Future Imperfect Motion Comic Feature Presentation

It's a motion comic, so it's not exactly comic nor pure animation, kinda in between. Thus when I usually watch these things, it's a lukewarm experience, but I did enjoy Broken Saints which was an influence. This was a lot of work but the challenge was worth it and taught me a lot about narrative. It was suppose to spearhead an edlab educational initiative where teens would use media technology or something like that. So I had the protagonist armed with a digital video camera. It was suppose to lead up to some sort of contest, but the AfterEd channel directive began steering away from ventures such as this and thus we had to leave audience in a cliffhanger.

I wrote, drew, colored, animated produced, and did most of the sound. I was fried. I couldn't have done it without my two gurus. Skye MacLeod and Josh Anderson were a tremendous force in helping me animate this mini-epic. Josh also contributed some of the music tracks. Much thanks goes to Joachim Castellano who had the vision to suggest something like this as well as the guts to push for it. I hope you enjoy. Below are the episode which are stitched together with new title animation I made. Each title is a play on words of certain sci-fi movies.

My students whom I showed it seemed to enjoy it and still remember it. They still ask about it and are expecting me to finish it because they want to know the ending. So maybe somewhere in there we did something right.

Episode 1: Closely Encountered
Episode 2: Late to the Future
Episode 3: Space Oddity
Episode 4: No Silent Runnings in the Hall
Episode 5: Cafeteria Event: Horizons (Season Finale)

Below are some of the storyboards...

Eduwonkette Animation & Storyboards

It was a great honor for me to co-produce an animated piece on Eduwonkette! Her site can be found here. Simon Doolittle came up with a fantastic script and from there Istoryboarded and then with the virtual viglante's blessing herself, I dove into much drawing and animating. Much thanks to Skye MacLeod and Josh Anderson for their expertise with Anime Studio Pro and making her type and walk with a natural gait. And Josh with his great narrator voice and fine tuned music, along with Simon's fantastic nerdy voice I think we came up with something entertaining. Much thanks to Simon for helping get the rhythm of the yawn down. (Another week another tweak!) Thanks to Joachim Castellano for the help with the sound and getting that voice echo modulation.

Super teachers: KLONA!

The one that started it all! I believe this piece was what helped us get work with Eduwonkette! This one a bit tricky to write because I was trying to make the deadline so I had to make sure I had to make sure I kept the dialogue from going father than our resources. With a couple of late nights of drawing and working on sound, our motley animation studio was able to pump this out in less than two weeks thanks to Skye MacLeod for the huge amount of animation work, Josh for the voice of the narrator, and some animation for the wristband console and the amazing theme music, James Phillips for some of the backgrounds, the logo, the copy machine symbols and also for that awesome console design, Evan Weintraub for great image research and vectorizing of backgrounds and objects, Joachim Castellano for audio feng shui, and the intro animation, and to everyone who contributed to the script. Let us know what you think!

Live Action Enhanced with Animation--Teacher Spotlight: Jordan Sonnenblick

I had the great opportunity to collaborate with Simon Doolittle on this piece. This teamwork helped inspire me to come up with different art techniques for the drawings in this piece. This was a more subtle piece because of the much slower pacing than usual, yet it I enjoyed the creation of the pieces immensely. Simon is a fantastic editor and great to work with. Josh Anderson did his usual wonderful job on the music.

Eduwonkette Reveal from Comic to Animation

I had the honor and exciting opportunity to work with the annonymous blogger. This web comic was posted on her site as part of her revealing herself to the rest of the public. I sent a scripted storyboard and she liked it and with a few edit changes we came up with a comic which Jennifer Jennings posted on her Eduwonkette site. Then I broke it up the pieces and found the music and sound fx for Skye to put together and animate, and with his great work we were able to pump out an animated comic in a week! The comic and animation differ because the viewer controls the pace of the comic and participates more in the imagination. The animation, though, provided us some little extra goodies to implant in the work. One works better than the other in certain aspects.

