at Disney doing breakdowns and clean-up for several films during the "Golden Age of Animation". My decision to officially pursue art as a career is owed to her.


The assignment was to take a comic book cover and change all the titles and blurbs around. Venom became the almighty Burger Beast, facing off against his arch-nemesis- the Hamburglar! Grided out the original and hand-drew it from there.

Got some cheap fountain pens from Michaels and spent a few hours messing around. This one was my favorite from that session.

An original creature I designed, called "Cactoids." What's that you say? I ripped off Final Fantasy's Cactuars?! How dare you...

See, my cacti have sexual dimorphism and pull their legs out of the ground!


This wasn't actually done in Cartooning, but rather a Printmaking class with the same teacher. I wasn't too into it, but at least I still got a couple decent pieces out of it.