J Bills / Compositor / Demo Reel: Animation

Standard shot representative of the challenges on this film. Shots were often broken into several layers or passes. Bluescreen, paint fixes, tweening/motion fixes, puppet seam fixes, and making it all work in stereo with less than stellar/non-existent Shake stereo tools.

I comped all of the snow globe shots from the film. Initial particle tests were passed over in favor of a live action (4k Red cam) solution. To insert the live action particles into the shots, a motion matte had to be constructed so that the occlusions within the snow globes would appear correct, and also in stereo.

Tricky "theater" set extension where the camera move filming the primary live action had to be (literally) reverse engineered to be able to film the plate meant to be the opposite side of the theater. This allowed me to graft the 2 plates together with some comp love, using essentially a 1 sided set piece and making it work.

This shot was a jigsaw puzzle of heavy rig removal that a single roto artist and I had to piece together. Involved a good amount of paint and grading "glue" in comp.

Other "highlight" shots from this project. The candle shot was a frame by frame digital paint reconstruction job (500+ frames) completed in Silhouette, in stereo! The fog sequence was fun, as we shot our own specific shot elements on a stage using dry ice fog.

Some highlights from Season 2 of The Shivering Truth. A lot of set extensions, and finding ways to maximize our "bang for buck" with a little compositing. Most all of the shots were plates and stock elements, but the knife cluster shots contained CG knives. (several puppets were harmed in the making of this production)

Opening title card of the film - which had to be composited to work in stereo.

A pair of challenging shots that had dramatic Z depth, and elements that were tricky to make work in stereo. In the case of the Moochy the fly shot a specialized rig had to be applied to Moochy's wings to make them appear with the correct separation. The toy orb shot had significant transparency, which is always a stereo challenge.

A few shots representing my work on Seasons 1 and 2 of the animated streamer "The Portal," which won an Emmy for outstanding design and animation. In addition to standard compositing of the CG characters, typically the stadium environment and jumbotron were handled entirely in comp.

A couple shots from some Fox Sports MLB promos we did at Psyop, around 2003. This was treating the footage with a high contrast illustrated look, working in grainy paper textures underneath, and layering with actual custom filmed paint splatters (all in house, no stock footage). I was mostly responsible for delivering all of the roto'd layers and helping prep the paint elements for use in Flame.

An ad for Bombay Sapphire that won a Silver Clio. I was responsible for many of the 2d elements, including the characters and water ripples. Inventive use of roto applied to cars in 3D space, to attain a faux 3D look (true to the feel of the spot) without having to animate and rig full CG characters.

2 ads for Aeroplan that show Psyop's flair for experimental looks. The first (cafe) spot wove 2d elements into a 3d world sprinkled with illustration and typography. The 2nd (walking/playground/sailing) was a toon shader applied to 3d animation, with significant fixes and comp help applied to the renders.

Highly specialized graphical treatment to the live action footage on these spots for LG, to play as more "comic book like." Required a heavy amount of "2D TD" work to help bring what ended up being in upwards of 40 or more rotoshapes to life for character, clothing and weight lines, and pass all of that across to the Flame.

To make these live action-puppeted shoes come to life and behave like a Cheetah for Reebok via Imaginary Forces, I had to employ a variety of rig removal processes and paint fixes. Many scenes were created entirely in post by repo'ing and splicing new shoes/poses out of the montage of materials and stills.

I'm putting these spots under the "Psyop" category, but in reality it was shoe commercials from Psyop (Marshalls), Sprocketship (Merrell) and Sockeye (Adidas). Portland is a big shoe town, gotta have 'em on the reel! And these all are well qualiified, with unique looks and animation.

In this sequence of ads for Target, design elements flow in and out of the treated live action footage, creating a bubbly feel. An impressive amount of roto was needed to bring each scene to life, and tricky things like hair keys were in abundance.

On this batch of spots for Carrington College, I served as the compositing lead (4 artists) and helped on-set when filming plates - several of the other commercials in this campaign were more live action oriented vs this one, which was more CG driven. Comp was tasked with CG integration on the renders, and creating the background environments.

My first stop motion work! Was just helping a little on this (mostly advising, really) ambitious stop motion short, which eventually became the basis for the film 9.99

A sampling of shots from ParaNorman, where I served as Lead Compositor. The usual stop motion multi-plate compositing with heavy 2d cleanup. The owl is CG. There are some nice subtle additions in comp, like some slight flaring when he points his phone (that is lighting his way) towards camera. The Uncle Prenderghast extreme closeup needed some equally extreme cleanup for his seam areas. The town square shot was Laika's first crowd system shot, and we were using an early iteration of Renderman's Deep Compositing toolset.