What influences your artwork?
Two things influence my artwork. First of all, old school Disney cartoons and the new computer animated films that are coming out – the Pixar 

and DreamWorks films. The second thing that influences my work is the work of my peers. Definitely when I look at their work I get inspiration. I learn as much from them as I do from the faculty.

I also get inspiration from my studio classes, like figure drawing, which is instrumental to being able to animate well. For idea generation and story development, liberal arts classes really help a lot. Art history classes are a huge help in finding references for animation or a style to work in.

What is the faculty like, and what is the most important thing they’ve taught you?
The faculty here at Ringling is extremely unique compared to experiences I’ve had with other teachers. Because the class sizes are small, they are able to talk to you on a one-on-one basis and you really get to develop a personal relationship with them. What’s also unique is if you email them at two in the morning, you are sure to get an answer 15 minutes later. The fact that the faculty works as hard as you is really reassuring and encourages you to work even harder because you know that they’re working there right alongside you.

What is the senior year in computer animation like?
When you start senior year, you already have all the preproduction work from the previous year. That is all your character designs; the story that you’re going to be working on; an animatic, which is a moving story board; and the camera angles you’ll be using. Hopefully you’ll have the visual style you’ll be going for. So all you do is sit in front of the computer and execute it in 3-D. The first thing you do is model your character, you texture it, you paint it, basically. As soon as you set up the character to be ready to move, you start animating. You do that all through the first semester. The second semester is more focused on lighting and texturing, just making it look better than last semester. If you have time, you keep tweaking the animation. Usually it’s a very long process. It gets tedious sometimes. But overall, the fact that we have had that preproduction work done helps out a lot. You’re not guessing anything, you’re just executing a plan that you’ve previously developed. It works out really well.