Did a shot for Oliver Stone's new movie Snowden at work this week.  It is definitely reel material.  I just need to find out the protocol for using it in a reel since it is only rotoscope work.  Do I wait for the composited shot to be done or do I just show it on a solid background? I don't know yet.  But I am happy with it and everybody else was too.

Here is Mat the penguin.  The second part of my project.  it is not as successful as Joanna the panda I think it's safe to say.  The problem was I did not shoot nearly enough footage.  Having a back of the head shot would have improved things immensely.  Also I was unable to rotopaint out the beak because tracks only work when the tracking object stays in frame the entire time, as far as I know.  In conclusion this project taught me I have more learning to do.

My friend Joanna as a red panda.  Part of my final project for the Vfx class at Daemen.

I learned much from this project.  Such as the limits of what each node can do and the order you must put certain nodes in to make them work.  It is a little unfortunate that the footage of Joanna is significantly better quality than that of the red panda, however i am still happy with the result.

A composite i did for class of a robot and an explosion.  Most of the rubble piles where assets I created.  The swooping plane is also an asset I created and is in my opinion the best part of the scene.  

Annoyingly, youtube cuts off the first second of the video so the fighter jet gets cut off which is no bueno because that is my favorite part.

Her is the what the script tree looks like

I am teaching animation basics to high school students.  Here are some of the examples I have used and examples I plan on using.

The first example is a really really crudely done ball bounce.  Before I made the ball bounce they had zero ability to visualize what I was talking about.

The next thing I taught them was the leaf test AKA the feather test.  Here it is, also fairly crude.

Here is a more fun (hopefully) project to teach the kids.  I want them to do a morph between 2 objects.  In my case I did a whale to a boat.  But since it is a very basic class I will instead likely have them morph a circle into a square or a star into a circle, just morphing shapes to start.  This assignment is also good because we have only 5 computers for 12 kids so I put them in groups of 2 and have them take turns drawing the frames.

This is the walk cycle I will show them, I doubt they will get this far but if they do HOORAY!