Everything has to start somewhere, whether it's a skyscraper, a meal, or even a human being. Creation doesn't just happen — it's an iterative process. Buildings start with a blueprint, meals begin with a recipe, and I don't think I need to explain where babies come from. The point is, there is a process to everything, and that includes videos.
While Stacy was busy painting the canvases with acrylic gel, I was talking with Ken Plume about the direction for the animation. The next hurdles would be to create storyboards and an animatic to detail the entire animated sequence, and live action bits in between.
The paintings arrived in an over-sized ~60" box a few days after placing our order with Canvas On Demand (opted for rush delivery). Each was neatly wrapped individually and stuck to each other and their box via thick plastic bands. After carefully unpacking the paintings and preserving the packing materials (they'd have to leave in this same box), we went about the business of taking reference photographs for the set dresser, and figuring out how we were going to texture these things.
For take two, I decided that photos were not the answer and I was going to have to actually paint this thing. Working from the notes that the piece needed to be more abstract, I downloaded an oil brush and palette knife brush set for Photoshop, and created the following ghostly images using the sketch as a reference. While getting closer to our final goal, these pieces were still not QUITE there.
In September of 2013 during a period of working on tons of corporate-style videos and a quirky animation starring a blowfish and DNA primers, I received an email from SModCo inc.’s Ken Plume, asking if I would be interested in animating a painting of the Halifax explosion of 1917 for Kevin Smith’s latest film, Tusk.
I'm happy to report that the 48 Hour Film Project I worked on with AVA Productions and Lost Weekend Productions, just landed best graphics in the Baltimore 48 Hour Film Project.
My latest animation for DNS Made Easy which details the process that happens every time you enter a domain name into your browser (unless the IP address is cached, but you know what I mean). The animation currently resides here, and was designed to teach not only technical people the ins and outs of a DNS lookup, but the general public as well.
