Video Mashup

The stipulations for this assignment were to mash up two videos in some way. I choose to strip the audio from a classic clip of Office space and sync it up to a classic scene of Disney animation.

Frame X Frame Art Book

Our senior class was a very tight-knit group and we wanted to commemorate our education and artistic abilities so we decided to compile a book full of our best still work, yes animators make still work too. I ran the business side of things because we printed it through the printing company I've worked for for over 10 years now. This was a limited edition 100 copy production so if you see one of these books anywhere, snatch it up. Here are some of the images that I included for my pages.

Back to go Forwards / Exquisite Corpse

The next film assignment was to film actions moving backwards then reverse the footage so that it is moving forwards to create a strange action. I got lucky and had my camera when it started to snow, so I had my friend walk around a courtyard and filmed snow falling up.



For the Exquisite Corpse assignment the class was broken up into groups of three.  Each student was assigned a section of the body that they had to portray in video either literally or conceptually.  I obviously had the torso and decided to show off some of my fashion and pixillation skills.

Film Chastity

The last semester of my senior year was surprisingly extremely productive. I got myself into a film class that really helped me explore film from behind a camera.

The first assignment was a study of Dogme 95 which was a group of filmmakers that created strict guidelines, or 'Vows of Chastity' in an attempt to purify the art form of film. Our assignment required that we just follow two of the guidelines so I choose to abstain from using filters or other optical work, and I used no out of place props. We were also not allowed to use a shot for more than 15 frames at a time. The last stipulations seemed to really override all of the Dogme 95 Vows, but it still made for an interesting assignment.

Senior Thesis Preview

Throughout the entire semester we were supposed to be working on our thesis films. At the end of the semester we were required to give a presentation to the entire department about how the production was going. I was pretty on schedule and so I made this little trailer.

Figure Drawing

I was taking a figure drawing elective. In honesty I really didn't take advantage of this class nearly as much as I should have. In any case, here are a few images from that.

Commercial

The last visual project for the Writing for the Media class was a commercial animatic that we could create for any company to sell any product we wanted. I made up my own fried chicken restaurant.

Propoganda Poster

I was also taking a class called 'Writing for the Media'. It was based on story structure and how to sell a product. Occasionally we would have some visual assignments, this being the first. We picked a cause and created a propaganda poster to represent it.

Artist Interview

To kick off the senior year, our Portfolio class required us to pair up with someone and take turns interviewing each other 10 years in the future. It was kind of an interesting project...

Senior Thesis GO!

The last thing I did over the summer was begin pre-production on my senior thesis. Everything was really loose and ended up drastically changing by the middle of my first semester, but I managed to make this short intro storyboard before changing the story. I was also messing around with some After Effects puppet animation and looking back I'm a little sad I didn't give it more of a shot. Those legs look pretty sexy.

Computer Programming Company

Also during the summer I scrounged up an infinitely more boring, but paid, internship for a computer programming company. I was enlisted to create simulated animations for the interface of a spreadsheet program they were working on.... exhilarating.



To liven up this post a little bit, briefly during the summer I helped my friend Stuart Bury animate a music video for The Chariot. I was a very minimal part of the production but what I did was cut-out some of the puppets and animate some run cycles.

Quixotic

Going into the summer, I had managed to get myself an internship at one of the few local Kansas City animation studios, Bazillion Pictures. For the first part of the internship we worked on abstract projections that would be used in the annual Quixotic Fusion show held on UMKC's campus. Here are several renders I created using Adobe Aftereffects and Trapcode Particular and Form.