(last edited on April 29, 2014 at 1:28 am)
My cousin John is studying Electrical Engineering at UCLA, and for fun he makes games and animates. That’s sort of like saying, “Noah once had to deal with a little rain”…John is a really talented animator and programmer.
He just showed me his latest opus, Shoo Fly, a one minute animated story about a girl chasing an annoying fly (I love the character design of the fly). It’s not often I choose to watch a Flash animation frame-by-frame…but really, it’s that fantastic. This original piece is astonishingly awesome. Although the soundtrack is not original, all the writing, direction, and character animation is 100% John. The editing alone is phenomenal; it’s well above-average.
You may have seen John’s acclaimed Final Fantasy A+ hit Newgrounds a couple years ago. Submitted as his final exam for Japanese class while still in high school, John also did all the voice work in Japanese for multiple characters, on top of creating the 10 minutes of Flash animation that recreated the world of Final Fantasy in an original and witty story.
10 Comments
wow. that is awesome. thank you!
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I’m a 3d animator by profession, and my professional opinion is your cousin has some real talent! What’s he doing in engineering?
That was amazing, your cousin surely has talent. He could surely make some money creating animations for the web.
Thats quality stuff. I normal dont like much of the flash stuff, but this was great.
Nice! You can tell a lot work went into the animation and it shows when you watching it. Thanks for sharing Dave.
Yes, he’s very talented. I don’t think he realizes how exceptional his skillset is yet :-) When I used to hire artists for games, I used to watch lots of demo reels and the hit rate was maybe 1 in 20 having more than just some technical skills. Then of that 1 in 20, another 1 in 10 would be really stand-out. I’ve shown his animations to people in charge of large game companies, and they all ask, “what the hell is he doing in EE?”
John writes on his Newsgrounds account that he’ll probably not pursue animation professionally, because he finds it pretty tedious and draining. Yep, it is! He might end up doing Flash games (he’s a competent programmer too) and make a killing :-)
Fantastic and clever. I imagine it takes not only creativity and talent but a lot of hard work to put out productions that good. Good for John, I hope he keeps at it even if only a little bit. “Final Fantasy A+” especially hit home, since it triggered memories of both studying Japanese and playing FFVII back in the late nineties. I thought I had forgotten both!
What a great anim! Wow. I was totally engaged! Love the girl’s movements! And like the fly’s cutesy roundedness which contributes to his sneer-like attitude.
very nice. i look forward to his next “tedious and draining” pet project.
Beautiful animation, I had seen it before coming to this site, but you guys have a lot of talent runnin’ through the family :) Make sure he knows that I idolize him as a flash animator.