CG Garage

While at FMX, I had the opportunity to visit Luxx Studios, an interesting small studio that does some really great Visual Effects work. I sat down with Andrea Block and Christian Haas in their very warm and inviting studio to talk about their work. Besides the work on White House Down and Grand Budapest Hotel, we also talked about the feature animation that they are producing called Manou the Swift. They talk about their inspiration in making the film, as well as what it takes to get something like this to happen.

Paul Debevec's contributions to the CG field are well known. As the Chief Visual Officer at University of Southern California's Institute of Creative Technology, he has broken ground with technology in many different ways for over 18 years. He may in fact be the godfather of Image Based Lighting, and probably the person that enabled HDR environment lighting to be as essential as most people consider it to be today. In doing so, his team help create a variety of Light stages, which over time also became high res facial scanners. They even used this technology to scan the President of the United States. He is also a member of the Digital Human League, which is why ICT helped provide us with the data that we needed to get our Wikihuman project started.

We recorded this podcast while at FMX in Stuttgart. We had a great conversation with Jörn Großhans a VFX Supervisor and Christian Zilliken a CG Supervisor at Mackevision. They talk about what it was like to start a VFX department there and all the amazing work they did on Game Of Thrones Season 4 and 5. You will also hear a bit from Kian Saemian who is the Business Development Manager.

Allan and I both started our podcasts around the same time. And while he and I have similar audiences, history, and friends, we were inspired by different motivations. At the age of 33, Allan has been doing visual effects professionally for 20 years. Besides his strong drive, he feels a strong need to give back to the community through his new mentorship program. I had a great time talking to Allan, and I have a strong feeling that we will be joining forces a lot more when it comes to supporting our community.

This week we talk to Ben West, a Creative Director at Framestore, and Director. His unique and interesting upbringing, combined with his strong creative education in both Architecture and Film School, led him to create interesting projects such as Fugu and Tako. Based on it's success, Ben has launched a kickstarter project to expand the story into a graphic novel form. He tells us about his past work, his passion for CG and VFX, and his creative process.

Most people that work in Visual Effects have a story about a person that helped get them in. For me, that person is Eric Hanson. In fact, for a long time he helped a number of people make the transition from Architecture to VFX. He has a long history in VFX, and continues to be a strong advocate in it's education as an associate professor of practice at University of Southern California. Greg Downing and Eric founded xRez in 2006, which has taken extremely high resolution photography and applied it to a myriad of uses. We discuss his career history and find out about some of the very interesting projects that he has been involved in recently.

Scott Ross is an extremely important person in the world of Visual Effects. He was the general manager at ILM when they started to go digital. He also founded Digital Domain with James Cameron and Stan Winston. He later made great efforts to be an advocate for the visual effects industry based on his strong knowledge of how the business is run. Most recently, he has become an ambassador for Trojan Horse was a Unicorn, bringing world class speakers to that event. We speak about his long and fascinating history, as well as what we each think is wrong with and how to fix the issues surrounding the world of VFX today.

Jonathan Litt has a long history in the world of VFX. We cover a large number of subjects in the podcast with Jon. From his first job at ILM, his work on the Matrix series, digital humans at Digital Domain, we even dive into his new passion for virtual reality. Jon offers insight into every part of the process.

How often to you hear people say: "It was so much better in the old days of special effects, now it is just all done on computers." There is a perception that VFX is easy, and that we, the artists, simply push a few buttons and it is all done. One of the places I often hear this is a place I actually have a huge respect for: the Nerdist podcast. I'd like to call on our listeners to listen to this podcast, then help us let Nerdist know, as follow nerds, we need their help to teach the world to #RespectVFX.

We recorded this podcast while in San Jose California during the GPU Technology Conference. Sponsored by NVIDIA, the conference is made for developers that are advancing development on the GPU with CUDA. From Deep Learning to Raytracing, the conference covers a lot of different subjects. I went there with several of our developers from our main office in Sofia, including Vlado and Boris, who I did this podcast with. While you probably know who Vlado is, Boris is our product manager in charge of V-Ray Cloud and V-Ray App SDK. We spent the podcast talking GPU development, V-Ray in Motionbuilder, Kevin Margo's CONSTRUCT, Cloud rendering, and other technology.