New License

I went in for a new license today and someone said that they thought the animating was really getting to me, I don't know why?



Okay so I made this! It is my computer generated 3 dimensional anime self. I had the most fun creating the background!

Hershey contest update: I went to the website last night and it appears as though they had selected their five and my animation wasn't there. No sweat, I'm on to the next thing already! I actually entered it last minute anyways, so it was an honor to be in the top ten.

Hope

This image is called Hope and in it's symbolism represents my own hope that we as a society continue to learn and grow. Click here to read a lot more about the symbols in this image and to view the high resolution version.
On a side note, a while back I entered the Hershey's Take Five Taste and Believe Film contest and they sent me an email stating that I am one of the top ten! The next step will be to see if I make it to the top five, from there they pick the winner. Keep your fingers crossed for me, I'll let you know what happens!

Zenith

Here is another fractal animation for you. This one demonstrates the infinite nature of the fractal by zooming into one base Mandelbrot. Click here to go to the webpage.
By the way my last fractal animation Odyssey received a response from Benoit Mandelbrot himself, he expressed regret that it hadn't been released early enough to have possibly been shown in an exhibit currently going on in Madrid for which he was going to attend. It was very exciting to hear from him since without his mathematical calculations my fractals would not exist.

Odyssey

I have been seeing fractals for days, in my eyes, in my sleep and in my heart. I made a seven minute fractal animation that you can click here to read about and download. I am a little crushed that the quality had to be compromised so that it could be small enough to upload, but I hope you enjoy it anyway. I had a fabulous time creating this little Odyssey. Literally, I would get up to dance! G`

Another Neuroticfish!

Yes! I've made two images in two days! So this is my third submission for that Neuroticfish album cover contest. I used a fractal program to generate the main image, I won't go into all of the boring math calculations but it was a lot of fun to see the end results. I then made the fish and fonts with an image editing program and layered them on top of the fractal. You will really want to look at this image on a larger scale to see all the fractal detail, to see much bigger versions of this and all the album covers I made please click here, you will be redirected to a webpage with high resolution links.
You can also see some of my earlier fractal work by visiting here.

Ascension

Another still image for you. The webpage is here. It's really a metaphor of our evolving mind, although in the context of this image could be taken literally too!

One more album cover submission

Here is the second submission that I made today for the Neuroticfish competition, the same one as in the below post. By the way who ever wins gets the artwork on the sleeve and a credit on the inside of the cover. If I don't win, I am thankful for the motivation and I am happy with the end results, I especially like this one. The most difficult aspect of this piece was all those little letters in the silhouette, but I like the concept so it was worth it! It came to me when I was waiting for another version of my silhouette to render for a different concept, I got bored and continued working on this for what I thought would be the backdrop for my initial idea but then this became the final version and I never returned to the previous concept. Sometimes the best ideas happen when you least expect them.

Neuroticfish submission

I'm trying to contain myself from uncontrollable laughter while writing the header of this post, it sounds peculiar I know. I made this image today as a submission for an album cover contest for the band Neuroticfish. See it makes sense!

Gnarls Barkley

Take a look at the Gnarls Barkley video "Crazy", not only is it an interesting and at some point in our lives relatable anthem but the cgi work is fantastic. It uses the mirror effect through out and seemingly effortless blending from frame to frame. The end results leave you in the psychologist couch answering ink blot questions, in spite of that, I am very fond of this piece.
The animation work was done by the Telly award winning BL:ND of Santa Monica California and directed by Robert Hales. I can't tell what programs they are using from the info provided on their website but from the studio pictures I can see a dark image that could resemble one of my programs. Hard to tell, but it does look like they have a very healthy render farm, that would be nice!
You can also see Gnarls Barkley singing "Crazy" at the 2006 MTV music awards by clicking here, be prepared for the future, or is it the past? I love Chewbacca.

Lenticular

Lenticular was a experimental animation to see how many different forms a torus could make without using modifiers but by only changing the parameters while animating. This is the end result. I ran into a strange problem with the quicktime version so if you have any problems viewing it, please let me know. This and all of my animations however do take a while to load. Click here to watch the movie.

I gave an animation talk!

So part of my away time from the blogsphere was not only due to tending to family matters but I also gave my first animation talk to a school of high school age students, it was about an hour long. I had so much fun! They were really excited about animation and asked lots of interesting questions. At the end of my talk I had a table set up with free CD demos of programs and animation magazines, they were all gone in two seconds. Some of the students hung around afterwards to ask questions and look at more of my work. What a wonderful experience. I was a little nervous right before I began but found that it came naturally since I know the content and am passionate about it, I really enjoyed presenting. You know one of the teachers came up to me afterwards and told my mom and I that I am a natural teacher, I didn't expect that. My mom told me that too, but she's biased. I really admire teachers and think that they and scientists/researchers should be the highest paid career tracks, they are our ushers into the future, but that's just my economic opinion.
Here are some photos of my talk and the sweet thank you card that some of the students signed and mailed to me! I will try to modify my power point presentation to make it web ready and upload it so that you can take a look at it some where down the line when I have more time. I had such a good time that I hope to give another talk some time in the future. Click the images to enlarge.