Discovering and eliminating repeititive tasks in a pipeline is one of my specialities. During my work for various studios, I’ve created tools that sped up the work of our artists, helped to obtain easier approvals, and redesigned the pipeline to make us stronger for future shows/products. I also often serve as an interface between my team and others, and lead regular efforts to streamline how we work together. In between production peaks, I give training lessons to new staffers and to industry veterans that wish to learn new parts of the production process.

For the last two films of Blue Sky Studios before its closure in 2020, I had the pleasure of serving as Lead Crowds Technical Director and guided several pipeline upgrades and new technology adoptions, such as a fully automated retargetting pipeline and customizable render tools. In service of other teams, I served as a troubleshooter to help avoid costly production slowdowns whenever a crowds-related challenge showed up. My crowds shot work included active and passive behaviors in bipeds, quadrupeds, furry characters and vehicles, with a scope that ranges from five agents to tens of thousands of agents on screen at the same time.

My early work in film began with a focus on garments and character simulation effects for cloth, rigid bodies, and hair. Even as an intern I was creating specs and workflow guides for teams that needed clothing but had no pipeline in place to handle those callouts. After the closure of Blue Sky Studios, I once again found myself in the world of cloth at Pixar Animation Studios. In my tenure at both studios I was responsible for the simulation of armor sets, layered garments, boat lines, villain capes, complex equipment rigs, vegetation simulations and full body human garments/tailoring.

When working for film studios, I am usually the loudest person in the room evalgenlizing for game technologies and pushing for the adaption of realtime workflows. While working for games I find myself wearing a big tower of hats as a generalist troubleshooter and character fx artist. I’m also a hobbyist developer and have worked on several small apps for mobile, PC, and VR. I’m currently developing a context-free dialogue tool for the Unity game engine to assist in creating engaging non-linear narratives.