| Chris McSpurren Toronto, Canada (416)278-0469 chris@cmcspurren.com http://www.cmcspurren.com WORK EXPERIENCE Sept 2007-Present Side Effects Software, Toronto Senior Quality Assurance Specialist - Responsible for ensuring a high level of quality and performance in Houdini. - Working with developers and technical support to conduct unit and production testing and to replicate customer issues. - Managing the beta program - Creating test projects simulating customer pipelines using the latest version of Houdini May 1995-Sept 2006 Alias (now Autodesk), Toronto Team Leader - Maya Quality Assurance - Leadership, management, and scheduling of QA teams in Toronto and Bangalore. - Created test plans, worked closely with programming team leads to ensure good coverage. - Also worked closely with our desktop and graphic card partners to manage qualification efforts. - Expert working knowledge of Academy award winning modelling and animation software, Maya - Worked on Maya and Studiopaint for eleven years, suggesting workflow and feature enhancements, finding bugs, and helping the development team to track and prioritize their bug fixing. - Prior to becoming a TL, was QA specialist for Maya Fur (Maya 2.0), Paint Effects (Maya 2.5), and Games (Maya 3.0) - Worked on In-house projects, including: "A Trip to Rene's House" - animated short w/ Chris Landreth, "Beamrunner" - video game (hover bike racing), and texturing characters for games like Quake and Half-life. - Communicating with and testing content from customers in the film and game industry. 1993-1995 Battlefield Graphics Inc., Burlington Graphic Artist - Pre-press dept. - Photo retouching using Photoshop - Used Quark Express, Adobe Illustrator, and Photoshop on both Mac and Windows, preparing files for magazine and newspaper ads, brochures, mailers, posters, business cards, etc. 1991-1992 Crosfield Canada Inc, Mississauga Engineering Dispatcher - Managed and assigned schedules of over fifteen engineers on assignment across Canada - Maintained tracking reports, service records, software/hardware information for our clients EDUCATION Bachelor of Arts - English, York University Certificates from Alias Maya Character Animation Dec 1998 Level 2 Animation July 1998 Level 2 Design Feb 1998 TECHNICAL SKILLS Expert working knowledge with Alias products including Maya, StudioPaint, Composer, Studio/PA Also experienced with: Photoshop, Illustrator, Quark Express, Pagemaker, Corel Draw, Word, Excel Expert cross-platform experience with Unix, Windows, Linux, and Mac operating systems GAME DESIGN EXPERIENCE Experienced with the Aurora Toolset and scripting for "NeverwinterNights". I designed, built, scripted and was Head DM for the Selgaunt server (online 24/7) for ALFA (A Land Far Away) - a persistantworld for Neverwinter Nights. I've passed it onto my DM team and no longer work on that project - I'm currently playing WoW. :) OTHER INTERESTS Member of the International Game Developers Association (Toronto Chapter), Hockey, Wallyball (volleyball in a raquetball court), RPG's, MUD's, World of Warcraft.Ran a web page design business on my spare time from 97-99 called Arachnitech. References and demo reel available upon request. |