Anthony is a concept artist and matte painter working in the VFX and Games industry. With 10 years of production experience, he has worked on feature films, commercials, TV and AAA game cinematics.
He currently works as a Senior Artist at Blizzard Entertainment contributing to the award-winning Cinematics team. His work can be seen in World of Warcraft: Warlords of Draenor, StarCraft II: Legacy of the Void and Diablo III. His most recent work has been on the animated shorts from Blizzard’s smash hit game Overwatch.
He has taught at the CGMA Master Academy for many years covering matte painting techniques for production and concept art. His topics cover the core elements of image creation; composition and staging, values, lighting, color, mood, and form. He also covers 3D techniques in concept art and production to add realism and believability.
Currently Kris Costa is a Creature Modeling Lead at Industrial Light & Magic, contributing to ILM’s blockbusters for the past 10 years.
Award winning Brazilian CG artist, Kris had participated as character animator, texture artist and/or digital modeler in productions such as Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Kong: Skull Island, Warcraft: The Beginning, The Avengers, Transformers 2, 3, 4 and 5, Pacific Rim, Rango, Pan’s Labyrinth among others. His tools of choice are ZBrush, Maya,
Arnold and Photoshop. Kris had won the 3D Grand Prize in two of the CGTalk’s Challenges “MachineFlesh” and “Master and Servant”, the biggest online CG challenges of this kind. He used ZBrush extensively in both challenges.
Kris “Antropus” Costa have his works,texts and interviews published in several websites, books and magazines.
See Kris’ personal sites:
– https://www.instagram.com/theantropus/
– https://www.artstation.com/artist/kriscosta
– https://www.facebook.com/pages/Antropus/223451400174
– http://www.antropus.com
2017 – Transformers: The Last Knight (senior modeler: ILM)
2017 – Kong: Skull Island (creature model supervisor: ILM)
2016 – Warcraft: The Beginning (senior creature modeler: ILM)
2015 – The Revenant (senior digital artist: ILM)
2015 – Star Wars: The Force Awakens (senior creature modeler: ILM)
2015 – Ant-Man (senior digital artist: ILM)
2015 – Jurassic World (senior digital artist: ILM)
2015 – Avengers: Age of Ultron (senior digital artist: ILM)
2014 – Transformers: Age of Extinction (senior digital artist: ILM)
2014 – Noah (senior creature modeler: ILM)
2013 – Pacific Rim (digital artist: Industrial Light & Magic)
2012 – The Avengers (senior creature modeler: ILM)
2011 – Cowboys & Aliens (senior digital artist: ILM – uncredited)
2011 – Transformers: Dark of the Moon (digital models and simulations: Industrial Light & Magic)
2011 – Super 8 (digital artist: ILM – uncredited)
2011 – Rango (senior creature modeler: ILM)
2009 – Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (senior modeler: ILM)
2009 – Star Wars: The Clone Wars (TV Series) Blue Shadow Virus (2009) … (senior modeler – as Kris Costa)
2007 – The Mist (creature animator: CafeFX) / (creature modeler: CafeFX) / (texture artist: CafeFX)
2007 – Evan Almighty (character animator: CafeFX)
2007 – Lucifer (Short) (modeling and texturing)
2006 – Snakes on a Plane (texture artist: CafeFX – as Kris Costa)
2006 – Barnyard (character animator)
2006 – Pan’s Labyrinth (character animator and rigger: CafeFX – as Kris Costa) / (texture artist: CafeFX)
2005 – Zathura: A Space Adventure (modeler: CafeFX – uncredited) / (texture artist: CafeFX – uncredited)
Ian is a concept artist/illustrator. He spent over 20 years working in the video game industry as lead concept artist and assistant art director on the bestselling Grand Theft Auto series.
Now freelance and working mainly in visual development for film, his recent clients include 20th Century Fox, Paramount, Warner Bros and Sony Pictures.
Peter de Sève’s work spans three decades and various media, including magazines, books, print and television advertising, animated feature films and magazines. He is perhaps best recognized for his many covers for The New Yorker magazine and his character designs for the blockbuster “Ice Age” franchise. (Its Scrat character is a veritable international celebrity).
De Sève has also contributed to such films as “Mulan,” “A Bug’s Life,” “Arthur Christmas” and “Finding Nemo” among others.
Most recently, de Sève was the lead character designer for Dreamworks recently canceled animated feature “Larrikins” and for Netflix’s highly acclaimed “The Little Prince.”
De Sève’s many distinctions include the prestigious Hamilton King Award from the Society of Illustrators, a Clio Award for a Nike television commercial and a Daytime Emmy Award for best character design in a daytime television show. Last year, he was inducted into the Society of Illustrator’s Hall of Fame, that organization’s highest honor.
With nearly 20 years experience and creative leadership in blockbuster films, television, and games, HALON Founder Daniel Gregoire has overseen hundreds of high profile projects including War of the Worlds, Kung Fu Panda, Spider-Man 3, Life of Pi, Birdman or (The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance), Jurassic World, The Hunger Games, Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, Alice Through the Looking Glass, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Deepwater Horizon, Logan, and Kong: Skull Island.
