Meet Steve Roberts


	COW Leaders : Steve Roberts

Creative COW Forum Host

Steve Roberts
Motion Graphics Toronto
Toronto, Ontario Canada

Steve has always been a jack-of-all-trades, with the inherent limitations of the title. His interests range from photography to directing theatre to new media, but he actually makes a buck doing motion graphics and video editing for corporate clients. He avoids new media because he hates having to "publish" something to test it. Ick.

Back in '96, after struggling to create motion graphics in Premiere 3.something, he downloaded the demo of After Effects 3.1, and after a week, was hooked. The tipping point was when he realized he could animate the arm of a basketball player by changing its anchor point to the shoulder, something that could not be done in Premiere. You had to rotate the arm and animate its position at the same time, since it was actually rotating at the elbow in the center of the picture. In a tiny window. You had to be there.

He's rather comfortable in After Effects now, but also uses Final Cut Pro and Lightwave, and is getting up to speed on Motion and Cinema 4D. He expects to use C4D for 3D motion graphics because of its flexible workflow. But he won't delete Lightwave just yet. He works on Mac and Windows, and has no patience with platform wars.

In his spare time he plays trumpet and studies Tai Chi and Liu He Ba Fa (Lok Hup Ba Fa in Cantonese). He also enjoys teaching and finds the students stimulating in every course he teaches. He lives in Toronto with his wife and too-small-for-an-animator action figure collection. There's also a large plastic kit of the Starship Enterprise sitting on the workbench awaiting his attention, but there's little hope of seeing that baby on the shelf anytime soon. He is a great fan of old Warner Brothers cartoons, and any other cartoons that have heart, and show excellent animation craft. He's old enough to remember prime time Star Trek, the Jackie Gleason show, and staying up to watch Topo Gigio.

When he gets a minute, he'll write a tutorial on something, but Aharon will probably do it first. :)

You can find Steve Roberts hosting in Creative COW's Adobe After Effects forum.