For this years Nuit Blanche I was asked to be a part a project called Words Travel Fast. The idea is to get poets and animators together to make some moving poetry to be screened all night on all the LCD screens in the TTC. Here are my two animations (click on the thumbnail to view):

I got paired up with a really cool guy named Matthew Tierney. We meet for a beer and he gave me his latest book, The Hayflick Limit, from which I chose two poems for the project.

This is just a quick post about the breakdown page for my demo reel. I’ve split up the sections of the reel and done explanations for each, as well as posting plenty of production stills, sketches, screen caps, test renders and videos. I really enjoy reading about other people’s projects, seeing how they went about solving the problems, maybe somebody out there will find this interesting.  I think sharing secrets and keeping an open dialogue is vital to the growth of an artistic community, so feel free to leave a comment if you have any questions.

BACK AT IT

A few months ago my friend Dan Cohen asked me to do some illustration work for his band Stop Drop (formerly Stop Drop N Skank*). I’ve been out of the game for a while, but it was nice to be drawing again. It was also a reminder to why I moved away from illustration in the first place. Regardless it was really fun, and I’m quite happy with the result. What they wanted was a boat lost at sea about to be overtaken by a huge wave. This was to be the album artwork for their new LP “A Wake//At Sea”. Dan and I met for lunch and we hammered out the details. Then I got to drawing and here’s what I came up with.

More on the project I’m doing with Mike Ellis, which now has a more permanent title, Aiming at Mountains, Shooting at Stars. Next up is the owl character named Nikolai.  I was over at Mike’s last night and we started hashing out the concept, it took about 4 hours to get to this point.

This year I’ll be doing a series of shorts with Mike based on characters he’s come up with. This is the first prototype of a character tentatively called KIDHEAD. Hopefully we’ll come up with something more appropriate when the body is designed. I’m really stoked to be working with mike, should be a lot of fun.

So here’s where we’re at: