NEW MUSIC VIDEO "LET IT RIDE" by Locksley

After a long wait it's officially online!  Check out the stopmotion music video I directed for Locksley for their new single "Let It Ride."  Behind the scenes coming soon!



full credits here.

"LET IT RIDE" Shot Breakdown

Here's how I put together a shot from my upcoming stopmotion music video for Locksley.  If you wanna check it out on the big screen your next chance is at the LES Film Festival Monday, June 16th at 7PM & 9PM (for more information click HERE).  Until then enjoy these video guts!

TED-Ed: "Historical Role Models"

Here's the fourth & latest animation I've directed for TED-Ed (voted one of Time Magazine's Top 50 Websites of 2013 & winner of three Webby Awards!).  It's all about the virtues of American historical figures.  Check it!  I'll be posting some behind-the-scenes work for it in the coming days.
I'm taking some time off from TED for the next few months to catch up on other work, but I hope to come back to TED later in the year with some fresh eyes.  They're some of the best and easiest people to work with, so hopefully it won't be too hard to stay away for so long.

I've also been working on another animated short that's gonna be big!  With explosions!  Kids like those right?  More soon...

How to Add Sex Appeal to Your Animation

Step 1:  Add Robert Pattinson

Step 2:  Watch the Youtube hits pile UP!!!

Step 3:  Retire rich and successful, like all animators do.

From the Archives: Levi's® Purple

This past January marked the fifth anniversary of my move from Chicago to Brooklyn.  During those first few months in NY I spent a lot of time working on a weird variety of jobs for LFS, one of them being Levi's®.  Many a nights' sleep was lost to adding dots to capes and feathers to helmets, but in the end the client wanted something that was so oddly color-corrected that you couldn't make out much detail, let alone what's going on if heaven-forbid they cross in front of a dark background.  Ah well!  It was a fun project regardless and as I mentioned in my original post, a good way to justify some of college.

PEMDAS: The Process, Part I

I've recently posted some pre-production goodness over on my site for my TED-Ed animated short, PEMDAS or How To Defeat a Dragon with Math (YouTube).  I wanted to take some time in this blog to walk thru how I go about making a project for TED-Ed from start to finish.  It may not be the model way to do things but it gets the job done, son!  Overall the whole process from pre-production to final posting takes anywhere between a month and a month and a half.

To get things started, TED sends me an audio file -- sometimes of my choosing, sometimes not -- and from there I begin listening to it over and over annnnd over.  I'll listen to it while I'm on the train, in the shower, grocery shoppin, etc etc so I can start brainstorming ideas & listening for workable rhythms in the narration.  I rarely cut up the audio, to whatever benefit or downsides that may provide.  Mainly I don't do it because I'd rather present the material as how it may play out in someone's head during a lecture.  Plus I don't need it to be any longer than it already is, I have a lot of ground to cover in a short time.  Initially, I start sorting out what could make for funny sight gags and what the characters might look like.

And then I let my brain crap all over my notebook for a few days, like this.

The scribble at the bottom eventually became the last shot in the animation of the desert.

First dragon drawings

Working out how I wanted to represent the musketeers

Fleshing out the dragon, if time permitted I was originally aiming to make him much more complicated.

More musketeer work where I decided on making parentheses 'just arms'

BONUS: Brain Crap isn't just for math design, here's an elephant from my last TED-Ed short.

Ahhh... wasn't that refreshing to get that all out?  I'm always jealous of some of my artist friends who keep amazingly well-kept sketchbooks full of beautiful drawings and proportion studies.  Mine looks like a four-year-old's with randomly fleshed-out drawings peppered in...

Due to the compressed nature of my TED-Ed productions (i.e. just me & producer) I usually start on storyboarding before or during initial character design, so my animatics typically end up looking nothing like the final product.  Certain parts will get chopped up, reworked or removed altogether.  This is true of all my TED-Ed projects but especially this latest one, with a much higher concentration of character interactions and backgrounds than my first two, which had long spans of charts and text animation.

Here are a few select storyboards and screenshots to compare storyboard vs. the final product:

My original design for the imperial senate.  The robot things were ... just that.  Overall, it looked too small and confined for me in the end.

The final design for the senate.  I added a truck with the words spelled out to better flow with the narration and changed the robot things to Star Wars® trash can droids for ease of animation.  Plus -- the guy was making a Star Wars reference and I needed to give it some sort of acknowledgement.  EXTRA NERD BONUS: The Imperial Senate has imperial units of measurement worked into its design. 

This was the animatic's original "Happy Ever After" shot... I had no idea how I was going to represent the Land of Pi design-wise and didn't have it down solid until about 10 days before final delivery.  So instead I had numbers and balloons.  Creativity.

The original "PEMDAS! There's another spot!" ... I wasn't really sure who I wanted to have yelling that line out so I just made a generic person.  The mouth was fun to draw.

This was the way I originally intended to show the musketeers riding their steeds toward the dragon.  After I got around to designing the horses, everything looked too jumbled up and busy so I went with the following design instead... 

The final version of the musketeers riding their steeds.

Finally, we come to the storyboard that eventually became the first image of this blog post.  This went through a few different changes, from the phone yelling to a wanted poster to a Street Fighter-style VS. screen to the musketeers sliding down a fire pole onto their horses.  Sometimes it's better just to keep it simple.

.... to be continued!



TOMORROW:  What Was I Animating 10 Years Ago?

MONDAY:  The Animatic! 

