Animation
"Like Father, Like Son" - 2006
Like Father, Like Son has a special place in my heart but it also brings me much regret. This was my Junior year final, a 4 minute puppet animation that I created over a 4 month period in 2006. The dialogue was recorded and edited before animating, and I used replacement mouths to sync their mouths to their voices at 30 fps. The puppets were wire-armatures with soft bedding foam for musculature and liquid latex mixed with acrylic paint and human hair for flesh. The heads were sculpted and baked sculpey clay. At the end of the school year, I was pleased with the animation but still had some sound design to complete after I traveled to Los Angeles for the summer. These were the days before I knew the importance of adequate hard-drive backup, and I was about to learn a serious lesson.
I completed the sound design and final DVD output after sneaking into some production facilities at UCLA and was very happy with the final project. My days in LA were over so my friend Ben and I started off on our road trip back to Rhode Island. We were staying at a hotel in Las Cruces, NM and I woke up to Ben telling me that his car had been broken into the night before. Of course, this was the one night that I hadn't brought up all my bags to the room. And of course, the only thing stolen from the car were my bags, one of which contained the only copy of the Like Father Like Son project files and original images.
So now the only place this animation exists is on Youtube and on a highly compressed DVD. 4 years later, I would love to have been able to go back into the project and redo it as an HD animation, as well as correct some color issues and flesh out the sound design, but alas - you can't change the past. I did learn a valuable lesson in how ESSENTIAL it is to back up your work, 3 times over and in different locations. 3 years later when making Slimed, we had 4 backups - one of which was 5 states away at my parents home in Florida. Never again, never forget.