Kanye West "Mercy"

I recently wrapped up on doing compositing/roto work over at Omega Darling for a new Kanye West video called "Mercy". The video may not visually be the most impressive thing ever, but it's actually a miracle the whole thing came together. The elements we had to work with posed some very interesting challenges for compositing. A mechanized camera was used which was supposed to make the same exact camera move for every take, but unfortunately all of the takes were all slightly off. This made compositing very challenging, especially since it was such a geometric background. We basically had to stitch multiple takes together in a way that made the video look natural and seamless. And finally, here's the fruit of our labors,

Kanye West [MERCY] ft. Big Sean, Pusha T, and 2 Chainz from nabil elderkin on Vimeo.


Hope you enjoy it!


Also sometime soon I will be posting some short Flash animations I made for Sockeye Media. They're part of a series called Mother Goose Club. It's a far cry from Kanye for sure, but they're very cute and I look forward to being able to share them with people.


If I'm not employed this week I'm going to make it my goal to start designing some new elements for an updated website. I think it's time for a change. An old friend of mine is going to code it for me in exchange for a short animation for his site. It seems like a great trade to me!

GE video

I helped out on this video for GE around Christmas time. It's just a bunch of sliding images moving around, but the editing was great. Editing by Matt Kliegman. Sliding images by me. Enjoy!

I also just wrapped on a long term project for Omega Darling. Some day it will be released... about 4 years from now. I'll be sure to share it at that time.

New Purse!

The last week I had off from work, so I decided to finally bunker down and do something productive like make a new purse. Voila! I think it might be my favorite I've made so far (which is really saying something since I've been making my own bags for 10 years). It's constructed out of vinyl fabric I got from a friend's sister who wanted to get rid of it- lucky for me! The interior is lined with cotton. Sewing vinyl is really hard on my machine and my hands. Pinning that stuff is a nightmare. I kept having to ice my fingertips! But I think the end result was worth it :) .

The interior has 3 accordion pockets for extra storage.

In other news I'm in the process of learning Maya finally. I've got a pretty good grip on the animating part, now I figure I'll work backwards and learn rigging, then return to learning more about modeling. Over the week of new years an ad I worked on for Samsung with Omega Darling aired on the massive jumbotron in Times Square! It was really exciting to see my work that big and to know that millions of people saw it. I also recently had to turn down a full time job on a show I really wanted to work on due to money. I don't understand how people expect animators to live on such puny salaries. It's especially mind blowing because we do a job that most people couldn't even dream of being CAPABLE of doing. It's a really hard skill to master, and thus it deserves fair wages. Sigh...