3D Animation Pioneer Turns His Attention to Mount Tamalpais

It's not every documentary short premiere that ends with a sold-out audience being led in Miwok Native American prayer. But such was the case Thursday, February 13th at the Throckmorton Theatre in Mill Valley.

Narrated and co-written by Marin County resident Peter Coyote, The Invisible Peak is a 25-minute labor of restitution-love for producer, co-director and volunteer fire lookout Gary Yost. He is hoping that the film's revisiting of how the second highest peak of nearby Mount Tamalpais (a.k.a. Mount Tam) was sheared off during the height of the Cold War to make way for a pair of missile base radar domes will help support a campaign to remove concrete footprints of this USSR-era chapter.


The next screening of the film will be at The Image Flow in Mill Valley on February 27th. Yost's background is pretty interesting. Initially hoping to pursue a career in photography, he got sidetracked - very successfully - into the realm of computer animation:

Yost was responsible for the first open-architecture 3D animation systems before leading the development of the most widely-used 3D production system in the world. Autodesk 3DS Max recently celebrated its 20th anniversary

Yost eventually found his way back to photography, exhibiting in galleries, appearing in major media outlets and teaching, to this day, the art to middle school students. And yes, of course, 3DS Max software was used for the film.

Yost's co-director and music supervisor, George Daly, also has a long, colorful resume. After starting out as an A&R rep in the music industry, he went on to produce such artists as Janis Joplin and The Cars, as well as invent new technologies including The Moan Tone, an early electrical guitar processor.

[The Invisible Peak]