ANIMATION

I do both keyframe and motion capture animation. I use both industry-standard workflows and my own custom pipeline.

Breakdown:

00:03:00 - 00:25:10: Juice Drop. Music video. I created all visuals. The character animation was created using my custom 2.5D mocap Maya plugin. The props (buttons, juicebox, etc.) and backgrounds are drawn by hand with India ink. I also performed all the motion capture. For more information, see my pipeline breakdown video. Audio by Jeff Schulthies. Vocals by Dimitri Beshkov.

00:25:11 - 00:32:22: Traveling ballet combination. Keyframe exercise. Created based on reference from former professional ballet dancer and current aerospace engineer Marie Tender. I modified the Stewart rig from Animation Mentor with blendshapes to achieve the correct shape for dancing en pointe. Other than the rig, I created all visual aspects of this shot.

00:32:23 - 00:45:16: Welcome to the Sideshow. Animated monologue. I created all visuals. The character animation was created using my custom 2.5D mocap Maya plugin. The props (chair, desk, etc.) and backgrounds are drawn by hand with India ink. I also performed all the motion capture. The primary voice is my voice.

00:45:17 - 00:50:23: Youth Group 4. Cinematic sequence created using Unity. I created this shot as part of an 8-minute film using Unity's Timeline and Cinemachine. I performed motion capture cleanup in MotionBuilder and character modeling in Maya. For more information, see a pipeline post on my blog.

00:50:24 - 00:58:15: Midland Safari Putt-Putt. Animated short. Created with a 2.5D animation technique in Autodesk Maya, which I later expanded upon to create the work you see in Juice Drop, Christmas Rose, and Sewer Issue. Animation is keyframed. For more information, see a pipeline post on my blog.

00:58:16 - 01:05:17: The Illinois Basin. Freelance scientific animation. Excerpt from one of four animations created for the Illinois State Geological Survey to demonstrate geological concepts related to carbon sequestration. As part of the project, I independently studied geology concepts in order to accurately represent them visually. For information about the outlines rendering technique used in this shot, see my toon outlines post on my blog.

01:05:18 - 01:24:00: Sewer Issue. Animated short. I created all visuals. The character animation was created using my custom 2.5D mocap Maya plugin. I also performed all the motion capture. Audio by Jeff Schulthies.

A man gets what he wants.

The four embeds below are freelance animations I created for an Illinois State Geological Survey documentary about their carbon sequestration partership with ADM. The documentary was directed by the Emmy-award winning director Alison Davis Wood. For each animation, I researched the scientific concepts I would be illustrating, and used visual reference for the geological structures. It was a fun project.

A woman lives in a drain.

A small-town insurance salesman has a secret.

A woman rises on Christmas.

I made this video card for my mother for her birthday. My family members sent me audio clips of themselves singing along to a birthday kareoke, as well as song nice messages for my mom. I cast them each as a fruit, targeted their audio to the fruit mesh using Nvidia's Audio2Face tool, exported it to Maya for additional cleanup, and rendered from Blender.

A youth group meeting goes off the rails.

A man reflects on his insecurities.