| About Me |
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I started my career as an offline editor in the pre-digital, low band u-matic days of television broadcasting. Pretty soon I was enjoying the wonders of 3 machine sp editing and soon after that I was being dazzled by the prowess of 'non-linear' editing. Seriously, it was an exciting time.
Then one day somebody dropped off a showreel from a company called Alias|wavefront. I remember it clearly. It was cut to a Bad Religion track called '21st century digital boy' and I must have played the tape more than a hundred times. I hadn't even noticed that the sun had set.
Pretty soon after that I got a job at a the Video Labs premiere FX unit called 'The House Next Door'. I spent many a late evening in front of an SGI machine patiently coaxing the goods from the hardware. I met many good friends and made lasting acquaintances while I was there.
At the end of the millenium I moved to Cape Town. I transferred to Video Lab's Cape Town office as flame op and continued working on commercials. I managed to maintain my passion for animation using A|W's next generation software package Maya. After many good years I resigned from the Lab and struck out on my own as a freelancer. I spent a year fighting the good fight after which I was offered a job as Flame artist at the new Condor post boutique which had just opened up in the Waterfront. I spent a year there working with many of my old colleagues from the Video Lab, after which I decided to open my own shop.
I managed to convince two talented youngsters to partner with me and we started SolidPDA(PostDesignAnimation). Now this is some story! We kept it running for two years with no capital! Talk about blood, sweat and tears! Although it was a great experience and I wouldn't change it for a thing, there is a world of difference between working on commercials and trying to make money out of them! :-) We met some great people and did some pretty sharp work but it was not to be. We closed SolidPDA in September of 2006.
And thats where I spent two years, working for a terrific company called sunrise (www.sunrise.co.za ) with some of the finest human beings one could hope to meet. I filled a supervisory role at Sunrise, doing everything from recruiting & R&D to shading, lighting, rendering and compositing. I love working with and learning from young (and old:-) talented people. I was also deeply involved in advising the story dept at sunrise of technical issues when they would start writing and storyboarding a concept. Given my compositing and cg experience I was able to plan technical approaches concurrently as the storyboard developed. I found myself working with the Director and Art director helping to plan and establish shots and sequences and how to achieve the best quality/efficiency solution. Much of my time at Sunrise was spent on the second series of 'Jungle Beats' (http://www.junglebeat.tv ) and at the same time, we did extensive reseach on their second feature project called 'An African Tale'.
I left Sunrise halfway through 2008 and rejoined Condor Cape Town. I spent more than half a year at Condor working on several animated and vfx commercials and, once more, learnt an enormous amount from both the work and the people.
March 09 saw me going solo once more as a freelancer but that was short lived as I picked up a dream gig at Animal Logic in Sydney! I've been here almost 9 months working on an awesome Warner Bros. picture called 'Legend of the Guardians', as a lighting and comp artist. It's been an unbelievable trip! I've met so many wonderful and talented people and the job itself has been an experience of note! The movie is scheduled for a September release and I'm really excited about this one!
See the News or Gallery links for more info or mail me via the Contacts link for more. Contact me via the Contact link on the left for a full resume'. |


