Almost 3 years ago I launched my web site with a vague idea where I was going. I spilled a bunch of digital paint on digital canvas and voila! A website of my own. It looked like no other and that was both good and bad. Obviously as an artist you always want to have a unique design, but I’m sure that it was often too messy and unconventional for some people. I don’t base all of my decisions solely on what others think, but it’s idiotic to ignore your visitors vibes and feedback. And in my head my site didn’t gel together. It felt like a half baked mixture of my CSS design, my WordPress blog, and my Vimeo channel.

So I’ve converted the whole site over to WordPress, and I have a much more organized and sensible structure for posts. I’m going to post my original stuff, as well as any new tutorials. I felt like 3 years with one look seems like and eternity, and revamping my look was the way to go. I wish I could take full credit for the design, but my php skills are limited so Press 75 laid out the foundation to highlight videos instead of posts and I fit the site with my color scheme and existing content.

The orange and blue colors contrast well, and the site has a very fresh feel to it. If you don’t like orange and blue you probably are just tired of losing.

Please let me know of any kinks, it’s still a work in progress but I am just going to keep the site live while I tweak.

The tutorials page was getting very sloppy. The page was scrolling down forever, and I hope to keep adding to it, so I had to do something eventually. I now made it as just a kind of menu page, and each tutorial opens in it’s own page. It might help SEO wise too, I don’t know.

I added and subtracted from my reel, some stuff needed to be off there for sure.

I should have a new tutorial ready for next week, keep your eyes peeled.

I added a few clips to my reel. I also picked a less obnoxious music track. Watch it and get your funk on.

Well actually it wasn’t slight, I kind of re-coded the whole thing. A few cosmetic changes too. Please alert me of any glitches.

So let’s see if I still remember how to work this blog thingy.

Here is my updated reel. I removed some car commercial junk that wasn’t going to impress anyone. I added my comic book spot that still hasn’t been on TV and won’t ever be, unless somebody wants me to freelance it for them.

I’ve got an After Effects tutorial idea in the works, but I’m procrastinating on it because things outside of working on computers all day have kept me happily occupied.

So I finally posted a new tutorial. This one shows you how to make a crumpling paper animation in Cinema 4D, like this video.

 I discovered the basis for this tutorial while doing a lot of experimenting with the Cloth Tag in Cinema 4D. It definitely saves a ton of time rather than the alternative of keyframing the entire animation. I would recommend playing around with the settings rather than just using what I gave you; you can get different results for you animation and experiment a little bit.

I’m going to make an effort to post tutorials more frequently. If you become a registered user I will send out a notice when a new tutorial is posted, or you can subscribe to my feed.

 Feel free to email me any questions you may have about this tutorial.

I felt my home page was in need of a bit of a makeover, so I created a new welcome video. I consulted my Xbox for inspiration and decided to create a Guitar Hero style video for my site. After doing tons of interactive research while observing the details and nuances of the game, I did my best to recreate the look and feel of the game with Cinema 4D, Photoshop, Motion, and After Effects. If you’ve never seen or played Guitar Hero (or even more awesomer, Rockband) then I suggest you head down to somewhere like Best Buy and take the floor sample for a spin.
I’m pleased with the way this came out. It’s good to know that all of my research and hard work payed off.

I’m planning on doing more welcome videos to the site every so often. I’ll either have them play randomly if I can figure out how or I will have a way to cycle between them.