Well, I was making my wife a birthday present in 2005, and I tried making something instead of buying something.  So I created some photo-mosaics and created a shadow box.  I’m no pro when it comes to this, but here’s what I came up with.

It’s a little hard to see, but those are all little pictures from our photo album.  Click to make the image bigger and see if you can see it a little better.  As we had only been married for a couple of years, the photo album wasn’t huge yet, and there are some duplicates.

Placed in a shadowbox with a ton of crap from Hobby Lobby, this is what resulted:

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Using the Smiley Logo that I had previously made, I created a “stitched” version that was printed on t-shirt transfer and ironed on.  A lot faster and cheaper than actual embroidery, and looks almost as good.

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I was amused by this.  I took a picture of my car in the driveway and Pixar’d it up for the kids in Photoshop.

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Just a logo I did for our company Skunkworks department (which I am a part of).

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Well, I had to watch the kids tonight, so I didn’t have time to practice my violin.  But I had a pencil, and i did have time to draw myself practicing the violin.  Close enough.

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After creating Hunters Star Wars Uncut video, I had some ideas about other things that I will never finish because I’m so overloaded with stuff.  But I thought I would take a break from my work, and starting testing.  So in the style of Monty Python or Jib Jab, I created this test video of Brooke.  It’s just an orthographic camera on 3 meshes with a simple rig.  I used Blender 2.5 alpha 1, I really like the interface changes to Blender.  It’s tough finding where everything is…but once you have found it, it’s a much easier interface to work.

I have had a lot of ideas for 2D vector style animations that I haven’t actually done.  I have Flash on my work PC, but not at home.  The keyframing seems a bit basic to me.  I have always felt like I need more from Flash.  So, having a little experience in 3D animation packages (3D Studio Max, Animation Master, etc), this seems like a more natural way to do some of the things that I was originally planning for Flash.

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Star Wars Uncut is a web site that is recreating the “Star Wars episode 4: A New Hope” movie by “crowdsourcing”.  Basically, they have broken the movie into a bunch of 15 second scenes.  Registered users sign up for a scene, then they recreate it however they want.  After all the scenes have been recreated, they will piece all of it together.  Check it out at http://starwarsuncut.com/.

Here’s a trailer for the project:

So Hunter and I were watching, and he really wanted to make one.  We tried a few things, and we went toy shopping…but there wasn’t a scene that worked for us with that.  Anyway, we decided to DRAW the scenes!  Hunter and Brooke were the voice actors, Hunter was the graphic artist, and I scanned the drawings in and brought them to life with Blender.  Here’s our 15 seconds of fame (literally).

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Just another add for the Regit (our high school paper).  This was another “here’s your money, just go create us an ad.”  I didn’t even get a tuxedo discount for senior prom for making this thing.

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Well, the economy of the lat 90’s anyway.  Just a simple illustration for my high school newspaper.  I’m sure someone would find this offensive, just as my Two Pesos ad.

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