Hitchcock Is Coming

Hitchcock seems to be showing up everywhere these days, from HBO original movies to major motion pictures to an upcoming A&E original series. It's certainly an exciting time to be taking a "Films of Alfred Hitchcock" course at Fordham. Aside from studying the master technician's films in depth, the class also offers its students the opportunity to produce creative projects in the vein of Hitchcock.

For my project, I've been developing an animated medley of Hitchcock characters and tropes---from men on the run to antagonistic birds to strangers on trains. The final piece will clock in at about one minute and thirty seconds, and will feel a bit like a Pixar end-credits sequence.

To give you a taste of where the video is going, here is a look at some of the production materials:

Production stills from finished animation sequences.

A pre-production character sheet for characters appearing in the medley.

A sample storyboard sheet for the opening of the medley.

Check back soon to see the final product in motion!

The Cardinal & Colbert: Animation

Last Friday's "The Cardinal & Colbert" event at Fordham University was a rousing success. I had the opportunity to contribute my own small bit of joy to the evening with the illustration posted previously, and the animated sequence posted above.

Now that the animation has started making its way around the web, I thought I would share a bit about the process of creating this labor of labor.

The animation began with a very formal story process:

Once the story was worked out, I created some rough storyboards to denote when and where specific actions would occur.

Following the storyboards, I began painting backgrounds and animations in Photoshop.

Then I imported the 2-D Photoshop planes into the 3-D virtual space of Blender, and began building "sets." The Colbert Report studio and St. Patrick's Cathedral were especially fun to reconstruct.

After animating some camera movements and splicing everything together in iMovie, the video was good to go!

This project has been a true joy to work on, and I couldn't be more thankful for the opportunity to work on such an exciting endeavor for such a unique event. The night of the event even brought a few of its own surprises...one of which is summed up in the illustration below.

I hope you have as much fun watching the video as I had making it! 

It Came from the Radio

On October 30th, 1938, burgeoning media star Orson Welles made quite a stir when he and his Mercury Theatre repertory broadcast an all-too-real take on H.G. Wells' War of the Worlds. The now-infamous radio play sent citizens fearing for their lives, and even compelled a few of them to take aim---with rifles---at telephone poles and watertowers, which vaguely resembled Martians in the moonlight.

As a final project for a film studies class, I've begun the process of setting Welles' masterful broadcast to an animated storyboard. Rather than tell the same story that Welles does, I want to tell the story of those he spooked. Following one Manhattan worker bee's personal odyssey home to his neglected family, I hope to trace the hallucinatory effects of the broadcast in an almost Kubrickian journey down the rabbit hole. You can view the current progress above. Enjoy!

You'll Burn Your Wings Off

Lately, I've been working on an animatic featuring everybody's favorite mythical birdman: Icarus. Inspired by the lyrics and tune of Cat Stevens' "The Wind"--which seem vaguely reminiscent of the high-flying hero--I've put together what you might call a "free adaptation" of the classic Icarus myth. You can check out both the original/thumbnail animatic and the shiny new finalized animatic below.

And remember children, if your parents give you a set of wax wings this Christmas, stay far far away from any giant balls of fire that may torch the wings in mid-flight. If you hate the present that much, just ask for the receipt.

Losing Your Work...Through the Ages

I recently endured one of the more harrowing experiences that an artist can face: the sad, irreversible tragedy of losing one's work. Fortunately for me, it was only a week's worth of paintings--iPad paintings, lost in a freak iCloud glitch--but the blow was still swift and merciless. Feeling helpless and defeated, I found myself a part of the great tradition of artists who have lost their work to any number of tragedies: fires, robberies, hurricanes, what have you. 

And so we add a new tragedy to that list of potential art-destroying torments: the iCloud (or iStormCloud, as I have re-dubbed it).

Anyway, I took my frustration and turned it into the shiny new animatic that you can watch below. Enjoy!