A cell animation class in 1976 prompted me to move to NYC, with the hope of getting work that would make my images get up and move. Over the next 20+ years, I worked for an assortment of graphic animation facilities. The first five years were in film animation. Between jobs, I’d do mechanical art for print designers. I’ve never been interested in being a print designer, but working with them gave me a great appreciation for typography and a fastidious attention to detail.

Around 1983, I was the first commercial artist working on “Images,” a software-based system developed at NYIT for the (ridiculous) movie “Tron.” From there I went to a facility that used the hardware-based Quantel Paintbox. That facility, Charlex, had just completed the first MTV Music Video of the Year, and was working on what was to become the emmy-winning opening montage to Saturday Night Live – heady stuff for 1984. It was fun, frantic and 80 hours a week. In NYC, I worked for people with highly entertaining but frequently debilitating idiosyncrasies. It could be challenging.

I moved to Portland, OR in 1986 with my new husband, a technical wizard and fellow refugee from Charlex. Once in Oregon, I continued my relationship with some New York clients, but my primary source of income became Nike.

I quit the commercial world in 2001, went back to school in a totally different field, and focused on my personal artwork. The video you see here is the last demo reel I created. It’s rather dated by today’s standards, as the last piece on here was created over 8 years ago.

Everything on this demo was done in Adobe After Effects. The two first pieces, “I Can’t See” and “What’s for Dinner,” contain a very large number of morphing shapes. These days there are software packages that do this automatically, but back then I had to build it all manually. Each intermediate stage of every transition in every piece was created by hand in Adobe Illustrator and transferred to Adobe After Effects.