I Am The Poop Within Me (2025)
A depressed loser who shits out his negative emotions must confront a monster made of his own excrement.
A 581 USC thesis film. I wrote / directed / edited / sound designed / production designed the film. Shot entirely on the USC stages.
Currently not available for public screenings, but link is available upon request.
Animatic:
Before beginning pre-production, I storyboarded the entire film and then made an animatronic. This helped with clarifying my own vision for the film (mainly the visual language, and knowing which shots we needed for the edit), and then communicating that vision to the crew. Every morning of production I would show the crew my crude animations for the scene(s) we were going to film that day, and then we’d get to work. It expedited and tempered the stresses of production enormously.
A depressed loser who shits out his negative emotions must confront a monster made of his own excrement.
A 581 USC thesis film. I wrote / directed / edited / sound designed / production designed the film. Shot entirely on the USC stages.
Currently not available for public screenings, but link is available upon request.
Animatic:
Before beginning pre-production, I storyboarded the entire film and then made an animatronic. This helped with clarifying my own vision for the film (mainly the visual language, and knowing which shots we needed for the edit), and then communicating that vision to the crew. Every morning of production I would show the crew my crude animations for the scene(s) we were going to film that day, and then we’d get to work. It expedited and tempered the stresses of production enormously.
Concept art:
We shot the film on two of USC’s sound stages. To accomodate the blocking and shots I had set up in my animatronic, I designed the sets in Photoshop, and then passed my sketches onto the production designer.
Working with my production designer and using the school’s resources to facilitate our collective vision was one of, if not the most, rewarding creative experiences of my life.
The Poopinator
The Poopinator costume was fabricated by a really kind and talented husband & wife creature designer team located up in Burbank. Here’s a sketch of the creature I drew and gave to them:
Positive Pal Picture Books
While writing and fine tuning the script, I began drawing the Positive Pal picturebooks that the character of the mother draws for Barton in-universe. Here is some of the art from those books, since you can’t see them too well in the film:
BTS Photos
The incredibly talented crew of I Am The Poop Within Me
The incredibly talented crew of I Am The Poop Within Me