A Cowboy’s Purpose (2019)

Collaboration with Frankie Tamaru.

Frankie and I took a class on Westerns when we were at CalArts. Frankie appreciated it a lot more than I, as much as I loved the teacher, I just hated cowboys and westerns in general. We had an amazing teacher, Gary Mairs, (also the voice of Derek in Ascensia) who was one of my absolute favorite teachers I had in my entire 4 years, which is why I took the class. But I found much hatred in my heart for cowboys, and found myself drawing this stuff in class a lot:

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For our final project in the class, a creative project, Frankie and I decided to team up and make an animation. We decided to use my cowboy guy as the main character, and then spent a day writing the insane script, and a week doing the animation.

So, while Ascensia was my final film, it was not the final thing I made at CalArts. This was. I think that’s beautiful.