I went to school initially at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. After two years there, I went west to the Academy of Art University in San Francisco. At the AAU, I studied traditional animation before I moved onto the computer. When I did move onto the computer, I continued my traditional training with illustration classes but my focus was on animation.

Fortunately I had some brilliant teachers helping me out the whole way. Dave Burgess was my teacher for Maya for Traditional Animators and he taught me much of the way that I work to this day. After that, I was accepted for character animation classes taught by the Spline Doctors Stephen Gregory, Billy Merrit, Andrew Gordon, and Mike Venturini. They taught me so many things I’d never be able to summarize it here.

The work with Dudeman, the yellow guy, is from Maya for Traditional Animators. The work with Hogan, the really lanky guy, is from Pixar 1 and Pixar 2. We had more assignments but not all of them were polished and finished up.