Demo Reel

Feature Film Work

Over the Moon

This was my most recent (announced) project at SPI, a Netflix/Pearl Studios Collaboration, helmed by the legendary Glen Keane. I was the Cloth Lead on this unique challenge for just over a year, and it’s got it all. Heart, beautiful artwork, design, humor, it’s really a wonderful tale. Keep your eyes out for it!

Here’s a trailer! I can’t wait until it’s out to share all the cool aspects of this multicultural adventure. Especially one of my favorite animated heroines, FeiFei — and her bunny Bungee.

Spider-man: Into the Spider-Verse

I was thrilled and proud to work as a Cloth Lead on Into the Spider-Verse, as it was immediately clear it would be both a huge challenge and one of the most rewarding, innovative films I’ve been on.

I wore a lot of hats for this movie, but I’m most proud to say I designed and implemented the technology that let us simulate cloth and deliver it “on twos”. An experienced animator will tell you it was never simply “twos”, so much as variable steps across the frame range of almost every shot. I worked with the animation team, the pipeline team, and the cfx team on the technology and the shots to get it all working, and as I said, I’m extremely pleased with the outcome and reception.

Smurfs the Lost Village

This reboot (not the third!) of the Smurfs digital world was a very interesting thing to work on cloth and hair for. Doing it's best to stay true to the original look of it's creator, Peyo, and the hand-drawn TV series of the 1980s, this is a much more appealing look than the more photorealistic recent films. It did have some peculiar challenges, like flipping Smurfette's bangs to present the perfect profile. It was a fun few months of what we call "shot work," primarily running shots on a movies through simulation and sculpting the perfect pose and shape. 

Storks

From March-July of 2016 I was a cloth artist on the WB movie Storks. It's a charming and funny story, and our job was to create and preserve sharp wrinkles and graphic shapes. Cloth for animated movies is a fascinating mix of realistic and art-directed movement. It can also, for certain short-scheduled movies, be quite a bit of work.

Alice Through the Looking Glass

I started a new adventure as a Character Effects (CFX) TD at Sony Imageworks in Vancouver, Canada starting in 2015. We simulate anything relating to characters. Fur, Feather, Cloth, Hair, we do it all and a bit more besides. Cloth, especially on "Alice 2," my first SPI show, was a lot of work - and a lot of learning. CFX, like much of movie magic, is full of two questions: both technical "how can we..?." and artistic "wouldn't it look better if...?" and both are challenging in their own right and more so together. I love my job.

Menlo Church

I took a breather in 2014-2015 to return to my roots as a live technical producer and stage manager for a 3,000+ member church at their largest campus. Live services, 5 a week, integrating all the music, lighting, technology, and owning the look and feel of several spaces, events, and volunteer teams. In addition, I was part of a newly formed team with somewhat under-defined roles and responsibilities. I should acknowledge that my version of "take a breather" is more like "jump on a moving roller coaster".

The Penguins of Madagascar

I was a Previz TD on this show for a year and a half. It was a great experience, working with a crack team of very talented artists with an extremely wide range of technical and artistic skills. Since it's not well known, I'd like to describe the previz process. 

Previsualization is the rapid prototype of the movie industry. In live action and vfx, entire companies do previz to plan complicated effects and battle sequences so that footage is captured as efficiently as possible. In feature animation, previz is the director and editor's playground to plan and experiment before the more expensive detail-oriented departments start work. The previz team works across the animation disciplines, but their core deliverables are cameras and shots, which are the cinematography parts of making a movie.

While in the Previz Department, I had the chance to work with some newer TDs and TD-interns, as well as managing bigger projects across multiple shows within the layout department.

Madagascar 3 - Europe's Most Wanted 

​I was put on Madagascar 3 to support the Crowds pipeline for the last 4-5 months of production, or as we call it, "crunch time".

​I couldn't have been more excited, because Crowds is a department that touches nearly every single other part of the pipeline. They have a complex system but freedom to innovate for unusual situations. If you've never wondered about the challenge of animating a crowd of people or animals, consider how much time and care is required to animate every single character. Additionally, in a crowd of people, you read general actions and emotions, not individual ones. This leads to a lot of cool strategies to generalize animation and apply it to different kinds of characters in groups and still have fine-tuned control for art direction. 

Supporting Crowds involved diving in headfirst to learn as fast as I could and support not only the crowds team, but also the downstream departments like character effects, animation, and lighting. I loved the sink-or-swim challenge, but it was also an incredible, gracious and supportive team to work on, which was a huge pleasure. 

Production Testing  

​For 6 months, I was a "Production Testing TD" with an Animation Technology team. The driving idea behind this role is that often R&D Departments build large scale toolsets for artists in a bit of a vacuum, and then hand them to shows that have to adapt them to the pipeline -- and to artists' real needs, which wastes considerable time and money . Presumably, frustration and waste are decreased if there are liaisons between the two while development and design are in process.

So, Production Testers at DreamWorks are ​artists and TDs that are intimately familiar with the needs of production and are temporarily attached to a Dev group to lend them real-world knowledge. I enjoyed this, because instead of months of band-aid style hacks, there was a little more space to dream about what could be and to lay solid groundwork for a future version of technology that could have everyday impact.

​I also loved working with the R&D teams and getting to learn more about their process - something I found invaluable when I was back in production and once again working with them from across the production/development divide..

Gift of the Night Fury  

My first project at DreamWorks was a holiday special that came to be called The Gift of the Night Fury, set in the universe of How to Train your Dragon.  It was quite an introduction to the studio, because it was a much smaller team than a feature film usually has,  and there was a lot to learn.

Animation studios (like DreamWorks and Pixar) are unique in that when they started in the early 1980s, the technology to make what they wanted to make did not exist. Today, many smaller VFX Studios use "off-the-shelf tools" like Maya and After Effects, but the animation studios have a legacy of innovative proprietary software to build on. I found that to be both a huge strength and a weakness, in that there was a lot to learn from the early tools, but it was certainly challenging supporting and trouble shooting software that was conceived when there were only three Star Wars movies.

The other challenge of this project was that I was brought on as an "Anim TD": I was supporting Character Animators, fantastic artists that have various levels of interest in and tolerance for technical challenges. My communication skills were very stretched in the non-technical direction, and I learned how -- and how much -- to explain a lot of problems for different audiences.

Tangled 

As a Trainee at Disney (or more formally, a Talent Development Artist), I was so lucky that my TD-mentor was responsible for the hair process on a movie where the hair was heavily featured, from the very early development and motion all the way to the look and shinyness of it. When it was time for the Trainees to help on production, he gave me the chance to help in a department that Disney calls "Tech Anim" where they run simulations and finesse motion on non-animated elements like cloth and hair. I learned a ton, and got to write a tool for them and to work on "fix-its" or requests for changes from lighting. It was an all-around awesome experience, and just the right amount of technical development, support, and artistic contribution for someone like me. 

Disney Talent Development Program 

The first part of a Disney "Traineeship" is to spend 6 weeks with an experienced mentor, working on projects for them and learning from them. 

I had a fantastic mentor, who spent time teaching us everything -- from troubleshooting to command line tricks with awk and sed, to writing new shaders and tools to wedge test them. After the first 6 weeks, we pooled our trainee talents and created a minute-long project that was completely self-directed and self-produced, while our individual mentors provided guidance and advice, and a marvelous VFX Sup worked with us to find technology and teachers from all over Disney to accomplish our vision. I was working with some of the most talented peers I've ever met, from Visual Designers to Traditional Animators and two other TDs.