Here’s my 2020 VFX reel— most of these projects are my own, because they’re my favorite ones.

So I’ve been creating visual effects for about a decade now. And I’ve actually been good at it for about 3 years! Haha, jk. But actually not jk though.

Bringing new ideas, characters, and visuals to life through VFX has been a lifelong passion of mine, one that began in middle school with Video Copilot tutorials and After Effects CS5. Even when I was young I knew I wanted to make films about things I couldn’t actually physically shoot— science fiction films that took place on other planets, Star Wars fan films (all bad) and supernatural horror stories. Armed with my old unibody MacBook Pro I realized that if I set my mind to it, I could create entire worlds sitting in my bedroom on my laptop.

Progress is frustratingly slow when you’re trying to teach yourself computer generated imagery at age 12. And the results are always bad, if not a little endearing in how bad they are. But I would spend hours working on the same effect, a force field or an explosion, just trying to figure out why it didn’t look right. Yes I am guilty of googling “how to make things look cinematic” before I really started to understand film. But I never stopped wanting to try and tell these stories, so I never stopped trying to get better.

Fast forward, I now understand and love After Effects, it’s probably the software I know best in the world. Cinema 4D, Blender, Nuke, Octane Render, all came later. The more I learn, the more I want to know. Blending live action with VFX is like a magic trick you play on yourself, and that sense of magic when everything composites together just right has never ceased to thrill me.

I look forward to another decade of self-guided learning and experimentation in this amazing art form.