how I got here...
I got started with all of this in high school - I was doing a a variety of related creative things like photography, theater and music/multitrack recording. In my junior year I made my first video and was hooked - it was the ideal medium because it combined all my interests. I bought my first video camera and began to plan for a career making videos...
After high school I spent a year and a half at a junior college taking a heavy load of general education and photography classes while working in a photography lab. In the summer of '94 I took a class in digital photography and got my first taste of photoshop - I became hooked on the power of working digitally. In that same class I also got a chance to use Premier 1.0 with a primitive video capture card. By the end of the summer I knew I needed to learn more about computers so I took out an Apple student loan and got my first macintosh, an 80mhz powermac with a whopping 16megs of RAM and 500meg hard drive...
I transfered to UC Santa Cruz in the winter of '95 and was accepted into the then-new film department. I learned 16mm production there, but unfortunately they didn't have many classes in digital imaging so I had to continue to learn that on my own. I taught myself non-linear editing, sound recording/editing, 3D modeling and animation, motion graphics and html. By my senior year the department had aquired a DV camera and Media 100 editing system, so I produced my senior thesis film digitally (one of only two digital projects that year). I stayed on an additional year after completing the film program and graduated in '98 with degrees in Film and Video Production and Modern Literature.
While at Santa Cruz I spent a summer as an intern on Baywatch and decided I wasn't interested in working in the LA movie industry, so after graduation I decided to stay in the SF Bay Area and focus on digital media.
After graduation I began an internship at a corporate media production company which led to a variety of freelance work. For the next two years I continued to freelance as an editor, camera operator and motion graphics artist on a variety of projects for corporate clients such as SBC, PeopleSoft, Cisco, etc. I also began doing some web authoring and Flash animation as components of many of the video projects I was involved in.
In 2000 I decided to go back to school and was accepted into the graduate multimedia program at Cal State Hayward. While there I was part of a thesis team which produced an enhanced television system using open-source web technologies. As part of this project I began working more seriously with html and CSS as well as learning Actionscript, PHP and MySQL. In 2002 I graduated from Hayward with an MA in Multimedia.
It was at Cal State Hayward that I also first started teaching. I began by teaching several workshops in After Effects and Final Cut Pro through the university extension program, and then filled in for a semester teaching the undergraduate video production class while the regular instructor was on leave. This led to an opportunity to teach at the College of San Mateo where I have been teaching After Effects (and occasionally Final Cut) for the past few years.
After graduating from Hayward, In addition to teaching, I have continued to freelance as well as forming a small multimedia business (
Digital Independence) with a partner. In the past two years the bulk of my work has been web based - either Flash animation or some combination of design, HTML and PHP/MYSQL - although I still do some video production work including motion graphics and DVD authoring.
And that brings us to the present...and this site. I like teaching and writing about this stuff because it helps me to understand it better - if you want to get really good at something there's no better way to do so than by teaching someone else. I'm also using this site as a test for a content management system I'm building in php/mysql, so it's a learning project as well. Where will I go from here? Keep checking back...
