Hasta La Motion!

Good afternoon everyone. I have been a lurker here and at CGTalk for a while mainly because I am a little shy when stepping into a pool of such talented people. I guess it is about time to get the courage up to introduce myself.

My name is Brett Dawson but I have gone by Buzz for almost twenty years. My background is about as varied as it gets but I will just touch on the major points.

I am a former NASA engineer (hence the forum name) that worked on the Checkout and Launch Control Systems project for the Space Shuttle at Kennedy Space Center. While there I became interested in robotics and competed regularly on the television series Battlebots. That led to my own television show called Robot Rivals on the Do It Yourself Network for a couple of years.

After our CLCS project was cancelled due to 9/11 I taught robotics at the University of Central Florida as a summer program where I would teach students math and physics through applied robotics. I also taught teachers how to integrate robotics into their own classroom curriculum.

After that I began working at the Orlando Science Center as the Exhibits Developer where I took complex science concepts and design and build hands-on exhibits to teach them to the general public. While there I was one of the founders of Otronicon (www.otronicon.org) and was its creative director for five years.

There was one problem with all of this though. I don’t have a degree. I am a self-taught engineer and as a result of not having a degree I was routinely paid half of what I was worth (i.e. underemployed). So, I decided to go back to school to get said degree and forego over a decade of mechanical engineering to get back to my roots as an artist.

I am a student at Full Sail University and have decided to focus on VFX because, in all honesty, I found it to be the most challenging and I have always tackled to the most difficult things that I can to make myself a more well rounded person.

I found that within the field of Visual Effects I can put my experience in math and physics to use with the eye of an animator to create some of the cool effects that I have loved in the movies and more. Now it is just a matter of learning how to do it within the confines of Maya and Houdini :-p

And that brings me here. I have followed closely people like David Schoneveld, Wayne Hollingsworth, Peter Shipkov, Duncan from The Area, and others in an effort to soak up as much information as I can. I hope to not only be able to ask a lot of questions and get great feedback to eventually give back with some of the knowledge that I have gained.

Here are some links to my personal stuff (a personal site devoted to my CG works is in the, um, works):

www.TeamDaVinci.com (my robotics and more website)

http://vimeo.com/buzznasa (my Vimeo page with a few hours of things ranging from school work to parts of episodes of my television show)

http://buzznasa.deviantart.com/ (my Deviant Art with recent stuff and stuff almost thirty years old)