“Moonbeam Death Ray” by Bronze Fawn

I made this video back in 2006 for an old high school friend who was in the Seattle band “Bronze Fawn” (he’s no longer with them). It was the first animation I ever made, apart from a couple of tiny tutorials, so really I learned animation by trying to make this video (I used Maya 6 software). It took many months and countless hours, but it’s really the project that got me hooked on digital art.

When I originally uploaded this video to YouTube it ended up getting almost 500,000 views thanks to a feature on the front page. Looking back now, the original upload is barely watchable because the resolution is so low. I managed to dig up this higher resolution version and decided to upload it.

The song is “Moonbeam Death Ray.”

The band is “Bronze Fawn.”

Hopefully you can make the connection at the end 🙂

Cardiac Development in the African Clawed Frog

Way back in 2005/2006 I was trying to finish up a Ph.D. in biology studying the genetics of heart development in the lab of Dr. Frank Conlon at UNC, using the frog as a model. My advisor at the time was also going up for tenure and wanted a decent animation of heart development for his presentation. Thus I convinced him to buy us a copy of Maya, with which I made the following video and started learning how to create 3D art and animations.