The Full Story

It all started back in 1991, when I saw the legendary film, Terminator 2: Judgement Day. It was an amazing film, and the one that ingrained the need to create something of that magnitude. While other visual effects artists may say their favorite film is The Abyss, or Jurassic Park, or Sinbad and the Seven Seas, T2 was the one for me. It combined several of my favorite techniques; miniatures, CGI, and compositing. A couple of years later, a new film overtook T2 as my favorite. Robocop. I embarked on a journey early in the 90s to try and recreate this magic that could be created on film. There was not much out there, save for a great show entitled Movie Magic. I was unaware of Cinefex at the time, and no one in my peer group was interested in this sort of thing, instead wanting to be lawyers or doctors, or something with potential.

At the time, BBSes were extremely popular. I came upon a BBS which contained an assortment of shareware programs. Two immediately caught my eye. A program called POV-Ray, which still exists today, and one called Poly-Ray. Similiar to POV-Ray, Poly-Ray allowed the inclusion of time markers, so you could effectively animate via a script that you would write and run on your DOS box. Through the early 90s I played with this package, not aware that other, professional, software programs existed on the horizon. Two years later in 1993, Jurassic Park came out. I was awestruck by the technologies which had created the walking behemoths.
In late 1994 I was accepted as an intern at NASA Goddard Space Flight Center, located in Greenbelt, Maryland. During my year there I was able to work on a variety of high-end machines, several of them being SGIs. My supervisor, Brendan Perkins, was just as interested in this CG craze. He had a copy of 3D Studio R4. It was amazing. It was the first time I had my hands on a piece of software that could be used to create the magic in the movies. Little did I know that other softwares would appear during the next two years.



I started to attend the University of Maryland, in College Park. While living in the dorms, hanging out with my peers, and having an insane amount of bandwidth directly to my room, I spent a good deal of time not going to class. I was just passing all my courses, and spent a majority of my time inside, playing with my new software package of choice, Lightwave 4. I was also a member of the Animation Club at UMCP, which met every week to discuss the new tools and see film. From my membership in the club, I learned of a program in the Computer Engineering building called Alias Power Animator. I spent copious amounts of time in learning all of it's intricacies. It was so over the top. It also ran on an SGI box, which I was familiar with working on at NASA. I was also a subscriber of the new at the time magazine, Computer Graphics World. Inside was an ad for a new school, located in Vancouver, Canada, called the Vancouver Film School. My life was about change. I was fortunate enough to arrive in Vancouver with a great friend of mine. Both of us grew up together, and were interested in this crazy fad, CGI. We started in the Digital Effects and 3D Animation course at VFS in September of 1997. We were in Class 10. Throughout the year we had some excellent classes. Color Theory, Composition, Modelling, Life Drawing. You name it. All the teachers were well versed in their chosen course. We were both glad to have someone to learn from that knew what they were doing. I was learning Softimage3D. I was learning color theory. It was an exciting time. Our seventh month in the program we were introduced to something different. Something not 3D related. Something quicker. Something with almost real time feedback. Something you didn't have to wait to see your results. Compositing. I dove into the program (Alias Composer) head-first. It was awesome. A nodal tree, switchable with a timeline, to layer images and effectively create something that didn't exist a moment before. And, you didn't have to wait half a day to see if something "looked right". I switched my possible career options and pursued compositing. Everyone else was learning how to be a modeller or an animator. Not me. I was actually going to get out of VFS and have a job.

