...you...

The Husband Who Was To Mind The House

This project was an interactive E-Book kicked off by Adobe. We were given a Norwegian short story entitled "The Husband Who Was To Mind The House" and were asked to create an interactive E-book in Flash. 

I learned so much from this project.  Not only had I never made an E-Book before, but I had never used flash before and had to learn it on the fly. 

The final product became a success and the artwork from our E-Book ended up winning us a copy of Adobe CS6.  Thank you Adobe!  

Base Painting by Bridget Ore, Paint overs by me. 

Base Painting by Bridget Ore, Paint overs by me. 

Base Painting by Crystal Han, Paint overs by me. 

Base Painting by Crystal Han, Paint overs by me. 

Base Painting by Crystal Han, Paint overs by me. 

The Well

This was the first project of the semester.  The assignment was kicked off by Dela Longfish and Jeff Sengali from Lucasfilm  The assignment was "A young child comes across a wishing well.  At the well the child discovers a creature". Then we drew a random country from a hat as the location for our story.  

I was assigned The United States...  That is pretty much a wildcard.  So, after running through all of the usual stereotypes, inner-city kids, rednecks and morbidly obese children.  I ended up having a long list of comps that I found boring.  So, I scrapped what I had and restarted by choosing the state I knew about the least and continued my research from there. 

I narrowed my story options to an on-shore oil "well" where the young son of a big rig trucker discovers an Inuit spirit. 

A Theriman is an Inuit spirit whose purpose is to disrupt humanity when it encroaches too close to nature. 

 My design made the Theriman out of oil so it can be disrupted by the existance of the oil rig. 

The first contact moment

The Story's Climax 

City of the Beasts

During this semester we produced art based off of Isabel Allende's novel "The City of the Beasts".  We decided to focus our visual exploration of the novel to the waterfall rescue scene. (I don't want to spoil anything about the book so if you are curious you can check it out here isabelallende.com)

 Here are a few snippets of revised work that I did for the project.  Below that is the original reel of my groups "City of the Beasts" from the beginning of the semester.

This piece is a collaborative painting between myself, Lenny Hung and Vincent Balmori doing the Maya VFX waterfalls. 

Along with this project being really fun to illustrate, it was a great opportunity to play around with After Effects and Premiere.



Group#2 FNLReel from Cody Gramstad on Vimeo.


Other participants in this City of the Beasts group are Vincent Balmori, Lenny Hung, Hillary Bradfield, Meena Indukuri, Adam Myers, Lisa Purdy, Kristine Santos, Kim Stramat and Richard Watson.

Fresh Start

It is the end of my time in school and the start of my professional career and It felt like a great time to refresh my sketch blog.

I am moving quickly from being the old cynical adult in school to a fresh young eager child in the industry.

It feels good.