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When I was in 5th grade in 1995, the classroom computer had a program called Amazing Animation. It was very basic, but I found the sound effects and animated animals hilarious. 

20 years later, I randomly remembered this program and decided to try and find it again. Somehow, with great effort, I managed to find the program again, plus an emulator required to use it on a modern computer, and recreated the style of animation that I had enjoyed so much in the 5th grade. 

When I presented this to my friends, one of them said, "Owen, I think you should stop doing everything else in your life and only make these kinds of animations." 

This was a project for my Found Footage class at UC Santa Cruz in 2007. It's a mashup of footage from The Lion King with dialogue from Pulp Fiction, which turned out wonderfully silly.

In retrospect, I could have done more to manipulate the characters' mouths, but I'm impressed that I was able to do this much entirely without changing the footage. I unexpectedly got quite a number of views on YouTube, which was fun.

This was another project for my Found Footage class at UC Santa Cruz. I loved the movie Sin City, especially the character Marv, but I was having trouble making a project out of it. 

Suddenly at the last minute, I was struck by the idea to subvert the character and completely change the context into a commercial. Hilarity ensued and I got an A on the project. Yay.

If I was ever notorious for anything, it was for building fire cannons that created enormous fireballs every New Year's Eve. I started by making potato cannons, also known as spud guns, which propelled potatoes at very high velocities. It was a lot of fun, but the original design was very unreliable because it required a precise mixture of air and fuel to be sprayed into a chamber, and there was no way to do that repeatably without specialized equipment. 

I was frustrated for a long time until my friend's dad made one using compressed air. This was a game-changer. It was just as powerful as the combustion model and much more reliable and consistent. I made my own and began putting everything I could think of into the barrel and launching it at high velocity. 

Then one day I filled the barrel with water, which sprayed out in a giant geyser when I pulled the trigger. Naturally, my next thought was "What if we used gasoline instead of water, and lit it on fire?" The rest is history. 

The fire cannon became a New Year's Eve tradition, and I built a new and different cannon every year, even using a set of Harley-Davidson exhaust pipes for the barrel in one of them. Somehow, every single year, the trees were soaked with rain from the previous day, preventing them from catching on fire when they were sprayed with burning gasoline from the fire cannon.

Our neighbor hated that we did this, so he started calling the police in later years. We would fire it a few times, then pack everything up and hide it. The final year we did it, the police came to the door and said "I'm not exactly sure what shooting a fire cannon is classified as, but I'm pretty sure it's a felony. So... I could go back to my car and check whether it's a felony, or I could NEVER HEAR ABOUT THIS AGAIN."

This will be fondly remembered as a true expression of my creativity. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.