The incompetent, skittish Mikey crash lands on a foreign planet with his commanding officer, the stern, competent Sir. The two attempt to survive in this environment, only for Mikey to disappoint Sir over and over again. Will Mikey be able to win the approval of Sir and survive in this hostile place?
Mikey’s Crash was my senior year thesis film at the Rhode Island School of Design. It is the most ambitious synthesis of my abilities to date, combining stop-motion background fabrication, 2D animation, and compositing, all alongside a greater scope of collaboration on the project. It most recently obtained an official selection from C-Show Short Video Competition in 2025.
The film was co-created with Vinny Wang. We worked with 3 other crewmembers, and I reached out to more than 20 other artists both inside and outside of RISD to create the animated sequences above.
To achieve the mixed media appearance of our film, I created these mushrooms out of foam, assembled and painted them, photographed them, and then composited them together. The rightmost image was the first test of the idea, and the look of our film progressed from there using that same process. Lee Tomlinson provided additional painting and fabrication help to take these designs to the next level.
The designs for the ship were much more complicated, and in creating it, we thought that this initial planning might be required, so I made this half-turn of the ship. Lee created the final paintjob for the ship and made some design adjustments here and there to create the final look of the ship, can partly be seen in the leftmost image below.
These stills represent the final look of the film.
Vinny and I had a couple of initial ideas about how Mikey and Sir could/should look, and I ultimately made the final character designs as well as the corresponding character packs, whose pages are shown above. Mikey was the first character we made, and we came up with Sir later as a foil to him.
Vinny came up with the design of the creatures and it was just about perfect from the start. Round enough to seem innocent, but hostile enough to still be a threat within the narrative.
Work on the project began in the summer of 2023, and there were massive changes to the scope and direction of the project along the way. this color script provides an early look at what we thought the film initially looked like.