Biography
At the age of nine, Jeff was inspired by a chance meeting with Walt Disney after a day of exploring Disneyland and Jeff's favorite attraction; The House of the Future.
Back in his native Texas, Jeff began planning his dream city, Westin Texas. Complete with residential, retail and light-rail transit, it seemed inevitable that Jeff would become an architect and land planner. But Disney's weekly television show, "The Wonderful World of Color" presented the idea that maybe he could also make films. Jeff borrowed his father's 8mm film camera and began making his own short films using friends and family as actors.
But once out of High School, a decision had to be made, to become an architect or a filmmaker. Maybe he could do both.
Jeff attended the University of Texas where he studied Architecture then a friend told him about a new course offering at Texas Christian University teaching practical filmmaking. Two semesters later, Jeff was hooked.
Jeff moved to Los Angeles to pursue a full time career in filmmaking. To pay for this journey, Jeff provided his design abilities to major retailers and developers in the form of concept illustration for commercial products and architecture. Jeff got his break in film when a friend asked him to illustrate several key scenes in a script he had written. The right producer saw Jeff's work and within a year, he was working full time for producer Dino De Laurentiis on multiple Steven King films while planning the motion picture studio now owned by Screen Gems.
To date, Jeff's career in motion pictures and television art direction has spanned twenty plus years having completed over sixty Hollywood-based productions working for Disney, MGM, Paramount, Lucasfilm, Universal, Turner, Showtime and many others. To date, Jeff has filled the screen with everything from authentic recreations of Wild West towns in the 1870's to the exploration of space.
To further his knowledge of architecture while working in film production full time, Jeff provided his hands on experience to the design of two of the largest motion picture studios on this side of the world; the Screen Gems Studio in North Carolina, now the largest in North America outside of Los Angeles and the four thousand acre Bahamas Film Studio on Grand Bahama Island. His original concept for what is now one of the world's largest filming tanks recently enabled the Bahamas studio to provide a successful shooting environment for Disney's Pirates of the Caribbean sequels two and three.
But in the early part of this new century with film production in North America racing to other parts of the world to save production costs, Jeff felt it was time to take the inevitable next step and pursue the full time career in architecture and master planning he had first dreamed about. Jeff accepted a full time position as architectural designer for a retail-based architecture firm located in Florida. Two years past quickly, and Jeff is now employed by one of the largest and most prestigious architectural and planning firms in the world. Jeff specializes in retail, mixed-use and lifestyle center design, master planning, theme-based design, and production facilities for traditional and new media.
To date, Jeff has provided his strengths as project designer and director to over 6,500 acres of open-air retail, mixed-use and lifestyle centers in the U.S. including master planning which to date include over five million square feet of retail with close design supervision and coordination with most of the largest most sought after anchor tenants in the world.
Film production is still a big part of Jeff's life as he provides his architectural and planning clients with the latest technological presentations coupling live-action and animation technique using the latest software; Final Cut Pro, Motion and After Effects.
