Watermark is a made up stock footage company created as an assignment by The Panics during the AKV master's program SOHO semester.
The assignment was to create a 30 second ad using at least 10 images/video clips in a unique and surprising way.
I was creative director and an animator in this project alongside animator Willem van den Boemen.
Our first pitch with this project was to recreate famous film scenes with the stock footage and drawn Memphis style elements. This idea was not quite the direction Watermark wanted so we came back with the idea of instead historical events.
As part of my expansion into digital cutout animation, I wanted to experiment with characters. I also have been delving into how to make my animations more personal. I wanted to make something less of a visual representation of a thought and more directly about me.
In this case, it's a reflection of how my favorite suit makes me look like a Vegas magician - my dream job.
As a personal project I painted an 80 page notebook in gouache focusing on shapes in 5 colors in 2015.
The drawings and color palette were inspired by 1800-1900 astronomical illustrations, Constructivism and Bauhaus.
The animation of this notebook was done in 2017 as part of an exploration of shape layers and transition animations in After Effects and Cinema 4d.
Fishsticks was my Senior Film at Savannah College of Art and Design. It is a stop-motion film about a fish biking home in Savannah to enjoy the last carton of green tea ice cream from the grocery store.
I created foam armature puppets that originally were covered in red latex paint, tracking pins for eyes and had a posable mouth. However, it looked very unappealing, so I covered the puppet in red felt wool and made clay mouths that could pin into the body.
The puppet only needed position securing through the bottom onto the bike, so there were no feet ties.
I had also originally made the cars out of plastic through silicone molds. However, silicone molds are not my strong suit and they came out poorly. My solution was to layer foamcore and carve out a car shape with bottle caps for wheels.
