Ever since I was a kid, I loved drawing whatever was in my head onto paper. That pushed me toward studying great art, and animated movies played a huge role in where I ended up. I used to break down Disney films pose to pose just to see how they built entire worlds out of nothing. Glen Keane, Andreas Deja, Frank and Ollie. Magicians at work. Then there was music. I grew up on Michael Jackson. Smooth Criminal was the first music video I ever watched on TV. His videos showed me that a song could have a whole cinema living inside it. As I got older I found Mozart, Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Bach. Then John Williams, Hans Zimmer, Thomas Newman, Jerry Goldsmith. That's when music stopped being something I listened to and became something I studied.

All of that is what made me. I'd rewatch the same scene four times trying to figure out why it hit different. That's how I got obsessed over three things. Editing, sound design, 2D animation. Because if a story can be told in any form, you better know every form. I'm the guy who deletes a perfectly good clip just because it's sitting there doing nothing. A story can live in any form. The only thing that separates a good one from a great one is how you carry it. WALL-E showed me that. A little robot stacking trash under a dead sky, not a single word spoken, and yet you sit there feeling everything. If you made it this far, thank you. Good luck with whatever you have in your dreams, pal.