the people

The two founders of biocursion have been creating 3D computer animation since the mid 1980's. Animation had been a hobby until 1988, when the first company had been formed by Mark, Computer Visions.  Even then, it was still a professional hobby - day jobs paid the bills while the animations paid for new hardware and software.  Mark owned one of the first Video Toasters in the county, and started producing animations using Lightwave .9 beta.

Mark Brennen  
He started like a lot of desktop CGI artists - in 1985 he purchased an Amiga 1000 (after years cutting his teeth on the Amiga's true predecessor, the Atari).  Soon afterwards - a copy of Sculpt 3D got him going where he needed to go. By the early 90's, he became proficient in most of the 3D animation packages for the microcomputer. In 1997 Computer Visions grew and operated with a small rendering farm of Pentium Pro machines. He moved away from relying on video production companies to lay animation to tape - and was one of the first to use non-linear post production in the area. Animations were being delivered to clients on SyQuest removable hard drive media before the Zip drive became popular.
Eric Williams  
Mark met Eric in 1991 at a magazine rack in a local bookstore, no doubt inspecting the latest Amiga World. One thing lead to another and several months later, Eric became the "2D guy" for Computer Visions. Approximately six months later, Mark moved him into the 3D arena. By the time he became the lead animator, Computer Visions was able to pump out animations efficiently - providing more time to work on side projects. In 1998, Eric became the Senior Animator.  This role sustained until a move from New York to Seattle.

biocursion

biocursion was conceived almost twelve years ago when Mark had created a mandelbrot zoom animation and showed it to Eric. Six months later, Mark suggested working on a project involving a video with nothing but fractal and mandelbrot imagery / animation.  This was the butterfly flapping its wing in China to produce a storm in Seattle.

Eric expanded the idea into something more than a video slideshow of fractal and mandelbrot animations. Reading James Gleick's "Chaos" became an inspiration for a for a vague storyline. Around this time, he also came up with the title, 'biocursion'.

Computer Visions became too busy to support any side projects, and biocursion was put on the back-burner.  Then it was virtually forgotten until 2001.  It took a year or more to get production moving - it was slow at first, primarily due to the coast-to-coast communications needed.  After four years of active work - biocursion finally solidified into the the form it is available today.

the contributors

Approximately one hundred minutes of animation was created by Mark and Eric.  The two hour mark would not have been possible without the contributions from animators and musicians:

contributor media minutes
Jock Cooper animation 12
Lloyd Garrick animation 7.5
Paul Kay music 37
Scott Wade music 35
Allen Tompkins music 20
Daniel Applegate music 24
Marc Fraser music 4

 

the company

Pixel Maven was formed to support the commercial side of biocursion. While the primary service is computer animation, DVD authoring and mastering is also offered .

Contact Information:

Mark Brennan - markbrennan@biocursion.com

Eric Williams - ericwilliams@biocursion.com

Web manager - web@biocursion.com

Customer Support / Sales- csales@biocursion.com