Teaching

Classes just wrapped again. I really enjoyed the finals and seeing the compilations of all their work from the semester. Since we are a community college they all leave just as they are getting interesting and go on to university or jobs. Here's an in class demo I did working sporadically during a week.

IMDB

I know a lot of my BYU friend have already reached this career milesstone, but looks like I have finally been recognized by IMDB.

Pumpkin Carving 2008

Here is this years pumpkin, I try not to get political on the blog here so I will leave it to the viewer to decide if this is support for a McCain/Palin presidency or if I'm saying she is a pumpkin head.

Batman

George Lucas at Disneyland 1990

My brothers have been bugging me for a copy of this picture. So I finally scanned it. In 1990 my family took a trip to Disneyland. Star Tours had opened 3 years earlier and we were excited to try the new ride. With 7 more years till there was a "Special Edition" and, 5 more years till there would be any new action figures, there was a drought of Star Wars items for hungry fans. This allowed George Lucas to enjoy a bit of anonymity and walk openly around Tomorrowland with out people swarming him. His VIP tour guide was enough to keep crowds back I guess. Not wanting to ruin his vacation I was satisfied to snap this photo from a distance.
Did you see him? Here's a closer look.

Good Ol' Flour Sack

Here's another one from last semester. Probably just an hour on this one. I can animate so much faster like this. I think probably spend too much time scrubbing the timeline, or checking my email when I use the computer.

Teaching Animation

Another reason I've been slow to post is I was teaching Animation II at the community college last semester and I'm teaching Animation I & III right now. Along with my full time job it takes up most of my free time. It's been really fun to get the students excited and see them grasp concepts. I sometimes do the assignments along with them if there's a moment in class where everyone is working. So this was done in a weeks worth of in-class time in spurts with lots of interruptions.

Thanks to Animation Backgrounds for supplying my class with good backgrounds to work from.

9lbs14oz 22inches

One reason posts are few and far between. We welcomed a son to our family on Dec 12.

"I will name him George, and I will hug him and squeeze him and love him and kiss him..."

Pumpkin Carving 2007

Here is this years pumpkin.

I wasn't going to do one this year until I saw this image on Jeff Pidgeon's blog. Where he shares his well photographed toy collection.

Last year's pumpkin had a Pixar subject also.

More Sketchbook Faces

Here is a sampling of fellow commuters I've drawn since the last post. We bought a house a while back and with my day equally divided between fixing up the house, work, and sleep, it seems my commute is the only time to draw. If you ride the train maybe you can spot yourself in there.

Making TRAX

It's been a long time. Thanks to all you who keep visiting. Since I posted last, I have a new job, and moved across the country. I'm back in Salt Lake. One of the benefits is I get to commute by train. If you ever need reference of people with white ear buds , or a person looking down as they read, you'd be hard pressed to find a place better then TRAX. Besides that, it is a nice diversified mix of people.

The Bumble

This huge sculpture was out in front of a pet groomers here in town during the holidays. I think they did a nice job.

Merry Christmas

ToonClub

Absolute Electric

Frederator

I recently found that this blog has been linked as a “Site of Interest” on the Frederator Cartoon Blog. Welcome to anyone visiting from there. Some of the best projects that I worked on with my previous employer were contracts from Frederator, and since one of the purposes of this blog is shameless self promotion I’ll take you on an illustrated tour of the some work I have done for them.

Random Cartoons Opening.

We were presented with the logo for this series which will be a collection of various animated shorts which will show on Nickelodeon some time in 2007. The Frederator Cartoon Blog is a collection of production blogs for creators of the shorts that will appear on this program. You can see the animation for this sequence on its production blog. With this project I conceived and storyboarded the opening based on the given logo.I designed a bunch of contraptions for them to choose from. The designs were greatly inspired by the kinetic sculptures of Andrew SmithThese are the drawings for the final contraption with some of the reference pasted in.I personally prefer the original color scheme before it was made more “bright and playfull.”

