Taylor, who has a traditional fine art honors degree in Sculpture and Drawing from Edinburgh College of Art, worked as a prop maker, DJ, and cartoonist before falling in love with digital technology.

"When I was a prop maker in London, I produced props for the BBC and was invited to visit their Visual Effects department," Taylor remembers. "I was spellbound. And at the same time, I was working as a DJ around the London club scene and had enrolled in a course in music and technology. This was my first introduction to using computers. We used old Amigas with the earliest incarnation of Cubase to make music. I took to the graphical interface like a fish to water. Soon after that, some of my cartoons were being published, and I went along to a graphics studio to watch the magazine being built. It was that day that I saw a Mac running Adobe® Photoshop® across a crowded room. I fell in love straight away."

Taylor then moved to Edinburgh and enrolled herself in an introductory Photoshop course. "I was always frustrated at the classes because they moved quite slowly," recalls Taylor. "I wanted to learn more than I could in a weekly course. That's when I decided to invest my savings in a shiny new Mac, scanner, and printer - there was no stopping me! I bought the Classroom in a Book series and plowed through. Then I played and played until I knew Photoshop inside out.

"A good friend of mine who knew of my ambitions to work in animation and visual effects then introduced me to Adobe After Effects®. I was completely blown away. Everything I'd learned in Photoshop could now be animated in After Effects. It's like Photoshop on wheels!"

Now that Taylor is in the full digital swing of things, she enjoys working in 2D, giving an edgy, hand-drawn look to her animations. She uses Adobe After Effects, Adobe Photoshop, Adobe Illustrator®, and Adobe Premiere® to animate elements ranging from computer-generated art and D1 footage to traditional photography, drawings, and paintings.

These elements are scanned or captured into a Power Mac 9600/350, arranged into layers in Photoshop and Illustrator, and then brought together in After Effects where complex animation tasks can be performed with ease using Motion Math scripts, filters, and keyframing. The animations are then edited in Premiere and output as component video through Taylor's NT hosted Pinnacle DC50 video board, as Mini DV through her DC 1000 with FireWire interface, or as an Edit Decision List for import into any other professional editing system.

"The thing I love about working with Adobe products is their versatility," says Taylor. "I can produce output to fit into any system, whether it's another desktop editing system, proprietary TV graphics system, or film-based system. I can even reformat the footage easily for print, Web, and multimedia. This is becoming increasingly important as the ways in which we visually communicate rapidly change. I could set up my own Web TV station from my bedroom now and broadcast my own interactive programs. Adobe gives me the software to both create the content and to publish it for all media. When I'm working with the Adobe family, it's almost like having just one application that does everything; the integration is so seamless.

"When I ask myself nowadays, 'how did they do that?' I can be confident that I can recreate it using my arsenal of Adobe software."