Any information can be placed in the sidebar to help your website visitors navigate your site.I’ve always had a passion for creativity. Since I was old enough to hold a pencil I was looking for outlets for the endless stream of ideas flowing through my brain. Whether I was drawing dinosaurs or Ninja Turtles, or designing my own board game, or inventing characters and worlds from my imagination- I had this compulsion to create, to bring my ideas into existence.
I would write stories about anything, some intended to be movie scripts, others intended to be games. I would create my own game ideas on paper by drawing up characters and environments and weapon statistics and game progression. At the same time I embraced art as this wonderful tool for visualizing your ideas and took every opportunity for stretching my drawing muscles.
Instead of growing up, I decided my goal was to get a job doing something creative like this and focused all my efforts on pursuing this ambition. In 2007 I graduated from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh with a degree in Game Art and Design and some new life-long friends.
Later that year I landed my job at 1st Playable Productions in Troy, NY (14 miles from my hometown of Clifton Park), where I currently work as a lead artist. It’s great to finally make a living creating art for videogames, it’s really the fulfillment of a lifelong ambition. But my job doesn’t end when I go home. Videogames are an art form, and I have a never-ending need to constantly be creating new art. Whether it’s making sketches, 3D models, writing scripts, game design documents or actually creating my own game using some sort of game engine- the ideas swimming around my head always manifest themselves in some way. I regularly seclude myself in my room until the late hours of the night working on a new project.
FIRST ROBOTICS (ANIMATION PROGRAM)
Here is our team's national award winning animation from 2011- winning 'Best Production' from Autodesk at the FIRST National Championship in St Louis. I was the adult mentor for a small team of high school students with 6 weeks to create an animation based on the theme of "Change Their World". An alien race called the iiko is struggling with environmental challenges and we have to think of a way to improve their society.
This is our animation submission for 2010- based on the theme of "Change Your World". The idea we decided on involved using robots to convert moon dust into solar panels for energy, which is apparently a real thing that exists (I have no idea- the kids in this program are much smarter than me). This one won first place at the Granite State Regional Competition, which was the first time the school won an award for animation.