I participated in the Winter 2026 session of Gunner School, which I treated like an artist residency and a safe space to fail. The disruptions in the economy and in the industry (motion design and animation) were really making me question my place and my future. I needed to reignite my creativity and my general way of working. So I applied to Gunner School and got accepted in their small cohort. My goals were to experiment more, push myself out of my established comfort zones, to treat pre-production with much more care and intention and to have more fun.
The program is designed as a choose your own adventure track with a series of 1 and 2-week briefs that you choose to work on, with mentors interrogating your choices, encouraging your ideas, and offering guidance where needed.
What follows is an abbreviated selection of the projects I took on and the work I produced during the program.
Brief 1: Cinematic Cartoons (1 Week)
Taking screenshots from a movie in order to recreate them in a simplified style
I choose David Fincher's Zodiac to work with here. The colors were going to be a challenge: muted and desaturated being the opposite of my sensibility of bright and garish. The lighting was low contrast and dark. There was lots of perspective and the compositions were misleading in their complexity. It's also my favorite movie so I know it inside and out.
I can't help but think of this image as What if Zodiac were a children's book?
Takeaways
I wanted a challenge and I got one. These scenes really forced me to move away from my preferred color palettes of garish, saturated colors.
I can see that color matching is like any other skill and needs to be maintained over time.
I have come to rely on the color picker too much because it’s easier (and so much faster).
My favorite scene (and the one that felt the easiest) was the exterior scene.
This is a beautifully shot movie. I really saw it in a new perspective.
Going this deep was constructive for my goals, but if I want to make color studies from movies a habit, I need to SIMPLIFY SIMPLIFY SIMPLIFY.
Brief 2: Sing Your Animation (2 Weeks)
Timing, Spacing and Movement while animating to sound
I designed and animated a personal ident video using a song from a friend's band when we were in high school. It was weird, weird, weird, and now opens my reel.
Explore this video in greater depth here.
Takeaways
I can maintain my messiness without being sloppy– this is a major distinction that I now see.
Creating a hybrid animation between hand drawn work in Animate and components in After Effects is more approachable than I thought– it just requires planning and staying organized (, and a timecode).
Animated textures really bring my sensibilities to another level.
I really like staccato timing in animation.
You can get closer to your handmade aesthetic in After Effects with minimal, intentional effects.
My lack of storyboarding when animating personal projects has become a bad habit; animation was so much smoother simply by planning ahead more.
Doing the thinking part of building a project while sick is no fun and way harder than it needs to be.
I can’t resist the urge to deviate slightly from my boards as I animate. Some things just feel right as you’re in the work, so long as it doesn’t deviate from the original concept.
This video is ridiculous and weird and if it doesn’t generate leads, I don’t know what’s wrong.
Brief 3: the power of parallax (1 Week)
Adding depth and character, frame by frame
I wanted to return to some foundations with this one. I focused on refining my clean up and removing my sloppy tendencies. I have a Herman Melville project in mind and this seemed like the perfect excuse to get a little into his head (literally).
Takeaways
Designs are more enjoyable to work with when they’re simplified.
You never get good enough to throw foundations out the window, you get good because you continually build off of foundations.
I still get exhausted doing clean up.
I can really only comfortably spend so much time in a sitting doing clean up, otherwise I turn sloppy as I try to speed up.
I do parallax all the time, but I never really think about it anymore.
The process of nudging caused me so much mental grief, but at the end of the day, this process isn’t too far off from my general process.
I should have paid more attention to my design and where his hair meets his ears and beard in the front view– that area could have had more clarity and fewer intersecting lines.
I like the contrast of clean line work and boiling color fill.
Melville still isn’t out of my system. We’re not done with him.
Brief 4: flip the script (2 Weeks)
Write a script, record the voice over, tell a story
This was the first group project of the program. I was paired with 2 other creatives and we each brought our own specialties and expertise to the project. We needed to write a 20 second script, record the VO and animate the short.
I wrote the script, designed the storyboards and was responsible for animating the alien and everything associated with them: the lights in the sky from the window and the green light spilling from the door as it swings open.
