I'm the co-founder and Creative Director of Tomato Beach, a New York based Creative Production Studio specializing in design and animation. We love transforming complex ideas into clear, engaging, and meaningful stories. tomatobeach.com

The Art and Animation Direction I developed for this project alongside my talented team utilized a 3D pipeline (Maya) and incorporated hand-drawn 2D animation (Harmony) to achieve a distinctive aesthetic. Each episode is structured around two contrasting worlds. The visual style of the real world remains consistent throughout all five episodes, while the imagined world of each episode explores a distinctive design theme, encompassing reimagined environment design, character design, and rendering. In the real world, characters were crafted with a more realistic design, necessitating nuanced facial expressions and body language, whereas the imagined worlds featured more stylized characters, demanding exaggerated performances. My leadership responsibilities encompassed recruiting, resource allocation, scheduling, budget management, studio organization, oversight of both 2D and 3D pipelines, and supervision of all artists. My hands-on involvement encompassed concept art, character design (including both iterations of the protagonist), modeling, texturing, animation, editing, and compositing.

Seasons 1-3 (46 half-hour episodes).As the Art Director on Showtime's "Our Cartoon President", I played a key role in recruiting, training, directing and managing the design department. Environments are exaggerated in scale, bathed in dramatic lighting, and rendered in a painterly style to amplify their grandeur. Characters are designed to capture the likeness of the real-life subjects and rendered in a comic style to contrast the dignified settings. I led the development of the show's style and established an efficient workflow to ensure that all artists consistently created high quality assets on schedule and achieved the show's creative goals and technical requirements. Additionally, I designed characters, created layouts, and provided guidance via draw-overs and critiques to direct the creation of the characters, props, and environments.

"With Drawn Arms" premiered at the Tribeca Film Festival in 2020. I directed and supervised a team of artists to produce the hand-drawn animated sequence that appears in this powerful film, directed by Glenn Kaino and Afshin Shahidi. This sequence depicts a difficult and life-altering moment in the life of Tommie Smith. My contributions included: animation direction, art direction, storyboards, design, animation, and compositing. "With Drawn Arms" uncovers the story behind a critical moment in American history, spawning one of most iconic images of protest from the past century. At the 1968 Summer Olympics in Mexico City, the world watched as two American runners, Tommie Smith and John Carlos, took the stage as the U.S. national anthem played, raising their fists in a symbol of black struggle and solidarity.

"In & Of Itself" premiered at SXSW 2020, winning a Special Award at the film festival. It was a great privilege to work closely with the film directors, Frank Oz and Derek DelGaudio, and two other animation directors, Steven Conner and Tim Luecke, on the three animated sequences that appear in this film. My contributions included: animation direction, art direction, storyboards, design, animation, and compositing.

To reflect the numerous interests and diversity of Claude Shannon’s work, the animated sequences I directed for this film were created in a variety of different visual styles and animation techniques. I worked closely with the film Director, Mark Levinson, to develop unique creative approaches for different sequences that aligned with the narrative and creative objectives. I resourced, recruited, directed and supervised a team of remote artists to produce thirty minutes of animated content, including the opening title sequence, lower thirds, vfx shots, and credits.

I had the unique pleasure of working as the Animation Studio Creative Director for Jon Stewart's satirical episodic project for HBO. This role encompassed Art Direction and Animation Direction for a fast paced production pipeline. I oversaw all aspects of character design, modeling, 3D animation (key animated and motion-captured), rigging, 2D animation, motion graphics, and visual effects.

As an ECD in the Content Studio, I directed and supervised 3D and 2D Animation, Motion Graphics, Stop-Motion, and Live-Action projects. In my 11 years with the agency, I played a key role in developing and running the animation department, which serviced the agency's global clients.