Cinema is the foundation of everything I do. I don’t think of myself as an “artist” in the traditional sense, but rather a collaborator, working with a team in an effort to create new techniques, methods or systems for solving difficult problems. As a visual effects artist and filmmaker, I have made films, written scripts, and created visual effects for feature films, games, and broadcast for more than thirty years.
After earning my degree in Cinema from San Francisco State University in 1992, I went to work for nearly a decade at Industrial Light & Magic, where I helped create 2D and 3D effects for movies such as Twister, The Mummy, Star Wars: The Special Edition(s) and 101 Dalmatians. A full list of my credits can be found on IMDb.
Over the course of my career, I have also worked for Warner Brothers, Tippett Studio, Weta Digital and MPC on numerous feature films including King Kong, Matrix: Revolutions, Hellboy, Constantine, and The Watchmen.
I served as Visual Effects Supervisor for the American artist, Matthew Barneyʼs Cremaster Cycle, De Lama Lamina, and Drawing Restraint 9 staring Bjork. I'm the director of the feature documentary film I Die Daily on the making of the Cremaster Cycle.
I am an active member of the Visual Effects Society (VES), creator and host of the podcast 8111 (Eighty-one Eleven), and co-host, producer, and editor of FX Guide's VFX Show podcast, both available for free online. I also serve as a member of ACM-SIGGRAPH, the Association for Computing Machinery's Special Interest Group on Computer Graphics and Interactive Techniques. I am the co-creator of the VCU 3D Mapping Color Software which you can read more about here.
I've had the good fortune to have worked with several leading artists and filmmakers including; George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, Woody Allen, Peter Jackson, the Wachowskis, Guillermo Del Toro, Matthew Barney, Madonna, Bjork, Richard Serra, Keith Edmier, Stephen Sommers, Robert Zemeckis, Barry Levinson, Francis Lawrence, & Zach Snyder.
Today I live on the East Coast and work as a visual effects supervisor, director, DP, and professor.
CG Garage host Chris Nichols (Chaos Group Labs) and I had a fun chat about my background and career at SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles back in July 2019. Give a listen below.
