Hey! I just posted a complete breakdown shot-by-shot of my demo reel. Now you can check out each individual clip and read exactly what it was I worked on. Just click the above image or the link to the right to view it. Enjoy!
I was given the opportunity to make another poster for Young Life. This time for their annual golf outing fundraiser. I wanted to make something that had a little Scottish influence to it since that was the birthplace of the sport. So in Scottish clan tradition, I made a Young Life golf coat of arms. I used Illustrator to modify the shield and golf clubs, then brought it into Photoshop to create the rest of the poster. It's always fun to make stuff for YL.
On a separate note we recently purchased an arsenal of nerf guns at work and decided to make some action photos. Below is the one I did of me wielding dual Mavericks. I have two images. The first one is the original photo we took and the second is me in the heat of battle. Everything was done with images from google image search and about 1 hour of playing around in Photoshop. It was just a fun exercise... a sort of graphics challenge.
Over the past month or so my friends and I have talked about making a comic together. The whole point being a tool to be creative and keep in touch on a regular basis since we live states, and even continents apart.
We all started out much more heavily in the traditional arts and only in college really moved over to the digital arts. After many years of just working on computers we're itching to put some pencil to paper and just draw a bit. Through this desire we came up with the idea to make a comic that we can all work on and then post the pages on the web for others to read as we complete them.
Right now we're sorting through all of our schedules and figuring out what a possible production timeline could be like and pooling all of our ideas into the story, concept art, and technique. We're all really excited about this project and are looking forward to making the first finished page.
Once we get everything fleshed out I'll post more about the story and characters (most likely in another blog dedicated to the comic) and I'll continue to post concept art and images as we create them. Here's the first peek.
JC Trombley drew up some quick concepts of characters and a guy getting pistol whipped and drew the revolver and vacuum tubes.
The colored one is my first attempt at trying to determine how the colors will look. I really haven't done a lot of this and every time I did I just filled the outlines with a solid color and used the dodge and burn tools in photoshop to create the shadows and highlights. This drawing I wanted to try to get away from that and experimented with different brushes. The main brush acted a bit like a marker. I used broad strokes of color and then refined it until I had what you see below. At the end I added his stubble and used a speckled brush in photoshop to create it. This got me thinking of what other great brushes could be created. I feel the next one could be a lot different because of this.
These are the first drawings I've done in a while. It's taking me back to my childhood when all I wanted to do with my friends was draw. It's a great feeling.
My wife and I recently purchased a Nikon D200 for our upcoming trip to Africa. We felt that pictures would be better memories and last longer than some expensive trinket we could find while over there. Since then, we've been taking photos around town trying to brush up our photography chops. I'm finding that I'm pretty rusty, but I'm having a lot of fun with it. It got me thinking of what I feel are the last 'art' photos I took. Some black and white film shots that I developed in the darkroom. Back before photoshop ruled my life. Don't get me wrong.. I love photoshop and the creative freedom it gives you, but there's something about actually going through the process of developing your film and trying to produce the best print possible with the proper contrast and exposures. Also, finding the perfect filter to use and the smell the of the development chemicals.. I just sometime miss that creative process. But I digress.. I love this new camera. Now, just to learn it well so not to miss any opportunities while on safari in Africa. I've posted some of my photos I developed through the now archaic methods and one of my dog, because he rocks.
The chair is a light study. I found it in an abysmal abandoned house on the outskirts of town. I truly believe if the blair witch house existed it would be this house. I never felt at ease here, but I really do love this picture.
The woman is a motion study. It was a series of photos that told a story and this is one of the final panels. The whole project was of her running from someone through the woods. I believe I shot this and the chair with a stock Pentax camera and a 50mm lens.
The dog is my dog - Brody. I took it with a point-and-shoot sony digital camera. Enjoy!
V1: Widescreen, 4x3
V2: Widescreen, 4x3
Back in the day one of my favorite comics was Scud: The Disposable Assassin. It was written and illustrated by Rob Schrab - one of the men behind the movie Monster House and the Sarah Silverman Program. The long and short of it is the comic was supposed to be concluded in issue 21. Well through a series of absurd happenings and unfortunate events (that can be found here) the series stopped with issue 20, leaving all the readers wondering how it all ended. Flash-forward 10 years to now and Rob decided to finish it and compile all the comics into one book. Fans rejoice. Well a few days ago he posted the cover art on his blog and I really liked it so I decided to make it into a desktop. After creating the cover desktop I decided to make a variant with just the main character - Scud. After all this I was pretty happy with how they turned out and figuring Rob was a cool guy, I felt he may like them too. I emailed them to him and that night I received a reply telling me how much he liked them and that he set one as his desktop. I got excited and geeked out a bit... prompting this post. Thanks for liking them Rob.
The artwork was done by Rob Schrab and the cover was colored by Jack Gray. The handguns in the background were also drawn by Rob. I took those elements and created the layout and design in photoshop. Hope you like them. Use the links above to download them.
For the last few years I've had the opportunity to work on creating the season opener video for Purdue Convocations. It's been a good working relationship and everyone has been happy with the past products. The convos dept creates a season opener brochure and provides the Adobe InDesign project for us to pull elements from. The idea is to make the whole feel of the edit fit with the brochure so the look of the piece draws directly from the provided elements they give us.
I'm posting the opening graphics that I created for the whole video. I started this graphic by creating one image that contained every category in one long comp. I originally was going to set the layers to 3D and pan across them with a camera. Once we started to make it, we decided to make it more dynamic by having the camera push through the individual categories to the music. What we came up with is below. I created all the comps and the other graphics designer, JC Trombley, put in the camera motion. I then polished and fleshed out each individual comp and added motion to the elements. I then smoothed out the camera movement and added the convos title on the end. You can see the full comp above.
The Completed Opener:
The whole opener took us about 3 days to complete. I pulled elements from InDesign, edited them in Illustrator and Photoshop and compiled the finished comps in Photoshop. I then pulled them into After Effects and added 3D motion to them all. Above you can see the finished motion version.
In my last post I talked about fun things I've worked on for Young Life so I decided to post a 30 sec. commercial my friend Matt Wallace and I made for a YL event. It's a commercial for an all-area dodge ball tournament that was shown at the various clubs around town leading up to the event. We just thought it would be funny to have some guys training up for the tournament with bad 80's big-hair rock music and cheesy graphics so that's what we made. We shot the whole thing in about 1 hour and edited it that night. Matt did all the vocals and V/O and I edited it and made the graphics. The graphics were all made in after effects and I just used the stock lightening effect which I always found a bit cheesy. Throw in some explosions and in-your-face 3D text and call it a night. Overall the commercial was well received by the kids and the closing "DODGE BALL!" gut-belting lyric that Matt threw in at the end became the de facto rock phrase to yell randomly at clubs the remainder of the year.
