One of my proudest moments as a designer was when my colleague Javier and I were awarded an Emmy for our Inside the Game Design. It was a great collaborative effort that we both worked extremely hard on.  The idea came to me when I first saw the 3d model of a space port. I thought it would be cool to have that space portal opening up into the Texans stadium. Since we live in space city, I thought it was a fitting concept.  From there we purchased models, then heavily customized both the stadium and space port. We utilized a lot of tools including downloading the NASA countdown audio from their website. We then had to build templates in our Vertigo template system and then later transferred that to our Ross Xpression template system.

I had the design chance of a lifetime when my boss came in one day and told me we were getting a new chopper. It was a unique chopper with all the new gadgets and they wanted a new design. I immediately got to work and started mocking up samples.  They wanted to see anything and wanted me to “experiment”.  I was pushing for a sleek black look. But I think FAA regulations killed that one.  We decided to go with a sleek simple blue and red. Once I finalized the design, I had to work with Churchill Navigation to pick paints that would match our design.  I actually had to go to the airport and sit in the chopper to upload and customize graphics in their computer system. That picture is me inside the chopper.

Our Creative Services director Dave had seen one of our sister stations' promos. They told him they had an outside design house do everything with a budget over $30K. Dave laid down the challenge to us to get it done with 1/4 of the budget. We used most of this budget on having an outside film company shoot the green screen for us. We all pitched in and I had the tasks of composing all green screens, assembling all the segments, doing the special effects, and using our weather graphics to tie it into our brand. I think the promo is a great representation of a great collaborative team effort that I was excited and proud to be a part of.

A personal project that I am really proud of was a movie picture journal for my deceased grandfather.  He had served in World War 2 and had taken many pictures throughout his service. Part of the massive workload of this was figuring out his journey and coordinating it with the many pictures. I was not old enough to ask him about his service so I had to do research and then assemble the puzzle with maps and pictures.  I did all the graphics and edited music, even creating a few music pieces of my own.  It took about 2 months to complete and I timed it to give it to my father for his birthday. I really enjoy doing these type of projects and have done a few others for family members.