Overview
After several years away from the industry, this reel represents more than an update — it marks a return. In 2020, I stepped back from full-time freelance to teach high school animation, 3D, and motion design. It was a deeply meaningful chapter, giving the next generation the professional guidance I never had access to at their age. But when it was time to transition back into production work, I knew I needed a reel that reflected not just what I can do — but who I’ve become.
Rather than creating another standard montage cut to music, I wanted a piece with intention, narrative, and personality. Something that acknowledged the past while signaling the next phase of my career. That instinct led to a design language rooted in retro nostalgia, vivid worldbuilding, and a highly personal creative process.
Creative Spark
The concept began the way many of my favorite ideas do: with music.
One late night, while scrolling through stock tracks, I stumbled on a funky, wildly out-of-place song buried inside a list of predictable corporate cues. Instantly, my head started nodding. That “I feel it” moment — the one you learn to trust after 25 years in the industry — hit immediately.
I kept returning to that track. Every time I did, vivid visuals surfaced: 70s furniture, warm browns and oranges, a console TV, shag carpet, decorative lamps, and mid-century patterns. The music didn’t just pair with the imagery — it opened a door to it.
The reel intro became a journey back to the living rooms of my childhood, a visual metaphor for returning to my creative roots after six years of teaching.
Preproduction & Reference Building
Before touching 3D, I spent a week building a detailed reference board in Milanote — fonts, color palettes, furniture references, animation inspiration, lighting direction, everything. I wanted absolute clarity about the tone: warm, analog, funky, tactile.
This pre-production phase was essential, especially with the complexity and mixed-application workflow I had planned. This “visual compass” guided every stage of production. My moodboard included:
70s interior photography
Retro prop design references
Mid-century color swatches
Magical/psychedelic animation inspiration
Lighting samples
Type references for the balloon-style title cards
Modeling the Retro Living Room
To challenge myself and showcase flexibility, I started the entire build in Blender:
Full modeling and UV mapping
Texturing foundations
Scene layout and prop creation
The room was constructed piece by piece: wood-paneled walls, a vintage console TV, lamps, coffee table props, books, magazines, and era-authentic décor. I even created custom book covers (including a Shaft reference by request and a stack of retro magazines) as small Easter eggs scattered around the environment.
Once the Blender stage was complete, I exported everything as Alembic/OBJ and moved into Cinema4D — my home base for shading, lighting, and rendering — since Redshift was FAR more stable and responsive there.
The Shag Carpet Problem
One of the most challenging technical elements was the shag carpet.
Blender couldn’t handle the density I needed, so I built it entirely in Cinema 4D using:
Hand-modeled carpet tufts, MoGraph Cloners, and ultimately using Redshift Scatter for full render-time instancing. Scatter allowed me to create a lush, tactile carpet that held up beautifully in renders without overwhelming my pair of humble GPUs.
Lighting: The “Why” Behind Every Light
I treated lighting like live-action cinematography. This step was crucial because it let post-production be about refinement, not rescue!
The living room scene ended up with around 10–12 lights, each added for a very specific reason:
Highlighting prop contours
Adding rim light to wood textures
Defining color zones
Guiding viewer attention
Balancing the nostalgic, warm palette
From Living Room to Psychedelic World
Once the camera pushes into the TV and transitions into the reel "title sequence", the aesthetic intentionally flips: from warm realism to playful surrealism.
The second world features a playful selection of:
Giant daisies, bounding and scurrying rabbits, rolling green hills, a vibrant sun with animated wiggling rays, and bold bouncy title cards!
For the balloon-text titles, I used a hybrid process. A big fat chunky font selection which I then retopologized with Cinema4D's Remesher. This gave me a solid foundation to paint some weights for wrinkles and run through simulation using Cinema 4D’s Cloth + Balloon system. Caching the sim allowed me to scrub through the result to find just the fright frame! Exporting snapshots of the simulated mesh as OBJ's and finally animating those pieces using MoGraph Effectors and the Fracture Object.
"This gave the titles a soft, squishy, marshmallow-balloon
quality that matched the music’s personality."
Rendering, AOVs & Compositing
Renders were done with Maxon's Redshift on dual GeForce 2080Ti GPUs circa 2018.
As always, I built the lighting and shading to support a deep AOV workflow, including:
Diffuse / specular / SSS layers, Cryptomattes, Depth/Environment & Volume passes, Utility channels for clean color and object isolation
All of this is then compiled in After Effects, where the magic happens! Seriously though...it seems like there is this moment when the pieces start to fall into place and the composite emerges! Before that...eeek lol.
I OFTEN use a black-and-white “value check” adjustment layer for tonal checks. This allows me to see EXACTLY what needs love, what needs extra punch, what needs to calm down...until there aren't any dark darks or distracting brights...BALANCE.
"Even the view outside the window in the living room is an Easter egg — it’s my actual front yard, captured and comp’d into the shot."
Timeline
I gave myself about five weeks for the full project. A week of unexpected computer issues pushed the deadline slightly, but the structure held.
Week 1: Planning, reference, storyboards
Weeks 2–3: Modeling, UVs, layout, prop building
Weeks 3–4: Shading, lighting, carpet R&D, rendering
Week 5: Compositing, color, final assembly