Art Direction

Art Direction – Commercials

A pair of commercials that I art directed.

Shot Breakdowns:


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Pontiac Tunnel

At Sway Studio I was given the opportunity to direct a spec commercial as a promotional piece for the company reel. Using the 2nd Street tunnel in Los Angeles as inspiration, I spent the following 2 weeks modeling, lighting and shading a similar tunnel of my own design. The tunnel is wider to accommodate larger camera moves and extreme stunt driving. My friend Graham Fyffe made a series of driving sims using Sway’s proprietary driving simulator, the Drive-a-Tron. I began blocking in camera moves and putting together an edit from playblasts. Once the edit was locked, I rendered out the necessary frames in final quality using VRay. I worked out a look with the compositor and the end result can be seen here.

-Art Direction and Development of tunnel environment
-Modeling, Lighting and Shading of all tunnel assets
-Animation of previs
-Supervised driving simulations and animated final cameras
-Edited final cut


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Pontiac Spy Hunter

Another opportunity at Sway Studio came when we were asked to bid a Pontiac commercial based on the 1983 arcade game Spy Hunter. We were essentially given one rough concept frame to convey what the director was after–a 3D version of the Spy Hunter world. Being heavily into retro gaming, I knew right away the look we needed, convinced the creative director, and overnight I put together a first proof of concept. It was very rough but with a few other artists we were able to get a high-quality render, showing the complete transition from an overhead view of the pixelated 8-bit game and swooping down into a semi-photo-real but still highly stylized CG world. Within 24 hours we had put together a presentation that won us the job immediately. The creative director could see my enthusiasm for the project, and I was given the job of spearheading the look of the CG, capturing and animating the 2D sprites from the game (with full approval from Midway), modeling all the environmental assets, creating the light rigs and shaders, and designing concepts for the enemy vehicles. The clients were very happy with the result, which you can see here.

-Research and Development of Spy Hunter environment based on the classic 8-bit game
-Modeling and animation of previs for project bidding
-Modeling and Shading of environment assets
-Art Direction and Concept Design of enemy vehicles based on original game sprites for realization in CG
-Development and distribution of light rigs and rendering setups to lighting team

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