Alumni Notes

As of 10-15-05

Eric Bermender (1997), Senior Systems Administrator for ILM, headed ILM’s facility and equipment move to the Presidio in San Francisco.
Zach Cox (2003) is moving up the corporate ladder at Santa Cruz Games which recently doubled in size. Zack is creating concept designs for characters and is involved in level design and conceptual planning.
Raymond Crook (2001) has finished up work on the critically acclaimed, Tim Schafer title, “Psychonauts.” He worked on the project for the past four years doing character animation, modeling and rigging. He is currently working on a new, yet to be announced, game title at Double Fine Productions in SF.
Clare Frank (2002) became Fire Chief for the City of Milpitas in August 2005. She is the first woman to serve in this capacity for the city. Chief Frank was valedictorian of her graduating class at the National Fire Academy’s Bachelors Degree Program at Cogswell Polytechnical College.
Vitaly M. Golomb (2004) recently sold his printing business in Sunnyvale and opened a new office in San Francisco expanding to corporate branding and technology infrastructure. Visit his company’s website at: www.sputniksf.com.
Jeff Herndon (2003) has worked for an independent filmmaker on storyboarding and creature/environment design. Currently he is in Colorado learning the art of Bronze casting for public sculpture. In his free time he works on his own entertainment design projects.
I-Wei Huang (1997) with solid work experience at some major companies, he is now Lead Animator at Toys for Bob and helped hire alumni Dave Huddleston (2004) and Paul Yan (2005).
Mike Kime (2002), Sean Weilage (2002) and Matthew Wegner (2001) founded Flashbang Studios, www.flashbangstudios.com in 2003. “Beesly's Buzzwords” received critical acclaim and was nominated as a finalist for the Independent Games Festival 2004. We took the honor of the winning the first-annual Project Goldmaster award at the 2004 IGF, which resulted in a development contract for Cartoon Network. We created a game for the late-night cartoon show Sealab 2021: Sweet Mayhem, in just four months.
Hats off to Daniel Kirksey (1998), Steven Sorenson (1998), Amy Jones (1999) and Carrie Van Etten (1998) for their work on the new penguin movie short released by Dreamworks.
Stephanie Lostimolo (2002) joined Ninth Ray Studios in Los Angeles as a Production Artist. Ninth Ray is an independent art department for hire – the first of its kind – owned and operated by concept art legend Iain McCaig.
Thanks to Barrett Meeker (2003) for giving a presentation and critique to Cogswell on 3D modeling. He is doing some fantastic modeling, painting and lighting for Blur Studios
Marc Miller (1999) is now with Sony Image Works and worked on lighting for Polar Express
Ashley Monif (2002) is a manager at EA on the James Bond 007 “From Russia With Love.”
Kevin Richardson (2003) is working at www.iwin.com producing games. His most recent game may be up for a Billboard award for casual game of the year. He also teaches cv495 here at Cogswell. We wish him luck!
Scott Russell (2002) was on the Chicago EA team but accepted a transfer back to the Bay area where he and several other Cogswell alumni, Kyle Brown (2004) & Greg Reisdorff (2003), are working on “The Godfather.” Welcome back!!
Scott Schlegel (2000) Currently working at Linkedin (www.linkedin.com) as a font-end developer and loving it. LinkedIn is a social networking start-up, focusing on connecting business users and managing professional identity.
Mason Sheffield (2003) is a Character TD on the Godfather team at EA which is finishing up its last few weeks of production. He expects to be rolling onto the next Lord of the Rings game “The White Council,” as a Character TD.
Allen Stetson ((2002) with Dreamworks, is now at the Glendale Office as Technical Director
Chad Stubblefield (2004) joined Disney Studios and is currently doing the character modeling and facial shapes for some of the main characters for the upcoming movie, “American Dog” and just finished working on “A Day with the Robinsons.”
Steve Swink (2002) is doing game design, art and programming for Flashbang Studios. He also teaches Game and Level Design at the Art Institute of Phoenix.
Angie Taylor-Traeger (1998) just finished TD work for ILM’s soon to be released “Chicken Little.” She is currently working for Lucas Animation at the George Lucas’ Ranch.
Doug Traeger (1998), sound engineer at Toy-knowlogy, is working on software and hardware to be used for calling wild game.
Nathan Webb (1999) is a senior animator at Sony Computer Entertainment in San Diego working on their basketball titles for the PS2 and PSP platforms. He is joined on the Sony animation team by Keith Ho (1999).
Rosie Wrede (2003) works at EA in the Central Tech Group testing game tools.