Storyboard and Animatic Portfolio
Storyboarding, to me, is the perfect blend of storytelling, problem solving, illustration, and cinematography. These are a few sequences I have done for both assignments and personal projects.
Dogfight Sequence
I got the green light to show this sequence from a little bit of fill-in work for a show currently in production. Working from the script, my job was to design this as a fight scene between two MiG-16 fighters and a jumbo jet (basically a 747).
This project was loads of fun! It was a fulfilling challenge from a visual storytelling standpoint, and I really loved pitching my idea of what I imagined the shots to look like to the director.
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BetterLegal Work
My first ​full-time storyboard job came courtesy of BetterLegal, which is a legal tech company based in Austin that simplifies the business setup process for new or experienced business owners. My job for a little over a year now has been to take audio clips that explain different legal aspects of the business startup process, and simplify them into visual elements, character sketches, gags, and abstract object lessons.
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Throughout the process, I've become a lot more particular about timing, camera moves, and character acting, and as a result my storyboard work has skewed a lot closer to animation.
The Deviant
This began as more of a writing exercise than the long-term animation project it turned into. When I wrote it initially, I was so happy with how well this particular story turned out that I began to think of what I could do with it. My overly ambitious first reaction was to turn it into a full-blown animation, but having cooled on that idea, I'm happy to just tell this story visually as best I can.
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The Deviant is a Star Wars fan movie about a street thief who finds the crypt of an ancient Jedi and takes his lightsaber as his own. With his newfound powerful weapon, and the legendary reputation of the nearly forgotten Jedi name, he becomes a clever and ruthless magistrate. But rumors of the deviant Jedi find their way out of the backwater systems, and bring the one threat he never thought to face - a real Jedi.
Rebels sequence
This sequence was an assignment an online storyboarding class with Sergio Paez, where he provided a scene from the script of ​Star Wars : Rebels for us to board. The focus was on action and dramatic camera movement.
Looking back, it feels pretty manic and probably has way too many cuts, but there are a few moments in here that I really love. Pardon the roughness of this sequence, I think at this point I was trying to learn Storyboard Pro, and it was kicking my butt so I settled for old school hand-drawn thumbnails. At this point in my education, I had a neat little set of Photoshop actions set up to take sequentially accurate snapshots of a scanned sheet of thumbnails, and export them to a folder. In terms of my bad habit of over-engineering a solution, this is one of my finest.
The Surprise Party
This was an assignment for working with multiple characters, and plotting their movements in floor-plan layout. We were required to write a scene based around a surprise party with at least 6 characters.
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In the scene I wrote, the main character is taken hostage by a hired thug who wants a particular item that's on the mantle above the fireplace in this guy's house. Neither person is aware of the surprise birthday party waiting for the main character when they enter the house. The situation changes completely when they enter a house full of people- the main character goes from trauma of being kidnapped, to surprise, to relief at being surrounded by friends, to confusion at whether his kidnapper was in on the surprise, then back to trauma as he realizes that he is still a hostage, but now is surrounded by more hostages.
Aang and the Blue Spirit vs.
Nightmare Korra
This is another assignment from my classes at Concept Design Academy, this one focused on fight structure and choreography. An interesting thing about this particular class is that we have to use characters from "Avatar the Last Airbender" and "The legend of Korra" for the characters in the homework. The assignment here was simply to make up a fight scene using the structures and concepts we had learned in class. I immediately wanted to see a scenario where the Blue Spirit fights "Chain-Korra" from season 3 and 4, so I wrote a scenario I thought might work in-universe, and got to work boarding it.
Escape the Circus
This was a project I gave myself that was focused around the concept of having two characters with an competitive/adversarial relationship who are after the same goal, and eventually have to work together to achieve it. A few other ideas that I really liked in the conception of the scene was the chase-scene involving a unicycle and pogo stick, a "the-floor-is-lava" element toward the end of the scene, and the general setting of a circus as a backdrop.
Solar Sam
This project began as an assignment from my story development class where the purpose of the scene we were to create was to present the first encounter between the main character and another major character. Part of the requirement was to adapt an existing IP, so I picked the fugitive because of its great dynamic between the main character and the detective pursuing him. Since that movie was a "cat and mouse" story, I decided to adapt mine into a story about a mouse thief, and a cat detective.
Titan Planet
This project is more of a long-form idea of mine to tell a story in a non-magical fantasy world, where I can mix fantastical monsters, creative environments, and brutalist designs into one story. As far as plot goes it's about someone born as an outsider who spends his young adult life working to be accepted, but when the crucial moment comes, he blows it and is ostracized completely. From there on out it is about his growth of character through the choices he makes to try and redeem himself.
The Secret Garden
This project began as an assignment from my story development class where the purpose of the scene we were to create was to present the first encounter between the main character and another major character. Part of the requirement was to adapt an existing IP, so I picked the fugitive because of its great dynamic between the main character and the detective pursuing him. Since that movie was a "cat and mouse" story, I decided to adapt mine into a story about a mouse thief, and a cat detective.