The Station Fire in La Crescenta

I bought a new camera recently and a couple of nice Canon L lenses, so I went out to record the Station Fire last night.

Legend of the Chihuahua

On March 3rd the Disney film Beverly Hills Chihuahua came out, and featured on the DVD was our new animated short, Legend of the Chihuahua. It's a multimedia collage of techniques and styles and was done primarily with Photoshop, Flash and After Effects, including both traditional and digital work. We used computers, scanners, digital cameras, stock photography, hell, even pencils. I say it was ours because we had a very small crew of about a dozen artists working on it.

Phil Pignotti was the Director and he also served as an animation supervisor, storyboard artist, additional bg designer, chief problem solver and the lead creative force behind the project.  I served as Art Director, and I was lucky enough to be given the chance by Phil do quite a few of the backgrounds and much of the After Effects animation and compositing.  My wife Suzannah Szabo was our Animation Producer. She rose to the near-impossible challenge of getting a crazy schedule and a complex project with a dozen busy artists all on the same page so we can get it all together, looking good, on time and on budget, without killing each other. (that last part is the tricky part.......)

Instrumental artists on the crew: Michael D'ambrosio editor and tech wizard. Rafael Hurtado character setup work, bg design and Photoshop Supagenious. Jason Brubaker and Todd Jacobsen on After Effects. Joel Reid, JC Chen, Rob Lilly, Jeff Zikry, Doug Gray and Steven Theis doing Flash animation. Rozalina Tchouchev and Ed Ghertner doing additional background designs. Scott Lowe helping out on the rendering of the final files. Michael Hurwitz, Chris Bonno, Laura Gerow, Peter Michail, Denny Siegel, Jeffrey Plamenig and Joe Whyte all doing voices for either the scratch track or the final short. (If I forgot anybody here, please accept my apologies)

Thanks also go to Sam Hurwitz, Pixel Plantation, and Renegade. This list certainly isn't meant to be an official, all-inclusive list, but being that we were unable to get credited on the end of the short, the talented crew deserves to be mentioned SOMEWHERE.

Thanks to all our crew! All these folks have day jobs at places like Dreamworks, Disney, Film Roman, Cartoon Network and Renegade that leave them dead tired at the end of the day, but everyone still managed to kick ass working on this stuff on their free time and everybody brought their A-game to the project. We couldn't have done it without you guys!!!!

I'm Alive!!!

So heres something different, a quick Photoshop poster for a group event. 

Ok, so its been a while since I have posted much of anything. That usually means either the blogger hasn't been busy or they've been so slammed they haven't had time to update anything. In my case, it has been the latter. I've been busy with plenty of freelance for multiple studios and individuals. Its actually been kind of a blur. Now I actually have some breathing time from a crazy summer and fall, so in the next couple weeks I'm gonna try to give an update on a little of what I've been up to. Some things I'm not sure I can show images for as they are not released yet, but at least I can mention what I've been up to.

Most recent project of note has been Art Directing a creative short film to be featured on the Beverly Hills Chihuahua DVD which is coming out in March. More on that soon.

So the moral of the story is to stay tuned as I'll try to update with some recent projects......

American Primitive

I've been working on background designs for the title sequence of a feature film entitled "American Primitive" for the last couple months or so. Here's a sample. (Cintiq and Photoshop)

Headlight

Messing around with Photoshop and the Cintiq again...... no particular destination in mind.

(The title is an afterthought.)

Chantry Flats

A simple poster created in an hour or so for a hike.

Flash FX design

Car chase abstract concepts

As the name implies, these are still-frame abstract concepts for an animated car chase sequence from a short film project.... I wanted to try a style of animation with some experiments.... think fast, blurry action with quick cuts, sparks flying, grinding, skidding, teeth gnashing, violent spitting flames and the like. You get the idea.

Flash Op Art

An experiment created in Flash.

Warehouse interior concept

Here is a concept for a warehouse interior for the project formerly known as "Fairfield". Photoshop painting.