peacock feathers

Another 3-hour portrait, with a laptop and live model.

Dark Metropolis- previz and matte painting

For the premiere of Smallville season 9, the producers asked for a sinister, more Batman-like view of Metropolis. I started with a couple digital concept paintings with opposing color palettes. They chose the second one.
The actor was filmed on a green screen and partial set in Vancouver.
Overlaying the concept painting with the live plate, 3d artist Andrea Shear assembled the Metropolis 3d geometry from the show's library of buildings to match the concept. She rendered it out in multiple passes, breaking out the windows, neon signage, radiosity, Z fog, Y fog, and volumetric fog into multiple grayscale passes.

Layering the passes in After Effects, I comped them all together and added color.

Dax Jordan does Portland

This is a video I shot with my cousin, comedian Dax Jordan. We shot the thing around Portland on an ipod nano.

Holiday card 2009

The Robot Rumpus holiday card, featuring a digital still-life of IG-88 and a candy cane! Happy whatever it is you celebrate!

VFX reel 2009

Robot Rumpus reel 2009 from Jason Dunn on Vimeo.

New exciting reel for 2009! Now mostly explosions!

Destruction of Kandor

From the Smallville episode, Kandor, in which we flash back its destruction on planet Krypton.


The matte painting was built as a still in photoshop, and I used the warp tools in Nuke to animate it. I then comped it in After Effects with footage of an LA firestorm to get the smoke to billow.The destruction of the city is a cocktail of particles, breaking glass elements, gas explosion elements, dust, and exploding Styrofoam.

Destruction of Kandor from Jason Dunn on Vimeo.

Halloween still life

Digital still life of Halloween stuff, lit by a glow stick and a candle.

Portrait of Mike Nusbaum

This was a commission I got from the University of Pennsylvania, to paint a portrait of the head of the neuroscience graduate program, on the occasion of his retirement. He is an expert on the crab nervous system, and an enthusiast of all things crab.

They have a centuries-long tradition of portraiture at the university, although it seems to have lost some steam in the last few decades. My brother and I decided to try to revive it. We wanted to emulate the classical style of a lot of the older portraits, but this one was done digitally in Photoshop.

It was meant to be a surprise for his retirement party, so I went to his lectures covertly to study his face and mannerisms. Along with that, and random snapshots and a mirror, I built this image.

art nouveau-themed portrait

Three hour digital sketch from a costumed model (Sara Streeter) at Bob Kato's drawing club.

Terminator submarine sequence

Here's a sequence we did for Terminator:The Sarah Connor Chronicles at Entity FX. A bunch of stuff happens in a submarine, so we needed a series of establishing shots of the exterior, as well as the climax shot when the submarine *spoiler alert* blows up at the end.

I started with a series of concept sketches based on the storyboards for color and composition...


The sub was modeled and animated in Maya by Pharoah Barrett, and the chrome terminator eel was animated by Andrew Lema. I comped the shot in After Effects, and used several layers of fire elements, spherized and color-corrected green, as the underwater explosion. I also layered in several time-warped dust-explosion elements to simulate underwater bubble clouds at a large scale.