Thomas Collier : Motion Graphics
- Brick + Tides
- Jan 28
- 6 min read
Thomas Collier, 34, Was Eight Years Old When the Computer Arrived.
It ran on MS-DOS, and came with floppy disks. One of them held a flight simulator game called Aces of the Pacific. The graphics were crude. The sounds were beeps and buzzes.
He remembers less about the game than the feeling of the machine itself. The fact that this box could do something. That it could be opened. Taken apart. Looked inside.
That curiosity never left.
He never imagined it would take him on a career path to work with some of the biggest sports brands in the world.
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By the time Thomas reached high school, computers had become a constant presence, though never an unlimited one. His parents set a timer—an hour and a half a day. When the time ran out, he went outside. He fished. He rode his bike. Swung sticks. He wandered into the woods and stayed there for hours.
“I’d sneak extra time every chance I got,” he says now, smiling. “But it wasn’t just playing games. I was driven by a desire to understand how computers worked, and how they could bring my ideas to life.”
At Maine Central Institute, two doors down from his childhood home, Thomas discovered something that finally clicked. During his senior year, through a vocational program in nearby Skowhegan, he traveled to a regional technical school where students were learning early versions of Photoshop and Illustrator—tools most high schoolers wouldn’t touch for years.
“I realized I could get more time in front of a computer,” he says. “And it wasn’t just messing around. It was building.”
Thomas wasn’t the academic standout in the family. He is the youngest of five. Three of his older sisters were valedictorians. When the third graduated, the local newspaper ran a headline: Three down, two to go.
However, Thomas was a straight B student.
“I could get A’s when I applied myself,” he says, “but nothing clicked. I think I was bored.”
That changed when he found digital design. Once he saw how things were made and how mistakes could be undone, reworked, rebuilt—he locked in.
At seventeen years old and a graduate of Maine Central Institute, Thomas packed his belongings and moved to Florida.
Seventeen and Certain
Full Sail University sits in Winter Park, just outside Orlando. It’s intense by design. Classes move fast. The workload mirrors industry pace. If you don’t love the work, you don’t last.
Thomas loved it.
He arrived with almost nothing. A suitcase. A computer he’d built himself. A sense—rare for someone that young—that this was exactly what he wanted to do.
“It wasn’t like, ‘Let’s see if this works,’” he says. “It was like, ‘Let’s do it.’”
He gravitated quickly toward 3D animation and motion graphics. After Effects. Cinema 4D. The idea of building in space instead of flat frames appealed to him. He compares it to Legos—assembling pieces, imagining something that doesn’t exist yet.
A month before graduating, he got a call from Madison Square Garden. Yes, that Madison Square Garden in New York City.
Nineteen and No Rewind Button
Thomas applied for a junior designer position. When the phone rang, he stepped out of class to answer it.
He was nineteen.
“They needed help,” he says. “The industry was new. Everybody suddenly had so many more screens that needed to be filled with content all the time.”
After graduating, He moved to New York City with two classmates. They rented a 700-square-foot apartment in Astoria—three people, one bathroom. Thomas brought his computer, a desk, and the mattress his parents gave him when he left for college.
At Madison Square Garden, he became the only dedicated 3D artist on the team. He worked on everything: ribbon boards, jumbotrons, projections on the ice. During the Rangers’ playoff run his first year, the arena unveiled a massive projection that played on the ice before games.
“I remember standing there,” he says. “Thinking, I made that. That moment is ingrained in my memory.”
There was no undo button once the broadcast went live.
During Hurricane Sandy, Thomas slept under his desk. The city lost power. The games still came. There were deadlines that didn’t care about weather or age or exhaustion.
“I loved it,” he says. “I was nineteen. I was working on what I thought was the coolest stuff in the world.”
That willingness—to stay, to care, to push through—became a pattern.
Moving, Building, Growing
After a year and a half in New York, Thomas moved again. Orlando. Then Dallas. Then Jacksonville.
Each move added something. Furniture. Tools. Responsibility.
At the Golf Channel, he helped execute a full broadcast rebrand after NBC acquired the network. At NBC News in Dallas, he worked inside a centralized graphics hub that served stations across the country, overnight shifts and all. It was there he met Laura, an accomplished graphic designer from Texas who would later become his wife.
From Jacksonville, he joined the PGA Tour, where his role expanded into art direction without leaving the box behind.
“I’m on the box,” he says. “That’s what I like.”
At the PGA Tour, Thomas helped redesign one of golf’s most iconic trophies—the Players Championship. The challenge was paradoxical: the figure couldn’t look like anyone, but it had to represent everyone.
His solution was quiet and brilliant. He layered the faces of every past champion together to create a composite human—no single identity, but all of them at once. And the swing pose?
That's a composite of the silhouette of the PGA Tour Logo aided by photo reference of his video editor and skilled golfer - friend Jackson Van Meter.
“That was my idea,” he says. “I don’t own a lot individually. But the face composite—I’m proud of that.”
Over five years, he helped shape how the PGA Tour appeared across NBC, CBS, ESPN.
Few choose to leave Florida, return to Maine, and keep doing the work anyway.
Today, Thomas works remotely for Two Fresh Creative https://www.twofresh.tv/, a Los Angeles-based creative studio whose client list spans the NFL, ESPN, CBS, NBC, EA Sports, Netflix, and more. Some of that work is public. Some of it is still years away, living quietly on a screen. He operates on a West Coast schedule from his house in Saco, Maine.
Midnight, Saco
Two months ago, on November 14, 2025, Thomas bought a ticket to a midnight showing at the Saco IMAX.
The movie was The Running Man—based on a Stephen King novel he read as a kid. He’d worked on the film a few miles away in his home studio. His name was in the credits.
“There were two other people in the theater,” he says. “I stayed until the end.”
Some of the motion graphics on that movie screen were made in Maine.
“It was surreal,” he says. “It was a bucket list item, I didn’t know I’d ever get that opportunity. Especially for that to be my first feature film.”
Choosing Maine
Thomas remembered the woods behind his childhood home in Pittsfield. The way summers felt longer. The freedom of being bored outside.
With the arrival of their new baby, Thomas and Laura wanted to be to closer to family and have their child experience Maine like Thomas did growing up.
They bought a house in Saco in August 2025 while on vacation, a middle ground between family in Pittsfield and the rest of New England. Thomas flew back to Jacksonville, sold what he could, packed the rest into a pod, and returned for good. Laura, pregnant at the time, stayed put. What began as a summer vacation north quietly became something more permanent.
It was another move. This time with intention.
Back to the Beginning
In a snowy field outside Saco, Thomas stands holding The Players Championship trophy he helped design.
The sky is wide, and the air fresh. He looks settled.
It’s hard not to think back to the first computer. The floppy disks. The typewriter.
The boy who wanted to know how things worked grew into a man who builds worlds seen by millions.
He’s still tinkering. Still learning. Still staying late.
Many thanks to Thomas for his time on Thursday, January 22, 2026.
If you watch live sports, you've seen Thomas' work. Visit - ThomasCollier.tv
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