Alumni Panel

Travis Howe

Travis left Sierra College in 2003 to pursue an education at Ex'pression College for Digital Arts in Emeryville, CA. While attending, he worked with a group of 6 others to create the opening visuals for the 2005 VES Festival in L.A. and began mentoring at Pixar under senior animator Dan Mason. Upon graduation he was offered a job at Perpetual Entertainment in San Francisco, making a World of Warcraft style game (a genre known as Massively Multiplayer Online Role-playing Games, or MMORPG's) called Gods and Heroes. Check out http://www.godsandheroes.com.

Bob Koch

Bob graduated from California Institute of the Arts with a certificate degree in Traditional Character Animation in 1998. His first job in the industry was with Walt Disney, primarily working with Euro Disneyland in France. He has since worked for a number of different gaming and animation studios including: Atari Games on “Bevis and Butthead”; Wild Brain on the TV show “The Twisted Tails of Felix the Cat”; Pixar Animation Studios on such projects as “Toy Story 2” and “A Bug’s Life”. Bob then worked for PDI/Dreamworks in their commercial and effects division as Senior Animator and Designer. While with Pixar Bob heard that Moebius, the French comic book illustrator was making a film in China. As a huge fan of Moebius, Bob applied and went to work for him. Since that work as the Character Animation Supervisor, Bob has worked with Mondo Media, Electonic Arts, and is currently working for LucasArts on the “Indiana Jones Next-Gen game as Animation Lead.

Josh Reis

Josh currently owns JRLAB in Southern California, a Motion Graphics, DVD Authoring and Short Form Online Finishing Studio. He graduated from USC in Fine Arts and Cinema-Television in 2003. Josh attended Colfax high school and Sierra College. Film credits include: Nomad Traveller, India, with Elizabeth Hurley; Johnny Polygon “Bag” music video directed by Nathan Morse, and “Speed Dating”, a short film directed by Crystal Liu. Other work includes Motion Graphics and After Effects animation for Sony Playstation 3, N, and for Red Bulls Major League Soccer Team commercial. Go to http://www.joshuareis.com to see Josh’s portfolio of work.

Darren Orr

Darren studied at Sierra College, Cosumnes River College, and Long Beach State, receiving a degree in Radio, TV and Film, He began his career as a PA and grip on long-format projects and eventually moved into the role of editor where he cut two documentaries for PBS, “Cycle of Life” and “The Infinite Frontier,” receiving an Emmy Award for Editing. He also worked on various projects for E! Entertainment before co-founding Spy Post, a post production company in San Francisco. At Spypost he taught himself the Flame and became a Lead Artist. Spy Post clients include Scion, Adidas, Saturn, 24 Hour Fitness and Toyota, among many others. Click on the following link to link to see the Spypost new demo reel. http://ftp.spypost.com/spyr33l/ReelV2.mov