I watched a behind the scenes video on the making of Spider-Man Into the Spider-Verse and came out of it thinking about my own work differently. The first thing that hit me was just how beautiful this movie is on a purely visual level. You can pause it at any random frame and it looks like a print you could hang on your wall. Every single shot was composed and crafted by a person making a deliberate choice. The hatching, the cross-hatching, the illustrative shading style — a

There's a behind the scenes documentary on the making of Avatar and honestly it kind of broke my brain a little bit. The whole movie, one of the most visually spectacular things ever put on a screen, was filmed in a gray room. Just people in motion capture jumpsuits, moving around an empty space, with dots on their faces. That's it. That's the raw material. And then hundreds of people, over years, took that gray room and turned it into Pandora. A whole planet. A whole ecosys

I've been a fan of Anyma for a while now purely from a music standpoint, but I never really looked into who was making the visuals until recently. Turns out the person responsible for the entire aesthetic is an Italian 3D artist and visual director named Alessio De Vecchi, and once I started digging I couldn't stop. What De Vecchi does is superimpose digital life onto something that isn't alive. His characters are massive humanoid figures, robotic beings with flowing hair an

The second we did the servo lab I knew exactly what I wanted to do with this project. Controlling a servo motor with a potentiometer, one to one, you turn the dial, the arm moves. This felt like the most satisfying thing I'd done in this class so far, andt genuinely feels like building a robot. A small, humble robot. But still... The question became what do I do with an arm that moves. Full robotic arm with joints is out of my range right now. But a single jointed arm can st

This one started with the servo motor and a potentiometer. The assignment was motion-based and that combination made immediate sense to me as one to one; you turn the dial, you control the position of the arm. Clean, direct, satisfying in a mechanical way. Pinball came to mind too. The idea of an arm batting something around a track. I liked that energy but couldn't figure out how to build the track itself. Then it clicked! A clock face already is the track. The ball just ri

This project was one of the most genuinely enjoyable things I've made in a long time, which surprised me a little because it also gave me a tremendous amount of trouble. The base started as a collage — which is something I've always loved doing. I just grabbed what I had around. Glue, paint, stickers, real rocks and sticks from outside in Colorado, and I'm pretty sure there's some dried ramen somewhere buried under the mountains in there. I built up the landscape piece by pie

This project is the one I've been building toward since the beginning of the semester without fully realizing it. It started with Avatar. Specifically Pandora — James Cameron's vision of a planet that is entirely, biologically alive. Every creature, every tree, every root system connected to everything else. An ecosystem that breathes as one thing. I referenced this in my project one brainstorm and never really let go of it. Around the time I started thinking about project t

Going into this class I had never written a line of code or built a circuit in my life. So project one was less about making something perfect and more about making something that worked at all. My original idea came from a Mr. Beast video featuring a concept car inspired by Pandora from Avatar,the planet where everything is biologically connected, where touching one living thing sends a signal through the whole ecosystem. The car had scales that would physically react when y

Project II for this class works with Blender, creating wearables to make Tik Tok filters in Effect House. My first time around I did not have too much trouble with blender aside from the initial learning curve, I did struggle with Effect House, although I was using an old computer (that has since been replaced) that I think the combination of software was too much for, but I found that process very frustration. Therefore, for my next project I am refreshing myself in the Bl

“From ashes we fall, to ashes we rise” — Peter Chainsaw, 2025 This project is inspired by a close friend’s time leading a trail restoration crew in the Montana wilderness. For months, he used chainsaws to clear paths and protect the environment—a process of using heavy machinery to preserve natural beauty. Stihlback Mountain aims to capture this tension between the rugged, physical work of the forest and the fragile, digital world of art. I plan to use various glitch techni

The other day I saw a cool Mr. Beast video which featured an extremely futuristic ten-million-dollar concept car inspired by the animals of Pandora, the fantastical planet and home to the Na’vi, from James Cameron’s 2009 film Avatar. The car has scales embedded in the body which react flex and fluctuate hypnotically when touched by a human. The car is compared more to a creature by one of its creators. On Pandora everything natural is connected by the mother-natured force “Ey

BMoCA showing : ★ *Practice* se t · up II *Practice* se t · up I