Growing up on the west coast of Canada in the suburbs of Vancouver, I was exposed to video games and cartoons at an early age. While I started with an Atari and Intelevision I really was a child of the NES generation. I was also luckly enough to be exposed to Star War’s at an early age (saw Empire at the age of 3) which has clearly had an impact on my life as I heavily favor Sci-fi and Fantasy genres.
This influx of film genre’s and gaming mixed with a great desire to build things (Lego was the toy of choice), has given me the passion to always be creating things. If it’s creating animate media then I end up taking on side projects around the house building decks, basements, sheds and gardens.
I’m an animator with an eye for cinematography and narrative story telling. I pride myself on being able to take a scenes, large and small from A to Z, from Script to a final output and all steps in between.
Over the years I’ve honed my creative skills, of shot creation, camera and lens work, shot flow, and editing to aid my ability to create pre-visualization for games, television, feature films and VR/AR projects.
I am told I run a lean and mean mocap shoot, often assistant directing my own shoots, a bit of a one man band, I apply my knowledge of animation and mocap manipulation to problem solve on the stage floor any limitations a production comes across while keeping focus on giving the acting talent the direction they need to get their performances locked in. I greatly enjoy casting and directing acting talent and have gotten great performances that can turn good scenes into amazing scenes.
I acutely understand how to take motion capture building and improving performances via character animation, problem solve where captured performances may not line up to previs and quickly make it all smoothly work together like it was planned that way.
I also have a very strong understanding the cinematic animation pipeline, How to take a scene and fully realize it within real-time applications such as Unreal and Frostbite. I can quickly identify where bottlenecks in workflows are, and work with engineering and tech teams to build workflow improvements. Automated export/importers, sequence autopolution tools... tools that can save production’s man years of time.
As the product owner of Dragon Age Origin’s cutscene editor, it is a great example of what can be achieved working with with a solid engineering team to build features that keep animators animating and not suffering through technical issues. The same methodology of workflow and tools was created for the Mass Effect franchise for Unreal 3.5.
Not limited to BioWare legacy game engines, I gave input to a sequencing tool that was built for the Dead Space engine, Neo. It’s prototype was even called the Tony Tool for it’s first iteration, it was put into use for DeadSpace 3. It was intended to also be used for the second Dante’s Inferno game that I was on, but that didn’t make it through pre production.
Frostbite’s first sequencing tool was the proud results of a collaboration between EA Montreal’s and EALA’s cinematic teams where I put the same methods and workflows into practice that allowed the 3rd Army of Two and Metal of Honor Warfighter to make heavy use of. Army of Two’s The Devils Cartel cinematics scenes would not have been possible to pull off in the timeframe given without these tools.
In 2017 we once again created another set of tools for Capcom Vancouver’s next project in Unreal 4 where we cut down the implementation time of a cinematic from 3-4 days to less then half a day. Keep your animators animating by having tools and a pipeline that support them and can handle the amount of content your producing.
More recently over the last 5-6 years I have gotten more involved with the business development, The Request for Proposal for small and large projects, creating accurate estimates to bid with working with vendors to land projects. I found that having a better understand of budgets and costs has allowed me to rework and re structure projects to get more for less which often can make the difference to being awarded a project or not.
With all of these skills and experiences over the last 24 years, I am still keen to get back into the thick of cinematic development and improve on what has been done before. If you need a senior cinematic animation type that has a wide range of supportive skills and knowledge I am your guy.