Gesture drawings of travelers at the Newark airport food court as I wait for my flight to Seattle. An evangelist saw me sketching and decided to add his own drawing to my sketchbook (2nd image, left side).
EWR
Save the Date!
My fiance and I just started wedding planning. We decided to go with hand-drawn Save-the-Date postcards. Here’s the result (without the text)!
Sketchblog!
I decided to start a Tumblr page for posting my quick sketches and drawings. It’s meant for practice and personal improvement so I’d like to keep it separate from my portfolio. Check it out at your own peril. 😉
Cousin Violet
With the advent of my new life on the West Coast, I decided it’s time to get back into sketching. My focus is to get the likeness of a person down. This was definitely a challenge.
Can’t wait ‘til Season 3!!
Changes
Lots have happened over the months since Skyrim’s release. Our game has garnered over 100 Game of the Year awards from various critics, which is staggering. But the bigger news for me, is that I left Bethesda to be with my fiance on the West Coast. I’m almost done with my first week at Sucker Punch! I’m still adjusting to life in Washington, but once I’m settled, expect some *actual* art updates.
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim shipped!
The game I’ve been working on over the past 2 years, TESV: Skyrim, shipped this past Friday. I’m overwhelmed from all the positive reception the game’s getting. Working on such an amazing project with the extremely talented people at Bethesda Game Studios was both a humbling and memorable experience. I’m so proud of all the hard work we’ve accomplished and consider myself lucky to be part of such a momentous project.
Once we get approval from management (currently, it’s not allowed), I’ll post up some of the animations I worked on for Skyrim. Until then, hope you enjoy the game!
AM: FINISHED!!!!!!
As of last month, I officially completed Animation Mentor! I’ll be traveling to San Francisco this weekend to attend the AM Graduation ceremony, and that’s that! To celebrate, I decided to redo my website layout. The home page contains my latest animation, which are my shots from AM. I’ll probably post another reel with my game work once Skyrim ships.
And speaking of Skyrim: last month was an exciting one for our studio. We had a fantastic show at E3 (so I hear from my co-workers who went), and our game garnered top awards at E3: “Best Console Game” and “Best Role-playing Game”! Here is some footage of our game demo from the show:
AM: Class 5 (the remaining .75) + Skyrim!
It’s been insanely busy both at work and at school. My second to last term at AM finished today, and we have this weekend to recharge before beginning anew on Monday. Two days of break? I’ll take it!
Another (scary) thing, this upcoming term marks my final term at AM, Class 6: Polishing and Portfolio.
Here’s my progress reel, which is a collection of all the animations I’ve done during my time at AM. Class 6 focuses solely on cleaning up and polishing your AM assignments. I need a LOT of polish, so I’m looking forward to it. I’m posting this so I can measure my progress next term and just to compile everything in one spot:
On the work front (though old news), my studio released our first gameplay trailer:
I’m incredibly excited about this project. I can’t wait ’til we get to show more of it. 11/11/11!
AM: Classes 4 and 5(.25)
This past December, I finished Class 4, Intro to Acting (or as my mentor would prefer, “Intro to Character”) and am already 4 weeks into Class 5, Advanced Acting. Acting is a new beast to me. Needless to say, I am learning TONS.
For Class 4, I had Steve Cunningham, Dreamworks animator extraordinaire, as my mentor. He taught me so much about developing a character for my acting shots, and how “action reveals character” (his favorite motto). The class was eye opening and changed the way I approach my shots. For our 1st assignment in that class, we had to do a pantomime shot. For the 2nd assignment we had to choose a 10 second (max.) single person dialogue and animate to it. We only had to animate the body; we do the facial animation in Class 5.
Bonus points if you can guess where it’s from:
My Class 5 mentor is Wayne Gilbert, of “Simplified Drawing for Planning Animation” fame. I highly recommend the book if you want good pointers for thumbnailing. He’s been a great mentor so far, extremely helpful in helping me with my facial animation for my Class 4 dialogue shot:
I’m not too keen of my work (particularly the pantomime) from Class 4. I feel like these were my “growing pains” as I tried to understand the concepts Steve taught us. It started coming together during the dialogue shot and during the first quarter of Class 5 as I wrap the shot up, but I still have ways to go when it comes to grasping character motivation. Reading “A Practical Handbook for The Actor” helped open my mind a bit on how to approach my shots. There’s definitely a long road ahead for me, but that’s what excites me most: the fact there’s still more to learn and more to improve upon.
We start our last AM assignment, a 2 person dialogue shot, this week. After that, we move onto our final class, Polishing and Portfolio. I can’t believe there’s only 5 more months to go!
The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim announcement trailer
Long time, no post! It’s been insanely busy with both work and Animation Mentor. I finished Class 4, and wow, I learned TONS. Class really kicked my butt but in a good way. 😉
Anyway, the project I’ve been working on at work was announced a couple weeks ago. I’m incredibly excited and honored to be a part of it! Below is our announcement trailer: