Seemingly Seamless
I am obsessed with creating visually captivating animations that have no discernable beginning or end. A seamless video, rather than a linear one. There is a fascinating system of rules to follow, but it shares many similarities with the rules of creating seamless tiling textures, which I created as a career for several years, when I worked as a texture artist for New World Computing/3DO.
I’ve been creating CG art for over 30 years now, but for over 10 of those years, I was very ill, sleeping 20 hours a day, due to Chronic Late-Stage Lyme disease, Babesia, Bartonella and other co-infections that I likely caught from a tick bite at age 6. I got very sick when I was first infected, but my doctor had no knowledge of Lyme and so I was never treated and my Lyme disease became chronic and incurable.
I was always exhausted growing up, but working 80 hour weeks for ‘crunch time’ when I was a computer game artist at 3DO stressed my system too much and my symptoms multiplied I became too sick to work. It took more effort to take a shower than I once expended to walk a mile. My doctors thought I had Systemic Lupus and gave me powerful pain meds, thinking I was going to die. Then at age 32, a real life Dr. House finally gave me the right tests, which came out with 5/5 positive signs for Lyme.
It was actually good news to learn I had parasitic bugs in my brain, since they at least had a treatment that often improved symptoms. After 3 years of taking powerful antibiotics every day, my brain fog started to clear up and I could actually finish a complete thought and remember every word I wanted to use in a sentence, rather than constantly needing to interrupt my statements to ask questions like ‘What are those shoes that are called… like… alligators or something?’
Since that time, I have fought for every inch of progress. During treatment, I went from sleeping all day to playing video games, which I hadn’t been able to enjoy for 10 years. Then I started sitting up in bed, then moved to a chair, then to a desk. I met a friend on XBox who was a talented artist and streamed PhotoShop on Twitch. They reminded me how much I loved making art. I started with PhotoShop and started using all my old apps again, as well as adding many new ones. I formed a new company (my last had been in 1999) and opened a Shopify store full of products of my own design, but had no success, because no one knew I existed and I had no money to advertise.
My first CG animation worthy of the name was an intro video for a new prototype snowboard called JAGZ. I made it in Bryce 3D, since this was in 1998 or so. A few years back, I found Resolume Arena, which instantly took Photoshop’s place as my favorite program, since it essentially was almost like a Photoshop for video. More recently, I have been using Stable Diffusion, Deforum, TouchDesigner, Blender 3D, 3D Coat, Davinci Resolve and more to create loops for me to use when I do VJ sets (usually streaming live). In the last year, I began offering some of my favorite seamless loops online. You can see more of my work on Instagram, YouTube, or on my personal site, https://www.m0le.me. Thanks for reading!
