I found an old comic of mine from freshman year at USC. If I recall correctly a party we had in the dorms was broken up by RA’s “residential advisers” and campus police “DPS”, so I lampooned it in the school paper, the daily Trojan. This strip was probably only funny if you were there, and high.
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.
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.
A few years ago I was really excited about ambient cinema. Making films for the purpose of creating atmosphere. Stillborn was one of my big project from that time. It was an ongoing abstract piece that I showed a lot at gallery shows and IDM parties in the Underground LA art scene. It was always fun to project this piece really big and watch people throughout the night get lost in it.
The film is a loop so it has no specific starting point.