Dance of the Bees

Dance of the Bees refers to the fact that bees communicate to the hive by complex choreographed dancing. The "bee" is also a metaphor for the cross pollination of ideas using technology and cross disciplinary and cross cultural methods to solve problems. Communicating to a wider group, using motion (animation) is one focus here, though still imagery also remains an important segment of supplied work.

"Linked-in" profile here. The "LinkedIn" profile is more up to date and complete than my truncated resume here. (Adobe PDF format, right click to download.)

Favorite tools now are Maya and Vray, and the Adobe suite, having used Maya since it was Sketch. Also Maya Paint effects, Mudbox, RealFlow, Mentalray, and Pixar Renderman (actually bought three licences of Renderman at one point). Moderate knowledge of Max, Rhino, Cinema4d, expert Formz user, basic Pro-Engineer, Bentley Inroads, Revit, and Autocad knowledge, along with a lot of experience with a host of more specialized software tools, including 3d scanning technologies, Geomagic and Rapidform, and the Realviz suite, and practical application of photogrammetry, and owns various 3d scanners. Used Dreamweaver since it was released, also Wordpress, and Flash, since it was Macromind Director (after having years of experience with simple lingo scripting in Director, which Flash is a subset of in many ways). Keen After Effects user for many years, along with Photoshop, Illustrator, Excel, Word, Powerpoint/Keynote. He still also loves (and uses in his work) non-computer based visualization tools like photography, after some of years experience as a practical commercial photographer as part of his journalism experience.

Dance of the Bees principal Donald Grahame has followed closely, and was an active participant and contributor, in the computer graphics, 3d animation and internet software revolution right through 1990 to the turn of the century, and now beyond, attending the SIGGRAPH computer graphics conference every year from 1991 till 2003, when it could be largely replaced by the web research.

The image behind this panel is of a recent computer model Donald made for use in legal presentations. It involved over six months work for the law firm Bell Rosenberg and Hughes (now merged with Kirkpatrick Stockton) of 12.5 miles of new freeway down near Santiago using thousands of construction documents including Microstation, Pro E, AutoCAD, aerial photography, GIS data, USGS 3d data, including using aerial photogrammetry to check construction documentation versus actual construction. He also developed a novel and efficient way of combining USGS data and more detailed localized topographic information in a 3d computer model.

Personal background

Donald Grahame has an honors degree in Agricultural Science from the University of Melbourne, and a nearly completed Bachelor of Arts degree in Journalism from RMIT, which he studied part time while writing a weekly press release newsletter for over four years for the Australian government, choosing not to complete the final year of the degree, as he was offered, and took, a position as editor of a national farming magazine for the Herald and Weekly Times, in Melbourne, Australia, one of the country's biggest publishers of newspapers and magazines. A nice character reference from that time from the head engineer at the Department of Agriculture here.

A few other career highlights from the distant past, noted here because the interactive, illustration and animation work showcased on this website does not show it directly, and because they still help provide underpinnings for his creative work, are three years working doing public relations for major chemical companies promoting minimum tillage farming, and as an undergraduate student of agriculture, he worked for almost four months for BHP, one of the world's biggest mining companies, landscaping and rehabilitating open-cut mines in aboriginal territory in the North of Australia.

This entailed living alongside one of the only remaining populations of Australian aborigines living partly traditionally, and still speaking their native language. He used his training at the time in speciation and plant biology - he and his co-workers at the time undertook some original research during that project into propagation of native species, that was eventually published as a note in an agricultural journal.

He also took Japanese at the University of Melbourne for a couple of years as a single subject, partly in the hope of understanding why their graphics were so different from ours.

Donald came to San Francisco in 1989 originally to buy a then $8,500 Macintosh 11x computer, and to spend a few weeks finding out why computers were invented here. His father made his living developing software for mainframes (actually he was the head systems analyst for the SEC, which is the equivalent of PG&E here in California.)

His father told him little about his work, so Donald didn't understand it, or his father for that matter, and thought maybe he could find out more here. He experienced the earthquake in '89, and was surprised how strongly he was talking about it as if it was HIS home that was "quaked", and ever since then, he has regarded this place as a real home.

He is now a joint US-Australian citizen, and has two children, who are 100% American, and are half Australian, which is a good example of simple mathematics not working to describe reality. Some more information about his past life in Australia is here.

Music, and the production of music has remained a lifelong strong interest also, and he has had stints playing at some of the top venues in Melbourne Australia as a lounge pianist, culminating in a long stint at Mietta's, when Mietta herself was there. Electronic music composition, and keyboard playing, are still some of his most enjoyable activities...

Finally, if you have got this far in the bio, hopefully this will count as a plus: he spent a large part of his days for the ten years before the last two caring for his two small children, as his business was based at home. He was the major caregiver during the day for both children in downtown San Francisco (North Beach) till his kids were

old. The kids are much older now, so I am back focussed fully on my career, (not that I ever stopped focussing on my work, just caring for children makes very intensively detailed and sometimes repetitive work attractive somehow. When the focus of your life is on the day to day personal needs of someone else, thinking about them fills up your mind while doing that sort of work, and the technical 3d modeling work especially that I was doing then was very satisfying in that regard.)