I did a lot of snow simulation for Star Wars: The Force Awakens. Probably too much. I spent almost the entirety of my stint on the show working on the sequence where the Millennium Falcon, carrying Han Solo and Chewbacca, crash lands onto the icy planet of Starkiller Base.

This was my first time simulating snow, and we had a new solver developed specifically to address the need to simulate snow and sand. The solver was in its infancy when I started work on my shots, so I ended up using a combination of the new solver and our traditional fluid simulation pipeline to get these shots done.

A unique aspect of snow which is difficult to capture with a traditional fluid solver is the chunkiness of dry snow and its interaction with other snow. Our new solver did a very nice job of replicating that chunkiness when the Millennium Falcon initially impacts on the planet surface.

Jurassic World was a short project for me; I joined the project about halfway through so ended up working on a lot of miscellaneous effects. Among those effects were smoke, water, and blood simulation. The most exciting part of the project for me was participating in my first extras shoot.

Some of the most difficult effects shots to work on are the ones which get very close to camera. In the case of the Pteranodon attack sequence, I had to simulate the water and bubbles perturbed by a Pteranodon dunking Zara in and out of water all while flapping its wings right in front of camera. 

Here is my cameo as a park visitor. I'm at the top of the spiral staircase in the blue shirt closest to the dinosaur hologram's head.

Captain America: The Winter Soldier was my first movie as a sequence supervisor. My role as a sequence supervisor involved tracking progress of the shots in my sequence and making sure that comments from the VFX supervisor were being addressed in a timely manner. 

In addition to supervising, I was on a small team of effects artists who worked on the climax of the film where three helicarriers destroy each other and fall out of the sky.

The bulk of my shot work on this movie involved explosions with all of the associated debris and smoke as well as a touch of water simulation. In the shot to the left, a helicarrier crashes into a reservoir which subsequently causes the underground hangars to flood.

Pacific Rim is a movie about Kaiju and mechs beating the crap out of each other. The majority of the effects work for my team was water-based. All of my shots were water simulation shots with the exception of the opening shot of the film, which was a combination of fires, bubbles, and a few other types of effects work.

I created the portal at the bottom of the ocean where the Kaiju emerge from. This is the first shot of the film. The portal is a molten fiery energy which generates a lot of bubbles which get sucked back into the portal. 

For Cloud Atlas I worked on the fast-paced chase sequence through the futuristic highways of Neo Seoul based in the year 2144.

I created the generic setup for all roads (also referred to as transways) in the Neo Seoul universe. Transways are translucent roads which help suspend and propel vehicles. The aesthetic of the transways is that of a smokey, delicate, yet stable energy field. They have a liquidy smoke layer with a sort of dissipative electrical energy as vehicles interact with it.

Though the bulk of the effects work on Battleship was water simulation, I was tasked with mostly smoke and pyrotechnic simulations.

I quickly became the go-to artist for wispy smoke and sparks generated from the alien "peg launchers" in the film. The enemy ships have munitions bays which launch explosive pegs in a mortar-like fashion which embed themselves in their targets and subsequently blow up. I carved out a niche as the artist for close-up shots of the pegs revving up to full speed and emitting a smokey haze.

The high point of this show for me was working on the eponymous "you sunk my battleship" shot -- over three-thousand frames of continuous destruction and mayhem as a battleship gets destroyed bit by bit. The shot concludes with an enemy shedder ripping the battleship completely in half. My work was just the explosive aspect of the sequence.

The Last Airbender was my first movie running shots at ILM. 

I had been the effects department Assistant Technical Director (ATD) for about half a year before being given an opportunity to do some shot work, and my first assignment was water simulation. My primary role was still to support the effects pipeline tools, but I was very fortunate to get a chance to contribute to this project artistically as well as technically.