About
There are artists. There are engineers. But it’s rare that you find people who are both.
Throughout my childhood and straight through my college years, you could always find me armed with a pencil and a sketchbook. I come from a family of artists and it runs through my veins.
Back in the mid-80s, my big brother got an Apple IIc, and I discovered I had a second passion – computing. I spent countless hours, writing the most basic of Basic, to individually color every pixel on screen and create some comically primitive digital paintings.
Over the years, I’ve honed both of these skills equally. At my first job out of college, I was authoring CD-ROMs and kiosks that I was both, illustrating and assembling in Macromedia Director. Years later, I worked for Warner Bros as a one-man game shop for their kids’ network website. There, I made dozens of online games and activities, from concept through completion; designing the games, drawing and animating the characters and backgrounds, selecting and sometimes scoring the music and sfx, and most notably, coding all of the interactivity using Flash’s ActionScript.
Even when I’ve had design jobs where programming was not expected of me, I’ve approached them with an artist’s eye, but an engineer’s mind; creating macros and actions to automate repetitive tasks, templatizing and instancing to make my files and my work more efficient.
For the past 10 years, I’ve immersed myself in the exciting world of motion graphics, and what I’ve found is, all of this prior experience has prepared me in unexpected and wonderful ways. It’s the perfect vehicle to utilize my entire skillset – balancing every bit of my left and right brain. Whether I’m building camera and XPresso rigs to streamline 3D animations, or writing expressions to develop systems for After Effects templates, I’m working in a methodical, dynamic way that comes natural to me. And the result is work that’s precise, organized, parametric, and easy to update.
Jiro Ietaka
914-787-9477
jiro@ietaka.com