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Blacksmith Room
This blacksmith environment was created as a personal project to experiment with environmental storytelling and handcrafted detail. Inspired by medieval fantasy workshops, the scene focuses on worn materials, practical props, and warm cinematic lighting to create a lived-in atmosphere. The project was developed using Maya, ZBrush, Substance Painter, Substance Designer, Arnold, Redshift, Procreate, and After Effects.
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Lego Crime
In a world where LEGO bricks are one of the most valuable commodities, the LEGO Police works tirelessly to stop the saof counterfeit bricks. When a suspicious dealer starts selling knockoff LEGO sets, it’s up to the LEGO cops to bring them to justice.
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Ascension Cross
A detailed 3D recreation of the Ascension Cross from my church. This asset was modeled in Maya and ZBrush, textured in Substance Painter, and rendered in Redshift, with a focus on capturing material detail and craftsmanship.
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Story with pictures
Here’s my final project for my cinematography class! It’s a visual story told through a combination of still photos and a bit of stop motion. I had a lot of fun making it, and I hope you enjoy this silly little video!
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Reconstructing Charles Willson Peale’s Mastodon Excavation and Display Through Al
I had the opportunity to participate in the STAR (Students Tackling Advanced Research) program at Drexel University, where I explored how AI can be used to bring history to life through animation. My project focused on recreating Charles Willson Peale’s 1801 mastodon excavation and the assembly of the first mastodon skeleton displayed in the United States.
Before I could begin generating any visuals, I spent time researching Peale’s letters, autobiography, and historical paintings to better understand the people, locations, and events I wanted to recreate. The narration in the film comes directly from passages in Peale’s own writing, allowing the story to be told using his words.
One of the biggest things I learned was that creating AI-generated video involves much more than simply writing a prompt. I spent a lot of time experimenting with prompts, testing different descriptions, and using reference images to guide the AI toward more historically accurate results. Even then, the AI frequently changed characters’ faces, clothing, and environments between shots, so a large part of the project involved editing, refining, and finding creative ways to maintain consistency throughout the film.
To improve historical accuracy, Charles Willson Peale and Rembrandt Peale were based on their self-portraits. Since no known portrait of Moses Williams exists, his appearance was created using a historical silhouette, a painting believed to depict him, and a 3D character model created by Tyrone Bullock in collaboration with my project mentor, Professor Glen Muschio. The waterwheel scene was also inspired by Peale’s painting Exhumation of the Mastodon.
This project changed the way I think about AI as a creative tool. Rather than replacing artists, I found that AI works best when combined with research, traditional digital art, and careful editing. It still required a significant amount of creative decision-making, but it also made it possible for me to produce a project that would have been difficult to complete on my own in a single summer.
This film was produced as part of my STAR research project under the mentorship of Professor Glen Muschio. The experience gave me a much better understanding of both the possibilities and the current limitations of AI, and it showed me how these tools can be used to create more engaging ways of sharing history.
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Peale’s Mastodon: AI-Assisted Historical Visualization
This project was developed during Drexel University’s Star Program and focuses on the historical discovery of Peale’s Mastodon. Inspired by Charles Willson Peale’s written letters to his son, I created a short AI-generated film interpreting his account of the excavation.
To support the visual accuracy of the AI output, I modeled a detailed mastodon skeleton in ZBrush, textured it in Substance Painter, and rendered it in Maya using Redshift. This asset was used to guide the AI pipeline toward more anatomically consistent results.
The video was generated using Google Gemini and Flow, with AI-generated narration produced through Eleven Labs. The script was written by me and based directly on Peale’s historical correspondence.
