When I was a little kid my parents would buy huge rolls of newsprint for me and my brothers to draw on. When I was in high school my friends and I would make comic books on index cards; the bloodier, the better. In college I switched to music, specifically the classical guitar. I reasoned that it would be somehow useful in my future career as a rock star. It wasn't. But it did teach me a lot about learning, discipline, and the discipline of learning.In 1997 I returned to the visual arts when I started to study computer animation. A year later I created my first professional animation for the Howard Hughes Medical Institute Holiday Lectures on Science series. It was a transparent beating heart with visible blobs of blood. I created it in Maya 1.0 on a little blue SGI O2.From 1998-2005 I was a full time scientific animator for HHMI. I have been lucky enough to create animations for some of the worlds leading scientists including Stuart Schreiber, Huda Zoghbi, Eric Lander, and Nobel Laurate Tom Cech. Most of these animations are available on-line at a web site we created called BioInteractive.In 2004 I published my first magazine tutorial in Highend Magazine Magazine on how to import and render macromolecular data in Maya. Since then I have published several more less scientific, but no less nerdy, tutorials in HDRI 3D Magazine.At the end of February, 2005, my wife Zoe and I packed up the dogs and all our stuff and moved from Washington, DC to West Hollywood, CA. I have contributed several chapters to Mastering Maya 7 (and subsequently Mastering maya 8.5 which is mostly an updtae to the book.) I have just completed my first solo bok Maya Visual Effects: The Innovators Guide which will be released in March 2007. Please feel free to contact me if you have questions or concerns about this book. Vists my website at www.bloopatone.com to see my current work. I have several tutorials on my website as well.