“The Lab”
This is a place for me to post my collection of personal projects, freelance work, and on-going experimental projects
Client: Blame Your Brother
I’ve had the pleasure of collaborating with the team at Blame Your Brother, a Toronto-based creative studio specializing in high-end animation and character-driven storytelling. Working across various commercial and narrative projects, my role focused on seamless compositing of hand-drawn animation to maintain the studio's distinct, polished aesthetic.
The Magic Hat
A BYB Holiday Special! Packaged full of easter eggs that tip our hat to Rankin Bass Christmas classics.
Eclipse Odyssey - Twitch RPG
An RPG gameplay spot for Twitch! Twitch viewers followed two “real life” animated streamers as they planet hopped toward the perfect Lunar eclipse lookout.
The New Scene+
A live action Scene+ spot featuring classic BYB 2D animation integrated into the real world.
View more of Blame Your Brother’s work here: https://blameyourbrother.com/
Community 3D Challenges
These biannual global competitions are hosted by Clint Jones (pwnisher), a prominent VFX artist and educator on YouTube. Each challenge provides thousands of artists worldwide with a synchronized camera and a base animation template, tasking them with building an entirely original world within those constraints.
At the conclusion of each month-long sprint, a "Top 100" is curated from thousands of international entries. While the competition is fierce, I use these challenges as a high-intensity creative outlet, allowing me to experiment with EmberGen, Blender, and Unreal Engine and expand my technical horizons beyond the traditional Nuke compositing workflow.
Endless Engines
The Challenge: “The time has come for our first ever 3D vehicle challenge! You have 5 weeks to replace a basic demo scene with any vehicle/environment you can imagine!”
For this one, I wanted to get out of my comfort zone and see what I could do in Unreal Engine. I’d messed around with Megascans before, but I used this challenge as an excuse to dive into a full animation workflow. Once I was done in Unreal I brought a foreground and background render into Nuke to composite the explosions and add the lens fx.
It was a massive learning curve, but it was a blast to build the environment from the ground up. I didn't make the "Top 100" cut this time, but the technical deep dive into Unreal was worth the late nights alone.
Software Used: Unreal Engine, Nuke
Moving Meditations
The Challenge: “The time has come for the 5th 3D Community Challenge! Through the month of August i'm challenging all 3D artists, regardless of skill level or age, to choose 1 of 27 unique martial arts animations provided, and create the coolest 3D scene around the downloadable template project.”
I went for a high-fantasy setting for this one. Yes, I know, a castle on a cliffside is a total rite of passage for every 3D artist, but I had to get it out of my system!
I spent a lot of time building out the foreground and figuring out how to get the foliage to realistically react to the wind. For the magic effects, rather than staying entirely in 3D, I leaned back into my Nuke roots. I opted to take 2D elements and animate them to match the CG movement, which allowed for much finer control over the final look and feel of the "energy".
Software Used: Blender, Nuke