NASA Goddard Space Flight Center
Roles: Leadership, producing, shooting, writing, editing, art direction, branding, motion design
At NASA, my main responsibility was to lead a team of eleven staff members and coordinate the work of several animators, video producers, and visualizers across multiple science divisions, including astrophysics and planetary science. I was also directly responsible for producing my own animations and videos from script, to animation, to final edit and sound design.
Above are two of my best videos: One is an experimental animated recounting of an average day for NASA's Swift satellite team, and the other explains how NASA's TESS spacecraft discovered its first circumbinary exoplanet.
Producing/Writing/Motion Design
Branding/Art Direction
We launched Goddard's YouTube channel early, back when it was hard to find official videos straight from the source. To help remind people that we WERE the source, I created a branding package for our videos. One of the first elements I created was an end tag that gave a nod to our history (we built some of the world's first unmanned satellites) while reflecting on that as our center's continuing focus. The end tag, first created in 2008, lasted over ten years and two refreshes before finally being retired due to an agency-wide rebranding. To this day, we still get comments from our subscribers saying that they miss "that beeping satellite" at the end of our videos.
When Goddard's end tag was retired, we got direction from the agency to replace it with a new set of graphics with the theme of "Explore." There were multiple versions of this theme, and I volunteered to create a set of end tags with imagery that reflected each version. The agency liked them so much that they added them to the "canon" set of graphics, and several NASA sites reached out to us and asked to use them once they saw what we were doing.
One last thing:
I got to write a PSA for--and direct--Peter Cullen, the legendary voice of Optimus Prime, for a NASA Spinoff commercial. Sadly, I didn't get to do the animation, but I got to shoot and direct the video.