LOOSELEAF REPORT

The one that started it all...Joachim Castellano being the visionary that he is came up with the idea for Looseleaf report and from there we have collaborated on them ever since...
Drawing for this segment has always been fun and at times challenging.

Character Design, Graphic Novel, Editorial Cartoons, Illustrations, & Gallery Exhibitions

Click here to see graphic novel and other illustration samples. 

Click here to see graphic design samples.

The above are character designs for my graphic novel. The first series of slides in this photo stream are the first few pages of my graphic novel, Image of the Invisible. It is a work in progress. Pen and Ink on Bristol. The beginning of the slide show shows my present logo. I got it off aplastic cup I drew on at a rooftop party in Astoria. Thanks Joachim, great party! The following works are other samples ranging from illustrations for posters and t-shirts to movie props. The Last series in this stream is an 8 feet high and 8 feet wide drawing piece exhibited in the Pearl Street Gallery in DUMBO Brooklyn in the Found in Transition show. Sorry about the horrible quality. I plan to do an all day scanning marathon with this piece when i get the chance. I enjoyed this piece very much and it ties in with my graphic novel.

Hand pencilled, hand inked Movie 80's Poster Series

Here is the sketch that I will soon be inking. This one has been planned out better that the Return to Oz piece. I like the composition better and I am looking forward to inking it but also am a little scared of messing it up. But I just gotta do it.
Ok the inking is done. Still needs work. Thinking of trying to color it in digitally later. This movie was my choice since it is one of my favorites.




Return to Oz...Joanne's movie choice and Birthday present. (You can pick it up any time, Joanne. The original is 11"X14", and I don't have a folder or backing unfortunately, so if you have any cardboard from the school you might think about getting one to protect it.) I hope you like it. I'm a bit rusty in my inking. Sung Ryen suggested I make Dorthy pop out more and I think I was able to do that, I would still like to add a bit more depth to places, but then again no...This is micron pen and brush pen on Strathmore Bristol.

The Movie is by Disney and it came out in 1985 starring Fairuza Balk and directed by Walter Murch, based on the Frank L. Baum's novles about Oz.

Samples of Editorial Cartoons for Teachers College Record

These first two are some samples of the editorial cartoons I did for the Teachers College Record. This last one, below, was suppose to be but later was turned into an actual going away card for Mr. Arthur Levine when he left Teachers College.

Spolaryum, 8’x 9’ drawing piece, Pearl Street Gallery, Brooklyn, NY

Sorry for the bad quality, will be putting up better quality in the future...

Click to enlarge
Whole piece


Click to enlarge
Closer and Center


Click to enlarge
Bottom Middle Portion


Click to enlarge
Bottom Left Portion

Teachers College Annual Report 2006 Magazine Illustration

Teachers College Annual Report 2006, Rip Van Winkle, 2006 by Arthur Levine

Samples of AfterEd.tv New Graphics

Education Reform Split


New G.I. Bill Recruitment Strategies


California Education Budget Cuts


Teachers in Texas Allowed to Carry Guns


Computers Sent to Vietnam Schools


NCLB Policy News

Napster Wins Ruling

New York Graduation Rates Up

Teachers College, Columbia University, Official Seal

Adobe Illustrator vectorized artwork. Fixed the face.
Cleaned up original seal which was not quite as discernible.
Made lines and shapes more coherent and smoother.
Easier for the silkscreen printers for their big banners.

PocketKnowledge Advertising Campaign

The original grid for the marketing campaign

PocketKnowledge Website Design

You can view the PocketKnowledge site here!

Adobe Illustrator Animals

Bear: Faculty
Raccoon: Public
Squirrel: Archiver
Ant: Student

I was commissioned to do a series of animal icon posters to represent different type of users of the proposed digital archiving software. They were used in the preliminary phases to help explain how PocketKnowledge would be used as an online archive as well as a social network for educators.