About me!

So this is the first post, so I thought I'd get some quick facts about me down here:

As anyone who really knows me will tell you, I'm obsessed with cartoons. My mind was corrupted by the altar of entertainment when I was... actually, I can't remember when I first started watching television, but some of my earliest memories consist of me pressing my face up against the television screen, giggling about Daffy getting his beak blown off, Wile falling off a cliff, Donald going quackers, Roger saving the day, etc. It was all cartoons. And then Power Rangers became popular and I was completely alienated from my classmates because I preferred watching Animaniacs instead. C'est la vie.

Sometime during middle school (summer of 2000), when I found another obsession, the computer, my dad introduced me to Macromedia Flash 5 (I maintain that he tricked me into thinking that it was a computer game, but I'm sure my folks will tell you otherwise). After 2 months of tinkering, I finally had my first game. Needless to say the amount of suck it generated caused me to eventually delete the file, run a magnet over the hard drive, and then cast it into a fire.

...okay, so maybe I didn't do anything THAT drastic, but I lost the file. But if you gave 30 chimps 2 hours to make something with Flash 5, they'd probably turn something of the similar quality up.

During the GOLDEN YEARS of highschool, it dawned on me that I had no idea what I wanted to do in college, or, for that matter, for the rest of my life, so, as most teenagers do, I set about to discover what it was that I wanted to do for the rest of my life. I first found the Shrewsbury High School Stage Crew, but, even after making my way up to Stage Manager, I knew I wouldn't want to do that for the rest of my life.

During my junior year research paper (on the Pentagon Papers, no less), I stumbled upon a book by John Canemaker called Nine Old Men. Now, why exactly my high school library would have this book is beyond me (the arts weren't especially well funded, especially with MCAS standards), but I took to that book like a moth to a flamethrower and I devoured it within a week. And then I read it again, and again, and again, halfway to the point where I knew what facts appeared where in the book. I don't think the phrase "I was inspired" does justice to how I felt the first time I read that book. I was already known in my classes as "That kid that knows how to use flash," so, what the heck, why not go for it?

So that brings me to today. So far I've gone through most of the animation books here at UMass and I even made it into the BFA Art/Animation program after initially getting rejected by the art department (The one time Deviantart was useful was when I had to convince the undergrad director, Frank, to let me into the classes when I was at orientation). I'm so adamant about character animation that my animation professor has started to try to get me to look in other directions (because animation isn't always that Disney/Warner Brothers stuff).

so enough about me. I'm not particularly proud of anything below here, but I'm getting better, honest! This is what I've done so far:


This is my portfolio reel from the Animation Fundamentals class at UMass, Amherst.


This is my final project from a 3D character animation class I took last year:



And I just finished these two animations for my media and motion graphics class:


(I did the character animation for this one)