Mister Cellophane

i have gotten the role of amos for the uw-stout production of "chicago." here's a little taste of what i will be doing.

animation i like: Jean-Luc

developing deer deborah

deborah becker approached me about creating a commercial for her state farm insurance business. i promptly agreed. it turns out that state farm requires their agents to stay within some rather strict guidelines when creating advertisements. one of the main rules is that the 30 second begins and ends with state farm supplied motion graphics; it's called a 'donut ad.' i had to stay in quite a few lines, but deborah wanted me to color as close to the lines as possible.

i pitched a few ideas and we narrowed it down to one. i then thought of something completely different, and she wanted to go with that (hopefully all future clients are this accepting). my concept was that we film the commercial that state farm wants, but rather than using a human, we use an extremely cute, but grumpy cartoon character. other than that, nothing is really special about the main character. it's just a guy who needs insurance... and it's good service that makes this cartoon magical.

next i needed to figure out what the heck this thing was. i played with some imaginary creatures, as well as some animal based things. i luckily(?) drove by a dead deer on the side of the highway one day and knew exactly what the cartoon will be. what's better than the cause of so many insurance claims? and how wonderful would it be to have a deer need insurance because it hit a human?

at this point the commercial went off as it would be expected to. i made storyboards for a 15 second and 60 second version (which i didn't make... yet). after deborah's approval, i moved to animatics, and then we actually filmed the thing. this process didn't take very long and didn't involve many issues.

the whole project was surprisingly uneventful. modeling, animating, and compositing the deer over the video footage was grueling, time consuming, and rather fun (for me, not my girlfriend). the only real issue i suppose would be the fact that deborah wanted me to do the narration. i narrated the animatic and she thought that it should stay my voice since i have such an "unusual tv voice" and the commercial would catch people's attention better. i suppose she has a point... but that's just a nice way of saying i have an ugly voice when heard over speakers. sad.

here's the animatic:

here's the final project:

creating a morning show

i created this animation a while ago, but i thought i would write a little blog about the creation of the project.

when i was interning at minnesota public radio, my boss and i were talking about my focus in animation and came up with a project for me to do. i think he was making me feel better about being unpaid... and it worked. i came up with the idea of short videos for each of the main djs a 89.3 the current (the best music station in the twin cities). the morning show was first.

i wanted to do something that was reminiscent to the old days of radio. i wanted to go back to when men were men and women served men. i found this to be a great juxtaposition to the actual on-air relationship of steve seel and jill riley.

like any good animation, i started with a script and a storyboard and then an animatic. originally, jill wanted her line to include the "f-word" but after the animatic, i think it was pretty obvious that we should keep it clean.

i voiced the narration in animatic, but man, i do not have a good voice for 50's animation. i needed an adult voice. luckily, my boss had just the voice. thank you michael wells.

here's the animatic. sorry about the swear mom.

nicaragua

they sure liked frisbees

i haven't made a blog post for a while. some of that is due to me being busy with summer school projects and now fall semester projects... but most of it is due to me spending two months in nicaragua. ashley and i lived in granada, teaching english at elementary schools and exploring the country. nicaragua gets a pretty bad reputation, and some of it may be true... but it's a pretty decent place full of really great people.

hitting the fan

the most ridiculous thing i did? my friend brody and i ran with bulls. we didn't really want to. we just wanted to watch... but there are no spectators in nicaragua. four bulls are released into the streets and no one is safe.

true art

i had a meeting at minnesota public radio this afternoon (in regards to creating an iphone app). on the way home i took advantage of passing trader joe's in woodbury. there was a mighty fine looking pizza in the frozen section, but i thought to myself, "alex, you could make a much better pizza for less. don't be a chump." well... i ain't no chump.

whole wheat dough. organic mozzarella. organic basil pesto. organic roma tomatoes. crust with a light glazing of spiced olive oil from mallorca, spain. baked at 360 degrees fahrenheit.

if this doesn't deserve to be on an art blog, i don't know what does.

pigzilla lives

the final project for my 3D modeling class was to create a short animation within a group. everybody in class was supposed to create a little art concept to present to the class, then vote on the projects they wanted to work on. i was in spain a missed a few days of class and forgot about the assignment, so before my presentation i did a quick photoshop drawing of the first thing i thought of... which would obviously be a giant pig. only the best digital artists are able to create the quality image i managed... and for some reason my concept was voted for and selected to be on of the 5 group projects.

after the group was formed, i came up with a storyboard and one of my group members came up with a good idea to go with a ertle farm toy look. i was the more established character modeler and animator so i delegate that task to myself (i was the group leader. i could do what i wanted). my first task was to make a pig. i started with pigzilla first but it turned into some sort of fat, ugly, pork pig and i scraped the model. i decide to create a regular, cute pig first and then just mutate it into some angry. i knew render times would probably become an issue near the end of the semester so my goal was to create really simple models that would render quickly but still have a very distinct and interesting style. really that just equated to taking an egg shape and morphing appendages to it. i consider the pig a success.

creating pigzilla was rather easy once i had a pig that i like. all i really did was stand the normal pig on its feet and give it some resemblance of a neck so it could look straight. most of the time spend on pigzilla was readjusting the geometry. bending an egg in half creates a lot of overlapping and messy meshes. also, getting the legs to be under the pig took quite some time to adjust. initially after moving the legs down, it just looked like a crumple mess of pink flesh. i suppose it might have been easier to just create an original mesh, but i really wanted pigzilla to be the exact same thing as a normal pig... and aside from some added polygons to make the eyebrows, it is the same exact mesh.

after creating the main characters, i needed to add some more things to the farm to make it more of a scene. a chicken was definitely needed. again, it really is just an elaborate egg and very quickly rendered. and due to some group miscommunication of tasks, we needed a farm house so i made one quickly. the house was pretty easy to make since i wanted it look like a plastic toy. that really helped me to limit the amount of polygons put into the model and the texture bump maps could be really simple.
so after compiling other group members pieces (and quickly creating pieces that were missing), i spend an entire day animating (in maya and modo), rendering (modo), and composting (after effects) the whole mess into something fairly interesting. enjoy:




http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_EA_FnmiWrs