Merry Christmas, Fordham University!

'Tis the season to be busy---with finals, end-of-year reports, holiday shopping, and just about everything else. Luckily, the Fordham Holiday Passport is here once again to help bring cheer (and great holiday city adventure ideas) to Fordham students everywhere! (But mostly just at Fordham).

You may remember last year's holiday ram-deer motif. While I loved those cute little guys, I wanted this year's cover to feel a little more "classic" (not to mention a little more "collegiate")---like an old Currier & Ives Christmas card, or something out of It's a Wonderful Life. Hopefully Frank Capra and Jimmy Stewart---or at least Buddy the Elf---would be proud.

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!