Scott Squires grew up in Indiana. As a kid he built his own microscope and was fascinated with bugs and ants. He worked for the local paper as a photographer in high school and was always interested in filmmaking. He travelled out to California shortly after high school and would up with a job opportunity working on Close Encounters of the Third Kind where he helped develop the “cloud tank”.
Scott worked at ILM for 20 years where he served as Visual Effects Supervisor and directed multiple commercials and ride films. Scott was also the ILM CTO during the transition to digital.
He has had 3 Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Nominations for Visual Effects - The Mask, Dragonheart, & The Phantom Menace. He also received an Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Scientific and Engineering Award for Pioneering Work in Film Input Scanning.
For the last 4 years, he Co-Founded and was CTO as well as Creative Director at Pixvana, a company specializing in making cloud tools to create the highest quality 360-degree videos for interactive VR use. Scott directed several special VR projects including The Play for the Holodome at the Seattle MPOP.
He has co-founded and helped run 3 companies: a visual effects company (Dream Quest– later sold to Disney), a software company based on the Commotion roto and paint software Scott wrote in C++ (Puffin Designs – later sold to Avid), and a virtual reality company (Pixvana) with complete cloud processing and streaming.
Squires is a member of the Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences and is a Visual Effects Society Fellow. He is a Director of Photography in the International Cinematographers Guild. He was a co-editor and writer on the Visual Effects Handbook and holds 3 patents for special video processes.
Scott’s boundless curiosity and enthusiasm for creative problem solving has propelled him forward throughout his life and made him an industry pioneer of the highest order. His kind and quiet unflappable demeanor, his willingness to share, and his overall good nature make him unique among luminaries of visual effects. It was a real honor and pleasure to chat with Scott about his career, past, present, and future.
