Mikey's Crash was my senior year thesis film at the Rhode Island School of Design. It is the most ambitious synthesis of my abilities to date, combining stop-motion background fabrication, 2D animation, and compositing, all alongside a greater scope of collaboration on the project.
The film was co-created with Vinny Wang as we collaborated with 3 other crewmembers, and I reached out to more than 20 other artists both inside and outside of RISD to create the animated sequences above.
To achieve the mixed media appearance of our film, I created these mushrooms out of foam, assembled and painted them, photographed them, and then composited them together. The rightmost image was the first test of the idea, and the look of our film progressed from there using that same process of creation. Lee Tomlinson provided additional painting and fabrication help to take these designs to the next level.
These stills represent the final composited look of the film.
I made these character design drawings to create character packs, which were used to create and maintain a consistent style throughout the course of the animation.
Mikey's character design was created first and was a design that Vinny and I made different iterations of to figure out his look. Once we had a fairly solid idea of how we wanted Mikey to be, I made the final character design.
Sir's character was made later into the process as somewhat of a foil to Mikey, and his design was meant to reflect that. Vinny and I had a couple of initial ideas about how Sir could/should look, and I ultimately made the final character design.
Vinny came up with the design of the creatures and it was just about perfect from the start. Round enough to seem innocent, but hostile enough to still be a threat within the narrative.
For the design of the ship, Vinny came up with a couple different designs and we iterated back and forth until we eventually settled on one. After that, we needed to make a turnaround for the ship once it had crashed since we were initially going to try and 3d print our assets, so I made a half-turnaround for it. We ended up liking the look of stop motion fabrication, though, so I made this small foam model of the ship, and while there were small modifications after the fact to respond to various critiques, this was essentially the final design of the ship. I painted a first pass initially, but Lee Tomlinson did a second pass which, after minor adjustments, resulted in the final look of the ship. Lee also created a large-scale model of the ship, which was an enormous help to the production.
Very early into the production process, Vinny and I wanted to figure out what we wanted out colors to be for the film. We initially wanted the film's events to happen over the course of a single day with a lot of flat colors, so I made this color script to try and figure out what those different times of day should look like.
Some of the ideas of this early color script can be seen in the final product, but the final version of the film is very different than what we had previously imagined.
