Resume

Having a resume with links to this blog being posted on this blog seems almost redundant, but sometimes that's ok.  Being a little extra prepared never hurt anybody :)

So without any further delay.. I present my resume for your viewing pleasure.

Matthew Ecenbarger      424 River Rock Pass           Phone 260-450-4224

Computer Artist­                                   Fort Wayne IN, 46814    Ecenbarger@gmail.com

http://matt-ecenbarger.blogspot.com

A graduate of the University of St. Francis, a NASAD accredited university, I am a very upbeat professional who is looking for an opportunity to prove myself in a rewarding and challenging position. With a Bachelor’s degree in computer art, I enjoy doing everything from Graphic design to 3D animation and would love to lend my versatile skill set to you.

 

Software Expertise

Extensive experience in both PC and Macintosh platforms, including, but not limited to the following programs:

   Photoshop – Illustrator -- After Effects -- Indesign -- Final Cut Pro

   Microsoft office -- Maya 6 through 8.5

Education

University of Saint Francis - B.A. in Computer Arts

·   Maintained a GPA of 3.59 while working and attending class

·   Sustained Deans list in all but two semesters in college

·   Held Presidential and art scholarship for all 4 years

·   Attended three separate SIGGRAPH conferences in Los Angeles in 2005, Boston in 2006, and Los Angeles in 2008

·   Member of the national SIGGRAPH organization from 2003 to 2008

·   Vice President of the U.S.F. Chapter of SIGGRAPH in the 2005-2006 and 2006-2007years

Work History

Food Clerk, Grocery - Meijer
Ft. Wayne, IN, 2003 to present

·   Preserved high standards for the overall conditions of the grocery department, including maintaining shelf displays, correct inventory, signage, and most importantly providing daily, friendly customer service.

Graphic Designer – Freelance examples include:

·   Designed a new header for the Noble County Prosecutor’s Office website in 2011

·   Designed a logo for a small music business 2010

·   Designed a mascot for a Healthcare practice in Brooklyn, NY 2009

3D Modeler and Animator – University of Saint Francis
Ft. Wayne, IN, 2005

·   Provided graphic support for a series of computer animations geared towards helping young children learn the alphabet.

Awards

·   Sophomore and Junior Achievers Award at USF

·   First Place in walk cycle category at the USF Film Festival 2005

·   First Place in Animation category at the USF Film Festival 2006

·   First place in Technical category at the USF Film Festival 2008

·   Second place in Animation category at the USF Film Festival 2008

Examples can be found at http://matt-ecenbarger.blogspot.com and references

are available upon request Thank you for taking the time to look at my resume!

Mascot Design

 Seeing as one of my ways to relax is to occasionally sit and doodle new characters on paper, creating mascots was a fun evolution of the hobby.  I had a really fun time developing a mascot for MCO (Managed Care Optimizer). Located in Brooklyn, NY.  They didn't know exactly what they wanted at first but we solved that with good communication.  First, I would sent 3 or 4 varying designs that I was able to piece together relatively easily in Photoshop so that had options to pick from, then after they let me know what they really liked and I knew we both were on the same page I could clean one of them up and give them a nice finished product without having waste a lot of time guessing what they were after.

Another opportunity came along when my sister was in need of a image to go with a college project she was presenting to the pediatric department of a local hospital.  I don't believe the image ended up being adopted for any real use, but we were both happy with how it looked :)

Graphic Design

 Two recent graphic design opportunities include the honor of being asked to make a new header for the Noble County Prosecutor's office and designing a logo for a someone planning on getting into a side career involved with music.

I was given a lot of room to come up with my own design for the header. I was handed the picture of their building, the current prosecutor, and the text they wanted to have included on it.  They said they wanted it to have a casual republican vibe and to feel free to come up with something cool.. so I gave it a go and they seemed to like were I was going with the first rough version I sent them.  I cleaned it up, finished it off and here we are!

It was a similar process with the logo. His initials were S.M. and his idea was to have them worked together in a kind of swirl pattern. I knew it was for a music related company, so I came up with the idea to refine the swirl idea into a modified treble clef and worked the M into that.  He was excited as soon as he saw it so I finished it out into the logo you see below.

Senior Project 3D Animation

While I have dabbled with 3D animation on and off for a while, my senior project is by far the most complete example of what I can do with the medium that I have at the moment.  I have improved my skills in modeling and texturing, but I am far from having a completed project to show them off through. 

I had  lot of fun making the video and I hope you enjoy!

Motion Graphics

A slightly more marketable skill than the 3D animation is a similar interest in motion graphics.  Motion graphics can be used in television commercials, training videos, or pretty much anything else in witch a camera and film are involved.

