The driving force behind Zipheron is its founder Beau Janzen.  Janzen has forged for himself a unique background in education and animation production. Janzen has written, designed, and animated short educational videos for clients including PBS, NASA, Annenberg CPB, and General Motors.  His works have received awards at film festivals throughout the United States, Europe, Asia, and Australia.

For five years, Janzen worked with Kentucky Educational Television as the Instructional Computer Graphics Designer for their series of six nation-wide broadcast high school distance learning courses.  There, he created material for classes ranging in content from advanced math and science to German and Latin.  “It was an amazing learning experience” relates Janzen, “We had a remarkable feedback system with our technology, and it fostered a real atmosphere of experimentation.  This was first generation distance learning, and we knew that we had to reconsider everything.  In terms of lessons and graphics, we could try something new and get immediate feedback from the hundreds of students to see if we were effective.”

In 1995, Janzen took a position as lead animator and CG supervisor with Kleiser-Walczak in Los Angeles.  There, he had the opportunity to work on a wide range of projects ranging from feature films including 20th Century Fox's X-Men and X-Men 3, Universal Studios' groundbreaking ride attraction The Amazing Adventures of Spiderman, Phillip Glass and Robert Wilson's stereoscopic opera  Monsters of Grace, and numerous television commercials.  In 2000, Janzen worked with Frank Vitz Productions to create over fifteen minutes of animation for the WGBH series Evolution which premiered on PBS in the fall of 2001.

In 2002, Janzen was offered a position in Berlin, Germany as Guest Researcher at the Technische Universität DFG Sonderforschungsbereich 288 in Differential Geometry and Quantum Physics.  There, he collaborated with Dr. Konrad Polthier on the video Mesh.

Janzen's formal education includes a BS in Graphic Design with a minor in Educational Psychology and a MS in Instructional Systems Design with an emphasis in Cognitive Ergonomics.  He currently is a faculty member at the Art Institute of California, Los Angeles where he teaches mathematics and computer animation.

Janzen admits that as a student, math was his least favorite subject.  In hindsight, he now feels thankful for his struggles. “I feel very fortunate to have had problems in math as a student.  As a teacher, and as a filmmaker, I have the challenge of taking my audience on a journey.  If a teacher or filmmaker hasn’t taken a similar journey themselves, it’s much more difficult to draw in your audience.  Imagine the struggle to create a romantic movie if you’ve never really been in love, to tell a horror movie if you’ve never been afraid, or a comedy if you’ve never laughed.  Now, imagine the struggle to truly reach an audience who has trouble or lacks a passion for math, if as a teacher, you never shared in those struggles?  Obviously, it isn’t a prerequisite for a good teacher to have had troubles in school, but I feel fortunate that I intimately understand how the ideas in math can be misunderstood and appear irrelevant.  It’s that journey into understanding and seeing the personal relevance of these ideas that I want to give to my audience.”