About

Who am I? Where am I from? Where am I going? Well, I'm not a software pilot, I'm not a programmer, and I'm definitely not a staple remover. I'm an artist and an animator. My name is Mike Brown and I'm from Colorado. I grew up in and around Denver. As a kid I spent a lot of time drawing, playing and looking for creepy, crawly things. I also spent a lot of time watching cartoons so as I got older it was no surprise that I wanted to be an animator.

In high school I began experimenting with Stop-motion animation and comic book illustration. Although drawing was fun (and still is) I always found myself asking the same question... what's this picture gonna look like a second from now. Stop-motion provided me with a method to find out.

I didn't do anything very elaborate with stop-mo at first but as I learned new techniques and principles from books and television I began trying things that were more outrageous. Like slicing up puppets with a cheese slicer and stacking the pieces one frame at a time to give the illusion of a character emerging from a television or book.

The smell of victory.

When I finished high school I really wasn't sure where to go next. At the time there weren't really any schools offering classes in animation so I figured I'd go for the fine art thing at University of Northern Colorado and see what I could get out of it. Working on still images again seemed a little boring to me at time so I only lasted a year before I thought it was time to do something different (although I did get a lot of great life drawing practice and color theory out of the experience).

Having fun on holloween.

I decided to just have fun for awhile so I packed up my stuff, moved to Vail Colorado, and became a ski bum. I spent three years loading people onto chair lifts and skiing every day. I had a lot of fun and learned a lot of stuff up there. I highly recommend everyone do something like that for a couple years. You'd be surprised at what you learn.

After messing around for a couple years I decided it was time to figure out what I wanted to do with the rest of my life so I moved back down to Denver. Signed up for animation classes at the Colorado Institute of Art. Bought a computer and started transferring all the stuff I learned doing Stop-Motion into a computer. The rest is history.