Today I ran into a guy who was in my puppet troupe 10 years ago, standing in the lobby of Imageworks. He was in for an interview to be a Technical Director, which he's been doing at ILM for the last 6 years or so, working on movies like Star Wars Episode I & II, A.I. and Hulk!

He told me that it was I who told him about I.L.M and Steve "Spaz" Williams (a key animator on Jurassic Park that I met at the 1993 Puppeteers of America National Festival in San Francisco), which is why he applied there and moved up the ranks.

Wow! It feels like a scene from "It's a Wonderful Life" or something.

That got me thinking of the various folks in the group, and whatever became of them.

LifeFormz alumni:

Brian Stokes: Sr. Production Services Technician, SPI, Los Angeles
Steve Nelson: Programmer, Palo Alto
Ranjit Bahtnagar: Programmer, GameLab, New York
Brian Flumen: Programmer, New York?
Dave Kury: Lead Animator, Electronic Arts, Los Angeles
Joe Spampinato: Programmer, PDI
Eva Molnar: Marketing Director, Disney, Anaheim
Mike Baltazar: CG Technical Director, ILM, San Rafael (and maybe soon, SPI)
Bernie Hou: ?
Paul Yarin: (Last I heard, at MIT. I met someone he knew, Melody Schoenfeld)
Joyce Brown: ?
Nora Munoz: ?
Matt McCrae: ?

Interesting trivia! Not a member, but a recruit at one of our meetings. Alex Alvarez, who did eventually design a recruiting poster (I sure wish I kept it!). He went on to become co-founder of Gnomon School of Visual FX in Hollywood.

If you were a member of LifeFormz not mentioned above or have new info about your whereabouts, sorry I forgot you! Please email me!