About the Author

A lifelong obsessive consumer of pop culture and pulp escapisms, CoolVFX was born and schooled in Massachusetts. Upon completion of film school at Boston's Emerson college, he moved to California and began working in television and film and worked with many of his film school heroes including John Carpenter, George Romero, Ed Nuemeier, Peter Hyams,Gale Ann Hurd, Robert and Dennis Skotak, Richard Edlund and many others. He got to be involved with the creation of many films and television shows. His film credits include Demolition Man, Clear and Present Danger, Timecop, the Relic, Escape from LA, Executive Decision, and many others. In 1998 he began work on one of the major visual breakthrough films of the last two decades, The Matrix.
After 20 plus years working in the industry my life took a slight detour..he decided to return to school to earn his masters degree. He sold everything he owned, packed his car with what was left and moved back east to an area unfamilar to start the next big adventure...

Examining the nominees for best visual effects 2012

This year was an interesting period for film. Commercial blockbuster fare continued to rule the roost but the year end round up offered some surprising deep and adult fare. After nearly a year with non stop pummeling of superhero and noisy action fare, filmgoers were sated with some more dramatic offerings such as Zero dark thirty, Django Unchained, Hitchcock, Life of Pi, Beast of the Southern Wild and Silver Linings Playbook. As film years go, 2012 wasn't half bad as the nominees were announced, very little surprising or innovations seemed evident in the list of nominees.

The following are a list of nominees for Visual Effects

Life of Pi
Bill Westenhofer, Guillaume Rocheron, Erik-Jan De Boer and Donald R. Elliott

Marvel’s The Avengers
Janek Sirrs, Jeff White, Guy Williams and Dan Sudick

The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
Joe Letteri, Eric Saindon, David Clayton and R. Christopher White

Snow White and the Huntsman
Cedric Nicolas-Troyan, Philip Brennan, Neil Corbould and Michael Dawson

Prometheus
Richard Stammers, Trevor Wood, Charley Henley and Martin Hill

All the nominees chosen represented excellent work. Prometheus, which fended off harsh criticism from fans and critics alike for being needlessly confusing, was visually very interesting but nothing in the film stood out as innovative or oscar calibre. What was stand out in that film for me as a viewer was that the filmmaker used a lot of location photography to depict the alien landscape as opposed to creating virtual environments which are technically somewhat of a mixed bag.

Marvel's Avenger was also visually satisfying and the technicians finally got the CGI Hulk to work after two moderately successful attempts. Avengers is at times  overwhelming in its visual content. I didn't feel much of a connect to the characters as I was awash in the relentless tide of CGI debris and explosions and alien onslaught that seem to be on a continuous loop.

The Hobbit, also well made and entertaining, offered nothing new or engaging in terms of it's visuals. It didn't seem to me that the film artists at WETA digital had made any considerable leaps in tech advancement or even art direction since their last Middle Earth outing nearly 7 years ago. It just seemed like more of the same gritty, earthy nirvana from Peter Jackson...running from Goblins, running from Trolls, large sweeping vistas etc, etc...the brief glimpse of Smaug the Dragon at the film end does promise some interesting visuals in the future installments. Snow White similarly also seemed to me more of the same CG "off- the -shelf" software solution to visual effects. 

For me the winner in this lot was Life of Pi. It took chances with the visual material and manage to make the CG animals believable and menacing. As I was watching the film it occurred to me that animal trainers will no longer be needed for films (provided the producers have the money to afford the expense of quality CGI). My prediction is Life of Pi will take the award.

My experience/ Resume

It's a little difficult to write one's own resume while still maintaining a sense of anonymity. Since much of my professional life has been working on somewhat high profile entertainment works, it probably wouldn't be difficult, by listing my credentials, who I was.

I begin my career working for the famous Boston animation studio Olive Jar.  I have been involved in visual effects for the last 16 years and have work for most of the major film studios as well as several large and medium size visual effects firms. I have personally worked with over seven Academy Award winning visual effects supervisors and have extensive experience producing and coordinating large digital teams as well as organizing location shoots and working with first unit film crews. I believe my experience in modern and traditional animation techniques would make me an asset in an education environment looking to train professionals.

1990-1991 work for Nickelodeon on the television show "Salute your shorts" doing a variety of different jobs from art dept. to AD work to Production assistant

1991-92 Prop master/ art department assistant. worked on several commercials and low budget features in this capacity. this helped me learn a lot about how to do budgets and how a film or tv set worked

1992-1994 Video Image coordinator. This job was a little more complex. as i had some experience in animation and production it was somewhat easy for me to learn my way around but I had to earn a new science. My job mostly involved the coordinating and implementation of 24 frame per sec video and computer graphic and video imagery playback for feature films

1994-1997 VIFX video and visual effects coordinator. Worked on many films in this capacity and learned the incoming technology that is now industry standard

1997 TIG productions/ Visual effects producer for a big budget kevin Costner film

1998-199 Worked on the team at Manex that Created the visual effects for the Matrix

probably the most difficult job I have done in the last 20 years.

1999-2000 VFX producer for 4Ward vfx. This was the visual effects company founded by Robert and Dennis Skotak, best known as collaborators with James Cameron on "Galaxy of Terror", "Aliens" and "Terminator 2". the Skotaks were first trained at the now legendary roger Corman studios so , although they were perfectionists, they tended to worked with limited budgets to perform miracles. It was quite amazing to work with such clever and creative people.

2001-2011 Freelance visual effects producer.  This period was the most harrowing. A lot of up and downs. a lot of traveling including South Africa, Canada, Kazakhstan and Germany. The industry was in a constant state of flux and visual effects and production companies were going out of business left and right and many were laying off large portions of their staffs to survive.

It was an industry experience to work in Hollywood for the last two decades. In 2011 I decided that it was time to look into other careers and get new training. That is what led me to Quinnipiac. 

Why Tech?

The subject I will be covering over the next semester deals primarily in the examination of technology in entertainment and social media. This includes , but is not limited to
movies, television,web, comic books, literature and games. I am most interested and the convergence of art with technology. One of the mainstays of these two areas is CG technology. Having worked in film production for the last 20 years I have had the unique opportunity of witnessing the development of the use of computers for the advancement of entertainment and information distribution. Computers are used for everything now in entertainment including editing, animation, administration and photography

Behind the steely veneer of the the technology brought to bear in this field are some amazing creative minds who have advanced the trends into a massive movement. It didn't take long to see the changes. Films very quickly went from being photographed with film cameras to film resolution digital cameras. High end compositing using optical printers became a thing of the past. Movies could be made faster, cheaper with less risk and a more polished finish. The evolution of these tools to create visual media is a fascinating journey and my goal is to follow and comment on the continuing changes but to also recognize the history of the art form.