Heist (2022)

"Heist" is the film I created in my senior year of my Bachelor's degree at Minneapolis College of Art and Design. Featuring characters I'd been workshopping since about 2018, it was my second foray into independent filmmaking and the first project of mine to make film festivals. Here is some "backstage access" to the ideation that led up to the film.

Previously, I'd only used these characters in comics and illustrations, and needed to retool their more complex designs into something more "animateable." That began with studying some of my biggest inspirations for the project as well as the larger world these characters inhabit. I looked to Invader Zim for inspiration in terms of color interaction and simplified shapes, and I looked to Sam & Max: Freelance Police for comedic inspiration, which I considered integral to their designs. In addition to that I designed some of their living spaces, as someone's home can tell you a lot about their psyche.

At the time, my ultimate career goal was to turn these characters' stories into an animated show hosted online, similar in structure to indie projects I grew up with like Red vs Blue: beginning with irreverent slapstick and absurdist comedy before condensing into something more serious, dramatic, and cinematic.

Full-character lineup of the entire cast of Untitled Villains Project; only Vitriol, Unknown, Vex and Toxic made it into the final short.

Once the film was finished, we were tasked with creating both a film poster and some promotional posters; as a majority of my work is character-focused, I zeroed in on trying to make posters to communicate their personalities, incorporating loose doodles into the background behind their finalized portraits. This was also useful in order to place their pronouns right beside them and display that right beside the film.

Then after that was the final design of the poster itself, which was its own challenge, as I had never done a movie poster before and had to study that particular design style.

And last but not least: the final design.

Oh, Catastrophe (2020)

Oh, Catastrophe was my final project for an undergraduate Storyboarding class and we were required to pitch and explain our idea prior to creating the work itself. I knew I wanted to finally illustrate this portion of Unknown Raccoon's story where they re-discover their supernatural powers, but I also needed to explain that to my classmates. These are the pitch documents I presented in 2020.

The project was my first foray into ToonBoom Storyboard Pro, a program I quickly adopted as my standard and used for Heist as well as the Werewolf Boyfriend animatic.

The most challenging part of this was the colour palette. Prior to this project I really struggled with setting a mood via colour and understanding the ways light interacts with colour. While I recognize most storyboards do not include colour, I aimed to challenge myself; though I didn't know the term at the time, this animatic serves as both a storyboard pass and a colour script for the final scene.

In my current work at UCF, I have been studying the ways colour interacts with composition as well as with the human psyche, studying Josef Albers' Interaction of Colour as well as Faber Birren's writings on colour.

Untitled Villains Project

Gallery of Images

Illustrations

Comics

First 2 pages of a 9-page comic script - Did not end up being finished as I wasn't satisfied with the design of the taller character, a maned wolf mad scientist known only as "Boss." She ended up being the star of The Lab, a stop-motion short film I created in my sophomore year of college, where you can see her more finalized design in felt-puppet form! It also appears in the character lineup on the previous page.

Icons:

These were a set of 4 icons I made early on in the development of Heist for personal use during Pride Month. As a queer individual, designing queer characters is deeply important to me; with Untitled Villains Project in specific, the characters are what I usually refer to as passively queer. Their labels and identities aren't usually the forefront of the story, but important facets of their being.

For example, Vitriol Ferret lives with his longterm boyfriend Rhys Serval, and within the eventual final project topics like homophobia, amatonormativity, transphobia and exorsexism will be discussed within the narrative.

Faux Screenshots

Around 2019 there was a social media trend to draw your characters in situations styled like fake Netflix screenshots, which was right up my alley as an aspiring showrunner. I used this to test how quickly I could do various rendering styles. At the time, I was still working almost entirely in PhotoShop--animation included--and my plan was to streamline particular methods of shading and texturing for use in the final product.

While these explorations were extremely fun to do, I do think that the finalized, less-detailed style seen in Heist is both more feasible and more easily read than this style.