ABOUT ME
When I was a kid I liked dinosaurs and airplanes. My dad, who is an industrial designer,
taught me how to draw decently by age 5 or 6, so I would make my own dinosaur books
or draw stuff I’d seen in movies. After graduating from, I went to UCLA to get a broad
education and took night classes at Art Center College of Design to help focus my design
skills.
I started Art Center full-time in Fall '94 with a scholarship, majoring in Transportation
Design. I wanted to make sure I learned the nuts and bolts of Industrial Design as
well as the Illustration skills- to be able to design a vehicle or an environment that
makes sense and looks good and then to depict it in three dimensional space. About
halfway through my studies, Art Center started to feature Entertainment Design classes.
By that time, I knew I didn't want to be a car designer. My heart was more in airplanes
and architecture, I guess. I eventually graduated with honors as a Transportation
Design major with emphasis on Entertainment Design. My time at Art Center was
really fantastic. The quality of the instructors was high, but I really owe my experience
to classmates and upper term students for providing the competition that was essential
to push me along.
I got a job at Walt Disney Imagineering right out of college and also did some freelancing
on the side for Universal Studios. WDI was a great place to work, but a lot of the projects
moved too quickly from the ‘blue sky fun’ phase to the engineering, budgeting,... the
reality part. A refreshing change came in the form of a job at Industrial Light + Magic in
the digital features division. I was at ILM for 3 years before moving up to Skywalker Ranch
as a Concept Design Supervisor on Star Wars Episode 2: Attack of the Clones (2002) and
stayed on for Episode 3: Revenge of the Sith (2005). I was also a Senior Art Director at
ILM where I did a lot of hands-on work during the post-production of Star Wars movies
and played a major role in creating the Tripods in Steven Spielberg's War of the Worlds
(2005).
At the beginning of Episode III pre-production, I went down to Pasadena every
weekend to teach an Advanced Entertainment Design course at Art Center. Response
was great, and it was a rewarding experience for me, too. But, my work schedule got
too hectic to continue. In late 2003, I got together with Alex Alvarez at Gnomon School
of Visual Effects to produce DVD demos. They do not focus on the software but on the
techniques I use daily at work. It has been over three years, and they continue to
serve as a great substitute to being in my class for those who want to learn to design
and paint digitally for feature film, themed environment, and video games.
In the Spring of 2005, I relocated back to Southern California to start the next chapter
of my career as a freelance concept artist. My client list keeps growing and now
includes Paramount Studios, Universal Pictures, Mattel, Sony Pictures, Blue Sky Studios,
Bay Films, Lightstorm Entertainment, Walt Disney Animation Studios, Dino de Laurentiis
Company, Digital Domain, and Electronic Arts. I have been lending my skills on many
bid projects as well as high profile film projects such as Star Trek (2009),
Transformers 2 (2009), and James Cameron's Avatar (2009), Transformers 3 (2011),
Disney's John Carter (2012), Zero Dark Thirty (2012), Star Trek Into Darkness (2013), Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey (2014) and Tomorrowland (2014).