Saturday, March 29, 2008

Working Stiffs

This film is my final project for Intermediate Film from Fall semester here at RISD, but it's finally cleaned up and ready to share with the world. It's a short mockumentary about zombies in the film industry. Shot on Kodak Vision2 16mm color film. The end credits song Undead was written and performed by my wonderful friend Brynna Campbell.
Enjoy!

Monday, March 17, 2008

Characters Galore!

This semester I'm taking an amazing course in Character Design, taught by the wonderful Shanth Enjeti. Here's a bit of work from the first few weeks.

Please be sure to view the full-sized images to see all the detail!

The first week, we were supposed to do any character design, simply to demonstrate our skill level. So was born Jet Quasar, Astro-Man:


The next week we were told to illustrate, in the form of a character, our best trait and our worst trait. For my best, I chose "smart":


For my bad trait I chose "elitist":


The next week was the same assignment, but for traits we saw in other people. For the bad trait I decided on "deceptive" and came up with this. I think it's a decent concept, but I'm really frustrated with how it turned out in terms of style. We were limited to using flat color, and I couldn't really figure out how to retro-style this one, so it came out looking like a weird blend of realism and stylization which I really dislike. Oh, well... here it is anyway:


This one I love. It illustrates the good trait of "hard-working" and I had a wonderful time trying to simulate cut-paper illustration:


All of these were done in Photoshop CS2.

Anyway, that's it so far. I'll post more as I create more characters.

Sunday, March 02, 2008

Finally!

Hey everyone...

I can't believe it's been this long, but I'm finally getting around to update. I've been extremely busy as of late, but the upside of that is that I've got lots of new work to show, so I'll most likely be updating the blog a bit more frequently. Anyway, on to the matter at hand... (no pun intended)

During my Winter semester, I did an independent study project in which I explored some special effects techniques. The first half of the semester was devoted to creating a realistic severed arm. To put it bluntly, this project turned out to be a real bitch. The main problem was really just the availability of materials here in Rhode Island that really caused some delays and other problems. In the end though, everything worked out and I wound up with a great looking finished product.



The arm is made of latex filled with polyurethane foam. The torn muscle on the end is plain old latex.


It was painted with acrylic paint, with a couple layers of clear nail polish on the fingernails. I used my brand new Iwata Eclipse airbrush and Sprint Jet compressor to paint the arm!

So, there you have it! I look forward to getting back on track with a more regular posting schedule. Sorry again for the long hiatus!