What’s the toughest thing you’ve had to face in your career and how did you overcome it? He also was one of the first artists to draw different views of the same object, with side, top, and perspective, which was the beginning of what we have in all 3D programs now, including After Effects. I loved that when he drew something, you often saw the exterior AND the interior, which to me is what I love most about holograms. ![]() He found a really beautiful way of blending the organic and the technical. Leonardo DaVinci has been my favorite source of inspiration since childhood. Who is your creative inspiration and why? Using Creative Cloud, I also love being able to build up custom libraries of colors, icons, and assets that our team can reference and share across all Adobe apps. Since what I do is a bit specialized, these allow me to create a bit of a bespoke program meant to quickly do exactly what I need it to do. I really love the added speed and abilities I can get from a huge library of add-on scripts. What’s your hidden gem/favorite workflow tip in After Effects or Adobe Creative Cloud? This kind of iteration is fairly typical in feature films, and is the reason I’ve always named my files with two leading zeros in the version numbers. For the final, they simply fly a single route. But at the end of the day, asking the audience to follow the three routes simultaneously proved to be too distracting. I'd then re-design and re-animate the entire sequences across all three big screens. For a few weeks, I’d re-break down the new scripts to determine where each pilot was at each moment in time, as well as what new things were happening, whether it was breaching the height ceiling, losing electro-optical tracking, taking enemy missiles etc. The three different routes, colored red, green and gold, that we originally had for the training is a good example of this. Each rewrite would be a healthy change to all of our designs and animations. For instance, the scenes for the main Tactical-Auditorium training sequence where the pilots are learning to fly super low below radar, were being rewritten almost every three to four days. This was a great thing, but unfortunately also meant that the script rewrites were pretty intense at times. The entire production team was very behind making these sequences really flow well together for the audience. What were some specific challenges you faced? How did you go about solving them? In the final film, it was great to see how director Joseph Kosinski did the final cuts between the cockpit screens and the large Mission Control screens reading out the mach numbers I designed. In the cockpit on set, the animation sequence was played on iPhone and iPad screens that were built into the bezels. I designed in Illustrator and animated in After Effects. By filming time, we had spent weeks building up a second-by-second real-time animation sequence for Maverick’s landmark, Mach 10.4 flight. He continuously delivered PDFs and Powerpoints of rough schematics, warnings and explanations for how they knew the jet would act within all the story points. ![]() Early on, I was assigned a Skunkworks “subject-matter-expert.” Norman “Spock” Eliasen was insanely smart and totally lived up to his nickname with all my questions. I was brought on to develop the cockpit displays. Lockheed was super enthusiastic to lead the full hardware design of Darkstar, from its full exterior to its full-fledged cockpit. How did the Skunkworks collaboration take shape? We also spent months designing and animating for the various training sequences and the end battle. They provided the foundation to design and animate the storytelling hero screens in the film, including the film’s opening scenes with the cockpit HUD screens and mission control for Darkstar, which is Tom Cruise’s next-gen stealthy X-72 fighter-jet. I learned so much working almost daily with Skunkworks and Lockheed. What was it like to design with Lockheed Martin? We had the dream squadron on this, led and built by visual design director Admiral Bradley “Gmunk” Munkowitz who collected our wingmen together: Sergeant David “Dlew” Lewandowski, who led the animation on my team, wingman designer Nicolas Lopardo, and crewmates, designer Toros Kose, and motion designer James Heredia. I think this is why Nicholas Lopardo gave me a call out of the blue one day. Because of those, I was also fortunate enough to work on real world next-gen military projects that are similar. I’d had some fighter-jet design experience while designing HUDs and holograms for films like Iron Man, Avengers, and Hunger Games.
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