The Random Rants & Raves of the Creative Mind

My Current Portfolio - Slideshow Format

2008-02-26T15:52:00.001-08:00

Last updated 2.26.08

A Day in the Life of Beethoven

2008-02-26T15:23:00.000-08:00

As part of an ongoing project for my BFA seminar class, we were asked to listen to Beethoven's music and base a series of environments through his eyes.

My Current Portfolio - Lightbox JS Format

2007-11-21T03:29:00.000-08:00

I update this periodically so feel free to flip through it. Thank you.

The Veldt -Ray Bradbury

2007-10-25T17:51:00.000-07:00

** These are a work in progress and are not quite finished yet.

We were asked to design 4 characters from the story by Ray Bradbury entitled "The Veldt." The story is set in the 1950s and is about a family that owns an automated house that does just about everything for them. The children, a boy, Peter and a girl, Wendy, aged 10, particularly like their Nursery, which simulates anything they think of virtually.

The father, George, eventually walks in on the children contemplating the African veldt, seeing its violent nature of lions attacking and vultures swooping, he threatens to shut down the Nursery. Before this could happen, a psychologist, David McClean, is brought on, to observe the childrens' behavior and the Nursery. In the end, the kids trick their parents into entering the Nursery when the Veldt is being contemplated, and the lions consume them. Not long after the vultures in the Veldt also consume the psychologist.

Cow Drawings

2007-10-25T17:31:00.001-07:00

I decided to revisit my cow drawings and color one up for my portfolio.

"My Last Duchess"

2007-09-22T16:46:00.000-07:00

For our first BFA seminar assignment, we were to design characters based on the poem by Robert Browning, "My Last Duchess". The three characters I chose were the Duke of Ferrara, the Duchess, and Fra Pandolf, a painter.

For the Duke, I relied solely on silhouettes to establish a shape and pose that I felt was characteristic of his evil self. In the poem, he acts as the narrator telling his friend of how he was wronged by the duchess and admitted that he planned her poisoning.

The Duchess, was said to be flirty and rather young, 14 when she married the Duke, but i portrayed her just before she had been poisoned at the age of 17

Fra Pandolf, was my favorite character to design, Fra meaning, friar. He was a man of the cloth but was commissioned to paint the young Duchess's portrait.

"The Phone Call"

2007-05-19T02:19:00.000-07:00

For our final vis dev project, we were given the short story, "The Phone Call" and asked to design the main character, and his office in two different lighting schemes. The story is about a young Russian diplomat that discovers that someone has tipped off the Americans about the A-bomb.

I chose to do a great deal of research to really get a feel for the story and its context. I wanted to avoid the usual Russian stereotypes and wanted to give the main character a great deal of character. I chose to make him a functioning schizophrenic, paranoid of the very government for whom he works for. When he's sane, he's fully functional and mindful of his job but when he lapses, he is in a paranoid state of mind, and at that time embraces the time Lenin was in power, wishing he were still alive so he could save Russia from its inevitable demise. In his office he had a lifesize safe put in, which acts as his panic room, and also has a false floor that reveals a ladder that leads to a tunnel that ends outside the building.

"The Drowned Giant" Story Moment Revision

2007-03-28T02:15:00.000-07:00

This a story moment I chose to illustrate in which the main character, a young librarian, sees the Giant for the first time, days after it had washed ashore and the excitement over it had died down.

I submitted my work on ACME and have gotten some really helpful comments from the pros. So here is my revision as a result.

"The Ordinary Son" Kitchen

2007-02-25T03:09:00.000-08:00

In viz dev class, we were given the task to design a kitchen loosely based on the short story "The Ordinary Son," a story about a family of geniuses and the son that wasn't so lucky to have been blessed with that genius. The illustration portrays a kitchen in the early morning and a make shift workplace for the father. a NASA physicist responsible for the photography of the moon landing.

Little Boy's Bedroom

2007-02-25T02:43:00.000-08:00

This is by far my favorite piece I've done. I've always been interested in working in Visual Development and this was my first stab at it, designing a little boy's bedroom. It started off as a simple sketch i did in my sketchbook, thinking back to my childhood and all the stuff I had as a child. In the next coming days, i really wanted to translate all that into an illustration consisting of odds and ends and things in general I wish I had in my room as a child. With such thought in mind, I made a trip to the library and researched books and started integrating that into the drawing. I had a lot of fun with it and the original was about 11 x 17 inches in size. It was the first time I ever wanted to invest so much time into the drawing and it wasn't a school assignment. When it was done and I had done a quick tonal study, i submitted it on the newly formed acmeanimation website and it was awarded Pro Pick by an actual working professional.

Animation Jump Test

2007-02-24T00:33:00.000-08:00

An Animation class assignment - we were to animate a jump focusing strictly on the mechanics.