'Beautiful Night' film Part 1, stills & layouts

Part 1 of 'Beautiful Night', my BFA4 (mostly) stop-motion film at CalArts about a slave girl disillusioned by beauty, wealth and acceptance.

Beautiful Night (Part 1) from Marvelous Things on Vimeo.

The rest to be uploaded soon!
Narration lovingly provided by Deborah Asiimwe
Violin & Percussion recording by:
Laura Geier, Violin & Composition
Greg Loewer, Percussion (Dumbek & Riq)
Roger Marcelo, Recording Engineer

Made @ CalArts 2009

The images uploaded backwards, darn! Okay, well pretend you're watching my film backwards.

Some 'Beautiful Night' (film 2009) characters & puppets

Some renders of the consorts, their replaceable heads and a camel with fully moving hinges. Designs of the main character (Leila) was posted a long while ago here!

All puppets are first designed on paper, then scanned into the computer, colored, textured & rendered with each part as a separate piece. They are then printed out, glued to cardstock, cut each piece with an x-acto blade, and finally sewn together to create the puppet suitable for animation.

More to come soon...!

Of silkworms & stalactites

My parents are spectacular and gave me BBC's Planet Earth series for Christmas, so I spent my spare time soaking in the incredible imagery of creation. And then some friends were practicing for their band and I got all doodly. Some sketches from that night:


Narwhals are real.


Jerry and Nick rocking out. That's a sugar-glider escaping from under Nick's beanie.
Sketches of the leafy-looking leg eventually turned into the pair for the installation.

Silkworm & stalactite doodles eventually turned into this:

Silkworms in New Zealand are the coolest cause they glow, so when you look up it looks like a starry night sky inside this cave!

Historic Superheroes Pt. 2

In a previous post I mentioned a class project in which I turned Marie Antoinette into a modern-day super hero, but I never included her other team members. There was a whole backstory about a Japanese scientist who resurrected them to help save the world from Communism, but that's besides right now. So here they are!



Nikola Tesla - ladies man and celibate scientist extraordinaire. Vegetarian. Builds death-ray guns. Hates round things and pearl jewelry. Also fond of pigeons. The favorite pigeon has a bionic eye with x-ray vision. Only one of these things is untrue.

Aaaand...


Amelia Earhart! Bless that woman.
In this version of history, our supreme female aviator did in fact disappear amongst the clouds. However, she was snatched up by our friend the Japanese scientist who - to save the world like all good doers - fashioned her a jet pack to carry out her stealthy missions. She's mostly the leader of this clan.

Here's some silly doodles I did of Marie, she's just fun: