A Little About Me

When I was young, I wouldn't say that I specifically wanted to be a crowds supervisor, but for the longest time, I knew I wanted to make movies. Terminator 2 and Jurassic Park both came out within a couple of years of each other and turned my world upside down. I had no choice but to somehow, someway, create dinosaurs and evil liquid metal robots. I went to the University of Tennessee and studied film. There I did stop-motion animation on 16mm film. It was during this time when the Lord of the Rings came out, and in particular, The Two Towers. I probably watched that movie 50+ times, studying the Battle of Helms Deep. This was the first time crowds animation was featured at such an unbelievable scale. It was fantastic.

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I later went to the School of Visual Arts for graduate school and studied computer animation. After I graduated I got a job as a runner at a commercial studio in NYC. The main tasks were getting coffee and snacks for clients - but so much talent and so many projects were happening all around me that I was learning tons from just being in that environment.

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It wasn't much longer before I started working at Blue Sky as a Lighting TA on Horton Hears a Who! (2008) I then moved over to the FX department for about four years creating smoke, dust and oceans. Then the studio started working on the movie Epic, which demanded many shots with simulated crowds. I knew I had to get on that team. I thought, "Here's my chance to control hoards of armies at the flip of a switch!" so I went for it. It turned out that there were a lot more switches than I had originally thought, but it ended up being awesome. I've been CROWDS ever since!