NEXT WEEK:  The Process, Part II  

TED-Ed: PEMDAS

I'll be posting more behind-the-scenes whatnots for this and other TED-Ed work shortly, and probably some sorta nipples for good measure.

VH1's 100 Sexiest Artists!

... mmm-MMMM!  Just in time for Thanksgiving we as a people can finally come together to celebrate not just the gifted or "talented" artists, but the 100 SEXIEST ARTISTS.  Check out the short animation above (credits) that I worked on & for more of Malika Favre's excellent work go here!  I haven't seen the show on TV but I can make a few guesses as to who they may have picked for their top 100:

1.  Shirtless Picasso ... obviously.

2.  Ann Romney

3.  Billy Zane as The Phantom

4.  James Quall 

5.  Courtney Stodden

6.  Mama Berenstain Bear

7.  Young Tim Meadows

8.  Robocop Action Figure w/ Battle Damage

9 - 100.  Grace Kelly, because my goodness!

NEW TED-Ed Animation - Electoral College

I just finished up my latest project with TED-Ed about everyone's favorite least-controversial subject of The Electoral College.  It's free, buddy!

Special thanks to my lovely producer Bridgette Spalding and the handsome sound designer Eric Hoffman.

TED-Ed: The Powers of Ten

I'm a bit busy at the moment to write too much more about it at this time, but check out TED-Ed and my website for more information!  Unfortunately at the moment the great sound people over at Henry Boy went uncredited, but that should be amended shortly.

Stay tuned for more!

Coming Soon: TED-Ed

I've been busy with more fun freelance projects lately, the most recent to have wrapped is a short I directed, designed & animated for TED Talks' sister site, TED Ed.  A few months ago my friend Jeremy pointed me to this page on their site saying that I should put my name in the hat for animator nominations.  A few weeks later I was contacted about doing some work and was assigned a four minute lesson.  I was granted a lot of creative control and it was such a pleasure to have the opportunity to work on a project for TED.  Before it's official release, I'll be posting a few bits from the production like storyboards, sound work, design ideas, and other random info.  

In the meantime, here are a few screenshots of what to expect: 

Awww yeah there will be pianos!

... this is where creative control is fun to exercise.

There will also be pianos in pants.

Everyone's fourth-favorite 20th Century physicist!

TIME TO WAKE UP.

I've got an exciting new project coming up, more to follow...

Storyboard: Fun with Science

Are the powers of ten getting you down?

Marked Animation 2012 Reel™

Happy Monday!

Lab Rats Love

Concept Art & Painting in Photoshop

I took a stab at some concept-arting* for a project last month that involved painting in Photoshop.  I haven't done much digital painting yet so it was pretty new to me; I really enjoyed doing it & want to work on refining it more.  Just think of all the detailed pimples & vivid in-grown hairs I could paint... maybe if I ever save up enough money to get me a fancy new Cintiq...**

click to enlarge

click to enlarge

More on these & what they're for later...



* If you want to check out what beautiful professional-level concept art looks like, check out this great tumblr feed: FUCKYEAHCONCEPTART 


** In the meantime, I did take the time to pre-order Wacom's new Inkling on Amazon.com and if you love to draw and are looking for a $200 investment that will change the way you sketch & edit illustrations then I highly encourage you to do the same.  I think it will be a great opportunity to get back into hand-drawn animation as well, since there's no tedious need to scan every image.

Locksley Taxicab Promo

For their upcoming release, my favorite friendband™ Locksley commissioned me to design a 15-second promo to be played on the displays in the back of cabs in NYC, Chicago & Boston.  It was a just under a two-day turnaround so I'm pretty pleased with how it came out, but I'm sure most people will be drunk when they see it anyhow.

UPDATE:  Here it is as seen in the wild:

Eyedrops Spec Spot "TGIF"

Here's my latest stop-motion project getting some love this week, I'm fairly swamped with work at the moment so I'll take time to deconstruct it in future blog posts.  For now, enjoy!  I worked hard on it dammit.

CREDITS: Directed by Mark Phillips
Written by Mark Phillips & Luke Rotzler
Additional Animation by Luke Rotzler
Sound Mix by Dave Wolfe
Voices by Luke Rotzler, Mark Phillips & Marybess Pritchett
Additional Sound by David Pietricola
Produced by Lifelong Friendship Society
Original Concept by JWT 

Leo Burnett "Language of the 21st Century" Intro

Shot on a Canon 7D w/ Dragon Stopmotion, composited in After Effects.

I worked on this project via The Lifelong Friendship Society in collaboration with agency Leo Burnett & artist Kieran Antill for the agency's 2011 Cannes Presentation.  The blocks themselves were actually quite large, over a foot-&-a-half across and hand-constructed by the good people of twoseven with wood.  It may not look like much but it was definitely one of the more physically challenging shoots I've been on lately, if only due to the weight of the cubes & the heat that day.  Riding $10K of camera equipment on a bike across Williamsburg to try to make call time probably didn't help much either...

BONUS: The official website up now: www.AlphabetOfToday.com

Coming Soon: New Stop Motion!

I'm currently wrapping up a couple of stop motion projects that I shot earlier this year, they should be up within the week!  In related news, I think I've done enough stop motion compositing for the summer.  

Visine "TGIF" Director's Cut

Leo Burnett & Kieran Antill "The Language of the 21st Century" 

I'd also like to thank everyone who came out to support at the Brooklyn Film Festival!  It was a great year & I'd like to congratulate all of my fellow filmmakers who put the 'tainment' back in 'edutainment'.

I didn't have time to photoshop more people into the audience.