Frankenkite

During my graduate studies, I took part in my program's Summer Industry Course, where teams of students worked with artists from Disney Animation Studios to create a 30-second animated short in just ten weeks. Over the course of the production, we had video-conferencing "dailies" meetings twice a week with a panel of Disney artists, and several of these artists made week-long visits to campus to assist us in person. My team of six people produced "Frankenkite," the story of a famous kite's bid for freedom. I was the Project Management Lead and Pipeline Lead on the project, but I also assisted with tasks such as lighting, compositing and modeling.

Lighting

Using Maya and Renderman (RIS), I created the lighting for this scene of a mad scientist’s lab, including some to complement the lighting generated by the electricity FX created by our effects lead. I also added compositing effects in Nuke. (Modeling, surfacing, layout, and effects in this scene were done by other team members.)

Rigging & Animation

I also rigged and animated the monster’s shadow, using 2D shadow puppet illustrations created by another team member.

Project Management

As the Project Management Lead for our short, I spent much of my time during production assisting and overseeing the team. This included maintaining a team work schedule (as seen above), preparing work-in-progress materials for feedback in our dailies meetings, handling communication with instructors and Disney mentors, and coordinating with team members to make sure deliverables were met and thus minimize time spent waiting on others.

Pipeline

I also helped the team manage our assets through all the stages of production, as the team Pipeline Lead. Our department has already developed a fairly robust internal pipeline, so my responsibility was mainly to learn the best practices from the pipeline admins, pass my learning on to my team, and work with them to develop our own team's approach for importing/exporting assets. As part of this, I created reference documents, such as the pipeline diagram seen above. I also assisted team members with troubleshooting unexpected pipeline errors.

Our Team

Finally, some acknowledgments: Shoutouts to my fellow members of Team Rocket: Soum, Dustin, Bailey, Josh, and Yolanda! Frankenkite would have never come together without our united effort. Our screen credits (shown in the text boxes above) reflect our Lead positions, but in reality, the whole team was contributing at all stages of the production. Thanks everyone, it was a pleasure working with you. (And special thanks to Bailey, who drew this rad illustration of our team!)

And thanks as well to our advisory team at Disney (especially Michelle Robinson, Brett Achorn, Rob Dressel, David Hutchins, and Dan Rice) and our support team at the Viz Lab (especially Andre Thomas, Gretchen Freitag, and Cameron Coker)! This course was a wonderful and unique experience that I'm very grateful to have had.