House of Beehives cont.

House of Beehives

My new project is based on a short story by Italo Calvino, House of Beehives. I am challenging myself with a darker story this time around. It's about a traumatized man who fled WWII and became a hermit. He resides among bees and suffers the consequences of losing his last human relationship. Eligio, the antihero wears a gas mask, layers of brambles and travels with bees to distance himself from humans and look less human. Cinzia, his love interest eventually dies from an attack of bees. I decided to go with the crowlike shape for him because he is an outcast and felt that a poppy shape would be appropriate for her since bees are attracted to flowers. My goal is to tell a horror story in a poetic flat manner. I am looking at Hitchcock's The Birds and Charlie Harper.

Last bit of Zeitoun

Zeitoun is a project about a Syrian man who survives Hurricane Katrina and ends up rescuing people on a canoe. He is unjustly arrested as a terrorist in the story and has a past out at sea. Since race is a running theme in the story, I decided to address it literally by assigning people different colors. Zeitoun describes a close connection between his people and the ocean, so I decided to make him blue. I also thought it'd be interesting if his wife was pink and together, they had purple children.

This is the last bit of work I created for this project. There are mistakes to fix in every piece, but I will take what I learned and pay attention to it in my next project. I feel as though this project started out much stronger and stopped progressing when I caught a nasty long fever a week ago. Time doesn't wait and I'm ready to jump into the next project!

More Zeitoun

Zeitoun update

Zeitoun preliminary work

Cinequest Film Festival - Experience 21 Trailer

Last Revisions

sketchy summer

These are sketchbooks from 2010. I took some with me to Kansas City and New York. They feel like past lives now.

I enjoyed how I wasn't worried so much about make them technically accurate, but rather letting the shapes and colors of the moment lead design.

quick sketch

more revisions

Revisions

These are revisions for the Part Time Indian Project. I got great feedback from Jake Panian and Zac Elsworth. There were awesome suggestions push some designs farther, but I decided it would fit better for my next project. Thanks guys!

Cinequest Film Festival Spot

For the past few weeks, I had the chance to work on a short film/commercial spot for Cinequest Film Festival directed by David Chai. It was really fun working in a team again and good experience for 2d pipeline production.

The first few images are concept work I designed inspired by UPA style short films. It was a challenge creating character ideations because they had to be general people from the bay area as opposed to a specific person with key characteristics. It was completely different from the way I'm used to working. Working in the UPA style was also incredibly fun! I experimented with breaking the rules--purposeful tangents, line/shape, texture...limiting my visual vocabulary to only a specific set of motifs and shapes.

We had a small team and very little time for turn arounds, so I was responsible for some of the backgrounds, while working with Kimberly Knoll, Wilbur Liang and Christine Nguyen. The animators designed the characters and the last images are color styling specific to the lighting of my scenes.