David is an accomplished and award-winning medical illustrator and animator whose pioneering career in digital animation spans 42 years. After ten years of illustrating surgical atlases by hand in pen & ink, David left his position as Senior Medical Illustrator at the Yale School of Medicine to found Advanced Imaging, Inc. (1984), the world’s first digital medical animation company and in 2000 co-founded XVIVO Scientific Animation.
David was Medical Director of the groundbreaking, award-winning film series ‘The Inner Life of the Cell’ for Harvard’s Department of Molecular and Cellular Biology.
David founded his current education-oriented company, e.mersion studios, LLC, in 2012 for client work and Emersionist, LLC for partnership projects.
It was not long before traditional medical illustrators outside the field of computer science began to adapt to the new technology. Making the transition to 3D after founding Advanced Imaging, the world’s first 3D medical animation company, David became the first traditional medical illustrator to fully embrace 3D CGI. His accomplishment is especially noteworthy because the transition from 2D to 3D visualization is not intuitive, due to 3D software’s steep learning curve, plus his need to self teach the Unix operating system. There were differences in design tools and terminology, and a very different workflow for bringing an idea from sketch to final visualization. Up to that point, 3D digital animation was aimed at synthesizing the rigid geometry of machines and buildings, not squishy organic shapes like organs, cells and molecules. David had to invent that visual vocabulary as he learned the constantly evolving software environment, while bootstrapping the market for digital medical animation from scratch. There were no courses online (there was barely ‘online’ at all) and YouTube was a science fiction conceit for the uncertain future.
Computer Graphics World has recognized Bolinsky as a pioneer who played a key role in revolutionizing medical illustration through his use of 3D CGI. “David Bolinsky created a muscle physiology animation for a videodisc on human physiology using Wavefront software running on a Silicon Graphics workstation. Computer graphics imagery such as this revolutionized medical illustration.” (Eastman, C. ‘From the Teapot to the Human: The Impact of 3D Computer Graphics on Medical Imaging and Medical Illustration’; Animation Journal. 2012; pp 30-50.)
“David Bolinsky was the first medical illustrator to make the (expensive) leap into 3-D computer animation production in 1984 when he founded Advanced Imaging.”(Mazierski, D. ‘History of Illustration’. Chapter 27: ‘Medical Illustration after Grey’s Anatomy: 1859 to the Present. From Pencils to Pixels’. In Press.)
A three time TED Speaker, David is passionate about bringing the power of visual learning to science education, through advances in interactive technologies and innovations in publishing.
Major clients include global corporations such as Merck, Genentech, Novartis, and Pfizer; Disney Imagineering (Kidney Transplants) and HBO (‘The Medicine Show’); museums such as the Smithsonian (‘Brain: The World Inside Your Head’), New York’s Museum of Natural History (Dance and Anatomy’), Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry (Interactive Heart Exhibit); DARPA; the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation and universities such as Yale, Johns Hopkins, Harvard and Oxford University Press.
“Collaborating with content specialists, we travel with our clients from script to screen. We are engaged with our partners to study how students best learn information in highly complex scientific topics. Our work is tuned to the expected audience; whether for kids attending a museum or medical students learning the complex pathways to coagulation, investors or medical professionals, we treat the aesthetic and scientific content with equal reverence, and always respect the viewers’ intelligence.”
Lately Bolinsky has expanded his technical repertoire to include Generative AI video creation. A recent Gen AI project included creating sixteen scenes from a Young Adult novel to create a feature film-style trailer to enhance the author’s ability to pitch the novel as a video series.
In production now is Bolinsky’s personal passion project, a deep dive into the cellular and molecular mechanisms of concussions and follow-on effects: ‘Invisible Injury – the Inner Life of a Neuron’.
