Animation reel
My love
for animation began in October of 1993. My mother took me to see ‘The Nightmare Before Christmas,’ after which I badgered her to take me another seven times.
I went to college with a ‘normal’ major, graduated into a recession, worked odd jobs, learned how to make websites, got burned out working for pharmaceutical marketing companies, and decided to go to art school in 2015.
I graduated from SCAD with a master’s in Animation, where I co-wrote, animated, and directed my Annie-nominated short film ‘Con Fuerza,’ which you can watch here.
My first job was as an assistant on Guillermo del Toro’s Oscar-winning film ‘Pinnochio,’ and I’m currently animating on Nickelodeon’s ‘The Tiny Chef Show,’ as well as working on my own passion projects at home! Stay tuned.
“Con Fuerza” is a 2019 Annie-nominated Spanish-language short film about a young Venezuelan woman who works in a small shop in Colombia. She receives dubious advice from magical townsfolk.
Con Fuerza (2019)
‘Con Fuerza’ began as an idea between myself and the film’s producer, Alejandro Siegert, to make a truly Latin film. We found a mutual love of folk stories and mythology through our shared interest in author Neil Gaiman, and from that our original story grew: a woman and her daughter run a tienda near a lake which is home to an ancient, greedy god. When the daughter, who wants to be a modern girl, has a fight with her more traditional mother, she throws the mother’s earrings into the lake, inciting a chain of supernatural events that test the daughter’s motivations.
The film we ended up making, of course, bears almost no resemblance to that first idea. Alejandro, a native of Colombia, went to visit family over the holidays. He came back with stories of refugees from Venezuela, where my mother’s family is from, everywhere he looked, most of them living in very poor conditions. He related a story of his mother telling him we should do something more important, to which I replied, “yes.”
After months of talking through the story while I drew storyboard thumbnails on sticky notes on the wall, we took the two stop motion classes offered at SCAD together and built our puppets, our sets, and the countless little products, fruits, arepas, trash, and so on we had decided the story needed. When a disagreement with a professor left us with only an unusable space in the school’s shooting space, I converted the second bedroom in my apartment into a studio instead of renting to a new roommate. I would wake up every day, make coffee, look at my whiteboard where I’d written what shots I needed to finish that week, and animate until it was time for bed. It was one of the best years of my life.
I hope you enjoy the film; thanks for reading :)