Visual Development - Animation

Appalachian Zombies Pitch

Borne from the old joke, "If you want to avoid the zombie apocalypse, just go to Kentucky, everything hits that state 7 years late," my final project for my undergraduate Character Design class was the pitch of a full animated series. Set in a futuristic Appalachia, the narrative follows two scrappy young adults trying to survive as the zombie apocalypse hits the Appalachian mountains.
For important reference: I was born and raised in Kentucky, and this is not meant to be a jab at the state or Appalachia as a whole.This project contains adult themes such as the following: Gore

Oh, Catastrophe Animatic

Oh, Catastrophe is an animatic created as part of Minneapolis College of Art and Design's Storyboarding class final. It is set in the same world as Heist, part of an animated series I am writing called Untitled Villains Project.
This was my first foray into pitching story ideas and I elected to start with a bang: A big climax of the overall story in Untitled Villains Project where the character Unknown Raccoon unlocks their Murphy's Law based power of catastrophes.
Oh, Catastrophe is also the first project I ever created with ToonBoom Storyboard Pro, a program which quickly became my default software for storyboard creation.
The audio featured is the song "Oh, Catastrophe" by Crown the Empire.
For more information about Untitled Villains Project, you can view a dedicated website page here.

Heist

Heist is my undergraduate capstone film, set in the world of a broader project, Untitled Villains Project. This project was my main focus during undergraduate and as such I have several short animations with these characters, featured below.

Animatic

Werewolf Boyfriend is a film explicitly inspired by the filmmaking ethos of Hayao Miyazaki. One of the core tenets of Miyazaki's filmmaking is the elevation of the everyday with a meditative kind of editing and timing to his works. In an interview, Miyazaki once said he aims to force his audience to sit with a moment longer than they expect to, engendering a kind of discomfort that, in our present age of instant gratification, is sorely needed. An audience needs to grow more comfortable with slower pacing and meditative narratives.
Werewolf Boyfriend turns the cozy feeling of Ghibli films on its head. A horror-romance at its core, the film flips the conventions of the genre on its head: 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.
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.

Beatboards

Unannounced Project

This is character design work done for Forbidden Kemono Studios, for a game that has not yet released. My responsibilities on this project were to focus on one character and her species, creating design documentation and a series of orthographics for her potential designs. All work featured is my own, building upon the work of other employees.During my tenure, I used Clip Studio Paint for a majority of my work, with additional ideation done traditionally in my sketchbook as ideas struck me. I greatly enjoyed helping to design some features of this character's species, a nature-based elf variant with flowers and plants adorning their hair.My employment at Forbidden Kemono Studios ranged from August 2025 to January 2026, at which time I unfortunately had to step down to focus on finishing Memento Mori, my capstone film.