My contribution was doing layouts for the opening scenes up to when the dragon exits behind the mountain road, before the bird enters. I animated and small handful of bits including the Space Invader Idols high-fiving and shooting lasers at the dragon. Dan also worked on layouts and animated the falling rock scene, Chad did the opening Idol’s run to the car, the bird, the fire/smoke/dust effects at the end, as well as the cycling background doodles and Mike animated all the Dragon sequences. We all worked virtually from our homes. It made me miss working at a studio, side by side with colleagues, absorbing all the creative energy. But this experience had it’s benefits too!

Here’s a behind-the-scenes piece about the video and the animation.

Thanks for the opportunity Hunter and thanks for checking in folks!

The roto animation was partially direct roto of live-action footage and some non-roto elements based on the said footage. I was involved in designing the style of the animation and executing the animation itself – the real challenge was changing the features of the man’s face and hair to fit the character requirements for the final video. In the live-action footage that I used, the actor had longer hair, so he needed a “haircut”. Also, I needed to change his expressions and eye movement. Here are two clips from this pharmaceutical video project for the production company, Eveo in San Francisco. Click on the black bar under the image and give it a moment to load the movie clip and it will begin to play.

Another project that had me busy on a couple of separate occasions was creating icon illustrations of bio-tech equipment for Zymergi, LLC. The challenge for these was to illustrate the units in an elevation view; a straight-on view without any perspective. All of the photo reference I had to work with was photographed in a lab setting with plenty of lens distortion, existing lighting and obscured by other components. Not only did I need to tweak the perspective but needed to light them all from a similar light source as well. Here are a few of the units.

Both projects were interesting experiences and gave me unique insight to these industries. I surely hope to do more work in these fields in the future.

This clip represents the ‘tag’ of a series of commercials in the late 1990s, just a few seconds of animation strarring Manny, Moe and Jack of the “Pep Boys” fame. Colleague and friend Ricardo Barahona animated Manny and I animated Moe and Jack.

Here’s one of the funny commercials the animation was used in:

Now this is a piece that was an experiment using Lightwave 3D 7.0 back in 2001. Again Ricardo helped on this, creating the art and cycling cow animation. I then took his art and created displacements to give it a 2 1/2 D look, animated the camera and animated the assets. Today, After Effects could have been the appropriate software to use. Another friend and colleague Michael Baker designed the audio track. And yes, I used a simple title from imovie at the end.

This next clip represents a title sequence for the feature film “Valley of the Hearts Delight” directed by Tim Boxell. I worked with Alligator Planet, Inc. and designed the backgrounds. They were digitally painted by Siri Margerine, Scott Adams and myself, giving them the fruit crate art stylization. When the film was screened for a focus group, the audience thought they were going to see an animated feature. It was then decided to go without the art in the final release of the film.

Well, this was fun. I’ll post another installment of clips from the archive soon.

-Tom

My 3 entries were co-written by friend and colleague Michael baker, and here they are:

And because it’s been nearly a whole two months since my last post, thought I’d share this one that I’ve been working off and on for a bit now.

As said on the Maverix Studios Blog:

“…All together as ONE , we raised $30,605, well over our initial goal for the cause.
Considering we only had a few weeks to prepare, it is an amazing success!”

Here are some shots of  before and during the auction at Super Frog Gallery space:

One_Art_Auction

All the best,

Tom

Here’s a link to New People and the Super Frog Gallery:

http://www.newpeopleworld.com/2011/03/30/hitotsu-as-in-one/

I’ll be posting my donation here soon.

All the best,

Tom

So, she was in this cafe in San Francisco on a cold afternoon last week. She found a place near the fireplace. Lucky her, a prime spot. Lucky me that I happened to be facing the right way while eating lunch with a friend. She was quite distracted, looking out the window across the cafe to see if her friend was going to show up. When her friend (a slightly older woman) did show up, they both just chatted away and sipped their lattes. Here then, is the glorious memory of Winter Girl in the San Francisco cafe.