There is a dolphin who lost her tale in Churaumi Aquarium.
Her name is Fuji.
She was attacked by an unknown disease which resulted in infecting her flukes.
After a surgery, Fuji lost 75% of her flukes and couldn’t swim like before.

Depressed Fuji gained weight.
So this projected started- to create an artificial fin for Fuji!
Bridgestone Co (Tire maker) and acrylic sculpture teamed up and created several artificial fins after trial and error.

Now Fuji is used to her flukes less body and can swim like other. She uses her artificial fin to participate in the show and corporates with the research.

I met Fuji in the Dolphin Lagoon. She is very friendly and will come very close to you.

You can read a full story of Fuji here!

Jodi & Kota’s baby shower was the best one ever!
Since babies can only see black & white, Jodi decided to create a mural in monochrome. (with a little bit of red and gold!)
The theme was “animals”, I know- I LOVE TO DRAW CUTE ANIMALS!
As you can see from the image, I got too excited and kept drawing. ( I should have slowed down.)

Although I kept telling myself to slow down, I couldn’t. I was having too much fun.
My friend Katie brought a DVD of Pablo Picasso drawing and it was too inspiring. All I wanted to do was to draw.
I hope to watch the DVD soon.

I met Jodi and Katie after college when we all studied at Dalvero Academy for drawings. We used to go to locations and reportage all the time. Now I feel rather stuck in commercial world and only draw cute characters. I should try to wrap up the year of 2008 with some reportage drawings. (That will be my goal!)

Thank you Jodi and Kota for having me there.
I will meet you soon, Juna Koko!

Finally finished the Forensic Lab that will be in our film!
The empty shelf to the side will have tons of formaldehyde like below

….? How come some pickles and gold fish are sneaking in there?

Ok, let’s get to the details

Soda can, paper & pencil, ashtray with cigarettes and a tissue box (and a mug hiden)

More formaldehyde. (Including a little pig)

Blood swab, test tubes and a computer.

Even a mouse! Is it going to get caught?

Finger print analysis.

Remaining clothing in zip lock bags.

A bulletin board of Zodiac Killer.

Everybody needs to be organized!

I bet many people are wondering how small this set is, so here is the picture of me holding a soda can.

small post it & pencil to the left and real version on the right.

These are props for a forensic scientist.

Last….


Boo!

I’ve always loved the story “The Elves and the Shoemaker.” It’s a cute little story of how elves made shoes overnight for the poor shoemaker.
As I was building these shoes for our upcoming film, “Something Left, Something Taken”, I was seriously wishing that elves will finish all these by next morning.
Well, keep wishing. I had to finish them.

I put my shoes (size female 5) to the left so you can compare the size.

Now you can really see the size.

Also, we did another voice over session with Erin and Kyle last weekend.
Still revising here and there with the writing and animatic.
Erin’s been a great all-around sound designer/musician through out! THANKS!

They Might Be Giant’s article was in The New York Times on August 24th.
See the very top left?
That is a still from “Davy Crockett in Outer Space” music video that we made for them!
My hands are in the Times! Hooray!

I’ve been teaching animation classes at Parsons The New School of Design’s Pre-college department.

It’s usually once a week on Saturdays for Fall and Spring semesters but Summer is different!
First, it was “Summer Intensive Studies” for high school Juniors and Seniors from all over the world.
Monday to Friday, 9:00 to 12:00 everyday. Plus editing films and preparing. So It ended up being full time job for 4 weeks. Learned a lot from this experience, and I really enjoyed the intensity of this class. We got to do tons of field trips like watching Wall-E, visiting the Museum of Moving Image, and visiting Nick Jr Studio. Also had 2 wonderful guest speakers, clay-animator Andy Kennedy and theater actor, Tim McDonough.

Here are some students’ final projects.

By Denise Rivas

By Lizzie Marks

By Jasper Johnson and Arvind Menon

By Olivia Pellicer

Then after 1 week of “vacation,” I had to teach Summer Academy for middle school students for 2 weeks. Here are some students final projects.

By Arielle Friedman, Maddie Kasemichael & Ali Soong

By Zac Mau & Will Tavlin

Great job students! Now I have 1.5 months off until the Fall semester to concentrate on my “real job”!!

If you want to check out more animations from the summer course and also from the previous Fall and Spring semester, check out Parsons Animation account on Youtube!

We just finished illustrating/designing a 12 page booklet for Child Abuse Prevention Services.
The audience is 2nd and 3rd graders, so we tried to make the book as fun as possible while still being informative.

Bella the Bunny and Fargo the Fox will teach kids “what is ok” and “what’s not” in their daily lives.
You can check more illustrations here

We just completed a brand new music video for They Might Be Giants and Playhouse Disney.

Making this video was a lot of fun and we got to work with a very talented illustrator, David Cowles.

Here is some production art from the video.

A model sheet for Davy Crockett. I don’t think we ever showed him from behind.

Portion of the storyboards.

This is the final animatic with some rough animation.
You might notice that the beginning is slightly different.

chalkboard/ character animation

Here is the super high-tech super model that we used for video reference.

Yes, I made a paper rocket.

Then we imported and rotoscoped the video footage in flash.

And here comes the most exciting part.

We projected the flash file to the chalkboard and traced it.

It’s actually a lot more difficult than just “tracing” because you have to maneuver your body so that you don’t block the light from the projector.

Then each time we photographed, max covered up the projector with a huge piece of foam board!

puppets

My favorite part was creating the theater ! I felt like I was decorating a pre-k classroom.
Crafted puppets were photographed and composited in After Effects.

collage

For the fight scene, we created the smallest green screen ever.

cleaning up

Our studio was covered with chalk. And we coughed for the next few days.
It took almost full day to clean everything. To be honest, that was actually MY favorite part of the process. (Max didn’t help.)
Enjoy the video!