New Beginnings…

Cheers to new beginnings! Hello Rokkan. 🙂

Beginning of Summer Update

Just some random thoughts and happenings…

1) I was featured on ReelRoulette’s Top 20 reels. I came in at #7. Nick Campbell continues to do wonderful things for the design and mograph community. Loving it.

2) Twitter has easily become my #1 visited website each and every morning. It gives me behind the scenes, fascinating news, advice and inside scoop on people/companies I actually care about. I have some pretty interesting people following me as well (@stinkdigital, @Attik_US, @nailguntv, @motionographer, @juxtinteractive, @razorfish, @b_reel, @struckaxiom, @click3X, @snowboardermag, @driftlab…) to name a few. 🙂 Go follow them!

3) Wrapping up some freelance projects and hopefully jumping back on a project I started with ToyNinja a couple weeks ago. Great brand and clothing.

4) I got a dope iPhone case from Nailgun, a motion studio in NYC. http://twitpic.com/1nau3e

5) Go check out my friend’s website: http://www.writingthepine.com for some entertaining sports insights.

6) Did a small interview with a student from the Art Institute of Fort Lauderdale. I actually learned a bit more about myself in the process of answering his questions. Will share that on another post.

7) I’m making a big move next week and really excited. More on that later… 🙂

Reel Critique by GSG!

Nick Campbell who is a motion designer at Digital Kitchen Chicago has a wonderful blog which has become a weekly bookmarked visit for me. I spoke once before about his 5 second projects and how it’s a great way to play with an open brief to experiment and learn. His new thing is reel critiques. Basically you can send him a link to your reel and he’ll do a real time critique of it. I was 1 of the 3 reels chosen for his 2nd episode. He had some nice words to say about my reel which is very encouraging and offered some insight into how I could improve it. Thanks Nick! And thanks to everyone else who’s left comments, emails, advice and everything else.

Watch the critique here.

New Fall 2009 Demo Reel

My new demo reel is up…check it out here.

New site update

I’m a bit late to post this but a couple weeks ago, I decided to change my portfolio website: thewiimix.com. I grew a bit tired of it’s layout and presentation. Although my flash site was created in such a way that following simple XML and SWF naming conventions would change the contents of the site, I wanted to go down an even more efficient route. I’ve always been a fan of cargo collective and indexhibit and decided to give the latter I try. I love the simplicity and the power of the CMS and it’s actually quite refreshing to go back to an HTML/CSS website. I have some new work to post soon as well as a new reel so keep your eyes out for that.

In other big news, I’m upgrading my HD camera. Although I seriously considered the 5D Mark II and the much-anticipated 7D, I fell in love with the Lumix GH1. DSLR cinematography is the new big thing – didn’t you know? 🙂 Although Panasonic has been slow to release it, I should be getting mine in 2 weeks. I’ve already jotted down numerous ideas for short movies and what I’ll do for next year’s snowboarding documentary. Going to take my amateur shoots to a whole new level. Can’t wait!

Greed – Experimental Short

Over the past month and a half, I’ve been working on an abstract, experimental short focusing on the theme of “Greed”.  During brainstorm sessions and explorations, I came across a quote by Albert Einstein. “The stakes are immense, the task colossal, the time is short. But we may hope – we must hope – that man’s own creation, man’s own genius, will not destroy him.” That pretty much summed up exactly what I wanted to portray – Man’s greed as a driving force for progression, yet destruction as well. Are we destroying what truly matters for selfish growth and advancement? Do we as people naturally yearn and desire for more? There seems to be a very thin line between greed and ambition.

These are some of the questions and ideas I had floating around my head when I began creating my concept. I wanted to create something abstract that reinforced this theme without being completely obvious. I hope I did leave some room for interpretation. I am also intrigued with the idea of trying this for all 7 deadly sins. Here’s to more free time!

View the video here: http://vimeo.com/5931699

WIP Short

Much to do 🙂 8-10 week deadline sounds reasonable at this pace..

Cinema 4D practice

Some quick animations I put together using dynamics, mograph, etc. Multi-pass renders rock 🙂

Logo bounce animation

Lebron James inspired animation

Last Exit Apps

According to Compass Intelligence, a global market research & consulting firm, US mobile application sales will reach 9 billion by 2011. It seems almost every major brand has a mobile application to accompany their online identity.

With that said, we have some very interesting applications currently lined up in our project pipeline. Our first app should hit iTunes very soon. Stay tuned!

May update

1) Went to Bermuda in early April. Captured some great footage and had an awesome time. Still doesn’t compare to Hawaii though..

2) Attended the Industry Spotlight VII hosted by Siggraph NYC at FIT. Seemed like the usual talks from all the nyc big shots. Nathan Love however were hilarious! They showed a studio project they were working on about some horror animation movie. It was amazing and grossly entertaining. Curious Pictures are also working on a 3D short.

3) Had to say goodbye to a wonderful coworker/friend and what better way to do that than drunk bowling! You will be missed..

4) I used to hate indexhibit sites. They seemed to all look the same and lacked any sort of personality. After installing it and messing around with the CSS file, it’s hard NOT to love this little tool. It’s an easy, efficient way to create a portfolio site. I work in Flash all the time but sometimes, it’s just not the right tool to use for a website. Sure, it’s flashier (no pun intended) and more engaging, but when I have to wait 3 minutes for a site to load, that’s 2 minutes too long of wasted time. I never thought I’d say this but I may cross over to the HTML side…

5) Wrapping up (finally) some big projects at work which I hope to include in my portfolio soon. And of course, more new and ongoing personal projects to come as well…