“A Lost Generation” is a graphic film that tells the story of Hayumi Ito and her granddaughter Sakura Ito. Hayumi is struggling to survive as she tries to overcome the unjustly imprisonment of the Japanese Americans by the American government during WWII. 3 generations later, Sakura is going through her own struggles of attaining pop stardom as she feels her Japanese name and culture is hindering her success. Thus, this film is a contemporary critique of the internment camps’ effect on current Japanese Americans’ knowledge of their cultural past. It is also a look at how the different generations struggle with different conflicts. Hayumi has to battle an external oppressor, while Sakura is battling her own psyche.

This film is an official selection of the Peachtree Village International Film Festival and will be premiering at the Frame by Frame Animation Showcase in late September, 2010.

These boards were produced at Stardust, where I had the opportunity to write the story and design the frames. Fritos wanted us to conceptualize and create a story about 2 things being made for each other. I decided to create a story where a triangle and a circle are having a hard time finding their place within the geometric environment that surrounds them.

Peter Jensen’s thesis is a beautifully written Opera-play that is about an American family’s secrets being exposed through the eyes of a family clock. The piece was about transformation, changing of perspectives, and was set in a 360 degree stage where the audience was constantly rotating their chair to follow the plot and characters as they shifted from one time period to the next.

The idea behind the poster was to have a story revealed through the negative and positive space. Thus, the poster is a patterned piece that can be tiled on all 4 sides and has images and messages hidden within the pattern. Everything from a diamond to a noose to a tomahawk to a gun to the word secret can be seen throughout the pattern as well as other hidden messages, symbols, and images.

John Gabriel Borkman is a psychogical thriller written by Henrik Ibsen and it’s about a son who is being overshadowed by his greedy, money-hungry father. Maureen Huskey, the director, wanted to go in a direction that was “beautifully grotesque” so they wanted to have an illustrative poster but still maintain a darker tone. As a result, I decided to use two types of ornamentation, one that is based on vector, plant-inspired ornamentation to represent the son’s world and the other is based on

a fluid, oil/gasoline like substance to represent the father’s world. The forms within the son’s ornmentation is meant to resemble psychology and birth by abstracting the grooves of the brain and also embedding blooming flowers and a fetus within that ornamentation. I also decided to make the flowers blue to represent the struggles and conflict that the son is experiencing internally.

This was a 4 color, screen-printed poster that was done for LifeLongFriendshipSociety when they lectured at CalArts. I collaborated with Devin Dailey and our goal was to capture the crafted, surreal, imaginative design that makes LFS great.

We used their old website as an inspiration for the underwater world and decided to make the poster HD proportions so that the poster would reference a motion studio as opposed to a print studio.

Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities” is a conversation between Marco Polo and Kublai Khan about Khan’s expanding empire that is in the form of prose poems. Each story is a very imaginative yet symbolic and calculated explanation about a specific city. There are 55 cities that are described in detail that defy the laws of physics but show how cities can conceptually relate to human nature. The idea behind this cover was to create an imaginative, surreal and constructed world that represented the worlds that Marco Polo was describing.

The next idea was to create a poetic, layered story within the illustration that addressed the different narratives and sub-narrative that exist in the book. Thus, there are references to the theme of mazes, obstacles, illusions, psychology and the power that words have in creating vivid imagery.