Thursday, May 28, 2009

to be a star, you gotta have Lips...


or hold the Xbox 360 microphone about three inches away from the speakers

Sunday, May 17, 2009

Summer starts

I’ve been home for almost a week now and this officially marks my halfway point in the hurricane of attending Pratt Institute. I’m not even kidding when I say that I still sign papers with 2007, I have no idea how the past two years were able to go by so fast. I’ve also made the president’s list again for the second time in a row which is both incredibly exciting and a great middle finger to all the strictness and overdramatic nature foundation year.

I’ve loved the past two years and I’ve got to meet the likes of Don Hertzfeldt, PES, Frank Warren from PostSecret and some coked out animator that recently left Dreamworks after being a character designer for Monsters vs. Aliens and storyboard artist for the Nightmare scene in Shrek the Third, though he made a pretty savage short film at CalArts called Son of Satan which was ridiculously awesome. I also got a chance to check out the late days of Astroland at Coney Island and I’ve been to just about every museum in New York that’s worth writing about with the notable exceptions being the Guggenheim and Cloisters.

My summer job at Save the Children has been cut due to the entire economic crisis thing. I’m not really as bummed out about it as a should be, I look at it more as a chance for me to catch up on a lot of Maya tutorials so I can be completely comfortable by the time next year comes around and I’ll have to spend a year and a half on one two minute-ish short film.

I was finally able to visit the new Kinokuniya location in New York City last week as well as the other Japanese book store Book Off. The place totally lived up to the hype, especially in all the cute (but INCREDIBLY OVERPRICED) Studio Ghibli merchandise they had on their bottom floor. I should have taken notes on titles that they had in their horror section for DVDs, they had a lot of horribly awesome looking movies there such as Attack Girls' Swim Team Versus the Undead; which looks like a fantastic thing to look for if it ever shows up on Veoh or something. Though I can’t say I didn’t have an urge to go to the Nintendo World Store immediately after like I did when it was in Rockefeller Center.

That day I also checked out the new Star Trek movie. If you’ve been following my Twitter feed you could probably tell I liked it quite a bit. Looking back on it I wished it had more of a complete plot but at the time I was too captivated by the action scenes, humor and the entire fact that they got Zachary ‘Sylar’ Quinto to play Spock to even notice. The audience I saw it with in Times Square was quite spirited and they did a good job letting me know of every single inside joke that I missed out on in the movie. Apparently there was an R2D2 hidden as a background prop in one scene.

Currently I’m playing a lot of Scene It? Box Office Smash on Xbox Live for both the easy achievements and the chance for me to show off how much of movie buff I am. I’ve also started to catch up on some games I never really had to chance to play when I was up at Pratt, mainly Kameo with a couple of others thrown in for good measure. I started to work on a web comic with April, we have a few really good ideas for it and I’ll let you guys know when we get our first issue up. It involves a whale that solves mysteries in a world that is over ran with literature stereotypes. Its based on a project my friend April started and we’re going to release it in more of a full fledged comic form versus the comic strip thing in most webcomics.

Now, I just need to find a good pair of headphones…

Thursday, May 7, 2009

Storyboarding: Cloverfeld



ah yes, as long as I'm getting around to posting my finals, here is my storyboarding project; Cloverfeld. I'm actually fairly satisfied with how this turned out. If I had more time I would have probably gotten more sound clips for Will Smith and tightened up the timing and a few more of the drawings in the animatic. While its true I have posted some of this already here a couple of months ago, I did a fair amount of tweaking and working from the ground up since then. Check it out...

and yes, for the record, he only wanted at least 25% of the boards colored


Tuesday, May 5, 2009

have a zombie to tide you over...

I know its been a long time between posts, but I have rigs and semi-satirical zombie movies to work on. Have this to tide you over before I get back into the full swing...

Zombie-2-Pass from Chris Cookson on Vimeo.

From the critically acclaimed producer of Dragonball Zebra Slash Brink 2 comes a coming-of-age story about a neurotic teenager who only just found out he was a zombie...one that likes scrambled eggs and walks around in clown make-up that is...