My full name is Nico Antonio Corrao. I was born and raised in Lewiston, Maine. While the name might suggest otherwise, I do not speak with any crazy accent other than my terrible downeast-AH drawl from time to time. My parents just wanted to get a little creative with the name I guess. It could’ve been worse, I was almost a ‘Mario” (no offense to those of you who are) which given my choice of profession could’ve proven rather horrific.

This is my portfolio website. It’s a place for me to organize and display my animation and other random things. I also use it to keep up to date with the digital arts community and get feedback on my own work.

Glad you asked: I would say this small strip pretty much sums up most of my childhood.

I have never really been interested in web development. I messed around with Netscape Composer, back when Netscape was still cool, so I always had a fundamental understanding of how things worked, but it just never struck me as something I wanted to “do.” I had been fortunate enough to have my previous site(s) developed by others smarter than I but I could never get the degree of customization I was looking for when I would go this route. It always just felt like I was being to picky etc. So being the fiddler that I am I decided (about a year ago from the time I’m writing this) to start building a new site from the ground up. I had no knowledge of blogging, RSS, Wordpress, or any of the other fancy schmancy things the kids are all raving about these days. I learned Wordpress mostly by checking out Codex (Wordpress’s very awesome online database/community) and from Chris Coyier. Chris runs CSS-Tricks a website dedicated to all (fun) things web-design. The video tutorials on that site are invaluable and if you are at all impressed with any of the functionality on this site, chances are it was helped along by that guy. I don’t know him personally, but if I were to run into him at a bar, I would feel obligated and honored to buy him a beer.
The site’s backend is running on Wordpress but it’s been torn to shreds with customization, plugins galore, and any javascript is likely the result of jQuery magic. If you have any questions feel free to contact me and I’ll do my best but please be aware that web-development isn’t my cup-o-tea. It’s probly closer to my cup-o-vinegar or cup-o-anti-freeze.

Because you should be paying attention to the road not looking at my silly website. Buckle up too.

Short Answer: Flash Sucks. But I realize it’s here to stay. I actually do have a YouTube channel and so hosting my work on YouTube is on the punchlist. But quicktime offers the most reliable playback speeds and allows the user to watch things frame by frame, which is really useful for getting critiques.