I will be working on this film in 2009. Setup the Matte Painting Compositing pipeline working with our Matte Painting Technical Director. I did some development tests in Vue. Provided sequence breakdowns for production. Worked on 3 sequences so far.

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Currently working as Matte Painting Compositor. We spend about 1 hour per week actually compositing, the rest is getting free coffee and food, not to mention playing a little foosball.

By the time we are done I will have touched about 15 sequences. It's DreamWorks Animation's first venture into 3D Stereo. I even did some painting.

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Worked on 30 sequences as Lead Matte Painting Compositor. A Matte Painting Compositor at DreamWorks Animation does more than compositing. We setup the sequence for matte painting, cyc's, individual shots, provide modeling, layout, projections, UVs, touch-ups, rendering, and compositing. We have to know a lot of software and techniques, including Maya, Vue, Photoshop, unix, proprietary scripts, lighting, rendering, and compositing. We work with lighting for final sequence and shot integration. 

One of my favorite sequences I've ever worked on is where Oogway (Old wise turtle) during magical night is taken away by peach tree petals. I love the emotion in that scene. David Bailey was the primary painter. He is the most organized and nicest guys I've ever worked with.

A favorite shot of mine was one I worked on with Max Boas (Vis Dev Artist). It's the wooshi finger hold shot where the entire valley is engulfed by chi energy light as the camera quickly pulls back. The shot was submitted to the Visual Effects Society for a possible award. 

The department was pushed to deliver an epic amount of matte paintings. Almost every single exterior background in the film is a matte painting.

Our Matte Painting Supervisor, Scott Brisbane, generated a library of rendered elements in Vue the painters used throughout the film as source elements.

It's great to work on a film that was so well received and has emotional resonance.

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Worked as Matte Painting Compositor. Much like Jerry Seinfeld I am obsessed with Superman and cereal.

Special thanks to Dan Brick for teaching me everything I know at DreamWorks Animation.

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Visual Effects Supervisor for Scott Leberecht's directorial debut. The goal for Midnight Son is for the audience to not know there is visual effects. Shooting wrapped in Summer 2007.

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A cinematic interpretation of The Strokes hit song "YOU ONLY LIVE ONCE" and tribute to Stanley Kubrick's "2001, A Space Odyssey." This is my first Visual Effects Supervisor project I can honestly say I am proud of. It has roughly 40 all CG shots. Directed by Warren Fu.

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Lighting, rendering, and compositing at Sony Pictures Imageworks as Senior Technical Director. Congratulations to Superman Returns for being nominated for an Academy Award in the Best Visual Effects category. Everyone on the crew at SPI was fantastic to work with.

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FANTASTIC FOUR

Provided Environment Lead Look and Lighting for an all CG shot in Maya and XSI. Supervised a full time assistant. A team of 5 artists worked on the shot. Approximately 400 layers made up the shot utilizing every CG technique Giant Killer Robots (GKR) uses. I also teamed up with Kent Matheson (Digital Matte Painter) on two challenging trailer shots. Giancarlo Lari (Digital Effects Supervisor) came on-board early on to provide pre-viz for a major sequence in the film and stayed to supervise that sequence. GKR's three owners and supervisors worked on the show. One of the three, Peter Oberdorfer (Visual Effects Supervisor) was on-location for six months. GKR gathered quite a team of industry talent for this film. Fortunately for GKR several artists and programmers from ESC Entertainment ended up working on the feature.

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Lead Look and Lighting in Maya and XSI. This was a challenging show from an FX standpoint. Show was led by Mike Schmitt. I was fortunate to be able to be on the show early on and help establish a Maya pipeline. For several shots there was a particular effect we couldn't render efficiently with Maya and Mental Ray. So we used XSI with the rapid motion blur rendering.

A Little Toaster Movie

Various visual effects and character work. For one shot I teamed up with FX veteran Thomas Hutchinson on a shot that ended up in the trailer. Hutch is a great guy to work with, a true professional. Show was led by John Vegher.

