Here are several shots I have animated within the last 6 months. I am currently available for work.

One intense year of study has come to a close as I have graduated Vancouver Film School and completed my animated short film ‘Growing Up!’

I hope the message of the short film is clear and that it resonates with some people.

I could not have completed this project without the help of my classmates, instructors, and support from friends and family. Thank you!

I’m responsible for all the visual elements of the film. I’m an animation student so that was my main focus in this short, but I also created the story, modeled, textured, rigged, lit, and composited everything myself as well.

I used Maya, Zbrush, Nuke, After Effects, Photoshop, and Premiere Pro.

When I started this project the end seemed so far away. When I wasn’t satisfied with the initial images I was creating, I remember thinking that I knew what the potential for this project could be and that pushed me to work harder and make dramatic changes by completely remodeling the character and environment. I believe that within my capacity, I took this work as far as I could in the time that I had.

Within the last six months of the program, except for two days of break, I worked every day for the entire six months, that’s 7 days a week and typically a minimum of 12 hour work days, every day, and I don’t regret it. Despite many challenges along the way, both technical and creative, I enjoyed the entire process.

Yesterday was our official graduation and it’s definitely bitter-sweet. It was overwhelming to see my classmate’s work in rapid succession on the ‘big screen.’ I am very fortunate to have been able to work with so many great people this year and have the opportunity to pursue what I love. Thanks for watching!

See more ‘making-of’ things about ‘Growing Up’ in an earlier post here.

Graduation in a movie theatre, it doesn't get better than that.

[Update: I placed 18th out of 202 entries]
Fresh out of VFS and I was anxious to keep working! It’s like an addiction! I was talking to my classmates that we should start a support group for recent graduates, ha! You get so accustomed to going to school every day and working, it’s tough to get out of that routine.

So, I stayed in that routine and decided to finish my first entry into the coveted 11 second club animation competition.

Shooting reference, one of my favorite parts of the process.

The competition is held once a month, hosted by Animation Mentor, they give you 11 seconds of audio, and it’s up to you to create a compelling animation. Then people vote for it over at the 11 second Club website, and they crown a winner with the award of a professional critique.

Those critiques are so awesome. I spent a weekend and watched all of them! You can learn a lot just from hearing someone else’s critique.

I spent 4 days on my animation: shoot reference one day, block in the golden poses and model the set, then spent two full days finishing the animation.

For this animation I was anxious to use Animschool‘s new free rig, Malcolm. And I have to say I really enjoy the controls provided. There are a few little quarks here and there, but for a free rig, it’s the best one out there by far!

So I hope you enjoy my entry for this month and stay tuned for more animation from me as I hope to be posting more on YouTube in the near future.

Oh, and my Dorito’s entry was featured in the top 25 over at Video Contest News, but I’m not holding my breath on making the final 5 of the real judges cut – there’s some stiff competition this year.

Why?

Because 1 million dollars and Super Bowl-level exposure is at stake!

In addition, this year they are adding the opportunity to create a commercial with The Lonely Island! So you can imagine how competitive this contest is, and this year is no exception. Browse the gallery to get an idea of what’s out there, but you might have to do a lot of hunting to find the gems, but there are some really good ones. You can see all the finalists from the past here.

Here’s how the contest works:

• Judges will select the top 5 entries and announce them the beginning of January

• These 5 will receive $25k and a trip to the Super Bowl

• A public vote will determine one winner from these 5

• This one winner will be run as an advertisement for Doritos during this year’s Super Bowl

• If that winner’s commercial is chosen by USA Today (newspaper) as the best Super Bowl commercial, either on USA Today’s facebook page or using their AdMeter system, Dorito’s will give that winner 1 million dollars. If they are second then $600k, and third is $400k.

So 1 million dollars seems like a long shot, right?

Well, it is and it isn’t. Out of the 5 years they have operated this contest they have awarded the million dollar prize twice!

I have entered this contest two years ago, you can see that unsuccessful entry here. This year I didn’t want to hold back so after a mild brain aneurysm I thought of a decent idea, ran it by my friend Eric, who made it even better, then I started storyboarding it.

Let me apologize in case you're incredibly intimidated by the unmitigated talent I display at drawing stick figures, I can't help it. Also, it's pricey, but not a bad app for your iPhone, this cinemek thingy.

