About
It speaks to me
I collaborate and help others develop interactive content. Whether it's my idea or someone else's. Whether it's interactive communications or interactive functionality that makes an online experience better - I like to get involved and make it work.
Interactive story-building and production have always been part of my life. I spent most of my childhood building small cities out of Lego blocks, organizing the neighborhood kids to stage events for our parents, and coordinating a mischievous business that involved selling spider plants and bags of compost. By the time I was 12 I grew out of it. By then my friends and I were enamored of holography. The precision required to build a holograpy table had my attention. We made plans to build our own table where we could photograph plastic soldiers, a Starsky and Hutch Hot Wheels car, and random objects we found. We read the Holography Handbook and assembled our list of materials. Unfortunately lasers cost much more than lunch money. So we simply admired the work of others. I got by on the Atari 2600 and Basic Programming cartridge Santa gave me. A couple years later I developed a number of stop-motion animated films. They featured the adventures of a Lego hero who flew through space to defend his home planet. Those super-8 films have been lost.
In high school a consumer-grade "hand-held" VHS camera was within somebody's parents' price range. So we created our own versions of Tim Burton-esque horror movies. High School dorm rooms made surprisingly good movie sets.
In college I developed my traditional media skills, studying study art and developing my skills with 3-dimensional and 2-dimensional media.
After college I moved to Boston and worked on a number of independent movie sets. I typically recorded audio on a Nagra reel-to-reel deck.
In 1995 I started doing some graphic design work and then got into web development. I built a number of Web sites and portfolios for illustrators and small businesses. I shared some office space with Interlock Media, a non-profit film company, in Boston (they're in Cambridge now). I did some design work there, got the chance to write a treatment to pitch Bill Viola on a video installation at the El Yunque Rain Forest in Puerto Rico. And I helped produce an industrial video for a steel-frame housing company that wanted to build houses in south america. While there I got pretty good with Video, Macromedia Director, and CD-ROM development. I then picked up a job in New Hampshire developing sales CD-ROMs for companies like Graham Engineering and Heidelberg.
CD-ROM development was short-lived and I quickly moved back to Boston to work at Molecular (Then it was TVisions) as a web architect. I got the chance to deepen my web development skills, work on some more video, and get into the new field of Information Architecture.
The online space has occupied my attention for the last 12 years; Information Architecture, Web Development, Web Design Production, User Experience, Content Development, and Project Management. I'm still involved with building precise communication systems and finding ways to use technology to tell a more engaging story. My current role is Director of Technology and Interactive Services at PJA. I bring all my experience to client projects and love collaborating with a terrific team of producers, developers, information architects, and freelancers.