My Office is so cool it's in WIRED!!

Seriously! Click here to read the WIRED photo-essay all about Three Rings' awesome office. It was even picked up by boingboing! Hooray!

I love working here. (Who wouldn't?!) Here's a few pics, there are lots more in the WIRED article....




All this hard work was done by the amazing pair from Because We Can, based in Oakland.

Planet Heroes!

As some of you may know, my previous job was at Fisher-Price, working on a direct-to-DVD animated show called "Planet Heroes." It was a 9 month project and we produced a 27 minute episode that will be packaged with a new line of toys coming out this fall. (Or summer? I'm really not sure.) It centers on a set of heroes culled from each planet of our solar system. And half-way through production Pluto was deemed no longer a planet! That was fun. (We had to keep him in, we just added jokes about how he was tiny and a dwarf planet...let's see how many short people get mad about that.) I was a designer, modeler, texture painter, lighter, animator, and compositor on this. The only things I never touched were rigging and sound. And now there's is a great website for the product that you can access here. On the site you can watch a trailer for the episode and download the theme song MP3 and a comic book and coloring book pages, etc. You can even order a copy of the DVD for free! Here's a screencap from the site:

I painted that matte painting of the city in the clouds. Hopefully once the DVD's been out for a while I can post some of my concept art for it and no one will mind. Also, I searched YouTube for an embeddable trailer but all I found was a video some mother had made of her kid's reactions to the Planet Heroes episode. (I would post it here but it was really boring.) They were two young boys and one of them liked "the skateboard race" and the character of Ace. (The hero from Earth.) And the other liked "the hot one" which would be Dazzle, from Venus. (She is not bad looking, but I assume he meant her fire-powers.)

Illustration Friday: Your Paradise

I was looking around for something old that might apply to this week's topic when I was suddenly hit with inspiration. I like books and I like quiet...so my paradise would be reading books in space. (Also, I liked being 5 years old?)

Also, if you are just stopping through Illustration Friday, take a look around my blog! If you're feeling crazy you might even add it to your RSS reader! I have some neat projects coming up that I'll be posting so come back soon.

Figure Drawing 2

Forced myself to go to figure drawing again this week. I wish I could find a group of animators who do this sort of thing. I might just have to start one...except I have no space for it. I wonder if Three Rings would go for a nude model in the office...






ALSO: I have lots of things I am thinking about doing with the blog here...like scans from a different vintage kid's book each week, fun links and stuff...but I'm not really sure it's worth it. When I post stuff to Illustration Friday it seems to get lots of comments, but otherwise I don't know if anyone's actually reading this blog. In which case I'm just wasting my...fingers? (I was going to say breath, but not really appropriate.) If anyone out there has an opinion, let me know.

My Thesis: Love at First Roach

Well it only took a year, but I finally posted my thesis on Youtube. "Love at First Roach" is the result of over 9 months of grueling work. My advisor on the project was Disney vet Nancy Beiman, and I have to say I learned an incredible amount working with her. Rigging was done by Greg Smith, who now works at Laika. The original idea for this film was very different, but I do like how it turned out. I needed about a year to distance myself from it, and now I can watch it without cringing so much, haha. I haven't spent too much time on sending it out to festivals, though I probably should. It did screen at Tony White's "2D or Not 2D
Festival in Washington state. Let me know what you think in the comments!

Crazy Rollerskaters

So I'm wandering around Golden Gate Park today with my newfound friend Michelle, and we hear some loud music and see people dancing. Turns out they weren't dancing, they were rollerskating! There was a whole bunch of em. Apparently Sunday is "no car day" in the park and they can take over the road and blast their music and go at it. Some of them were pretty good too. ALL of them were characters. (Especially fuzzy boots-skates guy and big hair man.)

Figure Drawing

I finally checked out an open figure drawing place in San Francisco. It was a small studio and we had a great model. A lot of other people, mostly pretty friendly. This is the first figure drawing I've done for many months. I am still looking for a group that focuses on gesture drawing (probably made up of other animators) and possible uses costumes as well. Any other Bay Area people know of such a thing? Or would like to start one up?