My first special effects job for a feature film occurred in 1986 at Image Engineering, a mechanical effects company owned by Peter Chesney. The movie was A NIGHTMARE ON ELM STREET 3: DREAM WARRIORS, and Image Engineering was responsible for many of the imaginative ways that the maniacal Freddy Krueger disposed of his victims in the dream world. Unlike the computer generated visual effects of today which are accomplished in post-production, this was a pre-production project that required a performance with the actors during the live action shooting. Lets take a look at how we seemingly made a bathroom sink and a television come to life as the personification of the evil Freddy.READ AND SEE MORE...

One of the most ambitious stop-motion commercials of all time was created in 1991 for MICKEY'S PARADE FROZEN TREATS, directed by Kevin Dole. The advertisement featured hundreds of animated puppets and props, and required ingenious methods to bring them to life.READ AND SEE MORE...

Behold the Red-Nosed Reindog, a rare creature from a remote mountain region near the North Pole! Okay, what you are actually looking at is a surreal photorealistic composite, which I created for the amusement of friends and family as this years Christmas card. I thought it would be fun to portray my daughter as an elf, and her dog as the iconic Rudolph. Being fairly adept at Photoshop magic, I combined a number of photographs to illustrate this imaginary scene.READ AND SEE MORE...

One of my all-time favorite animation projects was the 1989 production of STANLEY AND THE DINOSAURS, directed by John Clark Matthews. Besides animating half of the show, I also sculpted many of the characters, including a tribe of 10 cave people and a juvenile Tyrannosaurus Rex. The clay sculpture was the basis of each character, however it was only part of the collaborative process of creating stop-motion puppets for this movie.READ AND SEE MORE...

Since his debut in the mid sixties, the Pillsbury Doughboy was brought to life via stop-motion animation, but that era came to an end in 1992 when it was decided to switch to CGI. It was my pleasure to animate the Doughboy for his final stop-motion commercial campaign at Apogee Inc. for the Leo Burnett advertising agency. A couple commercials were created simultaneously under the direction of effects legend John Dykstra, and I was chosen to animate one of them with a Christmas theme. The budget for the project was clearly high since they offered me more than my normal pay rate, but of course expected the highest quality animation possible in return. I was given a luxurious amount of time to do tests and experiment with the character performance, which was far from the norm of a typical stop-motion shoot.READ AND SEE MORE...