Template:Realworld Adam "Mojo" Lebowitz of Foundation Imaging, was a computer graphics animation and CGI supervisor on that company's work for Star Trek: Voyager, Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and the first season of Star Trek: Enterprise. He has also worked on the Star Trek: The Motion Picture Director's Edition DVD, for which he was interviewed in its "Redirecting The Future" special feature. Lebowitz won an Emmy Award for his work on the Voyager episode "Dark Frontier", whereas he was previously nominated for the episode "Year of Hell, Part II".
Unlike most of his Foundation co-workers, Lebowitz opted no to follow them into the employ of Eden FX when Foundation went out of business after the first season of Enterprise, but to continue his work as an independent contractor. As such, Lebowitz shortly thereafter was yet to continue work on Star Trek, when he became the visual effects supervisor at Threshold Digital Research Labs for the Star Trek: The Experience movie Borg Invasion 4D.
While working on the episode VOY: "Relativity", Lebowitz hit upon the idea for what eventually became the successful Star Trek: Ships of the Line calendar series. Around the same time he also co-wrote the reference book, Star Trek: Starship Spotter. More recently, Lebowitz supervised the design of some of the starship models for the Star Trek: The Official Starships Collection partwork magazine.
The Ships of the Line calendars were a testbed by Lebowitz and colleague Robert Bonchune for the ultimately unrealized "Unseen Frontier" coffee table book, for which Lebowitz had hired aspiring CGI artist Ed Giddings build additional CGI models (the book was eventually scrapped due to a projected cover price which Pocket Books feared would be too high). Giddings went on to yet make contributions to the official Star Trek franchise. In hiring Giddings, Lebowitz became, alongside former Foundation colleague Doug Drexler, one of the few (former) Star Trek production staffers who granted budding CGI artists a chance to create work for official Star Trek print publications. Lebowitz had also granted the same opportunity to fellow Borg Invasion 4D digital artist Fabio Passaro.
Career outside Star Trek
A graduate of the School of Visual Arts, Lebowitz started his professional career in the motion picture industry in 1992, as he joined newly formed Foundation Imaging where he worked as a visual effects animator on the groundbreaking television series Babylon 5, as far as the then new technique of computer generated imagery (CGI) was concerned. Upon closure of Foundation in 2002, he was one of the few CGI staffers that did not follow his former Foundation co-workers into employment at Eden FX, the company that from then on was the sole CGI supplier for the remainder of the Star Trek television franchise. After having worked on the Borg Invasion 4D ride in 2004, he was employed by Zoic Studios to work on the first season of Ronald D. Moore's Battlestar Galactica franchise.
Between the first and second seasons he contributed to the science fiction movie Serenity in 2005 and then continued on Galactica through 2009 (he has the distinction of being the only Visual FX artist to stay with the series from the first episode to the last). He shared two Emmy nominations for his work on this series, one in 2005 and another in 2007 and won the latter nomination.
From 2009 onward, Lebowitz was employed by The Third Floor, Inc. as pre-visualization artist & stereoscopic supervisor. He contributed to Journey 2: The Mysterious Island, Battleship, Men in Black 3 (all three 2012) and Jack the Giant Slayer (2013). In 2012 he joined Persistence of Vision, working as a pre-visualization artist on the thriller Now You See Me, released in 2013.
In 2014, Lebowitz (along with CGI model maker Ed Giddings) created & supervised the photoreal illustrations for the Eaglemoss Publication Klingon Bird of Prey Owners' Workshop Manual. Following this effort, the duo continued creating content for Eaglemoss' line of Trek and Batman collectables.
Mojo now resides in Boston where he is seeking opportunities to further expand his career in media.
Emmy Awards
Emmy Award credits in the category "Outstanding Special Visual Effects for a Series":
- 1998 Emmy Award nomination for the episode "Year of Hell, Part II", shared with Eric Chauvin, Arthur Codron, Paul Hill, Koji Kuramura, Greg Rainoff, Mitch Suskin, and John M. Teska
- 1999 Emmy Award win for the episode "Dark Frontier", shared with Rob Bonchune, Elizabeth Castro, Arthur J. Codron, Dan Curry, Don Greenberg, Paul Hill, Ronald B. Moore, Mitch Suskin, Greg Rainoff, and John Teska
Bibliography
- "A Month in Hell", Sci-Fi & Fantasy Models, issue 32, September 1998, pp. 51-52 - Author
- "What's Going Down in MojoWorld?", Sci-Fi & Fantasy Models International, issue 41, October 1999, pp. 24-25 - Author
- Star Trek: Ships of the Line calendar series, 2001-2003 issues – Co-illustrator/Editor
- Star Trek: Starship Spotter – Co-illustrator
- Greater than the Sum – cover art with Alan Dingman
- Klingon Bird of Prey Owners' Workshop Manual – Illustrator
External links
- Template:IMDb-link
- Darth Mojo blog - Adam Lebowitz's personal blog
- Adam Lebowitz at Battlestar Wiki
- Adam "Mojo" Lebowitz at LinkedIn.com