After graduating high school at Kamehameha Schools in 1992, I left the life of surf, poi and hula girls, and headed east to attend Orange Coast College, in Southern California--go Pirates! I still didn't know how to get into animation, so I took several art and computer animation classes. I graduated from OCC in 1995 and moved up to San Francisco to attend the Academy of Art College's animation department.

Four years later, I was a graduate of the AAC and ready to enter the world as an animator. I was hired on as an animator/character designer at Spunky Productions. This was a great place for my first animation job. We had several cartoons in production, so there were several styles to animate in. In November 2000, I was brought on as animator at Vis-a-vis Inc. There I worked on several E-learning projects for Pfizer and Oracle. I also got to animate on several entertainment shorts including our "Nix Nax" series. One of our shorts, "Cosmic Soda Pop trailer" won first place at the 2001 World Animation Celebration, and gave me the opportunity to meet other industry animators, including animator extraordinaire, Bill Plimpton. The studio also gave me a chance to spread my wings, in storyboarding, story development and character design as well as working with several Industrial Light and Magic artists.