DANYK

2008-09-29T20:21:49Z

Here's a recent piece for the October group show at the Pony Club Gallery. The theme is black, white and one color. I sketched on paper and scanned the drawings and then used the Wacom to draw and texture in Photoshop. I printed on parchment paper and mounted the parchment onto spray painted card stock and gave each a final varnish. The varnish soaked through the parchment like grease on paper letting the spray paint come through a bit. Here is what the final print looks like.

Blue Version

Pink version

2008-09-15T04:07:43Z

When I was a kid I made little flip books or claymations on our family's VHS camcorder. My brother, who is now working at Activision as an animator, got a copy of Autodesk Animator when we were kids back in the early 90's. That was the first time I animated on a computer.

I've been working as a motion graphics artist for some time now. My job has been to make text and imagery fly around and usually in fairly abstract ways. Even with all my motion graphics experience, I always thought that if I ever needed to express emotion through the body mechanics of character animation I really wouldn't know where to begin.

Through research and a few recommendations, I discovered an online school that specializes in animation. The school, Animation Mentor, is a mentorship program comprised of master animators from studios like Pixar and ILM. Whenever I see an animated film and I truly believe in the character's personality and motives, it still blows me away that these animators can make me fall in love with or totally hate an imaginary creature. I feel truly grateful to have the chance to learn from people that have that kind of creative magic built into their bones.

2008-09-14T10:08:54Z

I made this music video last year on a tiny baby budget and a computer that was painfully outdated and slow. The nicest piece of gear was a DVX100 camera which a friend of mine was nice enough to bring out and shoot with for free. We had to grab chances when everyone was available and figure things out last minute with no prep time. I slammed through principal production as quickly as possible saying every two minutes,"I'll fix it in post! Let's move on!". Every shot had to be stabilized, reoriented or manipulated somehow in post which demolished the quality in a lot of shots.

The video was edited and animated entirely in After Effects on the slowest computer on earth! Every shot was worked on at quarter resolution with nothing in real-time. The whole process was a guestimation at what it was going to look like while I was working on it. Edit, animate, render, go eat a sandwich, come back and see what happened. Since the official video release, the video has been airing on Headbanger's Ball on MTV2, MTV Europe and was the #1 most streamed video on MTV2.com.

2008-09-14T10:01:49Z

This is an old After Effects demo of my news graphics work from 2000-2004.
The graphics department at the TV station usually consisted of me and one other guy in a dimly lit room. Art direction was non-existent and was left up to whoever was given the task to handle the job from concept to completion. The deadlines were horrendous and usually gave me little more than a couple days to create an entire branded graphics package on top of having to produce graphics for the daily shows in an afternoon. It was a grueling lesson in pressure and deadlines and was mostly worth it as a exercise in discipline.

2008-09-14T09:45:47Z

This is an illustration I created using a Wacom tablet and was done using custom brushes with the brush engine in Photoshop.

2008-09-14T09:34:11Z

Press photo for Danava. In March '08 issue of Spin Magazine.
"Sponsored by Gibson, Zildjian and V05 Extra Body" -The Portland Mercury