I was born in Brussels in 1948. At that time, I was very young so I had to learn a lot of things for many years. I finished with a diploma in chemistry and I worked for 12 years at the "Université Catholique de Louvain - Institute of Cellular Pathology" making some infinitesimal advance of the human knowledge in the field of biochemistry.

I had always been interested in photography and I had started an "after hours" activity in scientific photography.

In the beginning of the 80s appeared the microcomputer : ZX81, Apple II, TRS-80 and it was fascinating because you could make your own calculations without recourse to huge mysterious expensive machines and more they had some (primitive) graphic possibilities.

In 1982, with a friend who is graphic designer - he is now living in Houston, Texas - we started a small company with the idea to use microcomputers to make images, mainly business slides. We were the first in Belgium. There were some other companies making animations with huge machines, the first Silicon Graphic station was not far away, but from the start we decided to stick to the micro. It was a CPM machine with 512k of RAM, a graphic card of 256 colors out of 16M and two floppies of 720k as mass storage. No graphic palette software existed - imagine a world with no Photoshop, Bryce, Premiere... nothing - so the only solution was to write our own palette and so I have done.

It was a crazy period. I programmed during the night and my associate was making slides during the day, generally very pissed because a lot of things had changed since the last version of the preceding day.

In 86, with Jacques Landrain, a comics author - Belgian comics are of world fame - we created "Digitaline", the first comics ever made completely with a computer (except for the printing), a world première.

For now, thanks God, the Powermac, Photoshop, Bryce, Quark, Director, etc. exist and there is no more need for programming, only creativity is required and I am making Multimedia and Internet things. My server is at http://www.creativem.com and hosts some interesting sites including "Amnesty International, Belgium" and "Arts on the Web", a site devoted to the Art galleries with a virtual gallery.

I mainly work for big companies in the business to business field.

My ultimate goal is to die, aged 102, shot by a jealous husband, in bed with his teenager wife.

About my "Tribute to John Lasseter".

The idea was to make a Christmas card in QTVR. The main problem with softs like Bryce or in general with the 3D softs available on the Mac, is that the results are too often cold, with no soul and since I worked in computer graphics, I always advocated the fact that technological performances are without interest outside a very small circle of initiates. If you intend that your images or movie interest the public, you must tell a story. And bend the computer tools to what you need to tell inside these computer tools constraints and not the reverse as it is still too often done : maybe 95% of News generics show a rotating map of the world, probably because it's easy to do.

Therefore the challenge was to tell a one image story. The snowman was the only simple "human" element easy to do with simple graphic primitives of Bryce : some balls, one cone... With a snowman, the obvious story was a reference to "Nik Nak" of John Lasseter : the unhappy snowman desperatly trying to join the nice ladies of the sunny holydays souvenirs.

John Lasseter is certainly one of the greatest living animators ans certainly the greatest in computer graphics for the reason previously stated : he has always tell a story. From "Luxo Junior" to "Toys Story", he has tell something within the technical constraints of the moment.

And so my snowman is dreaming in his polar landscape, of a nice lady burning under the sunny winter sun of Belgium. By the way, if you doesn't know Belgium, there is no sun in winter. It doesn't rain 365 days per year in Belgium : sometimes it snows.

That's all folks.

The final touch was to give an impression of snow in the glass globe, I worked the final image in Photoshop taking advantage of the shaky appearence of the image when rotated in QTVR.

I have a lot of other ideas for QTVR or QT movies, the only trouble is that I have to work for customers to own enough money to eat every day and buy some books every weeks and it takes 99% of my time.

Patrick Marioné.

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