Dan Maas of Maas Digital received an Emmy Award nomination for his animation featured in the PBS Nova documentary, MARS DEAD OR ALIVE.
The 26th Annual News and Documentary Emmy Award nominees were announced July 7 by the National Television Academy. The awards, recognizing outstanding achievement by individuals and programs broadcast during 2004, will be given Sept. 19, 2005, in New York City.
The Cornell University alumnus whose realistic Mars rover mission animations have been shown on television news programs the world over, was nominated in the Outstanding Individual Achievement in a Craft: Graphic and Artistic Design category. The documentary is also nominated in the Outstanding Science, Technology and Nature Programming category. PBS is rebroadcasting MARS DEAD OR ALIVE on July 12 at 8:00 pm.
Recently Maas created an animation charting NASA's Deep Impact spacecrafts trek from Cape Canaveral to its collision with the comet Tempel 1 in the early morning hours of July 4.
Founder of Maas Digital in Ithaca, he was hired to create the computerized animations on the strength of the widely heralded videos he developed for NASA's Mars rover missions.
Maas, who entered Cornell University at 16, has been making films and animations since elementary school. At Cornell he was a College Scholar, which gave him the opportunity to create his own curriculum. He studied mainly Math, Physics and Theater Arts.
He launched his first company, Digital Cinema, at 16 and interned with an animation studio in Los Angeles at 17. However, mostly he is self-taught.
Mark Davis of MDTV Productions near Boston directed and produced the documentary, which aired after the rover Spirit landed in January 2004. Davis used about 10 minutes of Maas' animation, including six minutes of new animation that took Maas three months to complete. "I was working at breakneck speed," Maas said.
Currently Maas (www.maasdigital.com) is developing animation for a forthcoming Walt Disney IMAX film about the Mars rover mission, scheduled to be released in early 2006.
