There isn’t too much art to share for my thesis. I had a pretty clear visual idea of what i was going to make and jumped straight into the animation. There were a few pieces that I did make, some colour tests and a few character scribbles. Here they are.
Just so I can add it to the archive here are the original lype-synce test i made for Jimmy’s character.
something to hide
unwelcome observations
nothing to hear here move along
Cub Scouts character lineup
early scouut leader
color ideas
Los Angeles Park concept painting – griffith park
Early jimmy design
LA Park landscape
originally there was going to be another little emo scouut that just smoked off to the side
We spell scouts S-C-O-U-U-T-S which makes us a completely different autonomous organization.
This was my masters thesis from USC Animation. It is an improvised comedy about the woes of scouting in the middle of urban Los Angeles. Scouuts came into being when I realized that my original thesis proposal was far to ambitious and needed to be scrapped. It was late in the semester and I needed something fast and so I turned to my best friend Devin Westberg, who just happened to be an improv comedian, for help. Devin gathered a talented group of friends from the Improv Olympic over in Hollywood and brought them down to the USC sound department for a two hour session in the recording booths. it was free form and fast and within an hour or so we had Cub Scouuts Pack 213 in the can. It was a bit to long so I cut the audio down a little which give it a bit more structure and punch and then spent the next two months animating.
For this project I did all the animation in Toon Boom Animation, which at the time was pretty new and was lightning fast compared to the tradition pencil and paper method. It allowed me to completely bypass a dozen steps and be one of only a hand full of students to finnish their thesis on time. The b&w vector art was then exported as an image sequence which I coloured in Photoshop and composited in final Cut Pro. This was a brave new digital world and compared to the three years it took me to make my earlier film this one only took five months start to finnish.
Improv by: Devin Westberg, Tom Warren, Jimmy Zerda, David Ury, Ben Tolpin
Directed, Animated and Produced by Sterling Sheehy
This project is dedicated to the memory of my friend Jimmy Zerda, who passed away not long after we made this film. He was the scouut with glasses, avery talented comedian and a friend. He will be missed.
This sketchbook was made while I was a student at USC Animation. It is dated 2002. There are a lot of figure drawings and surfing doodles in it which is very fitting since that is all I really did back then. It is a notable book as it was in this sketchbook that I first started to develop my own style.
sketchbook, front and back
doodles and notes
Large metal giants and a tree
lamb to slaughter and falling up
nothing special
foot studies
hand studies
hand and feet studies
fat lady study
probably from a figure drawing class
photo nerd
fish chair
bedroom sketch with hawk kite and animation light box
notes and classmate eddie barraza
tom sito nots
hand study and color explosion
lisa mann class drawings
daisy church in Corney Cole’s drawing class with other random things
skeleton dance
a girl and a giant
russian river bridge memories
Corney Cole the big wave surfer
squares and curles
Thumbnail idea for the USC keyframe poster
figure studies
nude female back study
impressionist desk drawings
hyperbolic geometric, whatever that means
My brother and I the day after his graduation from UCSB
mixology
bedroom drawing at the lemoyne st house
fifi is dead
crowded surfing
surfing at manhattan beach
surfer girl
ink bleed and faded blue pencil
3d drawing expirament
corey jackson portrait and stereoscopic drawings
lemoyne room drawing
the dining room table
brad anderson lecture doodle
waiting by the phone
USC animation keyframe 2002 poster original art
surfing at manhattan beach
boy in the bar
harvest time
false prophets
Alley Oop Mistrial
squares and curles
Lebbeus Woods and sawing knots
surfing the back side of water
the devils on her sholder
figure drawing study
the angry wave
green ink
blacked out page
surrealism
figure drawing, light study
angle
drawing fish at the aquarium
wine harvest and vinegar label
falling down thumbs
fat lady study
lap study
figure drawing study
loose random doodles
random storyboards
lebbeus woods and giant robot
electro robot
mike hanfling at the drawing party
action kid comics
a little of this and that
quodropods
faded drawings
echo park doodles
a couple of couple figure studies
they too the pitcher too!!
bleeding colors
burning man party, fire dancers
title card used during photography for my film Red Sky Morning
I really should have a lot more work to show for this project. It has lived in my head for years. I really love it. I’ll leave the story for a future post but expect me to write a good deal about it in the future. Its my baby and I love it. Out side of friends and family this is the first time I have put any of it up for others to see.
Dragon is the story of a poor street sweeper in an ancient Himalayan city who sets out to clean up his city and in doing so uncovers more dirt than he was expecting. Our humble young hero is pulled into a world divided by greed. As an army of wild mountain bandits threatens to invade the isolated city its people see little hope for survival but to pray desperately to their dragon god for protection. From the grit of the gutter to the lavishness of the city’s palace our street sweeper must use all of his sweeping skills to uncover the truth about the dragon and find a way to save the city he loves before time runs out and all is lost.
The project is based upon the book “Everyone Knows What A Dragon Looks Like” BY J. Williams. Vanguard had the rights to the books and paid me to write it with a writing partner, Sejung Kim. The project has sat on the shelf for years. It’s a beautiful story and I would love to see it get its due some day. In my free time I have donated a ton of time and artwork for the project hoping it would help grease the wheels and get it moving. Every now and then I get a phone call and then the excitement fades and its back on the shelf again.
Above is a pitch trailer I made for the project and below are the panels I used to make it. Interestingly enough I drew all of this while I was in Jerusalem.
The dragon gives a lesson
Archers at the ready
There is a hole in the defences
A stranger appears
They have found a way in.
Down into the darkness he goes
The Mountain bandits ride into action
a warrior of the mountain
Han is captured
The mountain bandits ride to battle
Han find the wounded scout
The bridge that connects the two halves of the city
There was a time when Space Chimps was being tossed about as a possible musical. This was one of the sequences I was asked to make while exploring that idea. Somewhere I have the animatic for this sequence. I will post it when I find it.
This is a lost space chimps one scene. The greasy salesman character, I believe his name was spyro gyro or something like that, was cut and with him these boards. The set up to this was that NASA was getting its budget cut and they needed to sell to Feds a new mission, Ham was the unwilling pawn that would get the agency the money it needed. He had just been seized and dragged from the circus in the earlier scene.
These are the roughs for the big jetpack chase scene at the end of the Space Chimps 2. It’s particularly memorable because my wife went into labour while I was working on it. This is also why it is incomplete.
