Welcome to my homepage. I am currently the Animation Director for Electronic Arts Tiburon in Orlando FL.

Currently working as Animation Director for EA Sports MMA, Click the screen shot below to see our first look video!

Here is some of my past work:

As Animation Director for EA Sports, I was a primary inventor of a suite of Middleware tools called "ANT", this is the animation engine now used (voluntarily on a team by team basis) to make all 360 and PS3 EA Sports titles as well as Battlefield Bad Company 2, the new Medal of Honor, and a few other un-announced EA Games titles. My contributions to ANT have been constant over the past few years, designing new modular tools for the base plugin architecture. I began tools design on FIFA 2004 aiding in interface design for the previous generation engine for FIFA 2004-present. In the summer of 2005 after finishing as Animation Director for Marvel Nemesis, I lead (with engineer Sergey Klibanov) one of the most successful cross-studio group endeavors in EA's history, a team called "Fight Club" where I designed and sold my concept for rapid prototyping tools centering around a revolutionary state-machine design, and EA Chicago, EA Japan, EA Canada, EA UK (renderware team), and EA Blackbox, worked together and developed our next generation state machine inside of ANT (which first shipped as the state machine for NHL 2007, and is used today by every title using ANT), as part of Fight Club I also designing our robust multi-character interaction system that is the cornerstone of NBA Street, Facebreaker, FIFA Street, and EA Sports MMA. On NBA Street Homecourt I was the Animation Director, working closely with designer Todd Batty to design the implementation of all features. In addition to designing the technical execution for making the game, I also animated hands-on (including most of the dunks in the video below). After directing NBA Street Homecourt I was promoted to the Sr. Technical Animation Director position for EA Canada, overseeing animation tools development studio-wide and promoting the tools around the globe.

I then moved to Tiburon from Canada, and on Madden 2009 and 2010 I invented the technology now known as the "Pro-Tak" engine (Procedural Tackling), and over both years that I was Animation Director on both Madden NFL and NCAA Football I supervised the implementation of this animation technology that represented a complete overhaul of Madden's tackling, blocking, and Locomotion systems while also working as the creative Animation Director supervising all other gameplay animation features and animation production. I was then one of the first 4 people that began prototype work on EA Sports MMA and worked as one of the 7 guys that sold the project to the studio and then to EA Sports. I have been working on that project as the Animation Director for over 2 years now (working on MMA and Madden 10 simultaneously as Animation Director of both projects, and then transitioning to MMA full time when Madden 10 was completed).

EA Sports MMA represents the pinnacle of all my years of technical and creative animation direction work for EA, and I believe this game will show that no one in the world can compete with us on the animation front. We are doing things in MMA with interaction that I myself would have believed technically impossible with video game animation just a few years ago. I look forward to the world seeing this game as we release new video and screen shots in the months ahead.

Please click the Images below to view my past Animation Director work.

check out my resume on LinkedIN

Contact Me: simon@anim8or.net