Continue Reading "INTERVIEW: Jedediah Smith"Jedediah Smith has been burning it at both ends in VFX for 10 years. He’s worked as a Compositor, a VFX Supervisor and many roles in between. Self-taught since his origins in the wilderness of Alaska, he has a massive fascination for the intersection of art and technology. Playing with code, fiddling with cameras, building nodes to create pretty pictures… That’s the best quality time.
Continue Reading "INTERVIEW: Josh Parks"Josh Parks is a Senior Compositor at Important Looking Pirates. He’s worked in Film, TV and Advertising. Since starting in the industry, alongside compositing, Josh has been privately coaching students to VFX supervisors, as well as lecturing at universities.
Continue Reading "INTERVIEW: Thiago Porto"Thiago Porto is a VFX Supervisor, and Senior Flame & Nuke Artist for MPC Advertising in New York. He is also one of the leading forces behind researching Machine Learning for 2D-based applications in our industry.
Continue Reading "INTERVIEW: Pedro Andrade"My name’s Pedro Andrade and I’ve been working in VFX for around 10 years and out of a complete accident. I have a background in Mechanical Engineering and I effectively worked as one in different countries until I took a chance and left that field to pursue a career as a Music Producer in London – which I also did for a while. Then, in London in a sort of twist of fate, in a completely unplanned way, I came across with VFX, an industry in which I’ve been working as a 2D supervisor for some time now in companies like Milk VFX, Cinesite and more recently DNEG.
A couple of months ago, fuelled by the current pandemic situation, I’ve started a little project in the form of a live show on YouTube called ‘Comp Lair’.
Apart from that I love traveling (!!!), food, spending time with family and friends, playing and hearing music, holidays, etc.
Continue Reading "INTERVIEW: Geoffroy Givry"Hi, my name is Geoffroy Givry, I’ve been in the VFX industry since 2001, first as a Generalist and I quickly became a full-time Compositor around 2003. I’m a proud and dedicated husband and father of 3 wonderful children. I love looking after my family, my garden, cooking BBQs, chopping wood and building AI Drones. But most of all, my two real passions are learning (I’m addicted to video tutorials!) and in developing pipelines and intelligent workflows for the VFX industry, especially everything concerning remote work.
I created my own company in August 2019 after being at ILM for 5 years as Senior Comp, Comp TD and Comp Technical Lead. Now, I’m working remotely in the gorgeous countryside of Surrey in the UK, as a Visual Effects Supervisor, pipeline architect and senior compositor. As well, I am an Art Director and VFX Supervisor for Ubisoft on their game cinematics.
Continue Reading "INTERVIEW: Bernie Kimbacher, VFX Supervisor & Founder of Hive VFX."After graduating from Vancouver Film School I started my VFX career in 2007 at Image Engine in Vancouver where I worked for 8 years, with my last project being VFX Supervisor on Straight Outta Compton. I then went to OATS Studios and Umedia before returning to Image Engine again as VFX Supervisor on Pokemon: Detective Pikachu. After wrapping that one up I started my own business under Hive VFX using AWS.
Outside of geeking out at a computer, I enjoy anything in the outdoors, hiking, running, biking and skiing among others.
Continue Reading "INTERVIEW: Gen Camilleri, VFX Supervisor."My name is Gen (Genevieve Camilleri) and I recently finished working on my first feature film as a VFX Supervisor for Mill Film, Adelaide. I started my career 11 years ago in Melbourne, Australia and have since worked as a Senior compositor, Lead Compositor, Compositing Supervisor and DFX Supervisor for various studios such as ILM Vancouver, Animal Logic Sydney and Method Studios Montreal.
Outside of work, I enjoy spending my time outdoors doing anything from hiking, climbing to snowboarding.
Continue Reading "INTERVIEW: Ivan Busquets, Associate VFX Supervisor, ILM Vancouver."I started my VFX career 17 years ago, and since then I’ve worked for different studios in Barcelona, London, San Francisco and Vancouver. Currently, I work at ILM Vancouver as an Associate VFX Supervisor.
Outside of work, I enjoy photography in general, and astrophotography in particular, although I don’t get to practice those hobbies as much as I used to.
Continue Reading "INTERVIEW: Chris Van Dyck // Head of Studio, Crafty Apes, Vancouver"CVD VFX founder, Chris van Dyck is a Vancouver-based VFX Artist and Supervisor with over 16 years in the industry. He brings experience from some of the top studios around the world: WETA Digital, Industrial Light & Magic, Method, Rising Sun Pictures, Animal Logic, MPC and Prime Focus. Some of his most notable credits include: The Hobbit Trilogy, Warcraft, Thor 2, Life of Pi, TRON: Legacy, Harry Potter & the Half-Blood Prince, Iron Man, Frank Miller’s 300, Game of Thrones and Stranger Things.
Chris has conducted lectures for the VES, SIGGRAPH, and the Art Institute, been published by Digital Fusion on the topic of Digital Compositing, published by SIGGRAPH on the film industry in Vancouver and has taught Digital Compositing for over 7 years at the following schools: VanArts, Think Tank and Lost Boys.
As Head of Studio at Crafty Apes: Vancouver, he is passionate to grow a team focused on Quality of Work & Quality of Life.
Continue Reading "INTERVIEW: Ben Kent // Lead Research Engineer at Foundry"Hi, I’m Ben Kent and I’m a Lead Research Engineer at Foundry, as well as a screenwriter, producer and director.
I first joined Foundry in 2001 to work on the original Furnace suite of plug-ins, and I was one of the recipients of the 2007 Academy Award for Science and Engineering.
In 2011 I took a slight detour into the world of production and whilst making a number of shorts and adverts and doing a load of VFX work, I wrote, produced and directed my feature debut. Comedy horror Killer Weekend came out just this year, and so far has been licensed for distribution in over 15 countries.
At the beginning of 2018, with little left for me to do on the film, I returned to Foundry where I quickly remembered how much I loved both the company and the work. Now I lead the development of the NukeX research plugins and, more recently, the A.I.R (Artificial Intelligence Research) project.