spang animation studios | mike taylor, character animator

Grand Opening Week

First Monticello with South Pavilion

First Monticello with South Pavilion

Tearing down the first Monticello

Tearing down the first Monticello

Construction of Monticellos Dome

Construction of Monticello's Dome

Side view of second Monticello

Side view of second Monticello

While I’ve been settling into my new gig animating at Turbine – and loving it – the people at the Thomas Jefferson Foundation have been preparing to open the new visitor’s center at Monticello.  Part of the center has been open since November, and on April 15, they open the rest of it.  I’ve only seen plans and pictures, but it looks pretty amazing.  We hope to visit again soon to check it out.

I put together two of the pieces, under the direction of aMPU and am pretty proud to have seen them mentioned in today’s Boston Globe article.

“An Essay in Architecture” is an epic piece of 5 minutes of animation, interspersed with Jefferson drawings and drawings of French architecture.  It demonstrates how Jefferson planned Monticello I, and built most of it before moving to Paris as ambassador.  Upon returning, he had all new plans, tore down a large part of what he built and constructed what is there today.

The stills above are featured on the Monticello website.  Clicking on each will bring up a higher-resolution version of each.

The other piece, “A Passion for Ordered Knowledge”, humorously portrays Jefferson’s obsessive need to count and measure EVERYTHING.  See below for a clip.

Fun stuff.

Thomas Jefferson, Animated

The Thomas Jefferson Foundation has posted a clip that I worked on.  The clip is from a video that will display in one of the new galleries opening at the Monticello Visitor’s Center in April.  It is one of five pieces that will play in sequence, when started by a visitor.  (Here’s the clip on Monticello’s site)

My responsibilities on this project were to take these great collages provided to me, apply them to models in Maya and animate them.  The animation is pretty simple and straightforward, but was a lot of fun.

When the Visitor’s Center opens, I’ll post a few more clips of this and the other “epic” piece I worked on.

Other Work

spang - thunderhouse

Although my focus is now Character Animation, I have spent quite a while working on non-character pieces and feel that deserves a place on this site. Clicking on the picture above will take you to my 3D Work page, with a brief history of the projects I have worked on, and a Demo Reel.