By day, he's a mild-mannered reporter, but when the sun goes down, he dons his magic space helmet and becomes Captain Pixel, creator of whimsical music videos for the Bay Area rock group Sci-Fi.

Writing may be my profession, but visual arts, most notably computer animation and 3D graphics, have become a passion of mine. Thanks to personal computers, particularly Apple's Macintosh, we have entered a new era of creativity in which ordinary folks and trained artists alike can create stunning imagery. I began experimenting with graphics software in the early 1990's as part of my editorial work for Micro Publishing Press and, later, Macworld magazine. Then I hooked up with the guys in Sci-Fi, for whom I produced a multimedia show that I project from a laptop during their live performances. I've also created several music videos in QuickTime format. These "videos" don't include footage of the band. Instead, they are 2D and 3D animations that illustrate the lyrics of each song.

My graphics toolbox includes Adobe Photoshop, LiveMotion, GoLive, Premiere, and After Effects; Macromedia Flash; and a trio of 3D graphics programs: Electric Image's Amorphium Pro; Corel Bryce; and Curious Labs' Poser. Lately, I've been dabbling in Carrara Studio, a 3D package from Eovia. For the live performances, I use Tribeworks' iShell, a unique multimedia-authoring program that is especially useful for packaging and controlling QuickTime movies.

Here you will find excerpts from my music videos in QuickTime format. The original animations, at 480 by 360 pixels, weigh in at more than 200MB each. The versions posted here measure 160 by 120 pixels and don't include audio tracks. They range from 24K to 540K, so you should have no trouble viewing them even on a dial-up connection.

To view the movies, click on the thumbnail image or caption. You'll need QuickTime Player version 5 or 6. QuickTime 6 for Mac or PC is available for free download from Apple's Web site.

		Another Day. This is my latest video, created almost entirely in Bryce 5. The song is one of many nice tunes written by Sci-Fi's Jeff Rolka, a talented musician and composer. An MP3 is available for free download from the Sci-Fi Web site. I began work on the video in August 2002 and completed it in early October. It consists of 26 video clips depicting alien landscapes, ranging from 10 to 30 seconds each. Some took as long as 30 hours to render. I went crazy experimenting with Bryce's new metaballs modeling feature, which lets you create organic forms that can be animated. I made the alien heads in Poser.
"Avoiding the sun that brightens days..." (68K)
Guitar solo, clip 4 (164K)
Guitar solo, clip 5 (100K)

		Climb Down. This song is more of a collaboration among the band members, but Jeff wrote the lyrics and much of the music. The mood is dark and heavy, and the lyrics operate on two levels: alien abduction as a descent into Hell. The video combines 3D animation created in Bryce and Poser with stock photos that the "camera" pans over, much like a PBS documentary. I produced the video in spring of 2001, but with its allusion to false prophets and extensive fire imagery--not to mention shots of the New York City skyline--it eerily anticipated the events of 9/11. We had second thoughts about showing it in the immediate aftermath of that tragedy, but from a technical and artistic standpoint, it was my best video at the time.
"Take me..." (168K)
Guitar solo (96K)
Into the inferno (384K)

		Gigabit Space. This song, written by Sci-Fi guitarist M2, is based on Frederik Pohl's Heechee Saga. A space explorer encounters an alien technology that takes him into cyberspace, much like William Gibson's Neuromancer. For the opener, I created a still in the style of the old pulp magazines, which dissolves into a more-realistic 3D animation. I modeled the spaceship in Amorphium and produced the animations in Bryce and Poser. M2 is another talented composer. Sci-Fi's Web site includes a streaming video of the band performing the song.
Opener (72K)
Living in cyberspace (248K)

		Paradigm Shift. Another great M2 composition that's available as an MP3 download. I created the animation clips by composing still images in Photoshop--using lots of clip art and stock photos--and then animating them in Adobe's LiveMotion 1.0 software. LiveMotion is a fantastic tool for creating Flash animations (better than Flash itself in many ways), but it was never intended for this kind of full-screen bitmap-heavy animation. If I had to do it all over again, I would use After Effects instead. Some folks have told me the video reminds them of Terry Gilliam's old animations for Monty Python. That's Jeff Rolka's head in the second clip; now we know where all those pretty tunes come from. Can you guess who's in the third? Hint: look at the shapes and think back to geometry class...
"I move my feet to a digital beat..." (168K)
"The speed of mind..." (112K)
"I don't have time to explain the situation to you..." (120K)

		Release Me. Another nice Jeff Rolka composition. I began by creating male and female heads in Poser, then used Amorphium Pro's Boolean Subtract feature to isolate the faces. At that point, I realized that the faces looked like spaceships, so I imported them into Bryce for a variety of fly-throughs. The effect is surprising, because you don't realize at first that the spaceships are faces. I created the video in the summer of 2001. I had been out of work for a few months, and with all the time on my hands, I began studying filmmaking techniques in a big way. As a result, the scene composition and camera movement here are more sophisticated than in my earlier videos.
Opening clip 1 (24K)
Opening clip 2 (148K)
"Release me..." (152K)
		Ride On. Yet another Jeff Rolka tune, this one inspired by a Ray Bradbury story. It's a simple video concept: The camera is a spaceship that flies through various interplanetary scenes. I created the clips mostly in Bryce, but I also used some images from the Hubble Space Telescope. For the guitar solo, shown in the second clip, I composited a series of stock explosion videos, applying color transformations and layer-blending modes to create a multi-hued supernova effect.
"I've never felt this way before..." (108K)
Guitar solo (540K)