“Chicken Little” was my first computer-animated film working with Maya animation software.  I mainly animated Fish-Out-of-Water, the foreign exchange student from under the sea.  

I really enjoy animating pantomime characters.  Actions and facial expressions communicate everything.  Using the new technology of computer animation was really fun.  I challenged myself to achieve the kinds of performances in computer that I achieved in traditional animation.

Be sure to check the computer animation clip of Fish-Out-of-Water on my Animation Theater page.

Stone Sculpture

Animating rigs on a computer gave me a true insight into animating in perspective.  The z-axis mostly tells no lies.  Seeing true (mostly) 3-D revealed the subtleties I was missing in my hand-drawn idea of 3-D.  This somewhat corrected my dimensional thinking.  

Somehow this has a big influence in carving stone in real 3-D.  Stone sculpture is a subtractive medium and you have to visualize the form in the stone before you cut away the chaff.  A solid knowledge of the third dimension is useful.

Fish-Out-of-Water was more or less a little kid in a fish suit.  He didn’t do too many fishy things.  I have never sculpted a fish, but I have sculpted reptiles and amphibians.  In creating them, I have a different texture to my thinking.  Not little kids in fish suits and not furry little mammals. “One Handsome Frog“, “Hang On“, “The House Gecko” and “The Last Dinosaur” are my non-furry stone sculptures to date.