PORT OF SEATTLE | 75th Anniversary of SEA International Airport
In 2024, the Port of Seattle celebrated the 75th Anniversary of SEA International Airport. As part of the celebrations, I created an 8-episode docu-series exploring some of the fascinating stories of the airport’s history. We explored the development of the opening of the airport in 1949, the hiring of the first-ever Airport Wildlife Biologist, the development of the Third Runway, and the discovery of a fossilized sloth at the airport.
This project was a partnership between Port of Seattle and History Link.
NORTHWEST FILM FORUM | Murdock Charitable Trust - Leaders of Color Cohort 2025
In 2024, I was selected to participate in the Murdock Charitable Trust’s Leaders of Color Cohort. This space that we have cultivated is one that has been supportive, healing, and deeply educational. We have discussed the impactful ways that we lead community, the ways that we must care and heal ourselves, and how to move our organizations forward in the most positive direction possible.
To conclude our most recent session, our co-facilitator, Derek McNeil, shared a fable that he wrote with help from an AI assistant.
The Cedar Circle
In a rain-washed forest of the Pacific Northwest, a stand of old cedars formed a natural circle. The forest was bustling—rivers rising, winds shifting, seasons changing faster than anyone remembered. Leaders from across the forest met there once each moon to share counsel.
There was Salmon, who knew how to swim upstream but felt alone in the current; Hummingbird, tireless and bright yet anxious that her wings would fail; Bear, strong and steady but wary of asking for help; and Loon, whose beautiful song often went unheard across noisy waters. Each carried a different burden, and each had a different gift.
Guiding them were two wise wayfinders: Owl, who saw patterns beneath the bark and could name what others only felt, and Raven, who told hard truths with humor and invited everyone to sit closer to the fire. Owl and Raven did not give the Circle a map; they gave them practices.
First, the Practice of Seeing: they took turns speaking from the stump, while the others simply listened—no fixes, no interruptions—until the speaker felt fully seen.
Second, the Practice of Bearing: each leader named one weight they would not carry alone this moon. The Circle chose who would shoulder it with them— sometimes with time, sometimes with skill, sometimes with prayer.
Third, the Practice of Returning: they set small, courageous promises and returned the next moon to tell the truth about how it went—celebrating progress, grieving misses, and adjusting the path together.
As the moons turned, something subtle changed. Salmon still swam upstream, but now Bear walked the riverbank beside him to break the ice. Hummingbird still moved quickly, but she learned to rest on Cedar’s low branch while Loon kept time with a steady song. And Loon, once drowned out, found her voice amplified when Hummingbird repeated her notes and Bear held silence like a shelter.
The forest noticed. Streams cleared where confusion had pooled. Saplings survived windy nights because the Cedar Circle blocked the worst of the gusts. Even storms felt different—not smaller, but shared.
One day a young Fox asked Raven, “What magic did you teach them?”
Raven chuckled. “No magic. Just this—care is a structure, not a sentiment. Build it, return to it, repair it, and it will hold you.”
Owl added, “And remember—leadership is a long river. No creature crosses it alone.”
From then on, whenever a new leader felt the weight of the woods, the Circle widened. The cedars did not move, but their roots intertwined, and the forest— once fragmented—began to hum with a familiar sound: the quiet, resilient music of neighbors carrying neighbors.
NORTHWEST FILM FORUM | Building Community Through Film
Northwest Film Forum continues to amplify emerging voices throughout the state of Washington through the power of cinema programming, mentorship and apprenticeship, and artist support services.
Northwest Film Forum - Sharing Diverse Stories Through Film (KIRO 7 News)
NORTHWEST FILM FORUM | Filmmaking Fundamentals (Spring 2022)
Waiting For Cleo
NORTHWEST FILM FORUM | Filmmaking Fundamentals (Winter 2022)
Back in January, 2022, we endeavored to restart our Filmmaking Fundamentals program at Northwest Film Forum. It was a huge undertaking at the time because we had only done one other class since the COVID-19 Pandemic, and we were still very unsure of how people would respond. We also decided to completely revamp the program and separate the Production and Post-Production tracks into two individual programs. What this allowed for was a more robust look at all the technical departments and also gave us more time to explore Post-Production with individuals who were interested. Here is a sample of the curriculum that we developed for this first year:
Week 01 - Introductions and Screenwriting
Week 02 - Intro to Cameras
Week 03 - Intro to Sound
Week 04 - Intro to Lighting
Week 05 - Pre-Production
Week 06 - Casting
Week 07 - Advanced Camera Techniques
Week 08 - Production Day
Week 09 - Review and Reflect
CORNISH COLLEGE OF THE ARTS | Summer@Cornish
Fountain
Two pen pals correspond on the bathroom walls.
A Taste of Memory
Joan can’t remember the death of her friend, if it really happened?
Loretta
Sammie searches for her sister to give her one last important message.
ARCHITECTURAL HERITAGE CENTER | When The Mikado Was Home
The Mikado Hotel and Bathhouse opened in the heart of Portland’s historic Japantown in 1908 and was a center of retail and activity until it closed in 1942 due to Executive Order 9066, which forcibly removed 110,000 Nikkei from the West Coast and incarcerated them in various confinement sites. When the Mikado was Home shares recollections of this special place through an intergenerational conversation between Joni Kimoto, whose family owned the Mikado, and her granddaughter, writer Lauren Yoshiko Terry.
AE EXPRESSIONS | Week 02 - Planets and Dashboards
AE EXPRESSIONS | Week 01 - Dance Party on the Moon
I’m taking another course from School of Motion this quarter. I have always wanted to learn more about expressions in After Effects and now I will be diving into them for the next 12 weeks. This is my first assignment, we were tasked with animating this whole scene without using keyframes. All of the motion that you see is driven by expressions. We learned about the wiggle and linear functions this week and how to implement them into the scene. It was so much fun that I didn’t stop at the robots and animated the stars, the sun, and the smoke in the crater.
