My capstone project, this live action short film follows the story of a painter so overwhelmed with his past, that he struggles to pursue his passions in the present: painting. The end climax, where he finally begins to paint again, pursues my interest in combining stop-motion animation with live action footage: the paint streaks are animated through stop-motion, and then composited in with Adobe After Effects. When filming this scene on set, I made sure that my Cinematographer and Gaffer were aware of the end goal and had them set up additional lights to help sell the illusion of the stop-motion streaks glowing.
A small test snippet of a larger project exploring the mythological character, Medusa. These shots were testing mouth replacement parts, the wire snakes for her hair, articulated eyebrows, and a silicon molded body. This project was originally meant to be a group class project, but the COVID-19 pandemic halted all courses at Columbia, forcing everyone to go online. Nowadays, I work on it as a hobby project.
Another project practicing forced perspective, this was also an exercise in quadrupedal movement. Specifically, I aimed to capture the movements of a lizard: waddle walking, tail providing counter balancing, etc. In this exercise, I constructed main puppet with wire, foam, and epoxy putty. I unfortunately ran out of time to do a full coat of scaly latex, but I'm still very proud that the final puppet was balanced like a true lizard; the tail providing the perfect counter weight to the front body and putting the center of gravity about the knees. One day I want to finish the puppet.
A series of college assignments demonstrating the basics of character movement. Inspired by the black eye he just happened to have, I tried to give my puppet a little bit of an 'attitude’ in how he moved.
I often enjoy animating with a prehistoric flair, and this project was no different. The goal of the assignment was to fool the brain into believing clay inanimate objects were alive. Animated this the old fashioned way: I did not have access to DragonFrame at the time.