Last feature I worked on at Industrial Light and Magic. Assisted Ronn Brown with digital ships and compositing on two 3D matte paintings.

Visual FX shot of rocket taking off from silo in Tommy Lee Jones' flash back scene. Various shots in ending sequence including matte painting of rooftop over Manhattan, Statue of Liberty neuralyzing New York, and animatic of pullback from locker revealing aliens.

Opening sequence including Naboo Cruiser coming out of the fog and lands on platform with Naboo Starfighter. Modeled and Textured Coruscant airbus. Shot of Padme Starfighter's heading toward Genosis in space.

Worked on digital matte paintings, fx shots, and set extensions. Built two environments including Temple of Luxor/Karnak and Philae.

Modeled REMO (Resupply Module) and ERV (Earth Return Vehicle) hard surface models using John Goodson's miniatures for model and paint reference. Textured REMO with the assistance of Dawn Matheson and final texture tweaks by Shadi Almassizadeh, Erich Ippen, and Billy Brooks. Textured ERV with final textures done by Colie Wertz. 

Generated many layers of elements for ERV, bezel, window, and astronauts for the second to last shot in the film where the camera pushes into the window from space to see 3 astronauts inside peering out. Tom Rosseter ran a final composite of the elements and Andrew Hardaway worked on the CG planet and other Martian Ship in the background. Lorne Peterson built a large scale 4 foot section of the window area used as hires camera map texture source onto CG geometry.

I worked with Brian Flora on the Naboo Theed Queen's Palace establishing matte painting shots. I digitally modeled the palace, little city buildings, and animated the birds. Salt was shot on stage for the waterfalls and Brian Flora tied it all together with his beautiful camera mapped matte painting elements. 

I also generated matte paintings and environments for the pod race. Worked on exterior Jedi council chamber establishing shot with two ships flying towards tower in daylight. Created blasters for about 30 shots, graphical screens in about 20, and lots of congested traffic in the skies for Coruscant with Chris Stillman.
 

I worked on the opening shot of The Mummy with the pyramids, sphinx, plaza and a myriad of green screen/blue screen film people elements. 3 months in the making with many people and departments involved, most notably Rick Rische, Scott Farrar, Alex Laurant, Scott Frankel, Erich Ippen, Josh Pines, Diane Franey, Kim Marks, and Ben Snow. Barbara Affonso's modeling crew built and incredible miniature of the sphinx and plaza. I also did the first animatic 1 year prior to working on the real shot.

Worked on animatics for Hamunaptra collapsing.

I worked on the last shot in the film with Shadi Almassizzadeh, Jonathan Harb, and Jonathan Rothbart where Johnny Depp and Christina Ricci get out of  a carriage and turn towards New York in 1799 (It's actually a plate of London) while it's snowing.  The line Depp says in the carriage is appropriate for the release date of the film, "Just in time for the turn of the century." I modeled the buildings that are in the left beyond the courtyard.  I didn't expect a credit on Sleepy Hollow, but low and behold there it was!

I worked with Brian Flora once again on a shot of a frog (POV) free falling into a skylight of a house. I helped with the 3D aspects of the matte painting.

Animatics for 'Messiah' space vehicle heading towards comet for Alex Jaeger, Bill George, and Scott Farrar.

Headquarter graphical screen concepts for Art Director David Nakabayashi. Created After Effects film resolution animation to be compositied by flame inferno for final shots. Animatics for various digital matte paintings. 

Animatics for Jeep and Motorcylce sequence with George Hull.

Animatics for training sequence with Alex Jaeger and Jonathan Harb.

I joined Industrial Light and Magic in the Fall of 1996. I worked on animatics for motorcycle transformation and head transformation for Scott Leberecht and Steve "Spaz" Williams. Scott, Corey Rosen, and I worked on a popular 2D short called, "The Spirit of Spawn." Download and take a look at The Spirit of Spawn at http://louiskatz.com/Comedy/ A few years later we would team up again, this time with Jim Smentowski doing most of the FX, for a short entitled, "The Spirit of Sleepy Hollow."