blast from the past

found these old comic book pages that I inked many years ago, thought I'd share

Creative Director/Executive Producer

Microsoft is keeping me pretty busy these days, as I said in my last post I'm consulting on various teams/projects in an EP/CD role with some Art Direction and User Experience Design thrown in for good measure.....it's interesting and challenging work. I tend to come in to a project in an early stage of pre-production and help define the product or experience; who is the user, why do they need this product, how will they use this product, what differentiates this product from other products in it's competition space, what are the hero moments of the experience, what is the basic design of the product, what resources will be needed to achieve the design, what must be shipped and what can we cut etc.... I answer these questions and many others with the help of internal and external resources that I direct to deliver design documentation, user experience models, product mock ups, usability tests, art and design bibles etc.
Fun Stuff!
As usual, I can't talk about the projects right now but believe me, I'm working on some pretty cool stuff!

What I've been up to

I started working with Microsoft on several NDA'd projects while at X-Ray Kid, early 2008 or so... in June of last year I struck out on my own and have mostly been working with Microsoft as an Executive Producer or Creative Director in a consultant capacity, it's been fun and rewarding work and I've been involved on the ground floor of several high profile projects that you all will no doubtedly be using in the years to come. I have several contracts lined up with MSFT at this point and will continue working with them, though I am also open to other interesting opportunities.
I'm looking forward to an interesting and enriching 2010!

Executive Producer

Consulting as an Executive Producer for MS this month... interesting project.

Sims2 Pets direction

I was the art lead on the Sims2 Pets project and in charge of designing the create-a-pet system as well as defining the look and feel of the pets. The challenge was to make good looking pets that were as realistic as possible and yet still fit in well with the existing Sims style. We swapped geometry for several different body types and then used latices and morph targets to morph the dogs and cats, there were also choices for colors and patterns...these were all hooked up to sliders in the UI... have a look at it in action!

Animation keys

some key poses for animations...we would send these as well as reference videos to the outsource teams to help direct the avatar animations. some animations were universal, some were avatar specific...the avatar specific anims were used to define an avatars unique personality...I've also uploaded an example of video reference for a dance animation

Goth Family

this is a family concept, we separated the Avatars into several different families..goth, cute animal, normal, hip hop etc. then we would design the avatars for those families...some of these we felt were redundant and were not used.