Research projects and education are important to judge someone's technical skill, but what is often left out is their personality. Engaging in creative works allows me to let go of stress, lean into a different side of me, and bring out interesting works!

In today's multi-faceted, multi-disciplinary world, you cannot get enough knowledge by just learning in your respective field. It is therefore necessary to expand your horizons and dabble in other fields to understand the thought processes in the development of creative works in the hopes of including the knowledge in your technical work!

I knew I wanted to make a Helldivers II cinematic when the game came out - it was just a matter of when.

Helldivers II allows such amazing opportunities for cinematic shots despite the chaos and confusion of the fight raging on your screen. There are moments where the game is slower - like when you are walking through a blizzard - and others when the game ramps up dramatically - like when you are assaulting a heavily fortified enemy position.

In this video, I wanted to show the paths of a few "Helldivers," each going into action one after the other, always for the glory of super Earth. I wanted the mood to be tense at the beginning, where the viewer was unaware of what would unfold. I wanted the viewer to slowly understand and look up to the valor of these "Helldivers."

By the end, I wanted it to be like a propaganda reel from Super Earth to recruit more soldiers after seeing the power and overwhelming success of recent Helldivers campaigns.

All in all, I am quite proud of this work and think the beautiful music from Ivan Torrent complements it perfectly.

Building structures and creating vast landscapes in Minecraft might seem like a fool's errand but it's one of the most important things I've likely done in my life. Not only have the projects I've begun in Minecraft been carried out over several years, but they have taught me an invaluable number of life lessons:

1- Sometimes the best thing to do to keep moving forward is set yourself significantly backwards. There were a great many times I found myself stuck on a design, unable to quite get the colors I was using the match in the way I envisioned, or the structure of the whole building put too much weight on one side, or a landscape just didn't flow as I wanted it to. The best thing to do in those scenarios is to simply learn what you can from what you've done, and start with clean template. You aren't starting fresh - you have learned techniques, ideas, patterns that you can apply in new manners to build something anew.

2- Earth is an amazing planet home to hundreds of biomes, thousands of landscape types, and millions of wildlife species. Learning about different landscapes, the geology of the world and the way Earth's plates move is not only important common knowledge to know, it's knowledge that can improve your work in many fields, elevating your work to a higher level.

3- Designing something takes time - sometimes much more time than you care to admit. Over the 800+ hours of work funneled into this world, things are only starting to come together as one cohesive world. At no point in those 800 did I ever give up, ask myself why I was working on this, or ever think that this would not be worth it. The result has far surpassed any expectation I had ever set for myself and I learned a tremendous number of building techniques, design processes, facts about the world, and refined my patience, dedication, and critical analysis skills.

Minecraft certainly isn't a game for everyone, but it is a game everyone should know and understand. So many people have dedicated hours - many much more than I have - to learning so much in this game, most of which is directly translatable to the real world.

Drawing likely isn't what someone thinks of when they think of a relatively technically-oriented person. Yet, drawing is a big part of me - though not something I'm particularly proficient in.

Through my hard work and despite my lacking artistic skills, art is a big part of who I am and gives me a particular vision of the world. One of the first things I learned at the start of my artistic journey is the idea of "drawing blocks." Essentially, to draw something or someone that you can see, you separate it into big blocks, which you further separate into increasingly smaller subdivisions until you achieve the level of detail you want.

This concept is incredibly important to doing "studies," or drawings specifically focused on learning how to draw one thing better: that 'thing' could be anything from chimneys, to legs, or even mountain ranges.

That being said, separating a "big thing" into "small things" is essentially all that is being done in this process and is applicable to nearly everything in life. From rationing time, to getting work done on a project, or understanding a bit of code on GitHub, this skill is one of the most important skills any person can have.

Drawing - and indeed other forms of artistic impression - have taught me the incredibly power of subdivisions, and I get to walk away with interesting art pieces!