Donnie Worley recalls his mother’s words of wisdom, “you’ll be working for the rest of your life – make sure you choose something you like doing. Make your job your hobby.” Worley’s job and hobby is making three-dimensional and two-dimensional digital images look as real as possible and providing the special touches that make a good video game great.

“I have always loved art,” says Worley .” I asked my Patrick Henry High School art teacher Mrs. Felty about jobs in art and she made me do a report on it,” The report opened his eyes to the world of graphic design. Worley graduated with a bachelor of fine arts degree from RU in 1983 and has been working in the field since.

In 1999, Worley and five others started their own graphic arts post-production house The Ballistic Pixel Lab, Inc. in Altamonte Springs, Fla. They create 3D and 2D graphics for film, broadcast television and video games as well as edit and composite video for commercials and corporate videos. The breadth and scope of the company’s products are apparent on their website www.ballisticpixel.com. The website introduces the company spokesperson, Alexis, who looks quite human to the unsuspecting eye. However, she is a unique digital creation of Worley and his co-workers.

Worley’s company created characters like Alexis for the video game “James Bond 007” racing. Worley was given a script for short movies within the game and pictures of models on which to base the characters. They used software such as 3D Studio Max by Discreet Logic and Maya by Alias/Wavefront to make the characters and their settings look as real as possible. They had to make the girls’ mouth and body movements fit the audio for the movies. Worley says you never know when the creative muse will hit you, “my best ideas come to me in the shower.”

Before he began his own company, he worked for WDBJ-TV in Roanoke, WINK-TV in Fort Myers, Fla., then moved on to Tiburon Entertainment in Orlando. There he helped develop the Madden NFL video game from 1995 to when he started his own business in 1999. “When we worked on Madden, we put in 105 hour weeks. In the video game and computer graphic industry, it’s commonplace for designers to average a 60 hour work week,” says Worley. But he says it’s worth it. “I visited a video game store and asked how the Madden game was selling. The clerk asked me why and I told him I worked on it. He was very excited and pulled guys out of the back of the store to meet me,” says Worley. “It is great to know that people enjoy my work and have fun with it.” He says meeting and talking with someone who is excited about his work makes all the long hours worthwhile.

During Worley’s time at RU, he also spent many hours in the design lab with classmates and now retired professor Noel Lawson. “All of my classmates almost lived in the art department. We stayed until 5 a.m. some nights,” says Worley. He says he complained about it back then, but now he looks back on the good times they had. Worley viewed Lawson as a father away from home and appreciated all those basic design concepts Lawson taught him, “After you finish school, a lot of those concepts they tried to drive into your brain make sense. Now I get it!”

Worley has his design pen pointed to the future. Recently engaged to be married, he is looking forward to starting a family. He would like to get his company more involved in film work. His goal is to grow his company from the five people there now to around 50 or 60 employees. “That way I won’t have to work 90 hours a week,” he says with a chuckle.