Animation

Miller’s Dream

Miller’s Dream celebrates the annual migration of the Miller moth from the Colorado plains to the alpine meadows of the Rocky Mountains. The animation is created by programming intelligent behaviors for each moth to move through turbulence, flocking, and other organizing principles.

Commissioned by the Denver Theater District

Unstable Diffusion

Unstable Diffusion uses two forms of artificial intelligence(AI). Navigational AI is used by the dots to plot their paths and move towards a waypoint on the canvas. They will occasionally pair up with a nearby companion as they travel. As they move along their path, they unveil the image that is hidden underneath. The images were generated using text-to-image AI generator Stable Diffusion. The title page at the beginning is the prompt that was used to generate the image.

Systems

Systems is an exploration of shape, color and motion realized through programming and experiments with how computers draw shapes to the screen. These images are also part of an edition.

namaste

This animation was inspired by my exolith.form[] series of digital prints. The organism has been constructed from a series of mathematical splines that are altered in a progressive manner to create both similarity and variation.

Indistinct Boundaries Movement #2

This animation was created for Indistinct Boundaries, a collaborative dance project with Jane Franklin Dance. The video, animated by Rassamee Ruangsri, was projected onto the dancers as they moved, creating a blurred figure ground relationship. The organisms are animated as if they have thoughts and emotions, even though they appear to be microscopic in scale.

Indistinct Boundaries Movement #4

This animation was created for Indistinct Boundaries, a collaborative dance project with Jane Franklin Dance. The video was projected onto the dancers as they moved. The meditative sound and visual experience is centered on a pulsing creature inspired by the drawings of Ernst Haeckel. I created the sound using looping oscillations using synthesized sound. The audio for this piece is the central element and it is used as a motivating force for the organism.

Indistinct Boundaries Trailer

This shows excerpts from the entire animation including all 5 movements. The entire piece was more than 22 minutes long.

rupture

A full dome project presented in the Gates Planetarium at the Denver Museum of Nature & Science. The film is an experiment exploring the immersive possibilities of the dome projection environment. What is seen at the top of this dome master frame appears directly behind the audience, while the audience is more or less focused on the lower third of the frame. The perspective of the columns appear vertical to the audience.

Directed and animated by Bryan Leister | Sound Design: Jay Schamberg and Andrew White | Sound Effects: Jay Schamberg, Andrew White and Jake Montenegro Special Thanks to Aaron Thomas and Becky Heavner, runtime: 03 min : 44 sec, ©2009

drop

Rendered with a micro-photography aesthetic this is in reality all computer generated using fluid simulation algorithms. The film quality provides a feeling of scientific truth, as if we were a disinterested observer watching a water drop fall in space, hitting other drops and eventually landing in a pool of water. The sound was created after the animation utilizing random processes and frequency oscillations. The whole effect is meant to provide a meditative motion space for contemplating the path a drop takes as it falls.

skating still

Created for Gina Biver’s musical composition Skating Still that was part of the 2006 International 60X60 project. The movement is driven by each of the three instruments, raising and lowering with one, rotating pitch or heading with the others. The end result is a “drawing” made by the music itself.

P.R.

This is a short animation I created using found video footage of Pat Roberson, founder of the Christian Coalition, and host of the 700 club. I did not alter his text, but thought it would be interesting to create a piece that used his voice to animate symbols while he talked about an idea that seemed extreme to me. The film has been exhibited in many film festivals including the Black Maria and the Ann Arbor Film Festival.