you
I think a lot of my work splits between
really black and white or really
colorful and and I think I'm really in
love with this idea of binaries and
polarities and things that are kind of
shifting back and forth I've always been
into arts and crafts since I was a kid
and then sort of in the late 90s when a
lot of home video stuff came on the
market I think the first big thing was I
found out that I you could actually do
blue screen you know King at home and I
like near to that big time and I started
making my own like Star Wars fan film I
think that was my romance with the
technology and I kind of made my own
kind of visual effects at home and then
I shared my work with an HR lady yet an
FX company and she showed me what her
artists that she hired do and then they
were all these beautiful exquisite life
drawings she was like if you really want
to do this you need to focus on the art
you know because the technology is going
to change all the time and during high
school like went Art Center in Pasadena
and took some life drawing classes that
was like a big turning point for me when
it became like a discipline and you know
then I went to art school at USC during
that time I missed doing a lot of the
digital filmmaking kind of effects
experimentation that needs to do when I
was younger so I began incorporating the
two and made a film outside of the
curriculum
correctly with the coachman Dollface was
the film that I made it was really
pivotal I think because YouTube had only
been about two or three years old at the
time and I put it on YouTube not really
knowing what was gonna happen before I
knew it it was featured on the front
page and the first phone call I got was
from JJ Abrams office and he brought me
in was like he should direct I think I
got this wave of encouragement to follow
this this new path and it was a little
scary at first but I was felt really
challenged by it I feel like my work
starting out was very dark and I you
know I was really inspired by Chris
coming him and stuff like dark city and
dark cyberpunk movies from the 90s and I
think a big changing point was when I
started doing music videos I did a video
Farabi Buffalo I love Jim Henson and the
Muppets and I wanted to make kind of
this psychedelic universe where there's
all these coral reef creatures growing
everywhere the culture of music videos
is just a lot more forgiving and I think
that you can experiment with technology
creatively just a lot more I think the
technology was super instrumental in my
understanding of art and vice-versa
I got a hold of After Effects when I was
really young and and also Maya I learned
a lot just by tinkering with the 3d gap
graphics interface really starting to
think about visual effects in terms of
2d and 3d
these are drawings from solids this is a
really story early a puppet sort of
design sketches this is just sort of
make up ideas
I was really bogged down with work so I
started doodling more and then I
suddenly felt like super super
rejuvenated to make something like way
more ambitious and uncompromising and
than anything else I'd done at the time
so I really wanted to make sure that
this film was about bodies converging
into infinity you know that it was about
these kind of polarities that were kind
of fusing into like some gray area in
between this was a houston salt cyst for
the for the girls in the beginning and
we took these pieces like this and like
we had someone hiding behind the girls
like pulling it and then we reversed it
to make it look like it was growing out
of them but again it's just like vinyl
strips that that my costumer Lindsay
said together and fake grapes yarn all
the stuff that we found in the fashion
district of downtown LA this is from the
Bjork video and this is one of the props
we built this actually has real
Icelandic moss on it which I'm not sure
if I was allowed to bring back
I think York is on a very academic
trajectory right now with her biophilia
educational series that's perhaps why
she sought me how does it was right for
you know what
right now
I think my work has become more
confident and ambitious I kind of hit a
point of stagnation earlier with my work
where I was really relying heavily on my
previous skills or compositing and now I
feel like I'm kind of happily charging
towards new tools and using practical
puppetry and practical effects to kind
of marry digital and it's that kind of
marriage that I want to pursue and more
wholeheartedly now than I did before
you