This is so cool.  Because I’m an approved Lucasfilm artist and I worked on the Indiana Jones Heritage set, I’ve been invited to be part of a Sketch Card set for Indiana Jones 4.  My cards have arrived today and I’m pretty excited about the project.

If you haven’t already, go see the trailer.

I understand that there are quite a few collectors out there interested in these cards. I just didn’t know how big the community. My friend Jess sent me a link to eBay. Somebody got their hands on quite a few sketch cards and were selling them off. They even got one of my cards and…IT SOLD! Unknown artist, 6 bids, 21 bucks. wow

I’m glad that somebody likes my work. Does anybody want to pay me directly to draw some sketch cards?

It is so awesome to have creative kids.

I’ve completed my cards and have sent them off to Topps for approval. They have given me the OK to show off this scan from my first set of sketch cards.

More videos from the “Burt Builds a Bandit Contest” channel at Heavy.com

In the spirit of self improvement and making new friends, I have signed on to draw some sketch cards for Marvel.  These cards are licensed through Upper Deck.  I’ve been thinking that I would try and carry a theme throughout these cards and have decided that for the most part it will be “Spider-Friends”.  I used to watch the Spider-Friends cartoon with my brother so it made perfect sense to me to use those memories as inspiration for this card set.

It turns out that they’re 20% short on filling their order for sketch cards so I’ve signed on to do another 53. I felt like my first set was really all about getting back into the swing of things. I’ve really enjoyed doing the cards, but I felt like I rushed some of them. I imagine that some anxious collector would be ripping into their card set only to discover one of my cards. I can see the disappointment in their eyes as they look over my card and then they head off to their computers to start sending me hate mail.

THAT’S why I’m so happy to have the chance to do 53 more cards. REDEMPTION!!!!! hehehe

The year was 2001 (hmmm, that has a familiar ring to it), I had just started working for the Cisco Networking Academy and I was very confused.  You see, I was actually an employee of Aries Technology that was staffed at Cisco Networking Academy.  I felt like I was some sort of double-secret agent or something.  Then one day in 2004 I was moved with the majority of my team from the 2nd to the 4th floor.  We were now working for a company called the Cisco Learning Institute.  I was still employed by Aries, just on a new floor, with most of the same people.  Then in 2006 I was hired full time by Cisco Learning Institute and we moved to a new building.  The team that I was working with was slowly shrinking until I too was let go.

I was letting some of my old co-workers that I was now looking for work when Aries came back into the picture.  I started working today with my old teammates!  Most of the people that had transitioned to Cisco Learning Institute and were let go are now back at Aries and staffed at the Cisco Networking Academy.

I’ve been told that it’s a 3 month contract for me to be at the Networking Academy so I’m still looking for a fulltime job.

Well, here I go again. I’ve got some screen shots of the video contest that I entered for Nestles 100 Grand Bar. When I bite into the candy bar all that Nestle candy goodness sends me on a trip down memory lane. Those memories come in a series of flashes of images. I’ve gathered them all together and put them up here so that you can see them all.

In my last post I wrote a bit about the Dolly Zoom. I don’t think that it turned out exactly like I wanted but it’s pretty good.

Grand Memories

I thought that I’d be experimental with this video and try to do that cool vertigo effect from Jaws. The idea is that the camera dollys in while the lens zooms out. It ends up making the background of the image appear to push away from the character in the foreground.

I knew that I wanted things to be smooth so I figured that I needed some sort of rig. I can set the camera to automatically zoom so I just needed to work on the dolly part. I thought that a heavy wagon with air filled tires would do the trick, but it didn’t.

I’ve got an old church pew that I turned over and then strapped the camera to my ancient skateboard. This seemed to work pretty good.

You can see on top of the camera I’ve got it recording directly to a hard drive. Then on the skateboard you can see that I have a LCD monitor so that Jenna could watch me as she moved the camera in. All in all, I think that we’ll chalk this one up to a learning experience.