Projects
Across 25+ years, my work has spanned two tracks that feed each other: the software and pipelines that power modern animation and VFX, and the lit, rendered frames that end up on screen. Below are selected projects from both.
Production Technology & Leadership
Screenplay Analytics & Breakdown System - Nickelodeon Animation
On-prem system delivering an automated first-pass script breakdown in 25 minutes for a feature (under 10 for a half-hour episode), with a script chatbot. Python/Streamlit, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Ollama.
Paramount Archives AI Image Search - Nickelodeon Animation
Photoshop plugin giving artists natural-language search over curated production images (via Canto). Cut reference-search time an estimated 3x in a remote-first environment and reduced the legal risk of uncleared visuals reaching production.
Unreal → Premiere Editing Toolset - Nickelodeon Animation
Open-sourced Python toolset built with the Max & The Midknights team, letting Editorial and StoryVis work hand-in-hand in their favored applications.
VFX Pipeline & Render Farm - Company 3 / Method
Led an ~11-person team supporting 200+ artists across LA, Atlanta, and Vancouver. Automated the Deadline render farm (A/B framework, auto-wrangling), built metrics and disk-cleanup across a 2 PB Isilon cluster (reclaiming 10+ TB weekly), and led the Python 2 → 3 migration of 100+ repos.
DLight - Walt Disney Animation Studios
Contributed as a developer to DLight, the studio's internal lighting/rendering application (Python/C++), on Tangled.
Film Credits
Lighting and compositing for Moana.
Lighting and compositing for Zootopia, winner of the 2016 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
Lighting and compositing for Big Hero 6 - first feature to use hyperion, WDAS’s new global illumination renderer. This project won the 2014 Academy Award for Best Animated Feature.
Lighting supervisor for Frozen, the 2013 Academy Award winner for Best Animated Feature. Supervised a team of artists to deliver five sequences for the film.
Lighting and compositing for Wreck-It Ralph.
Lighting and compositing for Tangled. Prior to shot work, rotated through software department to help write DLight, the studio’s new internal application for lighting. Python/C++.
Lighting and compositing for Bolt. Prior to shot work, developed Renderman plugin used for rendering of right-eye stereo images.
Lighting and compositing for Meet The Robinsons.
Look Development Lead on Chicken Little. Led a department of 20 artists and technical directors applying materials (shaders and textures) to all characters, props, and sets. Collaborated on XGen, the studio’s new software for fur, feathers, hair, leaves, and grass. During this project, the studio made a transition from SGI Irix to RedHat Linux, and from NURBS geometry to subdivision surfaces.
Rock destruction effects for vortex attack sequence.
Particle effects and art-directed tile effects for bathroom transformation sequence. Developed a plant growth system in Maya to control spread and placement of decay patterns, enabling transitions between motion-control shot plates of before and after versions of the set.
At Cinesite Hollywood, created visual effects of fish schools for undersea sequences, as well as other sweetening for the underwater shark lab set that was shot dry-for-wet.
Particle effects for Chill Factor
Flower petal effects for spell casting sequence. Custom particle effects for final sequence.
Custom car paint shaders and textures for ferryboat / car escape sequence.
At Cinesite Hollywood, created particle effects and meteor effects for Armageddon.
Lighting, rendering and compositing for Paulie. Primarily beak replacement and re-projection of beak textures extracted from live-action plate on to animated beaks. Santa Barbara Studios was an alpha site for Nothing Real’s new compositing software, ‘look’ - which was only command-line at the time. Once the UI was written, the software became known as “Shake”.
Visual effects work - particle effects, lighting, rendering and comp - for “Hell” sequence.
System engineer and technical director for An American Werewolf in Paris.