* Click on images for pop-ups Ed
Harriss was born in 1970. He has been in Raleigh, North Carolina
for several years, but until now, never stayed in one place. His
parents are both music professors, their studies took him all
over the US and around the world. While hanging out at the various
educational intuitions where his parents worked, he started toying
with computer graphics on Trs-80, IBM and Apple machines, but
didn’t take it seriously till about 10 years ago. This is
when he discovered a machine called an Amiga and a program called
Silver. (Which eventually turned into Imagine.) From then on it
was painfully obvious what his career was going to be. His first
“career job” was working for the Durham Bulls. (Yes,
the same team from the movie, Bull Durham.) They had just built
a new baseball stadium that had a “jumbotron” style
screen behind center field. Ed was hired to create the graphics
and run the equipment during the games.
With
the Durham Bulls being a seasonal job, Ed was always on the lookout
for another job to help supplement his income. That’s when
he got a job teaching SoftImage3D at a local graphics school.
After teaching for several years, Ed got a job at a gaming company
called Southpeak Interactive where he worked on countless games.
The majority if them were FMV games, with a handful of realtime
3d as well. After a few years at Southpeak he moved on to making
effects for television commercials at Alternate Route Studios.
It was there that he did ads for companies such as Imax, SAS,
Carolina Lottery, Accucheck, etc. Just recently Alternate Route
Studios was absorbed into SAS Studio Productions. For Ed, not
much has changed. Even though the name is different, his job is
still pretty much the same.
When
Ed is not at work he is still working. Most recently he wrote
a book entitled “How to get a Job in Computer Animation.”
This book goes over everything you could possibly want to know
about getting a job in CG: Covering topics such as: how to create
a good demo reel, salary, choosing a school, writing a resume,
freelancing, avoiding lay-offs, interviewing, finding hidden jobs,
and much more. He also teaches an online SoftimageXSI course through
mesmer.com and produces SoftimageXSI training videos. In his spare
time he runs the local SIGGRAPH chapter, writes articles for graphics
magazines and speaks at colleges and universities.
Ed's
thoughts on production: As you can see from the write-up above, I’m always
busy. To me the ultimate production goal is efficiency. There
is nothing worse than wasting a lot of time because someone else
was sloppy. I don’t care what your production methods are
as long as they are efficient and don’t disrupt the production
pipeline. Everybody has their own style. When working with others
I like for them to feel that they have as much freedom as they
deserve. I.E. a person who produces clean output fast can pretty
much work however they want. I don’t care if they use an
abacus to do their work. However, when I have to work with a slow,
unorganized individual, they probably won’t get very much
freedom at all. More than likely the rest of the team will have
to breathe down this person’s neck just to make sure that
the work is done properly.
