Monsters vs Aliens Opens Today!!

I'm so excited my first show with DreamWorks opens today! MvA was so much fun to work on. So go check it out, and don't forget to grab a bag of pop-corn, your 3D glasses, and prepare to laugh your pants off!

(Picture above: The first shot I did on MvA...woo hoo!)

Horton's out on DVD!!

Horton is finally out on DVD and I have my shots to show you. Horton was amazing to work on, even though I was only there two months I learned tons. So here ya go, my shots from Horton Hears a Who!

Horton_Reel

Blocking Test - When we first started at Blue Sky they had us do a blocking test with the mayor to help us ramp onto the show. It was a lot of fun!

So as promised below here is the explanation for our move to California. I've accepted a position at DreamWorks Animation! I've been with DW now for 6 months and I absolutely love it here. I'm surrounded by extremely talented and generous animators. Not only that but a ton of my favorite animators from AM work here as well! DW is such a great studio to be apart of and I love getting up every morning to go there...the free breakfast may have something to do with that..haha. I'll definitely be posting more about my experiences here at DreamWorks.

So some of you know and some of you may not know but after my last post in January I started freelancing for ReelFX Creative Studios. This was a fantastic gig. I got to work from home on some really cool commercials featuring DreamWorks' Kung Fu Panda. My supervisor there was Dave Vallone, some of you may know him from Animation Mentor. Dave was a fantastic sup and made the difficult task of, organizing notes from several different outside sources and then delivering them simply and clearly to a team of outside animators, run amazingly smooth. I don't know how he did it. So here are the commercials I worked on for ReelFX:(You can click on the image to see the video)


The first project I did with ReelFx was for the 2008 Academy Awards. Barry Bee from Bee Movie was announcing the winner for Best Animated short. I've posted the entire segment here. The parts that I animated are(sorry I'll try to cut it up later):
The shot were Barry introduces his "Earlier work"
"And the Oscar goes too..." This was a lot of fun because we didn't know the winner so I had to hide his mouth behind the card and make a loop that could be for any one of the names.
I also did the little clap cycle at the end. The Academy was not sure how long they would need to see him clapping.


The next ad I did was for Hubba Bubba. This was great because not only was this my first chance to animate Po but Aardman Animation was responsible for the stop motion meerkat in the foreground. I was given reference of Jason Reisig's shots of Po punching the dummy as to the feel that they wanted. I love those shots! I'm really happy with the hit that Po takes as it knocks him off screen. I animated Po coming on screen in the beginning up until he knocks himself off. The rest was done by another animator at ReelFX.


This ad is for Samsung. It only aired in Korea I believe and it was part of a series of Olympic themed KFP ads to air around the 2008 Olympics. My part starts about half way in. It's the high shot looking down at Po lifting the weights and I animated the rest of the ad to the end except for a cut in shot of Po's ripped pants.




This ad was for Hewlet-Packard. It is part of their "Hands" ad campaign. This shot went through a lot of changes but in the end I think it looks great and I had a lot of fun working on it. My shot is from the beginning to Po flipping the pages in the book. And by the way a lot of that cloth animation in the beginning was done by hand....ha!

Ok so it's almost been a year since my last post.....wow so much has happened since then. I finally have some new stuff to post and share. I started this blog to help share what I've been up to with friends and family, and its about time I put something up. Being an animator I end up going through periods of lots of work and then some with a lot less. I'm glad to say since my last post I've been very busy, and the family and I made a big move across the country to California! I'll post in more details about that after this post. I just wanted to give a brief update before the flood of new stuff.

Here's wishing you an amazingly interesting New Year!!!

New Horton Trailer!!!

Hey the new Horton Trailer is up. Check it out and let me know what you think. I think it came out really cool, this one has a more zany, fun feel. Its weird watch it knowing the cuts and noticing the dialog replacements.

http://www.apple.com/trailers/fox/hortonhearsawho/

My New Laptop!!

Hey I finally got my new laptop....thats what I'm blogging on right now! I bought a HP dv9500t I priced it out and customized it to my liking and its kicking ass so far. I have Maya running on it and it runs great. I even got XP running on it instead of Vista. Now I'm all ready to start AM back in January....I'm so excited about that. I can't wait to be back and start my short film. I'll be chronicling that on my blog. I've worked on a short that made it into SIGGRAPH in 2001, but this will be the first time I'm doing my own....thats really exciting and inspirational to me.

Holy Updates Batman!!
Woooo! I had some time to blog. I told you I'd get better at this. I plan on forcing myself to make at least one entry a week from now on.

IBL for Animators is up!!

I've received several request to put my "IBL for Animators" lighting tutorial, that I originally posted on the AM forum,up on my website. For those of you unfamiliar with this tutorial, its explains how to get some nice lighting results with little effort using Mental Ray for maya and Image Based Lighting(IBL). You'll find the link in the links section on the sidebar of the blog.

Enjoy!
-Stephen

Horton Hears a Who!

I wanted to blog a little about my experience at Blue Sky. Blue Sky was a freaking blast!! It was a lot of hard work and long hours, but it was worth it. I had a really great time working there. I got to work with two of my Mentors; Pete Paquette, and Mike Walling, you guys Rock. I also got to meet face to face with a ton of AM students that I've seen there work and knew their name but never met. Also as I've mentioned in my Pixar post, I got to work with Curran and Tun again as well.

