In 2012, the toy company Mattel embarked on an ambitious reboot of its popular Max Steel franchise. This endeavor included an all-new CGI animated series featuring a sleek graphic style by Canadian company Nerd Corp. Concurrently, promotional still images for the web were generated at Brain Zoo studios in Los Angeles, where I was tasked with creating and rendering characters in dynamic poses. Many of these images required exaggerated perspective effects typical of comic book art. I had to use some creative techniques to achieve a superhero comic look with the 3D Max Steel characters!

During the late 1990s, I worked for Walt Disney Feature Animation on their first computer-generated movie, Dinosaur. For that production, I served as a supervising animator for Neera, the main character's love interest, and all of the juvenile dinosaurs. On Disney movies, supervising animators were made responsible for character acting performances; however, they had limited control over character design decisions, which were made by group committee. I was unhappy with the final design of the juvenile iguanodons which, in my opinion, did not look as cute as they could have been. Because of this dissatisfaction, I was inspired to create a personal sculpture - my own interpretation of how the young iguanodons should have looked.

In 1988, I assisted Niels Nielsen in building a prototype helicopter model created for presentation to the United States military as a potential future design. Not only did we fabricate the helicopter from scratch, but we also incorporated motorized rotors and lighting. Unfortunately, we worked in a small room with poor ventilation and used materials such as Bondo, urethanes, and glues that emitted toxic fumes. To make matters worse, I managed to cut my finger in half with an X-Acto blade, an accident that required a trip to the emergency room! That project served as a stark reminder of the occupational hazards involved in professional model-making. Our model was ultimately filmed by cinematographer Mehran Salamati, who used a motion control system against a blue screen to composite it against a sky background. I never saw the completed film.

This spooky castle was created for a 1986 Budweiser print advertisement. Anton Tremblay designed and supervised the project, while Christopher Halsted and I were the sculptors. The primary material used for the fabrication was green foam, known as "green death" in the model-making industry. Carving the foam released gritty, nasty particles that were hazardous to breathe and tended to cling to our clothing. The only real advantage of using this material was its fine grain, which made it easy to carve. We typically wore disposable coveralls and used a respirator or dust mask to protect our health while sculpting. The finished model, which I photographed on stage for my records, stood about four feet high. In the final advertisement, a couple of people were composited in, positioned by the bridge and looking up at the castle (without the benefit of Photoshop, which had not yet been invented).

My first real model-making gig was a job at Introvision in 1985, where I worked on a pilot project called Danger Quest under the supervision of Gene Rizzardi. In collaboration with model maker Zuzana Swansea, I was tasked with fabricating a mountain wall landscape featuring a cave-like entrance. Our technique involved carving the basic shapes out of styrofoam and then etching the foam by squirting it with acetone to create a lunar rock appearance. The acetone/foam reaction released toxic gases, requiring us to wear protective garments and respirators. From the start, I experienced some of the potential hazards of professional model making! Other model makers built the cool robot guards, which were added to the scene after we completed the miniature background set. Once the camera crew had lit the setup on stage, I was able to photograph the full scene in 3-D for my personal collection.

Leaning against a parked Harley-Davidson chopper is a woman, who is adorned in nothing but inked images. She gestures toward the doorway of the Living Art Tattoo Parlor. This was the concept for a piece I created in 1985 using the unique art form known as Shadowbox Diorama. Projects of this type require extensive planning and a range of skills, including painting, sculpture, model-making, staging, design, craftsmanship, and custom lighting. It was quite a challenge to produce!

One of my all-time favorite animation projects was the 1989 production of Stanley and the Dinosaurs, directed by John Clark Matthews. I was responsible for animating half of the show and also sculpting many of the characters, including a tribe of ten cave people and a juvenile Tyrannosaurus Rex. The clay sculpture served as the basis for each character, but it was only part of the collaborative process of creating the stop-motion puppets for the movie.