Used the wiggle function to add random movement to the head, arms, and claws.
Used an if/else statement to control the random placement of the selector button
JAPANESE CULTURAL COMMUNITY CENTER OF WASHINGTON | TOMODACHI GALA 2021
DIRECTOR | EDITOR
PORT OF SEATTLE | INTERNATIONAL ARRIVALS FACILITY
I started filming this project back in 2019. At that point the building was merely a shell and the bridge was being constructed at an off-site facility. I just starting filming things that I knew would be useful someday down the road when we wanted to do a sizzle reel about this project. Then one day, I went to go meet with the artist who was doing an art installation in the building and was blown away by the work that they were creating. It was this intense blend of organic shapes, textile patterns, and the culture and tradition of her cultural mythology. I knew that that would become the focal point of the storytelling. She symbolized everything that this building was and that it intended to be. Over the weeks and months to follow we stayed in touch, and I continued to film the progress of the building and her art practice. In 2022, we finally were able to bring all the elements together into one singular piece.
Welcome Home, is a short-documentary that follows the construction of the International Arrivals Facility at SEA Airport, but more importantly it is about the limitless potential of international travel and the ways that it strengthens us as a community to be connected to the world.
PRODUCER | DIRECTOR | EDITOR
SEATTLE REP | WINTER'S TALE
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY | EDITOR
SEATTLE REP | INDECENT SIZZLE REEL
SHOOTER | EDITOR
CINEMA 4D | Week 06 - Lights, Camera, Action
We are coming to the end of the Cinema 4D Bootcamp and things are starting to come together. I am starting to turn the corner in terms of confidence with the program and I starting to be able troubleshoot my own problems and also put concepts together. In this assignment we were focused animating the camera utilizing different camera types and different camera angles, but in addition to that I am continuing to use mograph effectors and fields to animate on all of the elements of this scene.
Chasing the Sun
ASSISTANT EDITOR
CINEMA 4D | Set Driver, Set Driven Experiment
One thing that I am learning to comfortable with are the imperfections of experiments. I was able to accomplish some things that were important to this specific topic, while there are other issues that I still I need to learn how to correct for. I learned the basic foundations of how to utilize XPresso in Cinema 4D to create basic expressions that can control objects and attributes. I also used an HDRI for the first time, which had limited success. I need to fine-tune this experiment to reduce all of the grain and noise in the video, but I am excited for the small accomplishments that I was able to work through with this topic.
CINEMA 4D | Week 05 - Mograph Madness
In the last week, we focused on the Mograph tools inside of Cinema 4D which included the cloner and effectors to create repeated geometry with variation and random effectors. We also learned how to use fields and generators to create easier techniques for animations. I utilized fields to create an organic assembly animation of the city. It was an interesting technique that will have wide-ranging applications for future explorations.
SEATTLE CHILDREN'S THEATER | SO MANY HEROES
“To: America’s Frontline Workers
Love: America’s Theatre Kids #SoManyHeroesTYA
Director: Kathryn Van Meter
Songwriter: Rich Gray
Music Direction: Tim Symons
Audio Engineer: Rob Witmer
Videographer: Derek Edamura
Idea Man: Jeff Revels
Band: Dave Pascal, Josh Carter,Jesse Whitford”
So Many Heroes, a national tribute to our frontline workers, is performed by 75 students representing 16 theatres across the country. Join us in saluting those who have made significant sacrifices during this unprecedented time. #SoManyHeroesTYA
CINEMA 4D | Week 04 - Animation & Motion
This was a very challenging week in my Cinema 4D journey. This week we dived into the basics animation in Cinema 4D and we started where everyone starts with keyframing objects in 3D space. We used this mouse trap setup as the assignment to animate. We had to animate the ball coming down the tubes, hitting the shoe swing, which would hit the hammer, which would land on the see-saw, our QBert character would go flying in the air, bouncing on the spring, landing on the button, which would trigger the lights and finally release the cage.
I approached this assignment like I would approach any complex problem and broke it down into smaller pieces and worked through each element of the assignment. First I keyframed the ball rolling through tubes, which was a simple series of keyframes on the positional elements of the object. Then we looked the keyframing the rotation of the shoe swing and hammer, aligning those timings to when the ball interacts with the shoe. In order to make QBert launch into the air, we duplicated the character and grouped it with the see-saw and made it visible til the apex of the see-saw motion. At this point, we cut to our “Flying QBert” where we keyframed all of the positional and rotational keyframes for him to do his jumps and flips in the air. We ended with simple keyframes on the spring, button, lights, and cage to finish the scene.
The final assignment for the week involved a new method of animating which involved creating Splines as motion paths and rail paths. We used the “Attach to Spline” tag to pin an object to Spline that we created for the path of our airplane. We also looked animation tags and deformers that can automate and generate specific types of motion. In this project we used the vibrate tag to create the floating islands, the wind deformer to make the flags wave in the air, a displacer deformer on the clouds, and an emitter to create the smoke puffs.
One of the things that I experimented with was attaching cameras to the motion path to create a tracking shot of the plane. In this assignment, one of the camera angles we used was attached to the motion path ahead of the plane and would lead the plane through the course achieving a kind of Top Gun “dog fight” shot. We also added a target tag to one of the cameras so that it could follow the plane through the course, which allowed us to get some interesting camera motion without any keyframes.
One of the things that I found incredibly interesting was thinking about how much dynamic motion I can create without creating any keyframes and just allowing certain tags and deformers do the majority of the work and then I can simply keyframe the big pieces for cleaner, smoother motion.
