According to my grandmother, when I was little I would sit back and stare up at the ceiling for hours. In her story, I was a great thinker, staring off into space and contemplating my existence. My memory tells me it wasn’t a blank stretch of wall that was fascinating me. In my reality, I was watching a city interconnected with roads. Those bumps in my grandparents’ popcorn textured wall were energetic, breathing creatures enacting stories and living full lives. Inanimate objects often came to life in my young mind, resulting in an odd attachment to the things of my past as much as the people.
I am a storyteller. My world and imagination has expanded since childhood, but I never lost my childhood fascination of concocting stories out of nothing. Spinning yarns through animation and memorable characters is my passion. The stories connect to memory, and the memories connect to generations of women in my family. I use objects and influences from childhood to take strings and threads of a forgotten family history and knit them into a structure I can understand.
Working with the Alice Team at Carnegie Mellon in the past year, I have gained experience designing, modeling, and rigging characters in Maya. The 3D characters will populate environments created by students in the Alice Program. The Alice Program aims to teach students to program by creating animations and playing interactive video-style games in Java. Alice 3.0 involves the creativity and imagination of storytelling as well as the technical challenge of programming. Having the chance to be a part of the Alice Team, while dreaming up and realizing characters, was one of the most rewarding opportunities at Carnegie Mellon University and part of my completion of the Bachelors of Computer Science and Art degree.
