AwkwardAI

Night of the Lepus is one of my favorite movies.   Concept: A Million Eyes in the Daark is both a reference to the poster for Night of the Lepus(along with several other old sci-fi/horror posters like the beast with 1,000,000 eyes) and the old cliche of cowboys resting around an open fire at the end of the day. It was a prime excuse to build a piece of art around observoors and campfire parcel installations.  The cacti worked very well also. The Process:   I knew 2 things that I specifically wanted out of this piece of art: 1. It would be pixelated but also 3D.   2. The flicker on the fire would be a lighting effect within the 3D environment. It was very important that the light not be represented in pixel form but as an overall lighting tone/effect. This was to sell the 3D look. Obviously the eyes would glow, but to achieve the effect of the poster influence I needed the Observoors as dark as possible. This means that each observoor is actually 2 images: The glowing...

Mutaant was the first piece I conceptualized for the Fake Gotchi project(found here ), however it was designed after Christmaas Gotree.   The Concept:   Being the first piece I envisioned, I wanted something that could serve as an introductory piece and a PFP. Thinking about PFP’s and how they would fit into the Fake Gotchi Collection, I decided to draw on something familiar and universally recognized but with a “gotchi twist”. I wanted do make something that payed homage to the original crypto punks. There’s an argument to be made that it could’ve easily been a “zombie” gotchi but making it a mutant like MAYC gave me a lot more creative license to incorporate some of the weirdness I was imagining in my head. Like tentacles, a third eye, and a smaller gotchi “growth”.   The Process:   This piece walks a very fine line between being both polished and unpolished in the same breath. My initial pass of this was too perfect, I wanted certain pixel ratios but I also wanted...

This was the first Fake Gotchi piece I created.  Found  here . The Concept:   To make a frenly, amusing, ubiquitous GIF that would become the staple Aavegotchi Christmas NFT. I imagined gotchis who wanted to celebrate Christmas only to find a lack of trees in the digital gotchiverse. One brave gotchi volunteered to be a tree, only to keep getting shocked by standing in the snow wrapped in Christmas lights.   It is inspired particularly by 2 things:   1. Chevy Chase in Christmas Vacation, getting shocked while wrapped in Christmas lights. 2. “Christmas Troy” from the TV Series Community . Which Chevy Chase is also in. The Process: For a Christmas release it felt topical and funny but there were a host of challenges to pull off this GIF.   As simple as the piece looks, it was actually devastatingly complex to put together. Most of the heavy lifting was done in the editing.   The main issue was the loop and the snow. How do you make the snow fall continuo...

I knew I wanted to be in film before I graduated high school but I was also attracted to animation. I was particularly inspired by mixed media animation utilized by Soviet animators and Ralph Bakshi (Who I had the honor to meet and hang out with in 2011).   My first animation class was in 2006, we made our own South Park animations in After Effects. By the end of the first week I realized I had a knack for making perfect GIF loops. (Thanks ADHD!!) In 2007 a theatre director saw me perform with my band and asked me to join the theatre company as a live composer. I wrote and recorded pre-arranged compositions as well as performed live along with the plays. When they found out that I had animation and editing skills; I started creating digital scenes and art that were integrated and projected as a backdrop into the live plays. At the time there were only a handful of productions in the world that were doing this. By 2009 I had beaten 33,000 applicants to earn a prestigious internship ...