CG Photography Coarse Art Other Stuff
CG Photography Coarse Art Other Stuff

Tito Sciortino

San Francisco, CA
415-386-5738
tito (at) incblots.com
website: incblots.com

Objective

Secure entry-level position in feature film animation or vfx studio as I continue learning everything I can about real and CG lighting, rendering, and compositing. Ultimately, secure Lighting Artist position.

Software Skills

  • Unix
    • The basics: ls, pwd, cd, man, cat, more, mkdir, rmdir, rm, ps, chmod, et cetera
    • The occasional command line ftp and cron/crontab
    • Mainly via terminal in Mac OSX, and via telnet to a FreeBSD webserver
  • Perl
    • Have written scripts to manage batch rendering with Maya/mental ray
    • Also, see Hieroglyphs.net, which relies heavily on perl
  • C
    • See the Write tool at Hieroglyphs.net; there's a perl interface to a C application there
    • Also, about three years of multimedia programming in C at Georgetown University Medical Center
  • Mel
    • Wrote Shader Attribute Cycler, a tool to systematically cycle through a number of a shader's attributes, stepping through specified values and rendering an image at each step; the images include text showing the relevant attributes' values, in a plane orthogonal to the persp camera
    • Have written the occasional tool to automate some basic, highly repetitive task (like scaling, orienting, and applying texture files to dozens of book model geometries)
  • Maya
    • Lighting
    • Rendering layers and passes (mental ray; learning RenderMan Studio)
    • Intermediate nurbs and poly modeling
    • Basic shading, texturing
    • Basic animation
  • Shake
    • Mainly compositing CGI elements with other CGI elements
    • Compositing layers and passes (adding or screening lights and reflections, multiplying shadows and ambient occlusion)
    • Unpremultiplying before color correcting
  • Photoshop
    • Texture painting
    • Photo manipulation
    • Compositing tests
  • Final Cut Pro
    • Including all-important project/file setup
  • Excel
    • Very high-level skills here
  • VBA
    • Goes hand-in-hand with high-level Excel skills

Experience

Since most of my professional experience doesn't really directly apply to the CG world, I'm presenting here some evidence of my ability to solve problems, which I think should be a skill applicable in pretty much any environment.

  • 2005 - June 2008
    Wells Fargo Company, San Francisco, California
    Financial Consultant
    • Problem: Monthly 20-page report to senior management required manual updates of hundreds of numbers.
      Solution: Created mechanism that pulled data directly from detailed package of tabular data, and created AI that automatically generated sophisticated variance explanations as semi-final draft, speeding production while reducing errors.

  • 2002 - 2005
    John F. Brown Company, Cincinnati, Ohio
    Senior Consultant
    • Problem: Present information about an airport and its competitors to quickly convey the airport's economic strategic position.
      Solution: Devised an information-dense diagram that incorporated the relevant information, and created a VBA application in Excel to draw the diagram using data provided in tables.

  • 1999 - 2002
    Hieroglyphs.net, Duluth, Minnesota
    Founder, Programmer, Graphic Designer
    • Conceived, programmed, and maintained the most informative interactive web site related to ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing. Perl, C, MySQL, HTML, CSS, Photoshop, BBEdit.

  • 1998 - 1999
    GE Capital, Capital Markets Services, Stamford, Connecticut
    Associate, Project Finance
    • Problem: Scattered data on deals in pipeline made deal progress difficult to monitor and deals difficult to manage and report on.
      Solution: Led specifications development and personally designed user interfaces for deal tracking database (programming was outsourced). Database cited at division level, became model for other groups.

  • 1996 - 1997
    Central Asian American Enterprise Fund, Tashkent, Uzbekistan
    Investment Officer Intern, promoted to Investment Officer
    • Problem: Investment documentation in English, Russian, and Uzbek, was difficult to keep archived and organized for auditing.
      Solution: Developed database for storing scanned images of all project documents, with numerous search keys for quickly retrieving specific images and (when available) electronic versions, with call numbers to stored original documents.

  • 1991 - 1994
    Georgetown University Medical Center, Washington, DC
    Programmer/Analyst, Biomedical Information Resource Center
    • Problem: Too few Kodachrome pathology slide sets to meet exam-time peak demand.
      Solution: Overcame limitations of physical inventory by programming an application in C to present digitized images of those slides along with text and optional audio notations on all networked computers.

Education

  • 1994 - 1998
    MBA in Finance, Yale University School of Management, New Haven, Connecticut
    MA in International Relations, Yale University Graduate School, New Haven, Connecticut

  • 1987 - 1990
    BA in Anthropology (Computer Science minor), Oberlin College, Oberlin, Ohio