“Tribute” was a collaborative and exhaustive effort between two senior project teams: film and animation/visual effects. It started over a year ago before we all went on CO-OP, which is a requirement here at Drexel. Being out in the world and working is so much fun. I enjoyed being in a small office environment, where you get to have lunch with your team every day and there’s always someone to turn to for help. Also I just love New York city more than anything. I’m biased because I was born in Queens, but I can feel myself starting to rant so I digress.

We met initially for a few weeks at the end of a term and then continued our meetings online, testing a long distance relationship as a team. During pre-production, a lot of our pipeline was muddied. Since the animators couldn’t yet animate and I couldn’t well start on textures without getting to know the software, the initial focus was simply art and story.

Due to our collection of skills, it was agreed upon that we wanted the focus our our team to be a single character and without a set story concepts were extreme in their variation. From my view all flora and fauna are perfect things so I mixed up all kinds of organisms, but these things ended up being scrapped for not looking friendly enough. Which is understandable, and it would have been difficult for us to work with something completely photo-realistic in the first place. It was actually a bit difficult for me to put aside my style to make a more agreeable concept. I kept collaborating with my fellow artists (there are three of us on the team) and I’d say this concept got the closest.

I initially despised this thing I’d drawn. It was quite outside my comfort zone, knowing full well how unnatural it appeared, but this was the most popular concept yet. And so we accepted and worked with it. I’ve grown to love Ceegee as much as anyone over time, and as most artists know working in the industry means commonly throwing out the things most precious to you for the sake of the team’s work. And to be honest you usually won’t mind it in the end as long as long as the team succeed’s as a whole. And I do feel quite grateful and successful today for all the work we’ve done together.

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