This is my first animation even remotely worth looking at.. I had had Lightwave for over a year and had been unable to do a thing with it. My friend Chris Mills (see links) recommended that I try Cinema 4D, and within a month and a half, I had put together this short. It's an elasmosaur of dubious accuracy menacing a school of fish. So, did plesiosaurs swim with their front flippers and steer with their back flippers, like modern marine turtles do? Or did they swim with an opposed flipper movement, the front pair going up as the rear went down? I don't know, but this one does the former. The one a couple of spaces below this does the latter.
Plesiosaur, Sorenson 3 , 1.23MB, QT 5
This is a test animation I did right after I found out how to have the plesiosaur grab a fish. It's actually a pretty tricky maneuver, using two identical fish. One remains in the thing's mouth the whole time, the other swims past. The trick is that the one in the creature's mouth is not visible. When the jaw hits the fish, you make the one in the mouth visible and the one that's swimming, invisible. Voila! Grabbed fish.
Plesiosaur Snap Test, Sorenson 3, 64K, QT5
The revised animation. The larger, individually animated fish were done using a wonderful plug-in for Cinema 4D called Multiple Spline Attach, or MSA. This allowed me to make undulating splines and then simply run the fish models down the splines, allowing them to deform to fit the curves, exactly as a real fish would do, only in reverse.
Plesiosaur W/Fish, Sorenson 3, 928K, QT5
This is a small animation done for fun as a logo device for my friend Melissa Ferreira's workshop, Buzzworks Studio. I'm a huge fan of the Dolby promotions that appear before movies and this was an attempt to replicate, on a small scale, some of those effects. Of course, this was before I heard about multi-pass rendering or compositing, so it's all done "in camera": an incredibly tedious and inaccurate render, with no chance to adjust. Still, it was a lot of fun to hum into a cheap little microphone and then use SoundEdit to multi-track my kazoo-like piping into an enormous bee swarm.
Buzzworks-MPEG-4, 2.2 MB, QT 6
An odd little thing done as a birthday card for my brother. It's supposed to be letters marching across the surface of a chocolate cake. No, I don't do drugs. Done in Hash's Animation:Master, possibly the most frustrating software in the world. I could never get it to run in a stable manner, but it's the least expensive, most agile character animation software around. If they could lick the stability issues (and maybe beef up the renderer) they would have Alias/Wavefront and Softimage beat for most users. I did the soundtrack for this one with a small electronic keyboard from Radio Shack, run through the trusty SoundEdit. No, I can't play piano...how did you guess?
John's Birthday, MPEG-4, 4.5MB, QT6
A gory little movie done to serve as wake-up comedic relief at a medical conference. My brother-in-law was presenting a paper on hand trauma (naturally) and wanted something to galvanize a crowd that had already heard far too many papers that day.
Hand Trauma, Sorenson 3, 1 MB, QT5
Whoa! Panoramic! This is the most ambitious thing I've completed so far: intended as a web-based promotion for a book, Soldiers Live, that I did the cover painting for. It's an extended riff on the images suggested by the cover, making use of a lot of particle effects, sound-effects CDs (via SoundEdit), and multi-layered compositing in AfterEffects.
Soldiers Live, Sorenson 3, 3.8 MB, QT5
Here's a link to my ongoing trilobite restoration project, an attempt to make the most complete and seemingly photographic restoration of a long-extinct genus yet attempted. It's based on the 450- million-year-old species Opipeuterella inconnivus.

Click on the image to check out the project diary and some pretty cool movies, if I do say so myself.