This project was done back in school as an alternate ending credit sequence for the movie I Robot.  I created all the elements in the video (aside from the clips of the film of course) from scratch in Photoshop, brought them into Adobe After Effects, and quite a few hours later... voila!

Wedding Invitations

When my wife and I got married we decided to go all out designing our wedding invitations since we both knew our way around a computer.  She designed the front to look like a James Bond movie poster and I designed the back of the invitation to look like the back of a DVD cover. We had a ball having our own little photo shoot to get the poses we wanted and used photos from a trip to Las Vegas a couple years earlier as the background.  They seemed to be received by the guests with varying levels of awe and confusion (more awe for the younger to middle aged crowd and confusion for the grandparents) but we had expected that going into it and were thoroughly pleased with how they turned out :)

When the wedding got closer I took over designing the wedding programs.  I went with a simple single page front and back design shown next to one another to the right.  I had a more or less standard back side, but kept the fun bond theme going with a simple silhouetted wedding dress and rings merged with the 007 logo on the front.

Traditional Art

Despite my love for all forms of computer art, I do still enjoy putting a good old fashioned pencil to paper.  Most of the time when I do this I end up doing what I can best describe as free form doodling. I just start drawing without a specific final image in mind and a creatures or character more or less forms itself as I go.  Drawing like that has always been a great way for me to relax, but I also enjoy drawing with purpose.  A great example of that is Jessica Alba here.  I wanted to make sure I wouldn't get rusty seeing as it had been a couple years since I had finished my drawing classes at Saint Francis, so one day I sat down and after an accumulative 8 or 9 hours I finished the drawing you see here, and I was very pleased with the result.

Diversoins into 3D animation

My love for computer art goes even beyond 2D. On top of graphic design, layout, and photo manipulation, I also enjoy creating 3D animated videos.  While the usefulness of a skill like this is limited in Fort Wayne, that doesn't stop me from pursuing it as a hobby that may or may not someday come in handy in my career.

These are two fun examples of my earlier 3D work.

 

The first here was a homage to the good old video games I grew up with as well as a venture into to previously untested areas: particle effects with the explosion, and dynamics with the question block being blown away.

 

The Pencil Bandit video here was my first real production of note using any 3D software.  I used Maya and Photoshop to make it and I learned a lot in the process.

Illustrator

 I think the Illustrator post is as good as any to follow up the Photoshop post.  Both images I have here started out as standard pictures I had found online.  The goal was to recreate the image using Illustrator so that instead of having a pixel based image that couldn't be enlarged without losing quality, I would have a vector based Illustrator image that could be enlarged to cover the face of the moon without losing any crispness to the picture.

The first one I did out of the two is the diamond. I was limited to only using simple gradients (a

shape that fades from one color to another single color) so i had to overlap and intertwine them in a way that gave the illusion of depth and radiance in the diamond.

When I was recreating the Bugatti in the second image I was using Meshes (a grid of many points where each point can have its own color assigned and the mesh as a whole can be bent and contorted) instead of simple gradients. The project as a whole was more or less a way to refine my skills with the program's tools and broaden my understanding of what they are capable of.

While the process is very time consuming on something as detailed as the car.. applying the same skills to a company's logo can turn a low resolution .jpg file that was barely large enough to print clearly on a business card, into something that can clearly stretch across a sign or even a billboard with ease.

Photoshop

I thought I'd kick of this blog with two examples of Photoshop work I've done in the past for fun.

The first on the left here is the result of some stray photography during a trip to the Art Institute of Chicago and some free time. I thought it was fun to have a twenty story man (Me) in such a casual pose.  What I think made the images fit so well together was planning the picture of me sitting thoroughly enough to be taken at the appropriate angle and matching the lighting conditions from the original picture.  Attention to details early on in projects like this make it come together much cleaner and easier at the end.

The second image is just an example of a project I colored in Photoshop. It started off as a freehand drawing with good old pencil and paper and I decided to scan it onto the computer in order to finish the drawing in color.  Doing smooth shading takes longer, but it's still fun to do.

Welcome one and all!

First of all, I would like to thank you for taking the time to visit my blog.

The purpose of this blog is twofold: to showcase examples of my work as my own reference on the go, and as a place where I can direct others to see what I have accomplished.

I hope you enjoy viewing my work and are able to take something away from it.. either as inspiration for a project of your own or simply as food for thought  =)

Also, please feel free to post any and all comments!
I love hearing thoughts about my work and I am always looking for ways to improve on it.