ARCANE - MAIN TITLES DESIGN PITCH

This project holds a special place in my career to this point. I had invested considerable time into developing my portfolio to include title sequence work for a couple years when I was contacted by Elastic to put together some designs for Netflix's upcoming League of Legends series - Arcane. Not only was I floored that they had reached out unsolicited, but I was also well... nervous as hell. I was designing along with some absolute heavy hitters in the motion industry and the task felt a little daunting when the project started. When I look back in retrospect, it's not the frames that I created or the fact that it was my first job designing for a high profile Title Sequence that made this a memorable project, instead it was the circumstances I found myself in over the course of those two weeks that made this one of the single most influential moments in my professional life...

The first week of the booking I was absolutely spinning my wheels. I had been working night and day to build something fresh and original that fell within the guidelines of the creative brief. To put it simply... I was holding myself to too high of a standard that at the time, I just couldn't meet. Seeing some of the early exports that Mike Zeng - ZAOEYO, Christoffer Bjerre and Toros Kose were creating only added to my angst. That weekend I decided to take a step back and completely pivot on my approach. I came up with a concept that might had a theoretical through line, but there was one problem - It would require some XParticles and I had never used the plugin before... So, I decided to go on a deep dive of late nights with Bob Wormsley tutorials trying to learn just enough to bring my vision to life.

That following Monday for the first time, I felt as though I had a little momentum behind me and my confidence was slowly bouncing upward. Then a reckoning from the League of Legends gods themselves, one of the worst storms in our history tore through our city of Cedar Rapids, IA with it's full unrelenting force...

2020 DOESN'T CARE ABOUT YOUR CAREER

Known as a Derecho, the storm was essentially an inland hurricane blasting 140mph straightline winds for 45 minutes straight. Palm trees might whip around the gulf in these kinds of winds, but up here we don't have many trees built to withstand this kind of weather. For my fellow midwesterners, think of it more like being inside a 75 mile wide F2 Tornado that goes on for 45 minutes. I do have to consider myself extremely fortunate though, despite getting locked out of our powerless coworking space for the first couple minutes of the storm I was in a sturdy steel and brick building looking out through tripple glazed industiral windows. Many of my friends and family were stuck in far more precarious situations, some with genuine questions of whether they would come out of it alive.

After a futile effort of trying to exit the cities maze of countless downed trees, obliterated older homes and bottleneck traffic, I ditched my well timed gassless car in a parking lot and borrowed a bicycle from a friend in the building to bike home and asses the damage. We were extremely fortunate in comparison to many around town. For the first time, I was grateful that our property had very few large established trees.

Clean up efforts around the city had already begun and the sounds of chainsaws reverberated all throughout the silent rows of houses. Before jumping into the fray with my neighbors that I so seldom even talked with, I called Michael Ross (Producer) and Hazel Baird (Creative Director) to fill them in on the situation. They could not have been more understanding and professional in handling the whole situation. Up to that point, I had delivered very little - actually, NO usable content to include within the pitch deck. I told them I would keep them in the loop on when the city could expect power to be restored and one way or another will deliver on my booking. I never felt pressured in any way to continue on with the project, however I didn't want this opportunity I'd been working toward to be squandered away by an ill-timed shit-out-of-luck scenario.

With no power restoration in sight, a day and a half of clean up work, and countless trips to and from friends and families homes for swapping power generators behind me, my business partner and good friend Jake Vardaman came to the resuce offering up one of his rental homes. While the storm had spread the length of the entire state, just 30 minutes south of us in Iowa City, much of the tree canopy had faired far better. My wife and I were able to round up our pups and move down south for the rest of the week.

Aftermath From the Derecho of 2020

BTS Shots From The Photo Shoots.

After Thursday rushed up on us, I was able to devote the rest of the week and that weekend to playing catch-up on all of the lost time. Because of the circumstances, it was relatively easy to pack away my self doubt and the second guessing of my new conceptual direction. My four day sprint to deliver a set of boards, was capped off with a 36 hour straight through work session. This experience has left an indelible mark on my philosphy toward business and creative endeavors:

If you really want something bad enough, dedicate yourself to seeing it through - NO MATTER WHAT. (I know, it sounds tacky and trite, but it's TRUE)