TIME MARCHES ON!!!

Wow, it's the New Year, 2012, and with it comes new resolutions and resolve. At the top of my list is to not let this blog collect as much dust as it did since the last post! It's not as if I didn't have anything to blog about. So a little playing catch-up is in order. Highlights of the latter half of 2011 include...

... working as a Team Leader in the Student Volunteer program at Siggraph in Vancouver Canada last August! What a gorgeous city and setting for the convention. This was my fifth outing in the SV program, and I made a splash early on with my contribution to the creation of the TL Intro Video. I choreographed and assisted with the direction onsite of our version of "The Office Lip Dub". If you watched the season 7 opener of "The Office", you'll know what I'm talking about. If not, well, just take a look at our take on it here: The SV OFFICE LIP DUB  P.S. what you will see was done in ONE TAKE with no cuts!!!

I've been working fairly regularly at Launch in mid-town Manhattan, and I am enjoying the company of my animator friends in the Pit as we produce a never-ending slate of previs commercials for test marketing. We use Motion Builder which is quite a different animal from Maya, and it's fun to get to know how to handle motion capture data. It's also fun to see one of our efforts selected for full production, such as a recent Bud commercial for the Superbowl, always a good sign that we're on target with our output. Here's a link to their website, with some examples of the type of work we produce: LAUNCH

They finally aired the two episodes that I worked on for Nickelodeon's "Team Umizoomi" made at Curious Pictures during the fall of 2010. This is a popular show geared for a very young audience. I got to work with Maya for the first time in a production environment, and animated several characters in these two specials. The style is extremely simplistic, and the main challenge was the shear number of shots that needed to be output. It was just me and the lead animator for these two half hour specials. Here's a link to a short compilation of the shots I worked on: Team Umizoomi Shots.

The last bit of exciting news from 2011 is that I was selected to serve on the six-person Student Volunteer Subcommittee for Siggraph 2012! It is quite an honor, and I've been hard at work already, keeping the Facebook page for the SVs full of exciting news, contests, videos, and more. I can use that as some of my excuse for neglecting THIS blog. Here's the link where you can catch up on all that we are jabbering about the SV program: Siggraph 2012 Student Volunteers on Facebook.

So that's it. When I am not in the NYC at work, I am working hard at home on new animation clips for my demo reel, and I hope to have some WIPs to share here in a bit. In the meantime, I hope to hear from all of you and do some serious catching up. Cheers!