It all started in 2001 at Singapore Polytechnic.
I enrolled in a 3-year Diploma for Multimedia Technology.
We were still burning CD-ROMs. Iomega Zip Drives were the future.

I learned:
Discreet 3ds Max, Discreet Combustion, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator, Macromedia Dreamweaver, Macromedia Flash, Macromedia Director, Steinberg Cubase, Audacity, ActionScript, JavaScript, Java, HTML, Lingo, Microsoft Project, MySQL.

No YouTube. No tutorials you could search for. Just manuals, trial and error, and figuring things out until the lab assistant kicked you out.

I was building websites, animating in Flash, modeling in 3ds Max, compositing in Combustion. Jack of all trades because that's what multimedia meant back then.

Then I went to the Army and until 2010 continued to learn more 3D:
Alias Wavefront Maya, Maxon Cinema 4D, Maxon BodyPaint 3D, Pixologic ZBrush, Softimage XSI, Side Effects Houdini, Blender, DAZ 3D, Adobe Premiere Pro, Adobe After Effects, Autodesk AutoCAD, Luxology Modo, Mental Ray, Headus UVLayout, XML, CSS, Ruby, V-Ray.

I was modeling sofa, characters and environments, rigging, lighting, shading, animating and rendering. And Photoshopped my way out of every technical glitch!

Eventually, I moved to Canada, taught General VFX Production and launched the first VFX Compositing program in North America in 2014.

And more software to learn and master
The Foundry Nuke, 2d3 Boujou, Autodesk Mudbox, The Foundry Mari, Allegorithmic Substance Designer, Allegorithmic Substance Painter, The Foundry Katana, Solid Angle Arnold, Pixar RenderMan, 3Delight, PTGui, Isotropix Clarisse, MOI3D, The Pixel Farm PFTrack, 3DEqualizer, Imagineer Systems Mocha, Boris FX Silhouette, SynthEyes, DaVinci Resolve, Unreal Engine, Python, Bash, RealityCapture.

And in the middle of all this?
I trained 240+ students to deliver production-quality shots.
I've kept 343TB of data.
Project files. Reference material. Tutorials. Student work. Everything in between.

The Cost
24 years.
More than half my life spent reading technical documents, reference guides, watching thousands of tutorials, figuring out why something broke at 2 AM.
That's what it took to teach all those students.

I'm sure I'm forgetting some.
Most of you won't ever need to learn all this anymore.
AI is changing and consolidating many tedious workflows.
But here's what won't change: understanding WHY something works.
Why This Matters for Teaching.

This is why I can teach compositing differently.
I don't just know Nuke.
I know what the lighting TD was thinking when they rendered that pass.
I know why the rigger built that control.
I know what the modeler was trying to achieve with that topology.
I know what happens upstream and downstream.
When I teach integration, I'm teaching from years of building, breaking, filming and fixing every part of the pipeline.

This is how compositing is taught at Alpha Chromatica.