Art has allways been a big part of my life, I grew up in a creative environment, with both of my parents and a few other family members being very talented artists.

My father was quite a renaissance man with many talents, he was an accomplished Jazz musician, he could play the Trumpet like the best of them, and he was also a skilled carpenter, with a love for Sailing.

My Mother is an extraordinarily skilled Floral and Jewelry designer, with a very successful flower shop that she has run for almost 30 years. Before her floral business she painted wonderful murals and portraits and occasionally decorated furniture for fun.

So what about me? Well with being around such cool parents the need to create is natural, it's how I think. Whether I was out in the back making stuff with scrap wood my dad would save for me to play with or drawing my own comic book characters, I was always up to something. Through out grade school I was in every art program that was available to me.

Video! Ah the love of video started when my Dad decided to start a small wedding video company in 1989, by this time my mother's flower shop had developed the reputation for providing the best wedding flowers in town. So with all of the wedding business coming in, my Father decided to offer a wedding video service to the growing list of clients.

We had a good Super VHS camcorder and editing VCR along with a simple title generator, man I mean this stuff was high-tech. Being a capable young kid, I quickly volunteered to become the back up camera man. Well that worked out a little better than I expected, seems like I spent quite a lot of time behind the camera, but I loved it.

Computers were always intriguing to me, in High school I choose every type of class that involved working on computers, drafting and computer science were the best. I was also in the Video Yearbook and other art classes. In the summer of 1994 when my senior year of High school was about to begin, I remember thinking about my future and that I need to decide on a general direction for my life.

Why Multimedia?

My girlfriend's Dad at the time had shown me some art work he designed with Corel on his computer for the company he worked for. So like any normal young guy I wanted to learn more about digital art so I could one day impress her Dad. For some reason I felt the need to have something more in common with him than just picking up his daughter and taking her out to do god knows what, god knows where.

So it happened. I bought my 1st PC, a big bad Pentium 90mhz with maxed out with 256megs of ram and a huge 17" crt monitor. This computer was going to help me learn all I could about computer graphics. This was the time when Microsoft launched the revolutionary operating system Windows 95. Depending on who you talk to some may have a different view, but to me I was amazed to say the least. It seemed light years ahead of all the computers I ever had access to at school.

After setting up my new pc, I jumped right into all the cool programs and extra multimedia clips that came on the 95 disk. There were two music videos one by Weezer singing Buddy Holly and another by Edie Brickell singing Good Times. After watching these videos to say the least I was really inspired. Amazed at how great it was to watch cool full motion videos on a computer, I had never seen anything like it.

After that 1st day it was a mission of mine to find out how to get digital video onto my computer to make my own productions. So with the 10hrs of free AOL internet that came with my system, I found a few sites about video editing, this was the time when companies started offering somewhat affordable hardware cards to get the video into the pc packaged with Adobe Premiere 4.0 for a reasonable price, but still out of my price range.

Computer Graphics! Oh yes, that was at the top of the list probably before digital video. After buying the pc I needed the right tools for the job, my findings from research told me that Adobe PhotoShop and Illustrator were already well on their way to becoming the most popular graphics software along with the Corel products. Software is not cheap; most of the applications were almost as much as my computer!

This was also the time before digital cameras, the only way that you could get a picture onto your computer was with a scanner, scanners were not cheap either, but I found a low cost one that came with Adobe PhotoShop 3.0 included. I taught myself how to use the scanner and the software, but my skills were no where close to being professional.

After graduating high school, I worked odd jobs and started to attend college at Southeastern Louisiana University were I majored in computer science with various other art classes. But they had no course for designed for digital arts, particularly digital video and motion graphics.

Houston here I come! One of my professors suggested I look into the Houston's Art Institute, they might be what I'm looking for. A few days later I called AI and they sent an information packet to me. They offered a Multimedia program that was exactly what I was looking for and more.

In June of 1997 I packed up and moved to Houston and the rest is history.well kinda, you can read my resume for more information about my skill set and past work experiences.

Recent Projects

CenterStage Karaoke
I recently finished a custom wallpaper and logo design for Drink Houston's new karaoke room.

BCM Interactive Map BCM's web operations hired me to help develop a new interactive flash map for their new website re-design.

Lagniappe

Check it out!

Here is my personal fun stuff page.