Half-time!

Hmmm, another five months have gone by without a blog post... must mean only one thing.... I've been working!  It's been a very productive 2012 and I should have some brand new eye candy to snaz up my reel in a little while. And I would be an ungrateful lout if I did not express my public gratitude to Angelo Collazo for his continued generosity in steering me toward job opportunities that come to his attention.

I booked  a gig at Absolute Post, a NY commercial house in the Chelsea district that has an affiliate office in London. And just to remind us that the pond inbetween is not that large, we had tea time at 4p every day which was a delightful touch. Working with them, I contributed to a couple of commercials that are currently airing. One was for Lipton Ice Tea. I animated some of the shots of the band Lady Antebellum as they transform into transparent 3D versions of themselves with floating tea leaves inside. Using a technique called "rotomation", I took the video footage of their playing in concert and animated the cg versions to match their performances. Some of the shots were roughly blocked and handed over to me to polish, and some were done from scratch.  The other spot was for Bandaid, and I animated two characters, a sad defeated ordinary bandaid and an ebullient, heroic new bandaid with super micro fiber somethings that make it spiffier than spiff.  I had a blast working there (my CG lead Dan Dixon had worked on one of the Matrix films and shared some badass shots of modeled set pieces with us).

Shortly after leaving there I got connected with Pandapanther on the Lower East Side, and I was brought in on the last month of a three month monster project that required them to produce close to 30 minutes of cinematic animated sequences for the videogame "Skylanders". This was for their new adventures called "Skylanders Giants" introducing some new characters. In addition to the FMVs (full motion videos) for the cut scenes in the game, I animated on a very peculiar trailer for "Skylander Giants" that aired at the E3 conference. What made it so peculiar was the aspect ratio of the trailer, which was roughly 7:1, or the similar to a web banner, only it was on a gigantic, long screen that towered overhead. Animating in such a long screen environment often felt like I was viewing the action through the gun turret of a tank. I saw some homevideo that someone took at the conference that showed the trailer playing, but so far I haven't seen it on the net. There is another trailer for the game that is up there, but in a more normal aspect ratio.

And now I am gearing up for SIGGRAPH, where I am working for the first time as a subcommittee member of the Student Volunteer program. I've been keeping the SV Facebook page active and fun since October, creating games and contests and silly videos.

So, 2012.  Liking it. Good first half. More please. :)