Then I began designing my dinosaur! I wanted a velociraptor so I did a litte research and rewatched Jurassic Park 1 and 2 for design, as well as reference for the animation. After creating the base mesh in Maya, I used Zbrush to finish off the model:

I am concurrently trying to finish up my student short film, so I didn’t have a ton of time for this project. For example, after I got the base mesh for the dinosaur done, I spent one day and completely finished modeling, texturing, and rigging this character. It was the fastest I’ve been able to work on anything, I think, just because of the time constraint I placed on myself. For that same reason, I feel I could have done better with some more time.

Also, to be efficient with my time, both dinosaurs are the exact same rig and model. Therefore, my one constraint, besides simplicity, was to make the rig scalable.

For animation, I tackled the hardest shot first, the bench ejector one, and I’m glad I did, because it made the other shots seem much easier. I also got the help of a classmate for the compositing of this commercial, thanks Marco!

I shot this commercial with my trusty Canon 7D. If you have any other questions, just make a comment below – thanks for watching!

You can watch it below or go to Dorito’s website and watch it there, so then you can see my competition afterwards:

For comparison, here’s last years contest winner, who won one-million dollars:

My take on it was a guy trying to catch a lightning bug, or as everyone else I’ve talked to that’s not from Kentucky, knows it as a fire fly.

First, we shot reference of each other and did multiple takes to see what was working and what was not. It helped to have my classmates there, thanks guys, to give me feedback and even try to act out my scene for me the way they would do it.

Next, I thumbnailed out the basic poses very rough to see lines of action and see my keys. Then I exaggerated those thumbnails in some more rough sketches.

Then I took it into Maya, using my reference to get my key poses blocked in, and timed out roughly. Then another pass to get the ‘extremes,’ and then yet another pass to get the breakdowns, which is more about timing. Then the final couple of passes were for polishing.

My reference footage cut next to my keys.

I added an entire section at the beginning when I was adding the breakdowns where he misses the bug and gets angry. It was fun to diverge from the reference and make the animation work better than what I shot of myself doing in the reference.

For next term I’ll begin animating my short film, which has undergone countless changes. I think I’m working on animatic number 7 or 8 this week, I’ve lost count. We’ll also be doing a lip sync assignment as well.

The assignment was to do a run cycle with a jump in the middle. I wanted to make it more interesting so I took a wing rig from Digital Tutors and attached it to the Norman rig to help him jump:

The assignment was to come up with your own kind of ‘stylized’ walk:

Run with wings WIP

The biggest news from me recently is I placed 3rd and won $3,800 in the Brisk Tea animation contest. I created this animation concurrent with my school assignments so I didn’t have a ton of time to put into it. I wanted to use it as a platform to take a project from start to finish. Thanks to Tongal and Brisk for putting on the contest and congrats to the other contestants!

Currently, I am restarting a run cycle/jump animation and just finished a short lip-sync below. I finally got around to learning how to composite in Nuke for the lip-sync. I really enjoyed the control over having all the passes in one flow down the node tree where in After Effects I’m trying to manage countless layers and precomps and how they’re interacting.

The audio for the lip-sync is from my favorite ‘break up’ movie “Forgetting Sarah Marshall.” I have another lip-sync I did for this assignment using a “Dumb and Dumber” quote, but haven’t taken the time to polish the animation, texture, light, render, and composite it together.

(Click to see larger)

This one could still use some work, but just wanted to get it ‘shipped’ in the words of Seth Godin.

I also recently attended a screening of Thor with Digital Domain presenting their work on the ‘show.’ I found it interesting when they talked about the movie they called it a ‘show.’

What they did on the film is very cool and was more interesting to get first hand accounts of with working with Marvel and all the shots that did and did not make it and to see all the original footage. It was like a special features DVD on steroids. They basically made two movies because half of their shots made the film and half did not.

For comparison to using Nuke here's After Effects

Almost all the green screen shots with people in Frost Giant suits were not used, so Digital Domain replaced the actors in suits with 3D animated models. There was one guy, the presenter joked, who spent months building 14 different bridges (digitally) for the frost world and none of them were used in the movie.

It’s awe-inspiring to get a behind the scenes look at how much work goes into these films. It really makes you appreciate the film on another level and that’s what would make me a horrible film critic, because I respect the hard work that goes into making films too much to be able to tear them down.

Anyways, I’m separating my YouTube channels from here on out. I’m only going to be putting hang gliding videos on alta8bird and put my animation and other work on LucasRidley.

For this animation I went to a bar and took a photograph of the pool table and shot an HDRI by taking different exposures of a chrome ball, like this and used it to light my animation within Maya.