Josh Young

2023 Demo Reel

A collection of my best work over the last couple years! A great introduction before singling out some of my best and most recent pieces. Edited to Fell in Love with a Girl by The White Stripes. 

Thesis Film

This was my passion project created over the course of my last semester at Ringling College. The piece is about dissociation and overstimulation in a cyberpunk world while also keeping it fun and exciting. I tried to combine all of the elements I have learned throughout my 4 years to create an engaging and visually stimulating piece that explores new methods such as point clouds mixed with realistic rendering. The song used is Bodystnatchers by Radiohead and sound design was done by Kelly Warner.

I sourced 3d models such as "Subway Train Interior" from Lukas Hahn 3d, and scans from Alban for the subway station. Most other environmental assets were sourced from Quixel Megascans. However, nearly all assets were edited from it's original. Most models were collected and transformed into point clouds that contained animation and material data. 

All of the 2d graphics were animated by myself in Adobe After Effects. A large variety was needed to get the overwhelming and overstimulating effect in the final piece.

Cyberpunk Weapons Test

This project is a remake of a project that I complete in my sophomore and junior year. I used all my newfound knowledge in 3D and FX to make a more realistic and visually appealing piece.

You can see some of the process and the older versions on my website!

Mystical Portal Composite

This was a large scale Advanced 3D Compositing project. I was tasked with creating a fully realized 3D scene, working with my professors to shoot greenscreen footage, generating and importing a motion tracked 3D camera, and compositing the raw footage into the rendered scene. 

The CG scene contained assets from Quixel megascans and two personally developed pyro simulations developed in Houdini. I have provided early renders of the simulations and the raw greenscreen footage below.

Universal Production Music

This piece was devolved alongside motion designer Sol Bourdeau Garcia. Together we developed a solution to a mock-brief for Universal Production Music. We decided on the following visual solution: A series of different glass refractions abstractly visualize different drone sounds, offset by a sudden explosion of primitive 3d and 2d shapes with tactile textures. We then worked very closely on the design phase, both of us splitting the storyboards and style frames equally. In the end I was in charge of animating and developing the scenes into their final form. Below is an interesting method I used of animating with formulas.

Explosion Abstraction

Painterly explosion effect created using advected particles and several animated brush textures! Imagined to be an asset to a larger 3D stylized world.

Overlaying Wave Script

(Soon to be distributed online!)

This is a vector-based script UI panel that you install into AfterEffects that includes 5 functions, one to create a rig and 4 options for modules that create 4 different types of waves for whatever the prompt may need. I have created this to have both constructive and destructive interference, meaning that you can layer wave type modules for overlapping waves resulting in wave interaction for a more realistic motion.

There is no wave rig right now that includes combinable modules, I scripted this with the final animator in mind to make it as user friendly as possible. The modular style and compact layers of this AfterEffects script makes it easy to use and so that you only see what you need to.

Futureproof 2023

This is a concept for Ringling's Motion Design conference, Futureproof. I was lucky enough to be on a team with Steven Dvornik where we equally shared the work and audio was done by professor Kelly Warner.

We both divided up all parts of the process. For animation and asset building we used Houdini to create a lot of complex procedural movements. I created most of the animated rocks in the beginning and end shots, while Steven created the still rocks. I also worked on all of the wood shots and animated the cloth in the last couple shots leading up to the lockup. Steven worked on all of the solo cloth shots and most of the solo rock shots. The wood and carbon fiber textures that were used I created almost entirely from scratch. We also divided equally lighting and texturing each scene.

The typeface was completely original and designed by me and half of the 2d graphics were designed and animated by me.

Psychedelic Bose Concept

This piece I created by myself using Cinema 4D and Houdini to run art directed liquid and vellum sims on my headphone model. The colors were created almost entirely in post by comping in multiple light passes.

Extras for fun!