The artwork was for a poster series, and was originally much more dense of a scene - a hodgepodge collage of houses, animals, and people. Meredith separated out a few scenes and these were the basis for the different shots in the sequence. I changed only one of the scenes and characters for utilization in the edit, the singing lady (for which I also provided the sound effects).

I roughed out each character pose using Rough Animator for iPad, and then came into Photoshop for creating more cleaned up line pass. I enjoyed using Animator’s Toolbar in PS to separate passes for the torso, limbs, and head.

My workflow evolved as I went along, and using more layers inside Photoshop became more comfortable. With the exception of the first bird shot, I used shape layers in After Effects with hold keyframes to clean up the moves. I’m not sure if this was the most time-efficient way to clean up the shots, but it worked well enough. I’m always trying to find ways of cutting down on time and retaining cleanliness and quality.

A few sections didn't fully make the cut to keep up the pacing of the edit. Working in Flash for more complex character moves made certain actions of Suzy's more efficient.

Throughout the project I would use a hybrid approach for different things - the complex moves of Suzy landing in the room, picking up her dog and spinning around necessitated a traditional approach, while the latter half of the final shot was more time efficient to animate using a rig. Some of my favorite moments in this shot are the quick smears when she makes a rapid turn.

The film was born out of a genuine desire to capture some of the feeling of friendship and adventure, as well as create something of my own. I let myself design and animate what I liked, and worried less about form than story. The vignettes of our activities are an expression of real memories, codified by this film.

I could not have completed this film without the tremendous help of Jeff Moberg on Sound and Score, Andrew Embury, Zak Tietjen, and Erich Reimers with help on a few of the shots. I am indebted to them infinitely and thankful for their generosity.

A few of the shots I blocked out with fewer in-betweens and really enjoyed how it looked. The stark, chunky feel of the walks and actions made this goodbye moment in particular feel more bare and melancholy.

I also experimented with a few other techniques, including blocking out a shot in Cinema 4d, roughing the character movement in Animate, and completing the rest in After Effects. I’m thankful I tried some processes a bit more out of my wheelhouse.

Varying the composition and color densities across the film helped me decide which shots would take the most time, as well as which ones would have the most emotional impact. Color choices across the storyboards were made in for the same reason: from pale, empty greens in the broken down van section to the somber brown, black and grey toward the end.

Broken down in the parking lot of Arcata, California. The van’s alternator died and we ran the battery down to nothing, sputtering to a halt. We got a tow to the nearest Napa Auto and waited for the new one until the next morning. We we’re back on the road the next day.

A stop in the redwoods after the van was repaired. We were transfixed.

We had spaghettios and beer for lunch out on the water on Klamath Lake. The water was super glassy and we saw all kinds of birds. It felt doubly victorious after getting back on the road.

The challenge was to illustrate an error that occurs with some home devices, when the mobile device comes into proximity with home wifi and unlocks the doors. Smart devices are not without fail, and Nest's system does a more intelligent job of working correctly. Eventually we landed on this design to illustrate the proximity problem. 

Second clip in a series showing the proximity problem. Showing the phone in her purse with her attention diverted underscores the severity of a problem this can cause: the user may not only unintentionally set off their home device, but also never even realize it. 

Superwide illustrations of the main floor of the house were used as reference to recreate the scene in full 3D to achieve the last shot's parallax effect. I helped create depth in 2D first, placing delicate lined objects in the background. The challenge was to integrate all of Nest's home devices working seamlessly in the art style given to us. 

Designing a rudimentary character for the intro was an enjoyable endeavor - I started with pencil sketches and decided to keep details sparse because I knew the character would spend less than 200 frames on screen.  It's function was simpler than conveying emotion or connecting on a human level. His only job was to carry the viewer into the content from the last year: a vehicle / transition into what you're about to see. 

For the intro and outro, I decided to use frame by frame animation in combination with standard motion graphics in After Effects. I love the look of super clean motion design holding hands with traditional frame by frame animations. Here the idea was that the viewer would grab 2017 and launch it into the future - then catch it and enter in.

Cleaning up the roughed out versions involved tweaking timing and stretching throughout. It was a good challenge to work on a tight turnaround and produce a simple character. 

Purpose, Trust, Communication, and Leadership personified in a colorful, interstellar tale of losing and finding what makes teamwork great.

This project required a lot of custom rigs, as each character was shown from multiple angles throughout. Almost every shot required a unique inverse kinematics chain, and sometimes no chain at all, just shape layers.

Thankfully, the characters were simple enough that discerning their anatomy and style of movement was already in place. Often the most challenging part was determining the character blocking so as to achieve a healthy sense of compositional balance.

Knowing the anatomy of the characters was crucial when the design phase was complete and I had about 4 weeks to complete the animation. The completeness of their character and personality enabled the execution of several new shots added in the eleventh hour, final moments of production. The substantial amount of exploration completed for the character designs was new to my process, and ultimately beneficial.

I enlisted the help of Emanuele Colombo for certain action shots in the sequence. His work was vital in making the characters come alive and pushing the narrative forward. It was a pleasure working with someone in a different time zone as well - I would wake up and Emanuele had completed several shots to be placed in the sequence.

Our influences for the piece were Lyft's origin story by Buck, a fantastic character-oriented, colorful, design forward piece. I enlisted the help of Al Boardman and Chad Clendinen for early design exploration, and took over once some of our options were narrowed down.

The video played once at a developer's conference with about for about 600 people.

In this piece I explored contrast through color and composition, attempting to focus the viewer in concrete ways throughout. 

Most of the initial sketches I passed to the production company were greenlit for fleshing out the designs. Not much changed between the first drawings and final compositions. 

It was important to me in the design process to mix up wide, midrange, and close up shots throughout the animation. I took the opportunity in this piece to explore the tensions a mixture of detailed and clean, dense and spacious. 

A mix of purchased models and self modeled geometry was utilized in preparing the hotel room assets. There was a decent amount of preproduction time for me to prepare assets based on the moodboards and pre-existing artwork set out by Jeremy Cowart. 

Most of my 2d animations lived inside the art framework of Jeremy's original designer. The art was angle heavy, isometric, with a lot of delicate lines. My palette was wider at first, but by the end had narrowed into 5 or 6 primaries, and essentially only used them at transitional sections. 

The scope of the project expanded when Jeremy learned that realistic 3d renderings could be accomplished. This project was an excellent opportunity to show the client what was already in his head, but couldn't articulate it unless my skills were at work. This sequence was what helped move the design forward into the fleshed out pre-visualizations that ended up in the final. 

My first designs for this project were far more graphic intensive - relying on textured designs and compositional experimentations to convey the ideas. After whittling down with the directors, it became clear that while these looks were appreciated, the larger narrative needed to shine, and some of the details needed to be shed. 

I did a lot of character exploration for this project - the characters had to be leaning toward non-gendered, and not necessarily African. Though C:W does work heavily in Africa, not all their work is conducted their, so style and format had to be more non-specific. 

Many of the motifs like callouts and connecting lines were implemented in the final, even if some of the specific compositions were shed. This project was an exercise in utility, function first, even when beauty and polish seemed appropriate at first.