My Demoreel

Jason Baldwin Demoreel 2015 from jason baldwin on Vimeo.

Last week PDI/Dreamworks (the Northern California division of Dreamworks) was shuttered due to the poor performance of recent Dreamworks films, leaving me and 499 talented people looking for work. More on that here. I have the option to move to the LA campus to work fulltime on dynamic hair systems instead of modeling. I've got 30 days to think about it.

Though the shutdown is a bummer, there's this exciting little thought that within the next 3 months we'll be living somewhere new. From a different part of San Francisco to a different country. It gets my sense of adventure tingling!

Club Graphics- Retro Futurism

I did a series of club graphics for a burningman camp called Planet Earth. They build an entire nightclub in the desert and blast 80's music for one week out of every year, then disassemble the thing and take it home. It's very impressive.

The project was a great way to re-introduce myself to After Effects. I created a total of 9 rotating, 80's themed earths, and this was one of my favorites. I was (am) obsessed with retro-futurism, so I created an animation in that style. Retro-futurism is an art style based on what the 80's thought the future would be. It's all hyper-saturated colors, space, geometry, CRT monitors, sunglasses and Ferraris. It's often combined with its musical bedfellow, synthwave.

What the year 2000 will look like. By Peter Machiocha

We also stayed with the camp and had a blast!

Handing out jagerbombs to a group of strangers who didn't know they were about to do jagerbombs.

The Daft Punkin

There are fantastic build blogs of people re-creating Daft Punk helmets. They inspired me to create my own take on the helmets. My idea was to mash it up with Halloween. Make it,"Daft Punk meets the headless horseman". The led display could be in the mouth and eyes. The led eyes could snap between a few different expressions, like Eve from Wall-e, and the mouth could play 8-bit style animations of candle flames, hypnotic spirals or fire. I modeled my concept in maya and, while I kept the head model simple, I indulged in some hand-modeled wrinkles.

I wanted to see what the helmet would look like as a physical model, so I exported the helmet into a program called Pepekura. Pepekura allows you to break your model into pieces and print it out at scale on card-stock.

Then you can cut out each of the thousands of sections by hand as you slowly lose your grip on reality.

Fun fact: time has no meaning. X-acto knives, hot glue guns and hand cramps are all that exist.

Reality is a lie. There is only a vague sense of now. You are one with the universe, and the universe is made up of card stock.

Sorry, I think I just had a flashback there. So, I finished the assembly and learned 2 important lessons:

1. My resolution (size of each square) was far too large to support a smooth, round shape. 

2. Large Pepekura models need internal supports to prevent warping.

I reprinted a single section at a much higher resolution and and added supports. It was so intricate it took nearly as long to assemble as the entire first pass of the head. I then coated it with autobody filler and sanded it smooth. 

Perfect! Now just 11 more to go...

The North Wind?

When you're the first modeler on a film, you can guarantee that your initial work will be redesigned or scrapped all together. It can be painful, but the film is almost always better for it. These were the initial models I created for 3 of the North Wind characters from the film The Penguins of Madagasgar. I loved them. Shortly after I finished the models the film went into a re-write and re-design phase and I moved onto another film. A few months later there were new designs, much more in line with the Madagasgar style. Minyu Chang did a fantastic remodel and those versions ultimately made it into the film.

Man, they're so cool. It was a good call. I do feel a tiny pang of sadness that my versions will be lost forever though. They'll live on in my heart.

And my demoreel.