Whoami | Career | Process | What's Next | FAQ
CURRENT ROLE:
Cinematics Light Lead at Epic Games.
My Back Story:
I've been a professional artist in the film and animation industry for more than 20 years. I received my B.F.A from the Ringling School of Art and Design, where I specialized in computer animation and fine arts. For several years post-graduation, I focused on showing and selling classical narrative paintings in several galleries in Atlanta, GA, and Highpoint, NC. This is really where my love for landscape started, particularly with clouds.
Crafting volumetric clouds and cloudscapes has been a huge part of my career for the past many years. Through my various roles over the years, I have been fortunate to have contributed to numerous films with the incredible teams at Pixar and Bluesky studios among others.
​
My work seeks to take that knowledge, acquired across the years of production, and return them to the narrative and surreal images that began in my early career. "Sentinels" pushes to generate imagery at a resolution and level of complexity that I only could create at studios with huge render farms.
The work explores the physical form and beauty of clouds. Draping them in cloth transforms them into vessels of metaphor for each narrative. The drapery encapsulates, connects, or even frees the subject or subjects in each piece. In addition to the clouds, the worlds they inhabit are also completely constructed in 3d to build a narrative framework. In concert, the world, the clouds, and the drapery become the stage, actor, and wardrobe for the performance of a deep and meaningful moment. Each of which are deeply personal meditations on some very important moments in my life
Career
EPIC games
Cinematic Light Lead
Pixar
Cloud/matte paint/Set extension, light/comp
Lightyear
Turning Red
Bluesky Studios
Light/Comp lead
Nimona
Skies Lead, Senior Light/Comp artist
Spies in Disguise
Rio2
Rio1
Epic
Ice Age 4-2
CHRLX
3D Creative Director
​
Process
Beginning back in 2009-ish when I began shaping and developing the skies department with my cohorts, Andrew Schneider and Trevor Thomson, my focus shifted to clouds.
I have ALWAYS felt that there was just something about them that resonated with me. They have provided many hours of wide eyed happiness in my life and a tremendous sense of awe. Im consumed with the physics of their formation, their material properties as well as the physics of the way light is transported through the wide variety of mediums that comprise a simple `ole cloud. They are nothing short of magic.
All of the elements that create cloud require a TON of complex dynamics and processing time.
I currently build all of my clouds through a wide variety of simulation methods and artistic embellishments in Houdini.
What's Next?
SO SO MUCH!!!!
FAQ
What is a "bunnylever"??? ... ok ok, so when all of this started for me, NFTs and twitter were not really in my life (or anyone's for that matter). My Son was a newborn little dude, so naturally he & my wife were (and are) the center of my universe. Whenever we would change him he would make this adorable hand gesture like he was pulling a lever. We joked that he was pulling the bunnylever and releasing interdimensional bunnies into our universe. I started making bunny clouds for his room, and when NFTs started and I jumped back onto twitter, I just picked that as my handle... then I found my bored ape and the rest just took its course.