dontmesswithdinosaurs.com

From the moment I first heard Warcloud’s (aka Holocaust’s) barraging, eidetic lyrical style I wanted to direct a music video inspired by the imagery in his lyrics. I was able to get in touch with his fellow American Poet, Nova Kane, and when Warcloud got let out (he was locked up for 3 years for fighting) Nova got in touch with me and asked me to direct a video for this track. We had a ton of fun making this, lurking around Los Angeles China Town and filming fight sequences in the Malibu hills, and I hope it’s fun to watch.

If you want to hear more of The American Poets 2099, You can preview the album and support the artists by purchasing it here:
http://www.undergroundhiphop.com/american-poets-2099-murderous-poetry

Thanks again to everyone who helped make shooting this video possible. So much goddamn fun.
WEAPON FACTORY!! WEAPON FACTORY!!

-historian

Here are a few screen grabs of some of the footage I’ve shot for the ‘In Mountains’ video:

And here is a recent collaborative track I did with a group called Weapon Mouth which consists of producer/forger of rhymes Mindscapes and his bloodthirsty lyrical skull stomper brother, Omega Hurtz. My verse is on third:

You can check out more of their music here:

Weaponmouth Youtube
Mindscapes Youtube
Omega Hurtz Youtube

that’s what this is:

download BATTLE ROAR!!!!!! (Beat by Steven Doman).mp3
(right click to download)

I was hanging out with my friend Steven Doman and he was playing beats that he made in high school. One of them was really bonked out and awesome and for some reason I just started freaking out and yelling things about time travel and shooting blood out of my eyes like horned lizards. So we decided we should probably record something over it, and a few weeks later we recorded the above video and vocals. Since then Steve went in on the beat and evolved it into what you hear in the video, while I drew pictures, animated and composited the images to match the stuff I’m yelling about.

Anyway, pachycephalosaurs are awesome.

I’ve been meaning to post this illustration for some time. Seeing Mike Taylor’s collection of illustrations featuring sauropods smashing theropods on SV-POW reminded me.

This illustration was also inspired by a discussion about Shunosaurus on SV-POW, which featured some great skeletal reference. Also, Mike was nice enough to clarify the exact structure of Shunosaurus’ tail club. It is often depicted with varying numbers of stegosaur-like spikes, when in reality it had some nice bony knobs on the dorsal surface, but no distinct evidence of spikes. I think that makes a lot of sense. Stegosaur tails are relatively short and stocky as compared to sauropods’ more whip-like tails. I can envision a stegosaur driving a spike deep into an opponent and then pulling it out, because there’s not a bunch of extra slack in the tail to pull strait before the spike is pulled. I imagine a spiky thagomizer on the end of a more whiplike sauropod tail would get imbedded, but would be difficult to remove, as there appears to have been very little musculature towards the end of sauropod’s tails. A thick knob of bone on the other hand, would handily deal out blunt-force trauma with less likelihood of entangling its owner with the attacker. That was the idea behind this illustration anyway.

The environment was reconstructed after fossils from the middle Jurassic of China. The Ginkgo is Ginkgo yimaensis, but reconstructed after Ginkgo biloba, which were kind enough to survive into the present so I could reference their beautiful gnarly structures and branch arrangement. The meat eater is some kind of middle Jurassic sinraptorid theropod. I’ll refrain from ascribing an exact species because there’s a smattering of incomplete theropod remains from roughly the same stratigraphic and geographic range as Shunosaurus, but there is some uncertainty to as which genus/species are legit and which should be consolidated. They’re all pretty similar murderous-looking mid-sized allosaurs similar to Sinraptor. Ultimately it doesn’t really matter to me what the official literature calls them…

I like them all.

Shunosaurus vs. Szechuanosaurus (rough sketch)

I inked the whole thing and then realized I hated how the dinosaurs were drawn. So I’m redrawing them (rough sketch above). I’m fairly happy with the gingko, though:

Just finished the sound design for this:

Let me know what you think. The director has plans to adapt further Lovecraft stories into short animations like this one, so I’ll hopefully be working with him in the future. It was a fun little project, and I think the idea of doing a series of adaptations of spooky shorts based on stories by Lovecraft has a lot of potential.

I mentioned in a previous post that I was working on building a miniature of a giant victorian-style factory machine for a short film. Well, it’s finished!

The blank area in the front will be replaced digitally with a section of full scale set that actors will be interacting with. When all the effects are done the scene will look like a huge factory with several giant machines being operated by tiny people working down at the base of each machine.

good lord I haven’t posted in ages…
people keep comin’ at me like “where the new shit at, son?” and I’m all, “It’s not finished.”

So, here are several of those unfinished things for you to enjoy and/or wonder about how they will be when they are finished (if that ever happens)…

First, I’m working on a couple Spinosaurus illustrations for a young paleontologist named Tor Bertin. I did this one as a sort of ‘warm up’ and I haven’t had time to finish it yet (let alone start the REAL illustration)…

My main job at the moment is building some miniature set pieces for a grad student’s thesis film. Right now I am making a miniature giant factory machine, but because I screwed up a few times, I still have a ways to go…

Here is some concept art I did for the same project, which shows the general style of the film…

When I need a break from working on the machine (or whatever else) I mess around in GarageBand. Between last night and today I made this beat…
Wong Fe Hong.mp3
I don’t think I’m going to do anything with it, so if you know how to kill evil robots with kung fu, you’re welcome to download it and rap on it. It’s 83 bpm, feel free to chop it up or whatever, I don’t care.

Also, a couple weeks ago I put together this track for a YouTube cypher called the “Third Eye Cypher”, but I haven’t had a chance to do a video for it (I want to do a good one):
Zephyr.mp3

Oh and just to complicate my schedule further, I also make ceramics, and I’m trying to get this commission done (it still needs to be glazed and fired):

…and on the back burner I have several major music video projects, three more albums, another short film and plans to revamp this website. Mainly I need to revise/add new stuff to/generally improve my illustration/concept design portfolio. I also need to add a “store” page, because I now have an Etsy page and I will be putting some of my art up for sale. I hope you’ll stay tuned and check it out.

Right after the very first Youtube rap contest I entered I got a message from this kid named Rhyval who wanted me to participate in his ‘Numbers Exhibition’ wherein participants were to rap over a beat from a Ludacris song using numbers as a lyrical theme. It sounded fun and I promised him I’d do a cool video for it. I worked on it here and there until I finally found some time to finish it up this week. I hope you like it.

Glorious Infinite.mp3
(right click to download)

My good buddy and former roommate David Reilly just put his recently completed senior animation thesis up on Youtube. It is a funny cartoon show about Admiral Tremendousness (the best and greatest super-hero). I did a little music and voice work for it, and David did a beautiful job writing, directing, designing and animating it. I hope you like it!