Moe's Trailer

The official trailer for Moe's Musical Morning, my first year MFA film.

Rhythms and Visions

This footage was shot at the Rhythms and Visions event at USC in April. The animation was projected opposite to the main event, the musical and video collective D-FUSE. Some of their images can be see reflected on the wall. The Animation was on loop throughout the entire night.

Moe's Musical Morning

Mel and the Vine

Here is the animation that I projected onto the music school last Friday. Mel is the character that appears at the end of Moe's Musical Morning. Video of the actual projection will be up soon!

Moe Running on the Green Screen

Working on runs for the music freak-out sequence. I animated these on a green screen, using a flying rig and removed the rig in After Effects. This is my first time shooting a run, shooting on green screen, and removing a rig in post, so it's definitely been a learning experience! Next step is to key out the green screen and integrate it with the flash animation.

Visions and Voices Prep

I'm working on a projected animation for the upcoming Visions and Voices event at USC. This will involve either Moe or Mel (the orange guy, I changed his name from Max) climbing around on the music building. I've been doing flash tests to get an idea of where I want him to crawl around. I've also been doing some projector tests to figure out how bright the image needs to be. Here are a couple of the tests!

Shots From Last Week

I shot for 5 days strait last week, 12-15 hour days. It was a huge learning experience and here are a couple of short segments from the shoot!

Set Shots

Here are some pics from my week long camp out in the stop motion lab!
I had replacement mouths, eyes and eyebrows ready at the side.


Some pics of my final set and light arrangement. To get a sense of depth I built the back layer of trees out of cardboard and painted with tempera paint. The next layer is cardboard wrapped in wire mesh and thin foam, spray painted. The front layer is sanded balsa foam with tempera paint.



My classmate Laura was a HUGE help with the light set up. I was kind of in the dark about this topic and she really lit the way. We set up a large light with bounce on the side for the sun, lit the back layers of trees with orange and set up a light pointing down. On this upper light we added some black foil to give the illusion of light shining through leaves. The film takes place in the morning and we were really hoping to go for that feeling with this setup.


For the moss ground I used a sheet of thin foam and spray painted it green. This allowed me to conceal the drill holes pretty well, I just cut a little slit with a hobby knife each time I drilled a new hole.

Headphones Build

I made this out of sculpy and matte board, but I am NOT liking how it is looking after painting. I think I'm going to try a second version with foam and matte board.

Armature Rebuilds

I scaled down one of the puppets and completely rebuilt another one. These guys should be much lighter, smaller and easier to animate. I also made the hands a lot simpler, with a wire bend over itself for each finger. I put square stock on the hands and wrists so they could be replaced in case any fingers brake.