About

An Excessive Bio

The Early Years

If I could characterize my childhood self, I would say that I was obsessed with drawing and dinosaurs. Sadly, I never fully recovered from this condition.

I lived most of my childhood in a small, idyllic, one-street-light-town called Blackstone. I am, if not proudly, then perhaps unabashedly, a child of New England. I love old industrial mills, long miserable winters, abundant seafood, and of course the regional accent. I try to keep my New England accent under control, but it is excitable and often leaps out when I’m least expecting it (pronouncing the word ‘broad’ will out me almost instantly).

For several years I took part in the great American tradition of playing in a garage band with my high school friends. We were called Taste of Chains, a name that was coined before I had arrived, and so I pretty much had to live with. Having no background in music theory, I naturally became the drummer. We had a lot of great experiences: playing gigs in Providence and Worcester at really deplorable clubs, winning a contest at a local radio station, being unexpectedly asked to be the opening band for a band we had just gone to watch, and recording two albums. It was my first experience working in a group for some creative endeavor and I learned several valuable lessons.

The Providence Years

For my undergraduate career I made the relatively short journey to the state of Rhode Island. I enrolled in Providence College and earned a B.S. in Biology with a minor in Studio Art. It was a long tumultuous experience, but I came out of it with a slightly thicker skin and a better idea of who wanted to be.

In 2009, something unexpected happened that would rewrite the last few pages of my college career. The year before, Maxis Studios, the game company behind Simcity and the Sims, released the game Spore™ and I became thoroughly addicted to the game’s creation tools. I created so many creatures and buildings that I think the developers grew a bit concerned. They asked me and a small group of the players to visit their studio in Emeryville, CA to try out one of their games in development. It was my first experience seeing what goes on behind the scenes at a video game studio. The trip planted a small thought in my mind that perhaps I should explore a more creative career.

The Butterfly Years

After college, I held the strangest position at a neuroscience research laboratory in Worcester Massachusetts. Labs often study so-called ‘model organisms’ such as lab rats, fruit flies, or something of that ilk. Unlike every other lab, our lab focused on Monarch Butterflies. Naturally, this required someone to care for, handle, and feed hundreds and hundreds of butterflies so that horrific experiments could be carried out on them. For a brief time in my life I was their butterfly feeder, or to give the humble position a bit more majesty, I was the Senior Lepidopteran Nutritional Specialist. This experience instilled in me a deep patience, a commitment to getting a job done, and an appreciation of the absurdity that occasionally colors life.

At the same time, I took night classes at the Rhode Island School of Design. The program was a Natural Science Illustration Certificate Program. There I was exposed to both traditional creative skills and digital ones. Students there learned how to render illustrations of organisms that were both visually integrated and faithful to subject matter. It combined my love of science with my creative background. The program has been critical in my development as an artist. In addition to the traditional media, I have been able to take several 3D modeling classes. Learning Maya and ZBrush has been liberating as I was finally able to build and sculpt my ideas. I also realized, or perhaps confirmed a past realization, that I am profoundly happy when I am creating something.

The Philly Years

While toiling away in the butterfly lab, the siren call of graduate school began to call to me. My sights turned to Philadelphia. In June of 2012, I enrolled at Drexel University’s Digital Media Master’s program. It was such a great experience to be a part of a diversity community of creative people.

One of the properties owned by Drexel University was the Academy of Natural Sciences. As a student with free admission, I spend an absurd amount of time there exploring the various displays and specimens. Being around all the specimens helped inspire my eventual thesis project. It revolved around using digital animation to make fossil collections more visible and assessable to the public. I worked with fossils of an extinct fish-like creature (named Bothriolepis) and attempted to make a believable animated reconstruction. The project was called Animating Ancient Ontogeny, because it also attempted to animate how the creature developed from a juvenile to an adult.

The Salt Years

With my graduate diploma still warm in my hands, I began searching for a job in the game industry. Like a resume dandelion, I tossed countless applications into the wind with the hope that just one would land. One finally did in the most unexpected places. I landed a role at Avalanche Studios / Disney Interactive in Salt Lake City. Previously, I hadn’t gone much further west than Connecticut. Avalanche was the studio behind the Disney Infinity franchise, a video game with an interactive collectable figurine component. I started off as an intern and was later hired full-time as an Art Outsourcing Coordinator. It was a great experience to work with iconic IPs like Star Wars, Marvel, and Pixar.

Homecoming

All good things come must come to an end, even dream jobs. In 2016, Disney announced that it was going to shut down the studio. I was devastated. I ended up moving back to my home state of Massachusetts. In 2017, I managed to get a job at a local game studio. Standing Stone Games, a studio spun off of Turbine Games, was the publisher and maintainer of two MMO’s Lord of the Rings Online and Dungeons and Dragons Online. I’ve been happily working there ever since.