The Green Bin Share Project

This year, I had been working on a personal project called The Green Bin Share Project with a small grant from the Small Grant Neighbourhood Project which is funded by the Vancouver Foundation.

Here's the animation I made to promote my sharing initiative:

The Green Bin Share Project encourages neighbours to share their city green bins, by letting others know with a green ribbon tied to the lid of their bins.

 

Simply put, in Vancouver multi-unit buildings like apartments, condos and townhouses do not yet have green bin service like those in houses and duplexes. So, to bridge this gap, The Green Bin Share Project encourages neighbours to share their city green bins by tying a green ribbon to the lid of their green bins to let others know they have room to spare. Eventually, multi-unit dwellers will get private green bin services but until then, the Green Bin Share Project allows everyone to start diverting their food scraps out of the landfill now, so that this lifestyle change can be practiced long before Vancouver's organic waste ban in 2015.

 

I also designed the print material that was to be distributed in the participating neighbourhoods. We had green ribbons, postcards, stickers and posters (poster designed by my friend Celia).

I created the project with scalability in mind, so that anyone who wanted to do this project in their neighbourhood could easily start by requesting a free DIY toolkit from our website, or by getting their own green ribbons or green fabric from a craft store.

This toolkit was mailed out by request to the Marpole area.

These are the Bin Buddies. I drew them half rotten, after hearing a complaint (from my Zero Waste workshops I attended at SPEC BC) that many composting advertisements show perfectly good, whole fruits and vegetables being thrown away which is misleading and wasteful.

It's been very rewarding to see some green ribbons in the participating neighbourhoods. Now, I don't have to drive to the farmer's market every weekend to compost my food scraps!

Please visit www.greenbinshareproject.com for much more info and updates! There, you can watch the animation, read the blog and request a free DIY toolkit.

Google Animation

Last spring I had the opportunity to do all the character animation for Google's policy video on Adult Content / AdSense, through Seth Kearsley's DOJO Productions.

This is most likely one of my proudest pieces of animation for a client, as I had a lot of creative freedom and it showcases my character animation abilities and my sense of timing. Enjoy!

Paper Dance Cat

Here's another wedding gift I did last week with the paper cutout style. I tried to get a sort of 60s/70s feel with the curry yellow paper and the repeating pattern, but the negative space of the pattern serendipitously changed into flowers. My partner and I spent most of the evening filling their guest notecards with bad puns. It was a happy day to see my longtime friend as the happy bride :)

Paper Pirate Bride

Two of my animation friends got married this year and because they are better artists than me, I was setting myself up for failure if I were to do my usual illustration-as-wedding-gift strategy. So, I tried my hand at paper cutout illustration which was really fun. The only thing I neglected to do was take a good photo of the finished piece, as I was literally gluing the last pieces together while the taxi waited for me outside. We tried to get one photo of it at the reception though. Haaaa.

The bride loves all things pirate and the pattern on the tail is supposed to be a tattoo the groom got recently. The dragon is wall-eyed and herpdederp and probably drunk.

t

*edit: I found a few more process photos that I forgot I took:

Here's a bunch of animation I did that I found on the interwebs. Good for kids! Enjoy!
 I still dunno why the renders are so saturated... :S 

Yoga Pretzels Trailer

I animated this trailer at Global Mechanic in the summer of 2010.

Barefoot Books wanted to bring to life the characters from their Yoga Pretzels card series to encourage children and their parents to do yoga together. I did most of the character animation and with the AE team, we tried our best to retain the painterly feel and charm found in the illustrations.

Kendo & Cake

This was a gift I drew for my friend's wedding last weekend. He loves kendo and cheesecake and his wife loves to cook. It's pretty special to see a longtime friend get married.

On another note, I've started drawing on paper again and have completely neglected to unpack my Cintiq from it's box since I've moved. Paper, you are swell, you can never be replaced!