EXPERIMENTAL CGI

I figured if I could do photorealism, I could also animate oils or water color or whatever, using the same techniques. This is my favorite painting from back when I got my BFA in painting. So check it out, it's freaky!

This kind of "art-realism" has a lot more impact on a viewer because with traditional FX and photorealism we tend to want to try to see if we can tell that it is an illusion, so people spend their time looking for the strings and saying "I could tell that wasn't real". With art-realism people can simply enjoy the magic.

WATERCOLOR-REALISM

This is another example of my "art-realism". Here I have taken original ink and watercolor drawings and animated them using a combination of 2D and 3D techniques. Unlike movies like "Sinbad" where the characters look flat (the 2d part) and the backgrounds look almost like photos (the 3d part) I make a point of having the viewer not be able to tell what techniques were used where. The end result is about technology serving art which has the ability to move people rather then merely showing off the latest technological trick. Think Bauhaus.

PEN&INK-REALISM

"inkboy" download a 2 MB quicktime movie clip

"woodcut" download a 2 MB quicktime movie clip

In these two examples I used a variety of techniques to get the russian classical woodcut look on the right (the hardest part was avoiding morrey effect on crappy TV sets!) and the inkboy on the left which placed a dripping staining ink character into a 3d world. The dripping paint method used on the "Transparent Dawg" oil painting above was the same method used for inkboy's dripping melting body.

This piece was done through a process I've dubbed "reverse-rotoscoping". In other words, I animated the cow and farmer in 3D using rough geometry, then printed each frame to paper as a roto-reference for drawings which were then scanned back into the computer. I did it over a weekend, and it was a lot of fun to draw. It is a homage to the popular "Got Milk" commercials with a little added violence :)

Using the same "reverse-rotoscope" technique, the drawn elements for the close-ups were combined with CGI elements that had been made to look like the drawing through the use of special filters and shaders.

I wrote a cartoon shader for this project that alternates between two cell colors (light and dark) based on a binary luminosity value. In other words, where the light hit the dog it would be yellow and where it didn't, it would be brown. This of course back in the days before carton shaders were widespread :) The background is hand drawn.

MAIN	COMMERCIALS	SHORTS	STUDIO	MAKING OF	CONTACT