Animations
Red & Blue
As my animated movie reviews became more and more involved, I wanted to try something different. I wanted someone else to tell me what to animate. I partnered with a stand up comedian also living in New York City and together we came up with a classic 2-characters-sitting-on-a-couch style sitcom. He wrote one episode, I wrote another, and we just riffed for the third.
The Red & Blue set is meant to invoke a classic apartment shared by two dudes. To achieve something so mundane and familiar on a micro scale, I got creative with the assets that give the space its flavor. The guitar is an
X-Mas ornament. The couch is
felt pulled over clay sculpted into
a couch shape. the poster is a
playing card. The standing light is
a flash bulb from a tiny camera
figurine. The space itself was
constructed to be taken down and
stored in between shooting.
Movie Review Animations
For a couple of years, I gave myself an assignment - write up reviews of (mostly) every movie I saw, and animate something to accompany them. This gave me a great opporutnity to practice not just sculpting and animating, but production design and filmmaking in general - on a micro scale! Here are the ones that required more in depth set design, in no particular order, followed by the smaller, simpler ones.
Barbarian
I wanted to create something with real movement for my Barbarian animation. I constructed a tunnel set out of cardboard and good ol fashioned dirt. To achieve the running effect, I had the characters run in place, and moved the set itself behind them. It perfectly created the illusion that the character was actually moving through the space.
Godzilla Vs Kong
I created a matte painting of a city scape in Photoshop, then printed it out for as a backdrop. The chessboard is a cardboard sheet, on top of a red clay brick block to act as the building they are playing on. The brittle nature of the clay lead to a happy accident when Kong presses the chess piece down on the block and damages the clay. Stuff like that is why building a set is so crucial, as you never know what physical variable will lend itself to the final product.
DUNE
For my Dune animation, I whipped up a bust of main character Timothee Chal. Knowing I'd only need him to turn around, I didn't sculpt him arms, legs, or even much of a torso. Then, I made a matte background out of colored pencils. The texture along with being blurred in the background gave it good depth. It's always better to shoot with a background in place so you don't have to painstakingly green screen in other elements.
Ghost Busters Afterlife
Ghost Busters Afterlife is the most realistic set design I've done so far. I wanted real camera movement that would pan into the start of the animation, so the set had to be built with the camera placement in mind. I designed a classic American mid century home, with windows for the light to poor through and painted the hallway door with a thick oil paint to give it some depth. The camera swiveled on a plate I use for sculpting. The camera starts and stops in a fixed position based on heavy stoppers I placed under the rotating disk. After getting the camera shot, I animated the ghost character on a green screen, so I could simply key him into the shot. Just like the OG Ghost Busters movie! The end result is, I think, the most realistic looking animation I've made so far.
Last Night In Soho
Last Night In Soho features some pretty wild camera tricks and visual flair. For its animation, I wanted to capture the fun transitions present in the film. A character dances on in the center of a rotating platform the lighting fairly neutral. As she dances, we switch between her dopplerganger, who dances in a much more wildly lit space of purples with gold flakes fallen on the ground. The pillars surrounding her were designed with simple geometric edges to catch the light at different angles and create new tones as they rotated. The design also made the transitions between the two characters easier to make. It's a great example of designing the set by considering how I might shoot and edit it later. I let a future step of the process inform an earlier step.
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Pan's Labyrinth
For my Pans Labyrinth animation, I wanted to recreate a scene instead of
animating something inspired by it. I chose
the classic Pale Man scene for a chance to
make own version of one of the best
creature designs ever in movies.
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Lighting the scene by candlelight presented issues with the amount of light. The solution of course being to simply add more candles. One thing that was not a problem was the candle flicker being inconsistent in between frames. Since the flicker essentially flung light on the subject at random, having the exact lighting switch in between frames allowed the flicker effect to translate through to the animation.
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Other Movie Review Animations
These animations were quicker and less of an undertaking than the others, but still required foresight and planning. Many of them I was able to get done in a single day. Any artist will tell you, sometimes that momentum is important and it's easier to do it in one day that to spread it out over several