Welcome, you’ve found the Idea Swamp. I’m the head mucky muck, Patrick. I live in Portland, Oregon, after having spent 17 years in the film and television industry in Los Angeles. Technically speaking, I still work in that industry, though I am no longer physically located in SoCal full-time.
So what is the Idea Swamp? Simply put, it's an animation graphics company. Or, to use my elevator pitch, I am a CG generalist specializing in documentary visualization. If you have something to explain, I create animated explainers.
In other words, let’s say you’re a producer for a documentary TV series. You don’t have the budget to hire a full-fledged VFX house to do your graphics, but you still need to have them done. So you turn to someone like me—a generalist—who can take your shots from beginning to end, and can do them quickly and at a high quality.
What I strive to do is to make it easier for producers and content creators to tell their stories by making the potential roadblocks to those stories—that is, the difficult to explain parts—visually appealing and seamlessly integrated into the rest of the piece. I do that by doing a lot of research and concept work, so it's not just random pretty-making. If you, as my hypothetical documentary producer, are trying to explain what the Loch Ness Monster is, I study maps, history, Plesiosaur fossils, alternate hypotheses, and whatever else I can get my hands on to inform my design and concept process. Then I use that information while I'm modeling, sculpting, and animating the shot. The end result, hopefully, is a more informed, detailed, and aesthetically richer animation.
While documentary visualization is my specialty, I do all manner of things graphical and animated for any industry that might need graphical and animated things. I've worked on TV shows, feature films, web series, short films, trade show presentations, and even patent applications. I've done main titles, technical illustrations, cartoons, and fully realized alien creatures. I'm living the nerd dream; I get to enter in to another world with every job and explore it from all angles, and then add my own little brand of polish here and there. It's one of my passions, and I'm grateful that I have the chance to do it. If you haven't done so already, please take a look at my showreel and check out some of the worlds I've ventured into.