A dangerous idea
The ancient Pythagoreans crafted a philosophy based on using numbers to understand the cosmos. While this revolutionary way of thinking was brilliant, a member of the Pythagorean school, Hippasus, made a discovery that threw all of that into jeopardy.
Hippasus: A Cautionary Tale explores how the ancient Pythagoreans were able to develop a method for understanding the world around them by encoding it in a framework of numbers. Math became a key for unlocking the beauty of the universe. With this process for gaining knowledge, they built their philosophy and were able to secure a place for themselves as part of the greater cosmos. However, when one of their members inadvertently made a shocking discovery, he threw all of that into question.
This story serves as a parable for how we can gain knowledge and build our belief system, but how we must also be careful not to defend the security of our biases.
Hippasus: A Cautionary Tale is written,directed, and animated by Beau Janzen.
Beau Janzen brings a unique background in education and animation production to his work. Blending an artist's sense for storytelling and a novel perspective on pedagogy, Janzen produces work that is engaging, inspiring, and thought provoking.
He has over twenty five years of experience in visual effects production has served on such projects as Game of Thrones, Westworld, Stranger Things, The Walking Dead, Batman vs Superman, Man of Steel, the VFX Oscar-winning Life of Pi, and won an Emmy for his CG supervision on the show Gotham.
In addition, Janzen has a strong background in education and math with a Master’s Degree in Instructional Systems Design, over fifteen years of classroom experience teaching mathematics, and a position as guest researcher at Berlin’s Technische Universität Department of Special Research Projects in Differential Geometry and Quantum Mechanics.
He has been invited to speak at numerous mathematical conferences including The International Congress of Mathematicians workshop on Visualization and Mathematics, MATRIX x IMAGINARY at the Institut Henri Poincaré, the German Mathematical Society, the Austrian Mathematical Society, and the National Museum of Mathematics in New York.
Janzen currently serves as Education Lead for the VFX program at the Gnomon School for VFX and Animation for Film and Games which in 2026 was once again ranked the #1 Visual Effects school in the U.S. by the Rookies Awards.
A portfolio of more of his work is available here.
Hippasus: A Cautionary Tale highlights how I like to use computer animation as a tool for storytelling.
I’ve spent my career leveraging the power of 3D animation to reify abstract concepts in mathematics and to give them a physicality that shows off their elegant beauty. With this short, I was able to take this visual storytelling beyond the math itself, and into the broader context behind the ideas. I enjoyed the opportunity to build a visual language to convey the key concepts in the story: building and protecting a belief system.
To help define the historical time and place for the story, I researched and drew upon design elements that would be contemporary to the Ionian Greeks. I developed a look for the characters influenced by sources including red-figure pottery and frescos, and designed a methodology for generating this style in a 3D animation pipeline. While the figures are modeled, animated, and lit in 3D, they needed to retain the silhouette-driven, two-dimensional feel. The final process involved hand painting textures for each scene, generating several layers of stylized 3D renders, and post processing the layers to achieve the final look.
Incorporating these design elements to portray the characters not only grounds them in their own time and place, but also serves as thematic reinforcements.
For instance, I used Greek mosaic patterns to depict elements in the environment around the Pythagoreans as an ongoing visual leitmotif. This ancient process of breaking an image or a design into a pattern of individual discrete tiles reflects the Pythagorean philosophy of a cosmos made of discrete, “rational” elements.
I also put particular attention to visual transitions to help smoothly evolve the train of thought. All these elements work in concert to bolster the story, from broader color and staging to more subtle visual semiotics. If I can draw in a viewer and they continue to study the visuals, I want to reward them with new things to find the further they dig.
After the success of my TikTok channel @reason4math, I wanted to return to longer form storytelling. Limited to a one to two minute story, it was difficult to explore the broader context of these ideas and the larger thesis of how we think and reason.
I find the ideas in math and science, particularly when viewed through an historical lens, to be an amazing catalyst for storytelling. There’s power in seeing how we learned the art of discovery and how different people around the world crafted diverse methods to answer the same questions and grappled with the profound challenge of understanding the world around us and how we as individuals fit into it.
And, mathematics gives us a clean lens for diving into these complex, difficult topics. As with any good story, the missteps and failures along the way give it color and guide the way forward. Discovery becomes relatable and intimate; understanding hits on an emotional level.
With these stories, I want the opportunity to do what I believe is one of the most powerful things you can do as a storyteller: help an audience see things in a new way and alter their perception.
Screening Updates
Hippasus: A Cautionary Tale is currently on the film festival circuit. Check back here for regular updates. Or, subscribe below for email updates. Meanwhile, you can see additional work here.