24 December 2014

Cheers 2014, A year as an artist in LA.

Well time snapped by super fast over the past year. LA has been a very exciting creative journey for me. Joining the We Are Royale team as an Art Director has been an amazing experience. Joining a new team can be daunting as everyone is learning each others strengths and weaknesses, but its been a super smooth transition. I've learned so much over the past year and look forward to growing more.

I wanted to do a slight recap of some of the projects I got to work on while I've been here -- mainly because I'm super proud of the work we've accomplished. It's hard to edit down to just a few select projects, but here are some that I thought worth re-sharing.

 Nike - XX9 The Art of Flight
Talk about walking into a high end project immediately on entering the door -- I got first hand experience working with the full production pipeline on this one. It was fun to jump on this project and help out where I could. Working on some design, r&d AE animation, and AE comp / animation.
https://vimeo.com/92534809


Nike - Colordry
And if creating a photo realistic shoe being built by a futuristic loom wasn't enough, the royale team really stepped up to the plate and knocked this one out of the park. Developing an animation to explain the actual color dry process from the molecular level out was a fun challenge. What made this project stand out even further was the decision to do a live action shoot to help augment the beautiful CG effects. I got to help direct the practical shoot and also took on the role of lead comper. Thankfully Renzo had already taught me so much by jumping onto XX9 with him and we had an amazing team of compositors. Just an overall great team!
https://vimeo.com/108527195

Nike - Flyknit
For this project I got to jump on a small team and help bring another Nike innovation, Flyknit, to life in a print and motion piece. Working with an amazing set of designers, we were able to create a large vertical image that lived on the web with various shoes rotating out. This was a super fun Art Direction job to be on and also got to comp the motion piece.
http://www.nike.com/us/en_us/c/better-world/flyknit/innovation

CW - The 100 main titiles
Title animations, who doesn't love working on them? It's fun to visualize a show's conceptual base and explore its theories in motion. This was another job where I got to jump around in my role as Art Director, creating an animated alphabet, exploring the edit foundation and also exploding some letters(numbers) with rayfire.  I think the team did an amazing job of making a sequence feel so effortless in its design and execution.
https://vimeo.com/110422987

ok ok -- I think that's it for this recap. There are a few more projects that I'd love to call out, but at the end of the day I walk with saying this: I work with some amazing artist. Each of those job recaps could have ended with the team  as a whole did an amazing job, but I figured I'd save that for here. I was jumping into a completely new place, and everyone has really embraced me. I think it's led to some awesome collaborations and smiles. Every part of the pipeline is filled with top notch artist, and I'm proud to work amongst them. Look forward to our 2015 accomplishments!

Cheers 2014 -- you were alright ;)

15 December 2014

Anomaly Tour Visuals

My close friend Carlos wanted to collaborate on doing some intro animation for this opening set on the Lecrae Anomaly Tour. We had fun and it was super awesome to watch it live here in LA!

I've uploaded one version to my vimeo account here:


DJ Promote Tour visuals from James Ramirez on Vimeo.

But you can also see an alternate version and hear the full tour mix on Promote's youtube page:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-nDlzyJn0I0&feature=youtu.be

01 December 2014