It's true ... and I'm happy

I got it. I am still in shock, but it is true. I am headed to California this summer to work as an intern at Pixar! Who would have thought!

I start on Monday, 6/2! It's a huge blessing in so many ways, with the only negative being that Jessica has to work this summer too, so she will be staying in Rhode Island while I am in California. Pixar is located in Emeryville which is next to Oakland, just across the bay from San Francisco.

I got hired as a Technical Director Intern and will be working on some upcoming Pixar film. I will be doing a lot of programming that will provide the animators with the tools that they need to make the movie. I will obviously post as I know more and continue to keep this updated while I am gone.

It is amazing to look at how this came about because of so many things happening in my life. I can only point this opportunity directly to God and the way he has directed my entire life. I really hope that this internship goes very well and opens up the perfect opportunities for me after I'm done with my degree next May. Thanks for keeping me (and Jess) in your prayers.

Another update

So, I keep meaning to update this. I had the interview at Brown with some folks from Pixar on 2/28 (the day after I turned 23). It went really well. I finished another school project on the 26th (called Photon Mapping) and was able to add some resulting images from that to my demo reel. I also read through the tips on Pixar's site for what they look for in a reel and changed mine quite a bit. I like it a lot better now and here is what it looks like.




Also, yesterday morning I was contacted by one of the Pixar recruiters letting me know they wanted to set up a phone interview! I was super excited and they called me last night at 6:45. I felt really good about that too, and I should hear back in about two weeks as to whether or not I got the internship.


School has been VERY busy lately I finished another assignment this week that was very long and very hard. It's called image analogies and was a concept that was presented in a research paper a couple of years ago. If you actually care the paper can be found here: http://mrl.nyu.edu/publications/image-analogies/analogies-300dpi.pdf
If nothing else I'd suggest you open it up and look at all the cool pictures they "describe" what the paper is about a lot better than I could. (Just for clarification of the pictures, we give the program images A, A' and B, and it outputs B'). Very cool but very complicated.

Now, I'm starting some more fun projects. I get to do the math that allows animators to manipulated digital 3D objects. The technique is called character deformation and is used all the time in computer graphics. Hopefully I'll update on other things besides school sometime soon. It's just that it seems to be most of what my life consists of right now, unfortunately.