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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
My name is Freddy Chávez Olmos. I’m a Visual Effects Supervisor currently working at Barnstorm VFX in Vancouver. I also write and direct short films mostly in the horror and sci-fi genre.
I am a digital compositor from Madrid, Spain, who has been living in different countries and working in different studios in the recent years, and who is really passionate about the technology of VFX and the technical part of image manipulation and learning something new every day. I’m fascinated by the world of compositing and although I’m an artist I keep getting attracted to programming. I am currently working as a freelance senior compositor in Trixter (Munich).
Since I was a child, I have always been fascinated by photography, film and the magic of combining and manipulating images. Having decided early to live my passion and what I love, I studied a media degree at the University of Applied Sciences Lübeck, Germany and did a study abroad at the Auckland University of Technology in New Zealand where I gained a broad knowledge about media production.
In 2012 I obtained a Bachelor of Science in Information Technology and Design. I worked as a Nuke and Flame Compositor for 5 years and then switched to the technical side. Currently, I am employed as Pipeline TD at Pixomondo where I concentrate on the 2d pipeline.
In my spare time, I created my own software brand Cragl VFX Tools where I develop commercial and free plugins for Nuke. I have taught several Pluralsight courses and have written multiple technical papers about Python programming.
I didn't know the name at the time, but I always was a bit of a nerdy kid. I was into cartoons, video games, and fantastic worlds. I learned to use a computer and started playing with some graphics software before I learned to ride a bike. When I was 10, I wanted to become a "video game maker", but didn't quite know what it was. Grown-ups told me I could choose to learn programming or CG, so I started playing with both a little. Not knowing English at the time made it a bit trickier to pursue programming, so I went the CG route instead.
I started professionally as a compositor in 2008. Little by little I started including programming into my work day, and it now overtook the amount of compositing I do. I have been working for SPINVFX since late 2016, first as a lead compositor, then head of comp, and now head of 2D.
I am Falk Hofmann and a compositor for roughly a decade. Since a couple of years also TD and recently I joined RISE FX | Berlin as Compositing-Supervisor. Besides that, I like to play around with my Raspberry Pies, occasionally writing Android apps and be outside in the garden. A personal aim is to bring these three together and enjoy them all at once.
Originally from Clatskanie, Oregon, Miles Lauridsen is a VFX artist now living in Vancouver, BC. Currently a Compositing Supervisor at Scanline VFX, he's worked in various roles including dustbuster, matchmover, 3d generalist, title animator, and compositor within feature film over the last 13 years. He enjoys the problem solving process that VFX entails in the service of helping filmmakers tell their stories.
My name Mads Hagbarth Damsbo. I am a compositor, vfx technical director, pipeline technical director, occasionally supervisor at Nordisk Film - Shortcut (Copenhagen, Denmark). Now also a sparetime iOS app developer and with the release of the PointRender a Nuke developer as well. All along with my daily life as a husband and father of 2 wonderfulboys.
João is one of those rare people who is the trio of super talented, humble & incredibly inspiring all at the same time. His long and diverse career in VFX spans a variety of Commercials, TV and Film projects, and has taken him from his home country in Brazil, all the way to Canada, where he now works at Framestore Montréal.
I had the pleasure of working with João at Image Engine, where he shared some valuable lessons, and helped me along my never-ending journey towards becoming a better artist. He was gracious enough to share this insightful interview with me, which I'm excited to share with you!
Mark Joey Tang, known as "MJ", started working in visual effects in Hong Kong, circa 2003. Throughout his career, he has worked with a handful of different studios from RodeoFX to Atomic Fiction (now Method Studios), and is currently a Senior Compositor at ScanlineVFX in Montreal. I reached out to MJ after discovering his unique tools on his Facebook page (which you can find below), and asked about his career in VFX, including how he got into programming & creating tools for Nuke.