Graphics for Fashion

In order to apply to UCF's character animation MFA, one of the requirements was a 5-minute animatic and sufficient pitch information accompanying it. I put together Werewolf Boyfriend in about a month in order to meet the deadline, the fastest turnaround I have achieved on a work of this scale.

Werewolf Boyfriend follows Flinch and his wife Trinity on the night of the full moon. Flinch is a werewolf, while Trinity appears human, and the short showcases what an ordinary night is for them: Flinch transforms in the basement under the watchful eye of Trinity, who draws him while he transforms. After, she feeds him to bring him back to his full strength, and the two of them galavant through their woodsy backyard to a local creek, playing until sunrise.

I want the film to have a Ghibli-inspired feel to it; one of the core tenets of Miyazaki's filmmaking is the elevation of the everyday. Many shots within Ghibli films linger for longer than could be considered necessary, using a stationary camera in most circumstances, and Miyazaki has said before he aims to make his audience sit with a moment longer than they expect to. I studied as much of Studio Ghibli as I could in one month, watching every DVD my parents still had on-hand and studying the storyboards for The Cat Returns, which we had thanks to them being a bonus feature on our old DVD.

Werewolf Boyfriend is a fusion of romance and horror in an unconventional manner: a majority of horror-romance media focuses on a relationship triumphing against horrors brought to the characters. In Werewolf Boyfriend, the characters are the horrors, and they're both deeply in love with each other and with their monstrosity. Flinch is more 'obviously' monstrous, but Trinity isn't human, either--Something that would be shown in the much-larger film my animatic is a pitch for. What is Trinity, then, you may ask? Well, that's a secret you'll find out later.

The film is textually queer, and not only in narrative. Both Flinch and Trinity are nonbinary and visibly transgender characters, and in the current political climate of the United States, it is deeply important to me to portray these two not only as a subversion of horror tropes but as deeply joyful, loving not-quite-people. This is queer art for a queer audience.

Memento Mori (So Make The Most Of It!) is my thesis film for University of Central Florida's MFA Animation & VFX program and is slated to release publically in 2027 following a film-circuit run in 2026.

This is an anticapitalist film about the lie of capitalism, being "work hard and you will be rewarded." We follow Dead Human Walking, who is hit by a food truck on their way to work and encounters a Grim Reaper named Red.

For Red, being a Grim Reaper is just as much a job as Dead Human Walking's cashiering job, and she wants them to come to terms with their death and Move On as soon as possible so she can make her other appointments. However, Dead Human Walking is not yet ready to die, fights for their life--and wins, challenging the capitalistic demand to accept one's lot in life (or death) and service capital's interests above your own.

This film is currently in production and is my first project using exclusively free or one-time-purchase software with an emphasis on open-source softwares. I have taught myself Blender's Grease Pencil tool in lieu of ToonBoom Harmony (the program that facilitated Heist (2022)) as well as pivoted my illustration pipeline from Adobe PhotoShop to ClipStudio Paint. Editing is being done in DaVinci Resolve and ShotCut.

This project has undergone many changes throughout development and encompasses a lot of research--technical research into Blender; art historical research into psychedelic art, psychedelia in general, and the historic relevance of the practice; and historical anti-capitalist activism.

This is also the first film I've composed a soundtrack for, learning GarageBand over the 2025 Spring semester and fabricating the score out of various loops as well as sampled sounds that have been edited or otherwise distorted to fit the film. The soundtrack centers on a sample of a heartbeat and mirrors the rise and fall of a heart rate during adrenaline-fuelled moments as well as the slow deceleration to death.

This is also the most I've ever pushed myself to diversify designs with regards to Dead Human Walking. Creating an "everyman" character for an audience to put themselves in the shoes of while keeping in mind historical trends of this archetype being a straight cisgender white man and my own potential biases shaped by this history led to a creation of about 20 different designs. In the end, Dead Human Walking has been designed to mirror Red just enough to make it clear that Red is seeing herself in them, and is resentful of their will to survive and tenacity to reject Death itself. In doing so, Memento Mori challenges the historical trend of an everyman being a cisgender white man and demands the audience relate to, empathize with, and ultimately see themselves in the type of person who has been historically relegated to an 'unrelatable' Other.

In the future, I aim to make this a multimedia series hosted online, containing short films, comics, and short stories or potentially a novel. Red is a character who I had originally conceptualized in 2019 and has already starred in a short story during my undergraduate Creative Writing course. She also has a best friend, another Grim Reaper, named Blue, who appears in a brief cameo post-credits in Memento Mori as a teaser for the broader world of this short film.

Memento Mori has its own webpage, also hosted by Carrd, which can be found here.