The Prop Co op is amazing!

I needed a mounted elk head. It's not like I needed it long term, just for a weekend. Turns out it's not the type of thing most people just have on hand. I remembered a local place featured on Mythbusters called "The Prop Warehouse". It's a giant repository of film props and junk where The Mythbusters tested myths related to hiding drugs from police dogs. (spoiler: that vacuum sealed baggie in a coffee can isn't going to fool a doggie)

Gotcha badguy!!!

I called the Prop Co-op and asked if they had an elk head. "Like Taxidermy?" The guy said. "Yeah, we got tons of it. Come take a look."
Turns out they have an entire wall of it from mountain goats to jackelopes.

They also have everything else. Literally. If you can imagine it, they have it. It's mind boggling.

You want a rotary phone? They have a wall of em. 

How about an entire army bunker full of foam and plastic gear?

In the jungle?

Or maybe you just need a box of empty lion king dvd cases. 

I pointed at a lamp and said,"Does this work?".

"Probably not" said the guy, "these are all props."

  While some of the objects were foam replicas, most were just broken junk. I realized that the only thing that makes this place different from a pack-rat's storage shed is organization. 

Still, while its easy to scoff at paying 20 bucks a week to rent a broken VCR, if you need one ASAP you could run to a bunch of thrift stores and garage sales in hopes of finding one, or you could just come here and pick one up, along with a foam radiator, a pay phone, a gold foil candelabra, a rubber Martian suit and a lifesize plastic replica of Michelangelo's David. 

Family Portraits

We decided we didn't want standard "Sears" style family portraits and instead committed to doing semi-annual family portraits based around a theme.

Baby Godzilla!!!

My wife and I are tall and we have a HUGE baby girl. I thought it was fitting then that we do a Godzilla themed shoot. We made a small set in our garage. My wife sponge painted the buildings, Jeremy Moe took the photos and I did the compositing.

Bedtime Stories

The concept was to play with orientation and gravity. I wanted to do it all in-camera, no photoshop tricks. I attached elements of Cammi's nursery to the wall in our garage with screws, thread and a glue-gun. Jeremy Moe climbed up into the loft above our garage and took the photo top-down. The only photoshopping in the final image was the wallpaper (It's shockingly expensive).

The set from ground level

Mistakes Happen

 Click for a higher res version

This concept was a simple seated portrait that someone could glance at for a split second before their gaze ricochets onto the next thing. But if they really look, they start to notice stuff is wrong. There are 15 "mistakes" total in the image. I chose a lodge setting as an excuse to get a bunch of junk in the scene and give me more to work with. I built a set in our garage and did as much as I could practical, then photoshopped the rest. I've included a cheat sheet.

These photos are a great excuse to be creative as a family and do a fun project together. I look forward to the day Cammi is old enough to come up with her own concept. I can't imagine what a little kid would come up with, but I bet it would be surreal.

Club Graphics: Max headroom

One of my initial ideas for 80's graphics for Planet Earth was doing some Max Headroom inspired animations. In case you were born in the 90's, Max Headroom was a futuristic dramatic series in the 80's about a detective and his AI counterpart. The AI, the eponymous Max Headroom, was a "hilarious" wisecracking virtual assistant that gained massive pop-culture fame, hawked New Coke, then vanished just as quickly. Again, my initial concept was creating rotating earths via the 80's vision of the future. In 1984, there was nothing more futuristic than Max Headroom. He looked plastic, glitched, had hard edges and lived inside a rotating, graphic cube. THE FUTURE!!! My inspiration came from Max's creation sequence in the first episode at the 27:40 mark:




I decided to do the grid animation inside After Effects using a pretty sweet plugin called Plexus. Its a plugin that generates simple 3d geometry or import models from other 3d programs then allows you to mess around with the geometry. I was using version 1.0 and it was pretty rocky. This simple animation turned out to be a pain. In addition to plexus I used an earth model I made in Maya and a ton of animated masks.



That animation seamlessly blended into a second animation based on Max Headroom himself. It was essentially a plastic looking earth that kept glitching and was surrounded by a cg grid. I tried doing the grid in Plexus, but it was too primitive to work it out. I finally gave up and did it all in Maya. My Mental Ray plastic shader ended up being pretty hefty and the animation took over a week to render.

Elephant Hunter Part 1

Concept artist Don Flores and I have worked on small projects together for well over 10 years. A while back he designed a fantastic Elephant Hunter for me to model. While I was working on it, Ovi Nedeclu drew his own take on the character. His Design was radically different from Don's, but just as appealing. I thought it'd be a fantastic challenge to model the same character in the different styles. Both of the models have been laying around my projects folder about 90% finished. I polished up the first one, Ovi's design, and rendered it. Now to polish Don's version.

Ovi's designs on the left, Don's designs on the right with reference/inspiration