Storyboards
takeaways
20 seconds feels at once too brief and endless.
There’s a whole new set of stressors involved when you bring in a “new to you” process and pipeline (ie. I know next to nothing about 3D).
I wish we had 3 weeks instead of 2– a week for dedicated exploration and experimentation would have helped to land on better choices with less struggle.
The process of figuring each other out was so truncated that it made for a haphazard approach to what we were doing and how we were going to approach it.
If we couldn’t have an equal distribution of work, we would have an equitable one. Me not being booked at the time, meant I could take on a heavier load than Rach and Dylan who both had day jobs.
We swung for the fences with this one. We took chances and properly experimented. Looking back on it, hardly any safe choices were made.
It didn’t feel terribly ambitious at the start, but it certainly came to be so.
We can each say that we produced something that is so wildly different from what we each would have done on our own.
Brief 5: logo animations (1 Week)
Representing the brand through motion, amplifying its intent
I needed a bit of breather following the intensity of the previous brief, so I dipped into logo animation, something I don't get to do nearly as much as I would like. I chose The Modern Library because I'm a something of a sucker for books, and if there's anything that I hate animating it's a walk cycle. The logo is so exaggerated there's really no place to hide behind subtlety, you have to swing for it and go bold.
The static logo of the running torchbearer to work with
The final logo, set on a textured paper background to mimic a book
takeaways
I had to pull out my Richard Williams book for this one, because I do walk and run cycles so infrequently; the reference definitely helped to get my key poses in place.
I find that I still struggle with walk and run cycles but this one felt more intuitive, maybe because of the stylization or the exaggeration, or that it was just fun to work on.
I achieved a fluidity that I don’t often get in my animation; this was one of those perfect scenarios where what I saw in my head is what was animated.
I enjoyed animating this logo more than I anticipated.
Always give yourself more time for clean up than you think you’ll need (my hand got pretty fatigued with this one).
It would have been a quick solution to simply use a clean puppet, but hand drawing the final gave me a control and attention to detail that I would have lost with using only the puppet.
Brief 6: what a feeling (2 Weeks)
Translating a feeling into an animated character
We needed to animate a feeling, and I chose Depression. I wanted to tackle a complex feeling without going maudlin, to personify the feeling through the character design itself and not just through performance and it was the feeling I kept circling back to as I brainstormed.
Explore this video in greater depth here.
takeaways
Doing the rough animation in Animate, and then importing it into Procreate Dreams for clean up was a great decision for speed and ease.
I still find Procreate Dreams a little clunky, so this Animate to PD pipeline is one I’ll probably use again in the future (the brushes are so much better).
Doing a 16 second video as a “I’ll just dip my toes into a new program” was a lot.
Moving frames around in PD is not that intuitive. I need to get more comfortable there in particular.
I can’t believe I thought that I could maybe tackle 2 feelings for this brief.
I didn’t make the best use of my time with this one– I was so fried during the first week that I didn’t even get into animation until the following Monday and then I was scrambling.
I’m so proud of how I was able to accurately capture my original illustration of the character with its textures and softness– that was the thing that stressed me out the most about this project.
Brief 7: tell a story (3 Weeks)
Write another script, tell another story
This was the second group project and the final brief of the program. I was paired with 2 other creatives and we had the smallest group of the cohort. We had to write, design and animate a 30 second short. No one stuck to the 30 second limit. Everyone went off the rails and we were all encouraged to do so.
We had a loose breakdown of the gag instead of a proper script, and we opted to forgo a voiceover, choosing instead to use exposition of screens to set up the gag. I designed the storyboards and animated the gorilla, Mr. Marbles along with frame by frame sequences like the curtain opening.
Storyboards kept getting expanded as we were encouraged to run wild with the gag and ignore the 30-second limit.
conclusion
That wraps up about 3 months of experimentation, taking chances, rebuilding my storyboarding skills, trying out moodboards, rediscovering my love of gags and being silly. I wanted an artist residency and I got one. My voice was fine tuned and my tool box got expanded. I met some great artists and got to work directly with a few of them. I got out of my silo and had fun. Overall, it was a huge success.