Jordan R. Zangrillo

“Zoey Puppy: The sneak”

RIT Student Film (2026)

When a playful puppy steals a sock, an ordinary home turns into a wild adventure as everyday object comes to life! An animated short with synchronized sound with a focus on character performance through comedic expression, exaggerated emotion, and physical comedy.

Created, Directed & Animated by: Jordan Zangrillo

Music by: Samuel Clark

Software: Toon Boom Harmony

SuperPig!

Limited Animation

A limited animation focused on creating maximum energy with minimal movement! This scene features a superhero pig rescuing a mother’s piglets from a burning house using smears, multiples, strong posing, looping cycles, and re-used animation to enhance efficiency without sacrificing impact.

Focus on:

• Squash & stretch, exaggeration, and appeal

• Pose clarity and silhouette readability

• Character personality through movement

• Energy, rhythm, and movement flow

The Hungry Elephant

Rough Animation, Clean-up Animation, Final Animation

This character animation explores quadruped movement and performance through believable weight, strong posing, secondary action, and comedic timing. This piece showcases rough animation, clean-up animation, digital coloring and final animation.

Focus on:

• Comedic timing and visual humor

• Spacing, arcs, weight, and timing

• Walk cycle mechanics and weight distribution

• Staging and visual storytelling

Tiny Dancer

In-Betweening, Keyframe animation, & Draftmanship

This exercise focused on the fundamentals of hand-drawn animation through the process of in-betweening. My teacher provided the keyframes animation along with a timing chart, which I had to interpret and follow. I carefully drew all the in-between frames to preserve volume, model accuracy, smooth arcs and believable spacing.

Focus on:

• Timing charts and in-between animation

• Motion clarity and believable spacing

• Preservation of volume and model consistency

• Body mechanics and believable movement

Mr. Miserable

Secondary Action

This animation is built around a clear main action supported by secondary action with dialogue and lip-sync to elevate simple movements into a layered performance using exposure sheets (X-sheets).

Focus on:

• Facial performance and character expression

• Lip sync and dialogue performance

• Secondary action and character appeal

• Expressive exaggeration and cartoon physics

Character Rotation 360

This exercise focused on designing a full-body humanoid character through a complete 360-degree rotation. I created a cohesive character design while maintaining consistent proportions, volume, and visual clarity across multiple angles. The assignment included 8 key poses (Front, ¼ Front, Side, ¼ Back, Back, and corresponding reverse angles) with at least one in-between drawing between each key, totaling 16 drawings.

Focus: Solid drawing, arcs, easing, line of action, strong silhouette, rotational consistency, and model accuracy.

Draftmanship (Klause)

For this assignment, the challenge was to analyze the underlying structure of a professionally designed character…then reconstruct it, using only a series of circles as guides. The goal was not to trace the drawing, but to understand the proportions, volumes, and relationships between major shapes in order to recreate the character accurately from just observation.