"Trolls" Cast Announced

Today DreamWorks sent out via Twitter the cast of "Trolls" - along with a first look at the characters they're playing.  My guess is we might even see a teaser or full trailer before Kung Fu Panda 3 at the end of the month.  It'll be interesting to see what changes are in store.  At the time I left, many of these cast members weren't in place (including one big recast).

See the entire cast shots HERE

I love the director, Mike Mitchell. He is just a fun, smart, and hard-working director. I think that fun carries through into his movies.  It was a strong and wacky film when I left, and I can't wait to see what's he's done with it since.

Bink - Freelance Animation

I have spent my winter break doing some freelance animation for Eric Miller Animation Studios.  I worked with Eric back at DreamWorks, and he's a great guy who has spent the last few years getting his very own company up and running.  He is keeping a very interesting blog about the experience, and if you're interested in the business side of animation and vfx he goes into some great detail.

The project I'm helping on is a web series he's creating to help showcase the company.  It's called Bink and features this adorable little alien captured in a testing lab.  The team Eric has put together is top-notch, full of folks I know from DreamWorks.  Which is to say, it's great to have nice proper rigs, and professional work going into this project.  The original animator on this was Jacob Gardner, who's a great guy I worked with as well.  He was transitioning from a cycles animator to full time character animator as I was helping out crowds on Shrek 4.  Jacob got busy with the Kung Fu Panda 3 crunch, and they needed to bring someone else on board.  Luckily it worked out schedule wise for me to join up.

It's been really fun to get some character animation time in.  Teaching (and the after effects of moving cross country) took up most of my time in the fall, and I really missed getting to spend some evenings back at the ol' graph editor tweaking animation curves.

Final Panda Trailer

One last final full trailer for KFP3.  Really excited to see how this turned out, it's looking great.  Some real nice moments in there since the screening I saw looong long ago.  I have to give a special shout out to Tyler Phillips for a hilarious "Chitty chitty chat chat" animation on Po!

Student Animations - Fall 2015

I was putting together some student examples from my Animation class this semester, and I thought it'd be nice to post them.  It was a face paced semester, as my students had to learn how to be animators, directors, writers, editors and actors in 15 weeks.  All while trying to learn to animate in Flash.  I am happy to no longer have to teach Flash - we just got Toon Boom Harmony purchased for next semester!

End of First Semester

I took this picture walking to my car after my last finals of the semester. I remember walking up to this building in August not sure what to expect. I have to say it was as fun, exhausting, exciting, stressful, and fulfilling as I had hoped.

Waterpik Freelance Project

The freelance project I did with my wife, Heather, is online.  It was a promotional video for Waterpik Clearview system and we did all the computer graphics for the video.  I did the rigging and animation, while my wife handled all the modeling, surfacing, and overall wrangling of this surprisingly large job.  It was fun to work together on a project again, but there were a lot of client redo's and it took a bit longer than we had wished.  A good project on the learning curve as we become full-time freelance artists while still balancing the homelife we moved to TN to have.

The full company page on the product can be seen HERE.