Animation Work
"Not Straight"
This is my most recent animation project, a rough animation I made as a part of my capstone. It's a story I like to tell friends about how I was trying to figure out myself in high school, particularly my sexuality, and in thinking back even further on my childhood, realizing I had some moments that suddenly make a lot more sense now.
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The topic of my orientation is one that I don't often know how to talk about with other people, but I find this anecdote funny enough that I thought it would be a good subject for an animation.
"Hunter" Animated Short
This was my final project for my stop-motion class. I used the deer-centaur puppet from the previous motion test homework assignment, and painted and built the set and props myself.
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The fish was actually several cutouts of different shapes that I swapped out depending on which direction it was swimming. Similarly, when the spear stabs into the water, I had several other replacement spears cut off at different points so the movement of the spear in and out of the "water" looked more realistic. The fish being pulled out of the water was actually clay that I molded around the different spears.
"Hunter" Motion Test
This project was a homework assignment for my stop-motion class I took in 2018, where we had to build a puppet and animate it from a variety of camera angles. I wanted to give the sense that the creature was sort of curiously inspecting the camera. I already wanted to use the puppet again for the final project in this class (which you can watch directly above), so I treated this assignment as a motion test, to get a sense of how this puppet could move like a living, breathing animal.
When it came to the design of the puppet itself, I knew I wanted it to be a bizarre alien deer-centaur creature, because I wanted to challenge myself by animating a creature with more than four limbs. The skeleton was made out of wire and plumber's epoxy, wrapped in spongy sports tape, then painted with latex that I mixed with green paint. The antlers and hooves were made from air-dry clay, then painted and attached to the final puppet.
"A Kid and a Dog"
This project was for a 3D sculpture-based class I took in 2017 that combined soldering metal, woodworking, and welding.
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I made the puppets of the human and the dog out of copper rods and wire, and soldered the pieces together, then covered them in clay. The "robot" I made by welding several metal plates together, and the set pieces that the human navigates around are rough wood carvings.
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Although this project was my first time animating stop-motion and there are a lot of things I would change if I did it again, I'm still proud of how this work turned out.
Various Shorter Works
