The Desk

 I'm really happy with how this miniature desk turned out.  First I constructed it with illustration board.  Then I covered the whole thing with thin wood strips that are a sticker on one side, some stuff called Sticky Bark.

 I painted the desk with an acrylic from Golden called transparent brown, which basically looks like a wood stain.

And here is the completed desk.  One prop down, several more to go.  The set is coming together!

Office Chair

There are a lot of props to make for my new stop motion web series.  One of the most challenging so far has been the office chair.  The cushions are painted foam, the rollers were made out of sculpey.  The bottom and back of the chair were made from illustration board and Magic Sculpt. There is also a decent amount of supper glue holding it all together.

 And here is the final chair.  There is also a screw hole in the bottom to secure it to the set.  It's not the most beautiful chair ever, but it will certainly work for the show.

Moving Forward

After much thought, I've decided to move forward with a new project.  I'm postponing the short film I was working on before and moving on to something I feel is more doable and possible to make in the space I have right now.  I will come back to that short film idea someday, and much of the preliminary work has already been done, which is no small feat in itself.  Right now I'm excited about this idea, which is the first thing I thought of doing after graduating from animation school.  It's one character, one set, endless possibilities.  It's going to be on-going webisodes, just how many I'm not sure yet, but I've got several ideas spinning in my head.

Above is a picture of what I've got going so far.  I'm using one of my ball and socket armatures to build the puppet.  The face you see on the puppet here is not final, and the hair will eventually be painted black, right now it's just a bunch of wires.  The whole thing is going to take place in an office, so on the bottom of the set you can see my idea for the floor.

Watch for the first webisode by the end of the year, and many more progress posts here before that!  

ParaNorman on DVD

Just thought I'd get the word out: ParaNorman comes out on DVD and Blueray tomorrow.  Check it out!

A Studio Glimpse

 The picture above is the studio space I have to work in at the moment.  It's pretty cramped, but I've got to make it work.  I built the wooden stage myself, it not totally done yet, but the basic piece is there.

And here you see my bare armatures with the beginnings of new character heads on them.  They are standing on what will be a dark cave set when it's done.  The one on the left has the remains of Skully's ribs on it, my old character from El Diablo.  The next step is applying foam to the armatures to make the bodies of the new puppets.

Bye Skully

For my student film El Diablo, I had some excellent ball and socket armatures made for me by John Wright model making in Bristol, England.  They do a lot of work for Aardman, the makers of such familiar stop motion characters as Wallace and Gromit.  These armatures were very expensive, so unfortunately they must be reused for my next film, which means I must destroy Skully.  I can keep his head at least.  Thanks for all your hard work Skully, time to be reincarnated as my next character.

A Bit About Me

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.