LCBO Deflate the Elephant 3D Design

Agency:Dashboard Communications and Due North

Project Role: CGI Elephant: 3D Design, Modeling, Skeletal Rig, Texture Design and Character Animation

For the second time in 2009 I had the chance to delve back into my 3D CGI roots for this one and modeled, designed, textured, rigged and animated this 3D elephant in Maya based on a real world inflatable elephant developed by Due North for their commercial spot. It was a fun challenge that took me back to some of the ATI character modeling days (though a simpler model) and was delivered in under 2 weeks on an alpha channel for creative and dev.

Site: www.deflatetheelephant.com

Kicking of the Real Food Movement

Agency: Dashboard Communications

Project Role: Lead Art Director, Designer, & Managed Production

Awards/Recognition: Applied Arts Interactive Award 2009

A punch and then a hug. A phrase that coined this projects entire system. The Real Food Movement is a plea to support local foods in Canada for a better economy, neighbourhood, and future. To demonstrate this we use an intriguing intro video delving into the facts of Canada’s state of food (the punch) followed by the solution: 4 simple steps to help you eat local in an environment rich with positivity and education (taking action, finding local food, asking your grocer to shelf more local food, making recipes with local ingredients). These steps along with a wealth of ways to share the word of the movement help contribute to reaching a goal of 100,000 actions at which point Hellmann’s would donate $25,000 to Evergreen. All of this happens within an interactive map of Canada.

Over the course of three months Dashboard developed one of their largest and most complex sites to kick off the 2009 Hellmann’s Real Movement. After a very challenging project the entire dashboard team (dev, creative and account) pulled closer together through a whirlwind development cycle that resulted in one of my proudest moments as an art director to see eatrealeatlocal.ca launch so close to the original creative idea and a very happy client. The site demonstrates various new techniques for dashboard including being the first fully fledged flash 10 site using the 3D motion controls and facebook connect to allow users to post directly to their facebook profiles.

Site: eatrealeatlocal.ca

Sunlight Laundry 2009 Refresh and “What do you see?” Promotion

Agency:Dashboard Communications

Project Role: Lead Art Director, Designer, Motion, 3D Design & Managed Production

For the first quarter of 2009 much of my time was spent on developing a site refresh including a digital campaign for “What do you see?” on sunlightlaundry.ca. Focusing on bringing once buried content to the forefront and cleaning up the home page to be purely activation focused - the site relaunched in March. The project broke down into two distance areas: the Activity/Stain Modules - which housed over a hundred combined tips and articles on how to remove stains and activities for every occasion in a clean, concise and organized format - and the What do you see?” promotion - which featured a series of CGI animations with interactivity to deliver a fresh new site. To add to user engagement the abilities to rate, comment, email and print the Activities and Stain Tips where also included.

I had the chance to delve back into my 3D CGI roots for this one and modeled/designed the washing machine myself in Maya. CGI animation and sound were developed by motion artist Dave Zak in a very collaborative effort. I was Excited to deliver a fully developed update of this size in a relatively short time span.

Site: sunlightlaundry.ca

Various 3D Game Art Modeling & Design (dated)

Project Role: everything

A collection of various 3D game art models both level and character development. These are a little old - as they were developed for the last generation gaming standards of low polygon. Now a days you can squeeze ten times the polygons into a model. Yet I still like to show them with my high res characters as it was a welcome challenge to have a limited amount of polygons to work with and small textures to boot. Made it fun to see that every single part of the model was thought out and planned to ensure maximum embellishment and that the texture mapping was having to be more contrasted to help further define the models.

Ati Technologies 3D Character Design

Project Role: 3D Character Design & Modeling

3D character design and modeling (maya) of a series of monsters for ATI Technologies’ graphics boards. The models where designed from scratch, starting in sketches then moving in to CGI where they where built, structured, rigged and posed for final model delivery. Each one taking a few days to sculpt into CGI reality.  From my computer they left to ATI for texturing, rendering and final inclusion in all marketing material for the products.

From what I hear they even had a giant poster in their office for a while with one of them - though I did not see it myself.

Final work was awarded a Bronze GXXi Graphic Exchange Award.

Marble Eye Short Scene

Project Role: everything

One of many 3D characters I’ve developed over the years. This one is a bit old now - but still one I always liked. Meet Marble-Eye. High-res model developed and rigged in Maya.Unfortunately due to unforeseen hard drive circumstances back in the day - these slides are all that remains of the original short he was meant for.