Carl has had a very memorable career creating top of the line commercial work the majority of which heavily utilize computer graphics, often times working with DD & BLR, to create very compelling imagery. After spanning out into new feature projects such as 47 Ronin, the opportunity came about for Visual Effects Supervisor James Atkinson and myself the ability to work directly with him and team.

The spots are predominantly CG with a mixture of live action photography. They proved to be some of the toughest shows I've worked on to date purely from a camera animation stand point, because not only were they a single camera move with no cuts, they required very natural fluid moves with a seemless blend of the live action plates. This proved to be even more challangeing than a piece like Gear of War Dust to Dust which is fully CG and had a tone of opportunities to hide transitions in battle photography.

After a two day motion control shoot on the Universal lot, and 5 weeks of pre/post vis later, the spots required over a month of addition camera animation polishing to make them look as smooth and seemless as possible. Proving sometimes making something look easy is the hardest to re-create.

Did a couple days of consulting work with multi-talented rocker / artist / filmmaker Dan Haigh ( Fightstar / Gunship / HithMedia ) and fellow renaissance man Bastiaan Koch on this sexy yet comical spot with really great production value. Directed by Bastiaan Koch.

Shot of my lapel pin to show my support fighting the visual effects industy's outsource race to the bottom.

Even more than real tilt-shift photography, HUGE inspiration for the spot was taken from this promotional piece for the amazing model sets of Germany's Miniatur Wunderland.

Supervised a team of animators during previs and then lead a composting team working closely with Jeff Husser, co-founder of FX Guide, to finish this fully CG spot for Cisco Systems under a very tight overall deadline. 

After shooting quite a bit of live action footage at the LA camp at city hall downtown with no particular narrative idea in mind and after seeing all the amazing YouTube footage along with a series of nicely shot live action pieces from Zuccotti Park and other occupy campsites around the US, I decided to go a different direction. I knew I could create a short and effective spokes piece in under a month by making it a still moment in time without any animation, designed in a graphic novel style, with a very simple and to the point concept. The primary goal of which was to capture the deeply empowering feeling and energy one can get from peaceful democratic protest within a group that's on the right side of history. Jeremy Joyce's song "Occupy" is certainly key to help elevate the spot to that level of emotion.

They said they came to Liberty Plaza to inspire a nation wide movement. Instead they inspired a world wide movement.

Following up our teaser trailer "Ashes to Ashes" for the third Gears of War game, collaborated with supervisor Vernon Wilbert and director Adam Berg on this final release trailer entitled "Dust to Dust". This marks Vern's sixth Gears spot for the franchise but the first to be done outside the game engine.

The concept was to show the whole timeline of the overarching story of all three Gears games via a time laps environment which our characters travel through in real time. The whole piece was to be lensed in a war photographer style as single camera move a la Children of Men.

Prior to starting this job, Digital Domain's hybrid production company Mothership had recently moved into a gorgeous new headquarters in Playa Vista, California. To quote the press release, "The spacious new studio space gives directors and the company's advertising, video game, and entertainment clientele access to live action and state-of-the-art virtual production capabilities and extended art, conceptual and creative development firepower." This spot marks the first piece I've done using the new motion capture stages, which were initially built by Disney and Robert Zemeckis for Image Movers Digital and are some of the nicest high-end stages in California and possibly the world.

This was my fourth collaboration with fellow film maker and Animation Director Rick Glenn, who's work usually picks up immediately where mine leaves off after motion and camera capture. This time around we had signifigant overlap due to camera essentially becoming the editorial department since the piece is all done in one take. The same Virtual Camera technology used for a year straight on Avatar was a perfect for acheiving the battle cam feel and a huge time saving tool allowing us to do in just a few hours what would take days if sitting at the box animating by hand.

On set toward the end of our 20 hour motion capture day.

Some of the best films educate in addition to entertain. On top of being a very clever short with good comedic moments, BLEACHED has a very serious undertone and an impressivly strong ending. It definetly has somthing to say and I was totally un-aware of skin bleaching in Asian cultures prior to seeing this film. Bravo Jess, mission accomplished.

Created the "Toughest Skin" official music video for Composer, Producer, and DJ The BS of D.

I could watch music videos all day, even bad ones. Good music videos, however, can be a true auteur art form. Since electronic music is a very new form of music only recently made possible through the advent of computers and technology, it's appropriate to associate that audio with visuals also created with computer technology and/or technologically advanced imagery. Ever since the early 90's when playing Tempest 2000 on my Atari Jaguar as well as using various music visualization plug-ins for Winamp, I have been interested in making a non-narrative music video for an instrumental electronic song. The flood gates opened in early 2009 on my decade-old-idea when I discovered several pieces of particle based software that can be driven by sound. I'm a big fan of futurism and while getting ideas for an environment I started researching real-world technologically advanced engineering marvels such as Tesla coils, fusion reactors, and particle accelerators. Then I discovered various mind-boggling photographs of the Large Hadron Collider at Cern. They lead me to decide on creating a music video that takes place inside a hybrid fusion reactor / particle accelerator-type environment that reacts to music.

A full confession regarding this piece is that it was initially motivated more by a tool than by a story, and my goal as a story teller is to of course not make a habit of this. So call this project a guilty pleasure if you will, but since it’s a non-narrative work I suppose I’m off the hook. Finding the right song that fit our extensive list of requirements for what we wanted out of the video would prove to be quite difficult, and securing the rights to associate with a song I feared would be even more difficult. Since you can’t really do an official music video for a older song, we needed a fairly recent track, which was of high quality and tastefully done, with a mix of classical as well as electronic elements, and because of the resources we had it couldn’t be more than 3 minutes long. Most importantly, it had to be a song which drove our pre-set visuals and of course, not the other way around. I prepared a pitch to send to several well established electronic musicians who were close to having new albums released, but ultimately deviated from that route due to the vast amount of independent electronic music available online. The appeal of working to promote quality substance from the bottom-up for an unsigned musician and not top-down is a general life philosophy I'll always try to follow in all of my work. Having the option to pick and choose and find exactly what we were looking for also greatly appealed to us over shooting blind with a well known artist's future next album.

Websites such as soundcloud and the Nine Inch Nails official remix site are not only great online communties for musicians but are also valuable resources for finding top-notch, non-signed, music online. Trent Reznor/Nine Inch Nails have been really supportive of opening up their music to fans and releasing songs as multi-tracks, which actively encourages high quality remixing of their original material and is a fantastic way for up-and-coming musicians to learn by reverse engineering. I ended up collaborating with The BS of D who makes great stuff and is also the creator of another NIN remix site ninremixes.com.

Director/Producer Bastiaan Koch at Marauder Film came onboard early on and was extremely valuable to the project helping design the environment. After initially experimenting with making the center system very colorful with a whole rainbow spectrum of color, the final look ended up being very cold, sterile, and monochrome. I generally always encourage referencing real world images and frown upon referencing other CG when developing the look of something that's not real, but I couldn't help but take a bit of inspiration from the 5gum spots The Mill did a few years prior. Huge thanks to Computer Graphics Supervisor / V-Ray Master, Tim Jones for his technical expertise on this project as well.

Continuity contact sheet here.

A great deal of insipration and creative influence for the peice was taken from the amazing & eery Phillips Carousel spot directed by Adam Berg.