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Introducing Myself
Animator, professor, nerd-who-likes-to-learn-about-anything. I was a happy nerd in school, accepted by my peers, active in drama, debate, art contests, student government and (for a short time) track and field. I loved art, I loved physics, and I loved math. As a teenager planning my college applications, I agonized over which route to take: science,…
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First Impressions
Ah! Blender. Okay, so I’ve been looking at Blender for a week or so. Doing nothing major, just finding tools, discovering features and watching tutorials. The first thing I discovered: it was a big mistake to choose “industry” settings for short keys, because it seems to remove just about every short key that is not…
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Commander Safeguard Lives!
In this age of COVID-19, I suddenly remembered the commercial animated series, Commander Safeguard. He taught children (and adults) about the importance of hand-washing, and made people understand that even though germs were invisible, they could still wreak a lot of havoc in our lives. It has been years since I have been a part…
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Mughal Architecture
I seemed to have been quite obsessed with cultural research as a teen/young adult. I recently discovered a leather-bound book that contained my 4500 word dissertation for school, based on the architecture of the Mughal Empire. This was such an exciting project for me, I remember my mom and I traveled to Lahore (we live…
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The Dungeon Lords?!
Some of the craziest stuff comes out when you start digging through old hard drives! I have always been especially sad that I never realized the importance of cataloging my art until I moved to the US. It felt a lot like my entire career in Pakistan was wiped out because I never built demoreels…
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The ’65 War, and The Green Army
I’ve been finding art from my student days, and it is really interesting to see my ideas after so many years. Take, for example, the idea I had for my BFA Thesis. I wanted to make a David and Goliath story, so I picked the real-life example of the Pak-India war of ’65. Now, I…
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Exploring past ideas to pave the way for new ones… my icky thesis wasn’t always that bad!
My graduate thesis was fraught with every kind of obstacle, obstruction and ornery feedback possible, and luckily, only about 50% of that was my fault. A little explanation: the film I made was not my original idea, nor was it something I particularly felt strongly about when I started planning my thesis concept. Actually, my…
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Graduate 3D Lighting Gallery 2017
This year, the 3D Lighting final project yielded such great results! The instructions were simple, to create an image of “Home” whilst taking visual inspiration from any one of the following artists: Edward Hopper, Paul Cezanne, Wayne Theibaud or Pablo Picasso.So proud of the great work produced by Manuel Moreno-Lee, Veenal D’Silva, Pengxu Chen and…
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The Character Mosaic Project
The Character Mosaic Project aims to increase representation of minorities and under served populations by making a number of ethnically accurate characters available online. The hope is to encourage animators and artists to produce more relevant and empathetic stories for broader audiences, and to allow young children to see themselves in their favorite stories. To…
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Bob Walk Animation
I enjoy building specific characters for my classes to help them practice visualizing animations for a variety of characters. This includes different types of ball rigs, a squirrel rig (basically a ball rig with a tail), a flat pencil-like character and this one-eyed biped named Bob. Bob is a favorite in my grad animation class…