Motion design, 3D, video, branding, UX design

Roles: Producing, art direction, motion design, writing, editing, UX design, sound design

At NASA, I got to do a lot. From branding the videos on our YouTube channel, to developing the original interface for an award-winning app, to managing animation and video production for 5 simultaneous missions, there was always something to do.

Producing/writing/

motion design/3D

While I was at NASA, my main responsibility was to coordinate the work of several animators, video producers, and visualizers across all of NASA Goddard's Planetary Science missions. 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, which is still one of the most popular animations ever on a NASA YouTube channel, shows the evolution of our Moon from a glowing ball of superheated rock to the cold, cratered, sphere we know today. I created that video in multiple formats, including spherical projection for museums, stereoscopic 3D, and regular 1080p HD. The second, the third in a tongue-in-cheek series on the convoluted process of building satellites, walks the audience through how scientists and engineers make the latest in a long series of Earth-observing satellites.

Branding

We launched Goddard's YouTube channel early, back when it was hard to find official videos straight from the source. To help keep our content consistent, I created a branding package to help things along. The first video, which focuses on our Goddard Space Flight Center end tag, shows how I evolved the end tag over my career there, from creating the original design, to developing alternates (even a fun one for Halloween), to the final revision that's still in use today. The idea behind the end tag was to give 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 second video shows additional branding to identify our science divisions (some are still in use today), along with some additional branding for NASA's Earth Right Now campaign (they wanted an "update" to the original Earth Science branding) and a co-branding project for NOAA and NASA.

UX Design

The Nasa Viz app is an iOS app designed to bring you the latest content from NASA Goddard, and I got to work on the original interface design. The iPad had just come out, and I thought it'd be great if we developed an app specifically for the device to showcase our best multimedia. I came up with a general concept, mocked up a quick UI in After Effects, shared it with some of my colleagues, and the app was born. We got funding support from the center to develop it, and as late as 2015 it won a People's Choice Vizzie from Popular Science. After about a year, I handed off interface design and returned to video producing, but much of the original design still persists in the app.

One last thing:

I got to 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 make the rest of the video.