I had the pleasure of working with Tatsuma Nakano for five years at my studio iBelieveInSwordfish. Tatsuma was recommended to me by the head of the motion design department at The Academy of Art University as a prospective intern. Tatsuma was following his own unique path at The Academy, exploring a wide range of cutting edge technologies for motion design including game engines and frameworks such as Processing. I brought him on board as an intern and started having him explore different ideas I had brewing in my head. We were just beginning to explore XR development with an Oculus development kit and HTC Vive, and with Tatsuma’s Unity experience we began creating prototypes. This included an 8k streaming 360-video tour of the San Francisco waterfront where users could hyper-port between 20 different destinations using eye gaze. We then explored creating 360 equirectangular matte paintings in Photoshop which Tatsuma spherically re-projected onto 3D geometry in Unity to create parallax with 6 degrees of freedom (6-DOF) in Vive. Tatsuma also ported this test to WebVR for playback in a browser, and Apple ARKit for an augmented reality version on iPhone. We shared the results withclients from companies like Facebook, Google, and Dolby, and everyone agreed that the results were stunning. After graduation I hired Tatsuma on staff as a full-time Creative Technologist. Within months our workload shifted to rely more and more on Unity and Unreal Engine, with Tatsuma leading those parts of the projects. Additionally, his core motion design skills continued to improve, both as an animator, designer, and technologist. Tatsuma put all of this knowledge-base together to dig into Side Effects Houdini software, which from my experience is one of the most technologically challenging tools to master. Within months Tatsuma was outputting very tricky shots involving fluid dynamics and difficult physics simulations. It was amazing to watch him grow from a kid in school to a seasoned professional production artist. When Tatsuma decided to leave Swordfish and head back to Japan, it was one of the biggest losses I have had at the studio – not only was I losing an amazing creative on our team, but more importantly I was losing a friend. I truly cherished the time I spent with Tatsuma as a mentor. He never ceased to amaze me, and I know he will continue to amaze me with whatever he does in the future.