My first passion was without a doubt music. My dad had worked in a record shop while I was growing up, and many of my earliest memories are of me playing on a keyboard, enclosed by walls filled with thousands of vinyl albums. After taking piano lessons from age 3 to my late teens, I became fascinated with samplers, drum machines - namely my friend Gaspare's Akai MPC2000XL (the year it came out, y2k). Since then I've had the honor of working with lots of artists from all different genres - from classical, jazz and rock to hip-hop, reggaeton, and ranchera. My music has been featured on TV (Adult Swim, VH1, MTV) here in the US and overseas, and even in video games and training videos for Adobe Flash.
At the end of 2009, I released a collection of original instrumentals which have been featured on Adult Swim, MTV, and VH1. There are also instrumentals from some songs I've released with other artists, including "Evil Violin," which is the instrumental for a song called "Rich 'n Stingy" featuring Chi-King and 12 O'Clock (member of Brooklyn Zu, and brother of the late ODB of Wu-Tang). read more...
One of my favorite aspects of digital media is the ability to combine music, art and programming all into one. MusicGraph is a short animation I created using Cinema 4D, MoGraph, After Effects and some original music.
When Flash 9 and ActionScript3 came out, I was scrambling to learn as much as possible. I took part in (and won) an online competition on Adobe Flash Evangelist Lee Brimelow's site The Flash Blog, to see who could make the coolest example. It was humbling, and a great learning experience.
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Nocens Sonitus roughly translates from Latin to "Evil Music," which was exactly what this song reminded me of. Using photographs from around Philadelphia taken by "Fawn Dollahs," and artwork commissioned by Thom May, I created this surreal fly-through animation in After Effects.
Another one of my all-time favorite projects, "Rich 'n Stingy" is the name of a song I produced with Wu-Family members Chi-King and 12 O'Clock (Brooklyn Zu, Sunz of Man). The song was recorded in Orlando during the Winter of 2005 and for a show in Downtown Orlando during early 2006, I grabbed a few cameras and a few friends to record the performance. After getting back home at about 3am, I put together a quick video edit of this song for promotion. It was shot to miniDV on two handhelds, edited in Premiere and composited with After Effects. The song was produced with an Akai MPC2000XL, an ASR-10 and a Yamaha AW4416.
This was a short video originally created to test out some new plugins in After Effects using public domain footage and original music.
Illegal Information is a short (less than 5 minutes long) documentary about online piracy. All of the footage was taken from public domain sources, and includes lots of self-shot footage. Animations and transitions were created in After Effects, and the video was edited using Premiere and Final Cut Pro. All of the music featured in this project is original.