Just thought I'd take a moment to post a bit about my journey in the stop motion world over the last couple of years. I graduated from Academy of Art University in San Francisco in 2010 with an MFA in Animation and VFX. My focus in school was stop motion animation.
A lot of people probably thought I was crazy to focus in stop motion (there were even a few teachers that told me it was a dying art) but after much wavering back and forth about what my major should be I finally decided to do what I love and chose stop motion. My thesis project El Diablo, inspired by Mexican Folk art, won best stop motion at the Academy of Art Spring show. It went on to be selected in the Stop Motion Magazine film fest, the ASIFA Hollywood Student Film Festival and the NextFrame Film Festival.
Six months after graduating I moved up to Portland, Oregon hoping to work at Laika, the biggest and best stop motion studio in the country, and probably the world at this point. A month after being in Portland I got hired as part of the crew on ParaNorman, and to this day I'm still working there.
Even though it seemed pretty risky to choose stop motion, I'd say it has worked out pretty well so far (knock on wood). I have a lot of gratitude and am very thankful for how it turned out, and to all the people that helped me along the way. Stop motion has become a more thriving and vital art form than ever before, and has made a resurgence into the public eye and back into movie theaters in a major way in the past few years. There is so much that can be done with it, and so much that has yet to be done with it. The possibilities are practically limitless.
Without further ado, I want to share my thesis film here. Hope you enjoy it. And I also want to say, I have a new film in the works, more about that next time.
A lot of people probably thought I was crazy to focus in stop motion (there were even a few teachers that told me it was a dying art) but after much wavering back and forth about what my major should be I finally decided to do what I love and chose stop motion. My thesis project El Diablo, inspired by Mexican Folk art, won best stop motion at the Academy of Art Spring show. It went on to be selected in the Stop Motion Magazine film fest, the ASIFA Hollywood Student Film Festival and the NextFrame Film Festival.
Six months after graduating I moved up to Portland, Oregon hoping to work at Laika, the biggest and best stop motion studio in the country, and probably the world at this point. A month after being in Portland I got hired as part of the crew on ParaNorman, and to this day I'm still working there.
Even though it seemed pretty risky to choose stop motion, I'd say it has worked out pretty well so far (knock on wood). I have a lot of gratitude and am very thankful for how it turned out, and to all the people that helped me along the way. Stop motion has become a more thriving and vital art form than ever before, and has made a resurgence into the public eye and back into movie theaters in a major way in the past few years. There is so much that can be done with it, and so much that has yet to be done with it. The possibilities are practically limitless.
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