I've always been interested in video. From a very young age I'd ask my parents how what I'd seen on TV was created and their answers only fuelled my interest. I'd often play around on my father's computer with Windows Movie Maker and Stick Figure Animator to create videos for myself. Being able to use a computer so proficiently from a young age was key for my future, unbeknownst to me.
In my time not working - both out of hours and during downtime - I spent hours recreating something I first made back in my college days; a kinetic typogrpahy music video for a song I adore.
This was part of my own creative development, forcing me to work smarter and efficiently, whilst simultaneously allowing me to hone my skills in After Effects and other applications from the Adobe Creative Suite.
For more than a decade I've been playing around with samples in various applications to create what I call music. It has always been just another creative outlet for me and was never meant to be anything more.
One day, I decided I was going to stop creating music. To sign off, I grabbed a load of my own personal favourites and spent hours and hours remastering them to create Closing Statement.
Currently, my main hobby and focus outside of work is on Steptax. This started as a home-built, home-run server built to host TeamSpeak for me and my friends while we played games together online.
While the physical server has since been taken out of service, its spirit lives on in a small home lab run from my home. I now develop and run services like Discord bots, applications and websites, including this one, for fun.
We chew through a lot of media at Girl&Bear. Storing it all along with all of the associated project files can turn into a nightmare if not properly managed, and doing this within budget is a challenge in and of itself!
I was a key part of a small team that came up with Girl&Bear's new cloud-first archiving solution which we managed to do on the fraction of the budget initially forecasted.