Computers and Gaming have been an influential part of my life since I can remember. My parents purchased our very first Atari 2600 when I was seven, and so it would begin.
I spent countless hours trying to get to the next level or beat a personal best, wearing out numerous joysticks. This and a habit of spending quarters at the local arcade and pizza shops, my parents decided to buy me a TRS-80 Color Computer II for my 10th birthday. They plugged it into the family room television, sat me down and said, "If you want any games for it, you're going to have to make them yourself". I accepted their challenge!
I dove into numerous Basic Programming books purchased from the local Radio Shack. Every time I went to the store, I remember being strangely attracted to the "high end" graphics been drawn on their display computers. My mind was made up; I would find a way to do this at home. After all, I had inherited my father’s artistic abilities. By age 12, I had written two drawing programs, one in ANSI and one using Vector Graphics. The coolest part of this was that I figured out how to save off drawing to a cassette tape drive! If you've never saved computer data to a cassette tape, you are missing out!
My addiction to computers grew throughout grade school. A friend introduced me to dial-up Bulletin Boards, which led to my discovery of Art Groups, ANSI-mation and Turbo Pascal Loaders. My high school art room had one single Macintosh computer with a copy of Photoshop on it. Every chance I had, during school, after hours and on holidays I was in the art room trying to better my digital art skills. I had my mind made up that I was going to Art School.
I knew I loved computers, art, video games and cartoons. Computer Animation combined all this into one major, and so I convinced my parents to let me attend Ringling School of Art and Design. Since my home was in Pennsylvania, I decided to choose a school on the East Coast. Some would argue it was the two page spread of the Sarasota beaches, but you can ask anyone, I probably was only at the beach a total of 10 times my entire stay. I am a firm believer that you get out what you put in. School was really awesome to say the least, and exposed me to a wide range of new career options.
Retro Studios hired me a few months before graduation as an entry-level animator on Raven Blade. Here I got the opportunity to work with motion capture for the first time ever. I was trained by some really talented folks, and once I got over my fear of "tracing motion”, I really learned a lot of technical knowledge which has helped me immensely with hand keyed animation as well as in character setup to this day. Inspired by setup artist and resident Maya guru, Cid Newman, I began looking seriously into MEL scripting and task automation. I was eventually laid off from Retro when Metroid went public and the studio decided to concentrate all efforts on this game.
I ended up moving to Dallas where I got a job at Paradigm Entertainment. Here I worked on Terminator: Dawn of Fate and Mission Impossible: Operation Surma. I took it upon myself to understand and automate the character pipeline at the studio, as it was in much need of an overhaul. I worked closely with the tools department to restructure data output, and with the animation team to simplify their pipeline. I eventually worked my way into a Senior Animator position. I was essentially the Animation Technical Director, although there was some corporate rule that I could not have such a job title because Atari World Wide did not have another studio structured with such a job title. Moving on. At the end of Mission, I was approached with a job offer I couldn't refuse with TKO-Software. I left Paradigm on good terms for career advancement opportunities.
I worked at TKO-Software for two years as Technical Animator on 6 different projects. I was presented with wide range of challenges, and worked on a number of different engines and target platforms. In two years alone, I made 3d phone games, sprite based games, console games, and PC games. Holy cow! Check out my resume for the full details. TKO was really a lot of fun and I'm sad to see it go away.
When TKO shut down, a skeleton crew of
individuals
stuck around and formed Method Solutions. Six weeks into Method Solutions an agreement with DC Studios was made in that Method Solutions would become the US Headquarters of the Canadian based DC Studios. After months of drama with DC, that acquisition deal was broken. Method Solutions was never
acquired, and thankfully so. Once could say things happen for a reason! I am currently employed at Method Solutions as Technical Animator where we are excited to be making innovative games.
That's my story for now. Hope you enjoy your visit to my site. Thanks for stopping by.
