mricks.com

I just posted the two Wonder Bread Mexico spots I worked on, along with a bonus breakdown video. I have some other work that I completed recently that I should probably try and post too pretty soon.

2013 is off to a good start for me. I got to see DJ Douggpound of Tim & Eric and Portlandia fame live last weekend, and I was crying from laughing so hard at one point. Last Friday, I scored high enough on the Terminator 3 and South Park pinball games to make it on to the leaderboard for each at Pinballz. I’m really looking forward to the Geographer concert next Saturday. And finally, I’m looking to buy a house. Now, I just need to keep that new work coming in!

It’s almost July, and summer is definitely here. We hit a high of 109º a few days ago in Austin, which is the new record high for the month of June. I’ve seen some of the stuff about the fires in Colorado and it reminds me of the fires that hit Texas last year. Hopefully those firefighters are able to get things under control soon and the deaths and injuries are at a minimum.

Now on a completely different note, I just updated my site with a couple of recent jobs. The first one is a video for AMD featuring their new ZeroCore Power Technology. View it here. The second one is a series of videos for The American Legacy Foundation that aim to educate Americans of the dangers and consequences of smoking. View them here.

Rap Superstars of the Summer and Beyond: Krispy Kreme and Money Maker Mike

Work has been a little slow lately, so I’ve had time to practice my Ping Pong skills on the PS3 Move. One day, though, I decided to test out the new Camera Tracker in After Effects CS6. It actually worked a lot better than I thought it would. And by combining the solved camera with the regular 2D point tracker (parenting the 2D track to the solved camera), it can be pretty useful. I used the C4D exporter plugin to take that solved camera into C4D and render out a couple of objects that could go into the scene. Did my work result in a pretty stupid video? Yes. Is it useless? Maybe. But it was a fun little test and it’s nice to know that if I need to insert a 3D object into a scene that it can be done really rather quickly with AE CS6 and C4D.

Just wanted to write a quick update. I just posted two new pieces of work that I recently finished. The first one was a fun and quick job for the guys at Revelator to help announce the new partnership between Tabbedout and PayPal. Check it out here. The second piece was for Two Shot West, LLC (Scott Rice and Austen Menges). It’s a :30 ad that tries to inform voters in the Metro Atlanta area about how much time they spend in traffic, and hopefully they will go out and vote one way or another for the proposed one penny sales tax to fund transportation projects. The version online now is the one MAVEN approved and is currently airing in Atlanta, however I know a director’s cut version for Two Shot West might appear in the future.

Today’s my first day back in the office after the holiday break. I hope you all had a Merry Christmas, Happy Hanukkah, Happy Kwanza, Happy Festivus, Happy New Year, or anything else you may have celebrated. It was nice to spend time at home with my parents and friends that were in town. But of course I mostly enjoyed the time to just relax and be lazy.

I’m slowly getting back into the swing of things; but since I don’t have any jobs to work on at the moment, I decided it was time to update my site with some work I completed last year that I hadn’t posted yet. Check out the updates here: ConocoPhillips, Droid Razr, Max Credit Union, HTC Rhyme, DCHP.

Here’s to a great year in 2012! Just 100 years until we take the temples back from those priests! (Bonus nerd points if you get that reference)

Here’s an awesome video that gives a brief history and summary of Motion Design, from “Motion Plus Design.”

Sometimes missing footage just makes things look cooler. From the AMC Stubs project.

This is a beautifully animated piece from weareseventeen for BBC Knowledge. The transitions are seamless, and I love the design. I hope to create something this good someday.

I’ve had some free time lately to catch up on some personal stuff and basically just relax. First priority was to update my demo reel. I had been putting it off but it was definitely something I needed to do. Check it out! Hopefully you enjoy it.

We got a tv in the office about a month ago, and that may have not been a good idea. Dustin brought in his PS3 and I brought in all my Nintendo stuff. It definitely provides a distraction at times. But it’s really nice to have in case a client wants to come in. We can easily hook it up as an external monitor and show them our work on a big screen. But for the past couple of weeks we spent our free time playing Burnout Paradise. It’s very addicting. We beat the game last week, so it’s less of a distraction now… until we get a new game. haha

My RAID was getting full during a recent project with a bunch of footage so I decided to upgrade it. I had 4 x 1TB drives in it before in a RAID-5 configuration, so it was about 3TB of space. I bought 4 new 3TB Hitachi drives and put those in there in a RAID-5 again, so now I have about 9TB of space. I don’t think I’ll be filling that up any time soon, but it’s nice to have that extra space.

I’ve also been watching the show Problem Solverz on Cartoon Network. It is amazing. The art in the show is just absolutely crazy. I think it’s pretty funny, but I know some of my friends hate it. It seems like a show that should be on Adult Swim, but it’s on regular Cartoon Network. Granted, it’s the last show before Adult Swim starts on Monday nights, but still. It’s not really vulgar or adult in any way, it’s just got that Adult Swim feel. And I was excited to find that there’s a Problem Solverz tumblr that is run by the creator of the show. I’ll leave you with a few gifs from the show that he posted.

Seems like I only update this thing every few months. Sorry about that. I’ve been pretty busy lately working on some stuff for AMC Theaters. Hopefully once that wraps up, I’ll be able to update my reel. It definitely needs one. Also, I still post frequently on my Tumblr page if you want to follow me there. It’s just random links and stuff that I like or find funny, but at least I update it pretty much daily instead of every few months (like I do with this blog).

In the little bit of down time I’ve had at the office, I’ve been playing around with the new plugin Plexus from AEscripts. I’ve been trying to use it in combination with Soundkeys so it reacts to audio. Below are a few frames of an animation I’ve been messing around with lately.

And for my random link, I just saw this video and I would pay good money to own this!

Well, it’s 2011. I guess that means I need to work on updating my reel. I’m sure I’ll get to it eventually. 2010 was pretty good business-wise for me, but most everything else was not. So, hopefully 2011 is a little bit better.

January is already off to a good start. I’ve been busy the past two weeks working on another AARP job for Shiny Object, and I’ll be working on another project with them once this one delivers. I’ve been hanging out with a couple friends a lot more lately too, and that has definitely made life more enjoyable.

As far as sports go, I think 2011 should be a good year. I mean, it’s not hard for Texas Football to be better than it was last year. The Spurs are off to their best start ever and they just keep winning. Hopefully they are able to keep it up.

I know I don’t update this thing that often, but I post way more often on my Tumblr. Follow me there if you are into that sort of thing.

I’ll leave you with this awesome video from Charlex, ShapeShifter.

As you may have noticed, the site url is now mricks.com instead of stubbysquirrel.com. I liked stubbysquirrel, but mricks.com is easier to remember and much shorter. I figured it was just time for a change.

Since this is sort of the end of the whole Stubby Squirrel name, I might as well tell of where the name came from in the first place. At my parents’ house, there always seems to be some birds or squirrels in the yard. They decided to put out bird seed and squirrel chow for them to enjoy, so of course that caused even more to visit the yard. One day we noticed a certain squirrel that looked a little different. We realized that this squirrel had no tail. All he had was a little nub (or stub) where his tail would be. Thus, we named him Stubby. He became a regular visitor to the yard and it was always nice to see him chowing down on some peanuts or corn. Over time his visits became less frequent, but he visited for almost 2 years. I’ll post a few pictures of Stubby below.