FredEx-FartRobot

I talked about this before. You may have seen when we were front paged on CG Talk. This was a 10 second animation for part of a compilation film celebrating the anniversary of Channel Frederator. Different animators were asked to conceive how a robot would do a particular thing. Our topic was a fart. For those that choose to view it I'll give you a warning that some of the topics given to varying animators took on a very ADULT tone. For this project I conceived the idea of old pot bellied stove robot, and did the design. I also did the final audio and helped with the final composite.Six Monsters

This one is currently in production. You can see its current status at its production blog. We were given 1 minute of the 7 minute short which will play like a Variety/Sketch Comedy Show. I wrote the story for our minute with input from the rest of studio, and rewrites by Fred Seibert & Alan Goodman, I then storyboarded our segment.The original character designs were by Alex Kirwan, and each of the segments will have the style of the animator doing that 1 minute gag. I wasn’t given a lot of leeway in my direction to change the designs around; my instructions were to just make Alex’s drawings translate to 3D.I designed the set with old sketch comedies in mind. I looked at Hee Haw, and SNL, and Sonny and Cher, and tried to keep simplicity in the set, but make it complex enough to go with the detail of rendered fur on the main character. The sets of the film Pleasantville seemed to meet those requirements, being based on old TV sets themselves. They were big influences. I tried to make areas in the set to stage the characters so hopefully, in the final, the light character will be against dark and the dark character against light. I was able to set all the models up in the set with cameras before I left, so it appears to be working. Sadly I didn't get to animate my shots. As the production goes forward without me I hope it will come close to what I’ve imagined in my mind for the last few months while creating it

Paperless merMAID

For this weeks ToonClub entry I thought I'd try something a little different, so for the the first time I've done a piece with out using paper, pencil, or scanner. Just my trusty Wacom. The sketch and background was done in Painter. It was inked and colored in Illustrator and then put together and retouched in Photoshop.

A New Drawing Board

When we moved out to Pennsylvania one of the things I gave up was my large studio space and desk. So while the computer found a permanent spot in our new home, my camera stand and disc did not. To add insult to injury the glass in the disc broke in the move.


For my birthday my wife repaired the glass, so I needed to make it usable again. Chromacoulour had a folding table-top board which would be perfect, but I didn't want to pay their price. So using their images I fashioned a measured drawing to make my own.

With an excuse to buy a jig saw it was off to Home Depot. Here's the finished board. It doesn't have a built in light, but it is really easy to re-purpose the desk lamp around to the back. Now I just need to figure out how to machine my own paper punch.

Now Available

This is a fun time for me, A bunch of things that I worked on are now available for people to see. I don't get anything but exposure from the sale of these, but it sure is fun to see stuff you've worked on out on the shelves.

To Share or NUT to Share is the project that got me to move to Pennsylvania. It is the seventh in a series of direct to DVD films. We worked on it February and March of this year, and it finally came to bookstore shelves last month. This was Don Knotts final performance. I cut together a reel of my stuff from the film. I had about 4 minutes of animation in there.(right click, save target as. 13.5MB)

Faux Paw was my Student Emmy winning film that was produced for ikeepsafe.org. It was a fun challenge for all of us involved. I illustrated a book that went along with the film that was recently published. It appears that the movie and it's sequel are included on a CD. This was the first I've seen of it since the film was finished, and over all I'm pleased with how it turned out (but don't ask me where the 's on the cover came from).

Pumpkin Carving

Here is this years pumpkin, Kerchow!

You can also see last year's Jack-O-Lanterns here.

Fart Bot

A short bit that I contributed to here at the studio was "FrontPaged" on the CG Talk forum.

We had 10 sec to show how a robot would pass gas. Trouser Trumpets are universal humor. Name one heathly person who doesn't toot. While some poo-poo the excessive use of barking spider humor in animation, I don't mind it in short bursts.

co-worker caricatures