A pioneer in his field, Daniel himself has been the Previs Supervisor for many of the most exciting motion picture directors in the industry including J.J. Abrams, George Lucas, Jon Favreau, M. Night Shyamalan, Michael Mann, Baz Luhrmann, and Steven Spielberg.
Beginning his career with JAK Films at Skywalker Ranch, Daniel collaborated with Lucas as Previs Supervisor on Star Wars: Episode II – Attack of the Clones, Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith, and the George Lucas Director’s Cut of THX 1138. In 2003 Gregoire established HALON, a dedicated Previs studio in Los Angeles and cultivated creative partnerships with such companies as DreamWorks Animation, Paramount, Universal, Apple, AMD, The Mill, Method, NBC, Disney and many more. Daniel has more recently directed real-time video game cinematics for the award-winning Evolve, Ubisoft’s E3 announcement trailer for The Division, and XCOM 2.
The animatics Director for the iconic Fox series Cosmos: A Spacetime Odyssey, he has also directed the virtual reality experiences FIRST and Vanuatu Dreams for his venture MATTERvr. Currently serving on the executive board for BAFTA’s VR committee, Daniel continues to speak internationally on the intersection of storytelling and technology.
Bastien Lecouffe Deharme was born on the shores of Brittany (France) at the beginning of the eighties. His artwork evolves at the crossroad of modern and ancient myths and legends, forgotten tales and tragedies. Bastien creates dark and symbolic pictures, blending a contrast of beauty and decadence.
Bastien’s traditional and digital work can be seen in publications and exhibitions worldwide, including the cover of the emblematic Spectrum Fantastic Art book, Beautiful Bizarre Magazine, ImagineFX, SFXMagazine, etc.
Today, Bastien lives in the USA and works as a freelance artist for companies such as Wizards of the Coast, Hasbro, National Geographic, Adobe, Random House, Penguin Books, Harper Collins, Orbit books, Applibot, Riot Games and many others.
His work is represented by the NYC agency Shannon Associates.
Carter Goodrich began his career as a freelance illustrator in 1983, working from a shared studio with fellow illustrator Buck Lewis in New York City. His book and editorial work eventually led to twenty-one published New Yorker covers, and counting, as well as an invitation to work as a character designer for DreamWork’s first animated film, “Prince of Egypt”, in 1995.
Shortly after completing work for that film, Carter moved to Los Angeles where he continued to contribute to various feature animated films as a freelance character designer.
Some of those films include, “Finding Nemo”, “Monsters Inc.”, “Shrek”, “Spirit”, “Sinbad”, “Open Season” as art director of character design, “Despicable Me” as lead character designer, “Hotel Transylvania”, “The Croods” as lead character designer, “Ratatouille” as lead character designer, and “Brave” as lead character designer.
His work on these films resulted in six ASIFA Annie Award nominations for best character design in a feature animated film, winning the Annie in 2007 for “Ratatouille”, and again in 2014 for “The Croods”. Of the films he’s worked on, four have gone on to win Academy Awards.
In addition to his earlier illustrated books, “Nutcracker” (1987) and “A Christmas Carol” (1997), Carter has written and illustrated “A Creature Was Stirring” (2006 Simon & Schuster) “The Hermit Crab” (2009 Simon & Schuster) “Say Hello to Zorro” (2011 Simon & Schuster) Zorro Gets an Outfit” (Simon & Schuster) and “Mister Bud Wears the Cone” (2014 Simon & Schuster).
His latest book, “We Forgot Brock!” (2015 Simon & Schuster) is currently being developed as a feature animated movie. In addition to working on various movies, Carter is presently working on his next book, “Nobody Hugs a Cactus”, also with Simon & Schuster, as well as a personal project entitled “Western”.
Maggie attended MIT for a BSci in Computer Science and Electrical Engineering, and worked at places like Pixar, Industrial Light and Magic (ILM), Microsoft (343 Industries for Halo 4 and Halo 5), Microsoft HoloLens, and NVIDIA.
Currently, she works in Lucasfilm’s ILMxLAB Advanced Development Group as the Content Pipeline Lead, having previously served as the Technical Program Manager for the Lucasfilm/ Magic Leap collaboration. She has experience in both offline and real-time projects, as an engineer and artist focusing on lighting and FX – her IMDb page
She has previously spoken at the Visual Effects Society (about how professionals can make the jump from film VFX to games to VR/AR/MR); MIT Women’s Leadership Conference about her unconventional career path; she.codes event at Pasadena City College; and wrote an op-ed article about entrepreneurship for the Korea Times newspaper.
From engineering at MIT, to starting an MFA at Academy of Art, to currently pursuing a Masters in Liberal Arts in Management at Harvard, she can offer insights and share stories of her academic and professional career thus far.
Goro Fujita is an Art Director, illustrator and visual development artist based in the Bay Area California.