It took about a year for me to get that elusive job. During that time I was a Teaching Assistant at VFS for their Compositing program. Being a TA was just like being a graduate student. I had access to the labs for a significant amount longer than the rest of my mates in Class 10, and it allowed me to continually improve my student reel, which did need improving. While a TA, Laurence Plotkin from Digital Domain had come up to Vancouver to quickly give the students a chance to show him our work. Unfortunately, nothing stemmed from this encounter aside from a quick interview. Almost immediately after, I was able to get into contact with an artist at MGM, Kent Matheson, from my compositing instructor, Geoff Richardson. Kent was at MGM working on Stargate SG-1, and was looking to find someone to teach him Lightwave. Geoff, knowing of my experience with Lightwave while working in his class, brought the two of us together. At MGM I met some key people, James, a visual effects supervisor, and Jeremy, an up-and-coming matte painter and playback artist. My brief stint at MGM (a whole day!) was very interesting. They were probably wondering what some kid was doing showing their artists Lightwave. Little did I know of the future that was to befall me. During my this time I also had a chance to do some freelance Lightwave work for a film called Max-Q, which I have yet to see, but was nominated for a Emmy in Special Visual Effects in 1999.



In the spring of 1999 I was accepted into an apprenticeship program in Vancouver at a small boutique VFX house called GVFX. Almost two weeks into the apprenticeship, I got a call from Laurence at Digital Domain, asking if I would be interested in coming down to work with them. What horrible timing! I couldn't just up and leave, even though Digital Domain was the place I wanted to be. Instead, I stayed in Vancouver. There were only a small number of compositing artists at GVFX, whom were all talented. GVFX was primarily a compositing studio, with several infernos, flames, and flints. It was just starting to get into the 3D realm. I had a trial run with flint my first day there. I was ecstatic. It was so powerful. So quick. I could do anything. During my three year stint at GVFX, I became an inferno and flame artist, alternating on the stations every other week. The bread and butter of my work was Stargate SG-1, some movies of the week, some Outer Limits, and some Discovery and TLC shows. In 2000 I was nominated for my first Emmy in Special Visual Effects for work in an episode of Stargate SG-1, and again in 2001 for another episode.

In mid 2002 I was given the opportunity to go overseas and work in Australia at a company called Photon VFX. This would be my first film that I would do at a dedicated feature film studio. Photon was located on the Warner lot near Brisbane. I met a number of great people from all over the world. I still keep in contact with some of them, as they are strewn about the globe, and I continue working with people I met there to this day. After my brief two month time in Australia, I returned to Vancouver, where I freelanced for six months. In early 2003 I was looking for new work. Jeremy, whom I had met years earlier at MGM, and later when he was brought in at GVFX, still kept in contact with Kent, who was now at Tippett Studio in California. I sent my newest reel to Kent, saying that I was eager to do something new, and that my reel would show my past and how I've progressed. It rang true, and I was brought down by Tippett Studio in May to start work on the third film of the Matrix trilogy, Revolutions. Tippett Studio has been around for more than twenty years. I was fortunate enough to work with a multitude of talented artists, each with their own niche. During my three years at Tippett Studio I worked on a variety of projects which include The Matrix Revolutions, Hellboy, Constantine, Milka chocolate commercial spots and Chevy Impala commercial spots, and Charlotte's Web. I was fortunate to be able to be a compositing lead for two of the Impala commercials.




During the early spring of 2006, I was approached, again, by Digital Domain in Venice, to come in and comp on a feature production produced by Spielberg and Eastwood and called Flags of our Fathers. DD and I had been in communication on and off for about seven years about coming in to work with them. In 2005 they contacted me and asked if I could work on Aeon Flux, but I was deep in production. In March of 2006 I was less busy as Charlotte's Web was winding down, so I accepted Digital Domain's offer. Upon arriving at Digital Domain, I was again startled and impressed with the artisans and technicians who've created effects for such films as The Grinch, X-Men, The Time Machine, What Dreams May Come, Red Planet, and Fight Club, to name a few! I had an extremely short amount of time to get up to speed with their pipeline and compositing software, Nuke. So far, during my year and a half here, I've been able to comp on some great, challenging films, which include Flags of our Fathers and its companion Letters from Iwo Jima, Meet The Robinsons 3D, and Pirates of the Caribbean. I just finished work on The Seeker: The Dark is Rising, and am currently finishing The Golden Compass. Next on my plate will be The Mummy 3, which will prove to be an effects extravaganza, releasing in the summer of 2008.