3D Matte Paintings.

We have our work cut out for us on this film. We'll be burning the midnight oil to finish this one.

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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. I touched 7 of the hardest shots and we have a superb team doing roughly 50 shots.

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Compositing. The small, but highly talented team did roughly 70 shots. I did merely a handful.

Growth The Movie

Worked as Matte Painting Compositor. We spent about 1 hour per week actually compositing, the rest was getting free coffee and food, not to mention playing a little foosball and chess. In the economy of 2009 I couldn't complain! Rachel Zusser (MvA Matte Painting Production Supervisor) hooked up Daniel J. Brick and I with an incredible office in our new space for the hard work we provide to the group. We both have views of the beautiful campus at DreamWorks Animation of the koi pond, fountain, trees, flowers, and characters walking by. We can pull a cord to get full shade, 1/2 shade, or pure ambient light. I can't stand dark offices with terrible lighting. In the new age of LCD's glare is not as much of an issue as old school compositors think. I feel like I've arrived. Time to buy some gold! Did I mention we get bonuses?

I touched about 15 sequences, including the opening shot from logo, and ending shot to logo. It's DreamWorks Animation's first 3D Stereo film, supervised by Phil McNally (aka Captain 3D). I did painting as well.

The first few months developing the 3D Stereo pipeline was stressful, but once we got it down we hit our stride, and cranked out the sequences. The amount of work and requirements are increased for matte painting setups, breaking out layers, and compositing. We had to break out skies into grads, upper clouds, and lower clouds to accommodate stereo depth and parallax. As opposed to a mono film in traditional matte painting or visual effects you can't do as many 2D gags or comp cheats. The setup has to be a full 3D environment with all assets in world space blending together.

Fortune 500 - 100 Best Companies to Work for - #47

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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 show, sequence(s) 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, including Maya, Vue, Photoshop, unix, and a host of proprietary tools. We work with layout and 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 Lead Matte Painter, 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.

Variety - 'Kung Fu Panda' rules Annie Awards

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Worked as Matte Painting Compositor. Much like Jerry Seinfeld I am obsessed with Superman. Special thanks to Daniel J. Brick for teaching me everything I know at DreamWorks Animation.

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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 was my first Visual Effects Supervisor project I can honestly say I was proud of. It has roughly 40 all CG shots. Directed by Warren Fu. I supervised a team of 10 artists in LA and SF.

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Lighting, rendering, and compositing at Sony Pictures ImageWorks as Senior Technical Director. Everyone on the crew at SPI was fantastic to work with.

Sighting of Superman!

Superman Returns Shots

Worked at the former offices of Complete Pandemonium in San Francisco primarily as pre-viz animator, and promoted to Set Designer a few months after almost being fired for buying a massage chair (no joke). Production took place at C.O.R.E. Feature Animation in Toronto, Canada. Directed by Steve 'Spaz' Williams. Produced by Clint Goldman.

FANTASTIC FOUR (2005)

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.

Fantastic Four Shots

Lead Look and Lighting in Maya and XSI. This was a challenging show from an FX standpoint. Show was supervised 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 for rendering.

A Little Toaster Movie

Technical Director for Morgan Creek Studios working for Matte Painter Alp Altiner. Also worked with Martin Meunier. We accomplished the ending shot in the film in a very short amount of time.

I joined Giant Killer Robots in 2004 and worked on the opening city fly-through shot of Vancouver with Visual Effects Supervisor Mike Schmitt and other in-house artists. Mike used XSI for several blocks. I used Maya and Mental Ray for the first two blocks with high-rises. Andrew Dickinson did the transition portion. Kristen Borges provided a myriad of textures. Dori Arazi setup the traffic. And a few pitch hitters last minute helped make the shot happen. Jason Porter composited the shot in Shake. The schedule was very tight for delivery.

I worked at Digital Domain in 2003 for the lighting team. Digital Domain is a great place in Los Angeles for visual effects. And the fact they are 2 blocks from the beach doesn't hurt.

AFI Thesis film. Various matte painting compositing and visual effects for director Scott Leberecht. Short premiered Summer 2004.

PARAMILITARY CHRISTMAS (2002)

AFI Student film. One matte painting composite of snow falling with Santa's workshop in the distance. The workshop was not your average looking workshop, it had smoke pouring out of stacks and barbed wire in the foreground. Directed by Scott Leberecht. You will have a hard time finding this film. First year AFI students films stay locked in a vault and rarely see the light of day.

Last feature I worked on at Industrial Light and Magic. Worked with Ronn Brown on 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.

Lead Rebel Unit Technical Director on 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 an incredible miniature of the sphinx and plaza. I also did the first animatic 1 year prior to working on the real shot.

Also did  animatics for Hamunaptra collapsing.

Working with Scott Farrar was one of the most rewarding experiences. We were always laughing or crying, quite literally.

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 1899 (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 did the animatic and 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 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.

Animatics for Jeep and Motorcylce sequence with George Hull.

Animatics for training sequence with Alex Jaeger and Jonathan Harb.

SPAWN (1997)

I worked on animatics for motorcycle transformation and head transformation for Scott Leberecht and Steve "Spaz" Williams. Scott Leberecht, Corey Rosen, and I worked on a popular 2D short in the spirit of South Park and behind the scenes of dailies at ILM with Spaz called, "The Spirit of Spawn."

The Spirit of Spawn at ILM:

http://katzfx.blogspot.com/2009/01/spirit-of-spawn-at-ilm.html

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."

I joined Industrial Light and Magic in 1996 at the age of 22. Thanks to Jonathan Rothbart, Susan Davis, and Mark Moore.

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

Ironically, this is the first film I ever worked on, received a credit, but every film in visual effects since has not been as good of a movie. I hope the same doesn't happen in feature animation since working on Kung Fu Panda. Beginners luck perhaps.