What I did:
For Cholula I was involved from start to finish. We began by sitting down, figuring out how things would be staged. While we discussed, I storyboarded both episodes out on the spot.

I modeled the Sandwich and rigged up the mouth while my talented coworkers rigged up everything else. I made the animatic based on my storyboards.

Details:
Besides the graphics for "Automatchmaker with Dabby Love" one of the running gags among the three spots was her matchmaker machine making strange noises and displaying some strange UI on the panel. It's extremely subtle to the point that you'll likely only notice it now because I've called it out. Each spot had its own oddity: A loading bar, an 8-bit police chase, and... well the third one's gag was that it didn't actually do anything weird.

What I did:
My super talented coworker Julie and I worked on this one. While she focused mainly on the titles, I focused on the character design and scenes. While she animated most of the first spot, I animated most of this second one.

What I did:
This spot for Truth was supposed to be parodying something you might see on Vice (which I already find pretty funny as a premise) and I was asked to make something that felt "Urban" as far as the graphics went. This was a project where I was actually given full control over the art direction. I made a custom text-animator for it and grunged up the Truth branding to fit the music selection. Around 1:37 there's a blurred-out shot of the main character and his girlfriend's pants with burned holes in them - all done in post by yours truthly. For the endcard I pitched a roto-wipe off as he walked off camera. Heck, I even make a cameo in the spot working at my desk!

What I did:
Learn Attack was a Clickhole fake learning show that had always been somewhat of a pipe-dream, filmed a year before I'd started working there, and we were able to finally make it happen! I'm not going to mince words: Learn Attack is my favorite project I've ever worked on. It was five episodes long, and one of the most fun things I've ever helped create. It seemed to resonate with Clickhole's fans as well. To this day people still comment "When is Learn Attack coming back?" and the answer is unfortunately probably never.

Details:
When this idea was first wafted my way, Clickhole gave me some nice buzzwords like, "Snickering Skunk" and "Aww shucks, tee hee" and that led to the skunk above being animated. This was the first film shoot I'd ever been on, with the important job of "How should we line up the camera?" and "How do we make it look like the cartoon skunk is actually on the bed?"

Details:
Is this impressive or important enough to include on my website? Probably not. Am I doing it anyways? You bet. If left to my own devices, this is the content I would naturally produce.

What I did:
Sportology was the first big Onion project I worked on. While I'd love to be able to claim to have done all of it, I can only claim most of it. By most of it I mean graphical overlays, the parallaxing photos, and (in the example above) a cool transition from live-action footage to my coworker Scott's 3D archery range.

Details:
Due in part to being brought on to work on social media in the first place, I worked with the art department at The Onion to do some branding for their alternative to Facebook "Onion Social." In addition to animating the mock interface, I was also given the abstract task of creating a visualization of an Algorithm that people could toss meat into. If that sounds interesting to you, have I got the perfect video linked for you above!

Details:
There have so far been 2 seasons of The Onion's first original podcast "A Very Fatal Murder" and I got to animate the preview for both. For the first season I recreated the head of a wind turbine in 3D and composited it into the promotional image for the podcast. The second season's promotional material was a little more difficult, but I worked with the art director and podcast producers to arrive at the above tweet.

What did I Do?:
On the eye video, I did everything that wasn't the 3D Rabbit sequence. On the "You're Wrong" video, a lot of the design of the words and how they animated on and off was me, as well as the opening title. The text ended up being the show's packaging moving forward.

What is this?
In an effort to keep myself up on my traditional 2D animation skills I animated this big old anime-style punch. It's just a work in progress and I need to actually take it from sketch to finished product, but I'm including it on my website because it's the best example of my traditional animation skills as we currently sit here in 2019.

What was this?
Rough Cuts is a pet project we always had kicking around the back burner at The Blank Frame (my company I co-founded) when we wanted to work on something for ourselves. It's a sort of complex idea for a show, but to try and break it down to its core: Rough Cuts is a show about the filmmaking industry that follows some of the cliche people you would expect to meet in that business. But they're all animals.

These two shorts were sort of a "proof of concept" for how the show would eventually look quality-wise (four years later, personal opinion, the quality could stand to increase), as well as an introduction to some of the characters you'd see in the show. The first short features Dusty and Wally, our hero and villain. The second short features Kat, the love interest of Dusty who, as a fox, is not really interested in squirrels. It also features Chewy, whom I've described above.

As I said, these were sort of "proof-of-concept" projects to experiment working with different programs together. The backgrounds were made in Photoshop, the characters were animated with Flash, and it was all put together as a final product using After Effects for camera and lighting. I rigged each of the characters and animated them myself. I also made each of the backgrounds in Photoshop myself.

What is this?
iTey was born from an idea I had one winter about a girl finding a yeti. One doodle led to another, and we decided it would be a wonderful short. So we went to work on it.

The focus of this project was entirely on making something that was, for the most part, stylistically a little different than we normally would make. iTey was also an exercise in figuring out how complex we could get with After effects and 2D Environments (note reflections in the icicles in the cave).

Things to note: All the music was made by me. I'm really proud of it! At the time I don't think the Rubberhose AE plugin existed and if I could go back and do it all over again, the character animation would be so much better.

What is this?
How old is too old for a piece to be included on your portfolio? This was one of my first finals in college, the traditional Flour Sack animation from 2D Animation 1, and it remains to this day a testament to what I know I can accomplish as an artist. I had the due date wrong, and thought I had 48 hours to finish this entire project. So I finished it in 48 hours. Hand-drawn frame-by-frame on a light table, I will never stop featuring this on my portfolio.

What I did:
Fun fact: I was originally hired at The Onion to produce content for their under-development Snapchat Discover channel, with content from Clickhole and The Onion. It's all un-released content because the Discover channel never got off the ground. That work didn't go to waste though! Most of what we made was templatized and turned into content for Instagram and Instagram Stories.

This is an article from the launch, which coincided with the Olympics in Rio. And here's some praise the entire team recieved from how successful our Instagram has been as a whole!
Here's an example of the Weather template I made. The team making the stories each day would simply need to check off which weather type they were using (Sunny, Partly Cloudy, Rain, Snow, etc.), type the text in a box that automatically sized, and export a single comp. So simple that folks with zero prior After Effects knowledge could do it!

Details:
Here's something fun: Facebook Live. No hear me out, there's so much that can actually be done with it outside of simply making a live video. We made some live videos at work for The Onion, Clickhole, and The AV Club; so I wanted to experiment a little bit at home as well. With the right idea and the right tools, it's easy to set up!

What I did:
I animated an awesome cat is what I did. I went on set, storyboarded it, rigged up this cat in After Effects, and went to town over the course of two weeks. I'm pretty happy with the personality I gave this cat.

Details:
After The Onion, my friend Nate asked me if I knew how to edit, which yeah. I might not know how to compile footage, but I can compile video clips into a compelling enough narrative. He passed an editing job on to me that he'd been doing for a YouTuber. Now, at the time I had no idea it was Mark Rober, but after a quick audition, here I am now editing Mark's videos and doing some motion graphics on top to boot. Honestly, you can never have too many skills because you never know where it can lead!