HAmilton “Tony” S. Johnson Jr.
Lecturer of Art (Animation)
Biography
Hamilton S. Johnson Jr. (Tony) has been creating and teaching computer graphics for the past 20 years. He has owned three companies during that time Degraphics, Hamiltoonz and Searight Studios, Inc. These have focused on various enterprises including Architectural rendering and pre-vis, Animation and Post-production (including some national television spots) and most recently, exploring new uses for the technology while on a five year contract with the Naval research Laboratory in Washington, DC.
He has created permanent animated display pieces for the Constitution Center Museum in Philadelphia and his list of clients has included ABC-TV, Fox Television, Prudential Television, LRP Digital Studios, Avekta Productions, The Animation Café, The Napoleon Group, Tree House Animation/The Splinter Group, the Orthodox Union, Vista-Con Technologies, AVID, NOVA/WGBH, NASA and the Naval Research Laboratory.
In 1996 Tony joined the staff of Future Media Concepts as a Certified Trainer for Sofimage|3D. He has continued to train for them both as staff member and as a freelance instructor on products that include XSI, Avid|DS, and Adobe Photoshop and After Effects. Through FMC’s many offices Tony has provided training for all branches of the military and the CIA, as well as onsite training at FOX news, ABC Television, HBO, NASA, The Naval Research Lab and the Defense Information School at Fort Meade.
Since 2000, Tony has been on the Faculty of the Fashion Institute of Technology where he currently teaches seven different classes ranging from computer modeling and animation to post-production workflow using Avid and Adobe products. He has also taught similar classes as visiting faculty at Rutgers University, the School of Visual Arts (MFACA) and Brooklyn College (CUNY).
In 2005 he co-authored the book, Softimage|XSI for a future animation studio boss, with George Avgerakis. He currently maintains industry certifications in Autodesk Softimage and Adobe After Effects and he sits on advisory boards at Autodesk and Nvidia.
On a final note: Tony’s multi-media career actually began in the theater in 1981 when he spent three years as the resident sound designer at the Alley Theatre in Houston, TX. During that time he designed the sound for more than 40 shows and wrote the music for three of them. This was followed by a stint at Dartmouth College as Technical Director of the Hopkins Center and Assistant Professor of Drama.
He attended the Yale School of Drama | Yale Repertory theatre, where he studied Lighting and Technical Direction. It was here that he first discovered that you could create 3-dimensional images on a computer, and so despite a final theater job as Technical Director of the Boston Shakespeare Company, the writing was on the wall and in 1992 he gave up the live stage and opened his first computer graphics design company.