Publications 7

Making Solo: A Star Wars Story

Making Solo: A Star Wars Story

My book, ILM Presents: Making Solo A Star Wars Story is out and I got to sit down with the team at StarWars.com to chat a bit about the book. Excerpts from the interview below… “The first time we put the cast into hyperspace was really fun,” …

Trick Work

Trick Work

(Originally published in the March 2014 VFX issue of ICG Magazine) “What a vista opens before us at the very mention of trick-work! There is hardly a single fantastic idea which cannot be given existence upon the screen. The masterpieces of the …

Wrangling Waves

Wrangling Waves

Cortes Bank is a break 100 miles off the coast of California created by a giant underwater mountain that makes the water shallow enough to create breaking waves with 30-60 foot faces in the right conditions. Sean Collins, who runs surfline.com, is the master at predicting these waves and had just moved our timetable up...

Surf's Up Course at Siggraph

Surf's Up Course at Siggraph

On Monday, August 6th 2007, the Surf’s Up team presented a half day course detailing The Making of the Animated Documentary. If you couldn’t make the course, you can download the course notes [6 Mb PDF file].

From Mocap To Movie

From Mocap To Movie

Course # 28, SIGGRAPH 2005 Los Angeles, CA, USA Important Note: I am part way through reformatting these course notes from the original and the below is a work-in-progress with errors. In the meantime, please feel free to download the full course …

Renderman on Film: With Examples from Stuart Little

Renderman on Film: With Examples from Stuart Little

In 2002 I was invited back to present in the Renderman course. This time, I used examples from Stuart Little 2 and walked through the then-current visual effects and animation pipeline. This paper served as a general overview of the techniques of the …

Renderman Course: Fur in Stuart Little

Renderman Course: Fur in Stuart Little

In 2000, I was invited to help teach a Siggraph session on Renderman. I was able to present the work of many people at Sony Imageworks who helped bring our furry hero to life. Stuart Little was the first CG character to lead in a live-action movie, …