Horton has so much eye candy in it....its so tasty. The animation we were seeing on a daily basis blew our minds. Blue Sky has an all star team of animators that were just bringing it every day. For me the best part was the style of animation. I've never done that exaggerated or that broad before and being exposed to it everyday just gets you hooked. I love Chuck Jones, his cleaver direction gave us some of the best animated shorts of all time. I feel that Horton has a lot of that in its animation. To really see what I'm talking about your just going to half to wait until March 14 cough Plug cough.

I think the one of the coolest things that happened on that project was on my last day. We were doing rounds and I had the Directors, Jimmy Hayward and Steve Martino at my desk and I said to them..."Thank you so much for letting me work on your movie." and Steve looks at me and says "OUR movie" I said "thats right, our movie!" That really made me feel good! Even though I was a temp and only there for two months they really considered us part of the team...and you really felt that there. I'm very proud to be apart of Horton...heck I'm even sporting my Horton T-shirt as I'm blogging this. So go see Horton on March 14 and Blue Sky kicks Ass!......."Good Stuff!"

Pixar Wrap-Up.....

Ok so now that I have some time off I can finally update this thing. I got a bunch of my pictures together from my internship and put them up. You can check them out here. They are a few pics from around the facility and from the Autorama. I also added a few of my assignments to my demo reel. I'll compress the rest and put them up soon. I got to intern with 3 of the best animators I've ever met; Curran Giddens, Veerapatra Jinanavin, and Blake Johnson. These guys are awesome, you may have seen their work before, if not check'm out. To prove that it is a small industry, all four of us said our goodbyes not knowing when we would see each other again. Well 3 weeks later, Curran, Tun(Veerapatra) and I were waiting together in the lobby of Blue Sky to start our first day. Blake probably would have been there as well but he went back to school. It was awesome getting to work with them again!

While at Pixar we got to spend a lot of time with the story department. All three of my roommates were in story. These guys were so cool and amazingly talented; Jeremy Spears, Alex Hirsch, and Eric Fountain. I can't wait to see them again. Speaking of super cool and talented friends, While I was out there I got to see a really good buddy of mine, the guy that introduced me to Animation Mentor, Mike Safianoff. He lives in Emeryville. Even though I didn't get to see him that much it was still a lot of fun...we hadn't hung out since we were both living in Orlando. I also got to see another buddy of mine that I hadn't seen since I went to the Art Institute, Scott Trosclair. He's an extremely talented lighter....you may have seen his work before, he's been know to light some assignments for us AM'rs. And Speaking of AM'rs I got to meet the leader of the pack...that's right...I got to have lunch with Bobby Beck!!! Bobby is so great. It was really great to thank you in person for starting a life changing school!

While at Pixar I learned so much, I can't thank them enough for having the intern program. They made us all feel so welcome and taught us soooo much.....no kidding, I have a notebook that I brought with me...by the end I was squeezing in lines in corners, anywhere I could find some space to write. I'd like to give some special thanks to the People that I really spent a lot of time with....Andrew Gordon and Travis Hathaway you guys are awesome, Victor Navone, You were such a great mentor, your guidance really took my work to another level, Michal Makarewicz, super mentor extraordinair, Adrian Molina and Austin Madison, thanks for teaching me Risk, Carlos Baena, Doug Dooley, Dave Mullins, Pete Sohn, Mark Andrews, and Matt Majers....you all are so generous, I really can't thank you enough! And everyone else in the animation department, you were all so generous with your time and advice! So that about wraps it up without writing an entire book. It was the hardest and most rewarding experience I've had in animation. Some stand out moments would have to be: Meeting John Lasseter and getting to ask him questions, having our Ratatouille dialog assignment critiqued by the sups, Mark Walsh and Dylan Brown, and watching WALL-E come together and seeing dailies with Andrew Stanton.

Enjoy the pics!

-Stephen

Bad Blogger

Ok so I've been a bad Blogger. I'm going to try and make up for that. So this is just a quick update and I'll be posting some real content in the next few weeks. The short of it is I finished up with Pixar, it was freaking awesome. I met so many amazing people. I updated the link to my reel so you can see some of my stuff from the internship. Ok, so right after Pixar I was picked up at Blue Sky to work on Horton Hears a Who! Horton is going to be sweet, I can't wait till it comes out. Again I had an amazing time and met so many awesome animators. So thats the short. I'm taking some time off for the Holidays and before I start mentor again in January. So that gives me plenty of time to really update this thing and be a better blogger...maybe that will be my New Years resolution. So more content to come....pics...stories....ect.

Animation Mentor BBQ

I went to the AM BBQ today and it was awesome. I had a really great time. Mike B and Dan drove up from LA and Logan picked me up and we drove over from Emeryville. It was great to finally meet some of my AM classmates and our wonderful founders. I'm new to the area so this was my first visit to San Francisco....wow...and how cool was it to have the Golden Gate bridge as the back drop to the bbq. So here are some pics from the day...