Project 1: 3D animation
As part of my Senior Thesis at FIT, and with the guidance of my teachers, I storyboarded, designed, modeled, rigged, textured, and animated this short animation using XSI SoftImage.
I sketched detailed orthographic views of the 3 characters (front, side and back) as a basis for modeling them. In this wordless story, I payed careful attention to creating a facial rig that would allow for a wide range of visual expressions. Studying the book Stop Staring by Jason Osipa, I created several versions of the mouth, brow and eye shapes and used blend shapes to animate seamlessly from one expression to the next. The hand animation is another example of creative rigging, where I connected a legs rig to the fingers to animate them walking.
Project 2: Quirky Animals
A personal project I am working on right now, using Photoshop and a Cintiq tablet.
Animals are one of my favorite topics to draw and I have illustrated a wide range of them in different styles, both traditionally using pen and ink and watercolor, and digitally.
PROJECT 3: Illustrations for a CHildren’s interactive app
I art directed and illustrated this 2D animated interactive app while working for Speakaboos, a children’s apps publisher. The story is an homage to the astronaut Sally Ride, and follows a little girl as she imagines taking the Challenger into space and releasing a satellite.
The artwork was prepared in Photoshop, and I worked closely with our Animation Director to deliver turn-arounds, mouth shapes for lip-sync and several hand shapes to make it easy for the animators to rig the characters in Flash/Animate.
