...a world without Science

Hello and Happy Thanksgiving! I just finished working with Interspectacular on some animated television bumper spots for the Discovery Channel. This whole job took maybe on and off 3 months to finish. I think four of these are going to be aired on TV ("Moon Or Bust 2" and "The Wright Bros" are extras that we did for fun). I've done a little work in motion graphics but this was the first time that I could have my own work animated. Basically, I did the storyboards and the key frames for all of these spots. You can kind of see the evolution of my process where I tried to get really complicated with the first "Caveman" spot to the last "Wright Bros" spot which is extremely simple. It was a learning experience for myself in the way I had to think more about the readability of a 16 second spot versus what would read for a print illustration. Many thanks to the two Creative Directors at Interspectacular who wrote and directed all the spots, Michael Uman and Luis Blanco, the two hardworking animators Ben Lee(animated "Caveman" and "Columbus") and Efrain Cintron (animated everything else). Oh, and my favorite designer Ara Devejian who did a lot of the type.

Here's a sample of the first storyboard I did for "Caveman" that went through a few revisions..



A sample of the changes and tweaks that went on through this process. This was a scene in "Moon Or Bust" that went through several evolutions. First one looked too much like the surface of the moon, we added telephone wires and changed some colors. Which wasn't enough, I made a small sign pointing up with the word "MOON" on it, which wasn't quite enough. Finally the creatives at Discovery Channel insisted on a background that was set in New England. I think the final grassy version is what's going to be aired on the Discovery Channel.






Some of the key scenes that I worked on. The bright pink parrot unfortunately got cut.


This is the last spot that is still being animated as I type this. Should be finished after Thanksgiving. I'll post it somewhere.



Out of all the spots, this one's my favorite:
Moon or Bust|Quicktime (9MB)



See the rest HERE

p.s.
I updated my site

Good Times

The Times have been good to me. Got a call a couple weeks back from the estimable Sam Weber to do a spot for the NY Times OpEd about food choices. I had been a little sleep deprived, so some of my ideas may have been questionable... like the giant burger boxing the giant apple.



While I was in the middle of sketching that, I got a call from the LA Times Book Review. The review was about a cabbie who, after being barred from seeing his son by his ex-wife, writes a hate-filled book and buries it in her yard... only to have it resurface 500 years later and turned into a religion.

Celebrity

Those of you who know me know that I love the ladies.

Wait, that's not how I meant to start this out. Actually, I felt like trying to do some likenesses. I started with Natalie Portman, who I used to like in high school (a lot), and then I did a musician I admire named Bert Jansch. I realized that no one was going to be able to give me feedback on the quality/accuracy of my likenesses if they didn't know who the person being depicted was, so I moved on...to other girls I used to like in high school. Pattern I've noticed: they're all kind of "troubled" in movies I remembered them from. Life imitates art in my case, it seems.

Anyhow, the ladies depicted are Natalie Portman, Thora Birch, Winona Rider, and Bea Arthur of the Golden Girls (for comic relief).

And in other news, I'm going to be one of the artists featured in the third issue of Ashley Wood's Swallow

Originally I was trying to keep this on the down-low, but then I came across this rad promo poster image thingy with my name on it and so I thought "wow he must be serious." So here goes. Look the amazing company I'm in!