I had a fun project a couple months ago with my friends at Whittier doing some animation for a video on the homepage of the website for Equality Charter School. This project was done in collaboration with Montana Scheff, Ava Penner and others at Whittier. My part was making the lines and other animated elements dance. You can check it out on their website here, or just view the video below.
Category Archives: Video
Post Cereals Social Media Videos
I’ve made a number of short Post Cereals social media animations for my friends at Public Works (in collaboration with Brian Hurley, Chris Henderson, Derek Bitter and others). These are intended as ephemeral content for various brands’ social media presences to keep them current. They are generally accompanied by copy-writing to give them some context, they usually are very short, and they often loop. Besides the long series of them that I did for Pebbles cereal featuring some anthropomorphic animated cereal flakes, I have done a lot of other ones for Pebbles and a number of other Post brands. Here is a sampling of some of them.
Sour Patch Kids Cereal: It’s Not a Dream
Great Grains: Crunchy Pecans
Great Grains: Tree
Cinnamon Pebbles: Groundhog
Malt-O-Meal: Jackpot
Pebbles: Snow Flakes
Pebbles: Video Game Day
Common Bond Communities Promotional and Social Video
I recently collaborated with my friends Zeb Carlson and designer Rachel Carpenter on this promotional and social video for the nonprofit Common Bond Communities.
Kids Ezy-Dose Animations
Here are some animations showing how some interesting products work for putting medicine into or sucking the snot out of children. I animated these for my pals at Public Works in collaboration with designer Paige Gregory.
SQUIRMISH: The Card Game of Brawling Beasties
Back in 2014, my oldest daughter became obsessed with Pokemon cards. I enjoyed the creativity of the cards, but when we sat down and figured out how to play the game, I found it pretty disappointing… but inspiring! The things that I did not enjoy about that game got me thinking about how a better card-battling game could be designed… and thus SQUIRMISH was born.
After spending a year or so developing, illustrating and testing the game, I initially self-published it using the print-on-demand service The Gamecrafter. I’m more of a maker-of-things than a seller-of-things, though, so I decided I wanted to find a publisher for it. My favorite game publisher, Gamewright, had an open submission policy, so I decided to send a copy of it their way. They were enthusiastic about it, and picked it up to publish in 2018.
Here is the promotional video I made for the game:
As the audience for the game has grown, it has received a number of reviews. Here are a few of them:
“There is a ton of replay ability here… All of the boys, including Dad, are fans of Pokémon and Squirmish has provided a fresh and simple take on card battling games. The variety that is found within the game is really amazing.” – 8 0f 10 Stars at The Dice Have It.
“It’s really fun to play, really funny cards, and really fun to see all the different types of abilities and how you can try to utilize those during each game.” – Landon Squire at How Lou Sees It
“Squirmish is a fun, family-friendly game which surprised me a bit with the depth of play. When I read the rules, I thought that it would be too kiddy-like. While the artistic style and the humorous text on the cards makes it appropriate for kids, the actions on the cards does give the gamer something to work with! … If you’re looking for a game to introduce the concepts of individual card actions and combat, this would be a good choice. It also will be a good filler for gamers looking for a few laughs mixed in with their gaming.” – Dale Yu at opinionatedgamers.com
Squirmish was one of 16 games picked as one of “The Best New Puzzles and Games in 2018” by The Noise on Toys. Squirmish made #58 on the top 100 list of games at Benjamin’s Board Game Blog!
You can learn more about SQUIRMISH at the website for the game that I built here.
You can download the rule book for SQUIRMISH here.
Currently I am working both on creating an expansion to the initial game, and on a SQUIRMISH video game that I am developing in collaboration with Faust Logic.
For a more thorough summary of the process I went through making SQUIRMISH, you can read this article I wrote about it on Board Game Geek.
Here is a video I made on how to play SQUIRMISH:
Whiteboard Animation for the i.e. network
I had a fun, quick project last month doing a whiteboard animation for the i.e. network. Technically, I didn’t use a whiteboard, though… I used big sheets of paper, and shot frames of me drawing and moving around post-it notes (or did they move themselves?). It is always a treat to get away from the computer for a while and actually shoot some stop-motion animation. Rick Kupchella at the i.e. network provided me a script to work from, and gave me a generous amount of leeway collaborating on coming up with the visuals. You can see the results below.