After graduating “The German Film School for digital production” near Berlin in 2005 majoring in 3D animation he started working as a freelance character animator and visual development artist for various companies in Germany.
In 2008 he joined DreamWorks Animation as a visual development artist and worked on Merry Madagascar, Megamind, Madagascar 3, Penguins of Madagascar and Boss Baby. He left DreamWorks in 2015 and joined Oculus Story Studio in San Francisco where he art directed the Emmy Award winning VR experience “Henry”. Goro is also known for pioneering art in VR using tools like Quill and Medium.
He created the first ever animated Quillustration called “A moment in time” (see above)
In 2017 he joined Facebook Social VR to continue the development on Quill and to introduce the world to Art in VR.
Allan McKay is an award winning Visual Effects Supervisor and Technical Director in Hollywood with over 20 years experience having worked for many leading studios – including ILM, Blur Studio, Psyop, Frantic Films, Pixomondo and Ubisoft, amongst others. Allan has contributed to over 30 Films and Games including Star Trek Into Darkness, Flight, Superman Returns, 2012, The Last Airbender, Daybreakers, Transformers 3 and Beautiful Creatures as well as Halo and Bioshock. More recent projects include the feature length cinematics for Halo 10th anniversary, Denzel Washington’s movie the Equalizer, as well as vfxsupervisor on Destiny.
Allan works closely with Autodesk presenting and contributing to their Media and Entertainment products Maya and 3D Studio Max. He also specializes in dynamics, fluid simulations (water, fire, smoke), digital demolition and complex particle simulations. He has courses running with Digital Tutors, CG Society, Gnomon and FXPHD as well as recently launching his own course series Technical Director Transformation.
Allan was presented the Max Master award by Autodesk in 2007 and has earned, or been nominated for other awards including an Oscar and an Emmy to name a few. In addition to holding over 100 workshops and master classes at events all over the world
Allan has delivered keynotes, workshops and lectures to combined audiences of over 20,000 people. You can find out more about Allan by tuning in to his podcast The Allan McKay Podcast, which focuses on interviewing many of the leaders in the vfx industry from studios such as Weta, Pixar and ILM as well as practical how to episodes on furthering your career. You can find The Allan McKay podcast is typically ranked #5 on iTunes.
Marc Simonetti (born in 1977 in France) is a French concept artist/ illustrator. Best known for his work on GRR Martin’s books “A song of Ice and Fire”, and his Iron throne, he’s also illustrated some of the most well known fantasy and SciFi novels, such as the Discworld by Terry Pratchett, The Royal Assassin trilogy by Robin Hobb, Terry Goodkind’s “Sword of truth”, or Dune Saga by Frank Herbert
He’s also worked for many video games companies such as Activision, ubisoft, Magic The Gathering, EA, Square Enix and King Isle Entertainment. He’s just released an art book “coverama”, and is currently working on several projects such as long feature movies, and doing some concept art for video games, as a freelancer.
Marc has recently worked on Valerian and the City of Thousands Planets, a movie directed by Luc Besson,on the environments, vehicles, characters, props and weapons during 10 months. He’s currently on System Schock 3 Video Game and on several upcoming feature films
Art Director of Assassin’s Creed. Sales for this game only are estimated at around 80 million. Raphaël Lacoste was the Art Director of Ubisoft for games like Prince of Persia and Assassin’s Creed. He won a VES Award in February 2006 for his work on “Two Thrones” from Prince of Persia.
After this experience, Raphael worked as a Matte Painter and Senior Concept Artist on movies like Terminator Salvation, Journey to the Center of the Earth, Death Race, Immortals 2011, Repo Men, and Jupiter Ascending. In 2009, Raphael returned to the Video Game industry as a Senior Art Director for Electronic Arts Montreal.Today, he is the Art Director for the Assassin’s Creed games for Ubisoft.
John Nevarez has been an artist within the animation industry for over 20 years. First working at Disney Television as a storyboard revisionist and storyboard artist on such shows as Pepper Ann and Kim Possible, where he then transitioned over as a designer for DisneyToons, where he worked on Tinkerbell, Kronk’s New Groove and Brother Bear 2.
For 5 years, John worked at Pixar Animation Studios where he provided designs for Cars 2, Monster’s University, Inside Out and Lee Unkrich’s upcoming Coco movie. John also worked for Rovio Animation for the Angry Birds Movie and provided design work for Google’s Spotlight Stories.
John provided storyboards for the Promotions group for Illumination Entertainment for “The Secret Life of Pets”. John has been an Art Director for Duncan Studios and is currently at Sony Pictures Animation providing both story and art for numerous features.
John has also hosted workshops for The Animation Workshop in Denmark, The Icon Academy in Manila, The Animation Collaborative in Emeryville, CGMA Online, The Los Angeles Academy of Figurative Art, the Nemo Academy in Florence, The Animation Centrifuge in Scotland and very soon Schoolism.
James Paick is the founder and Creative Director at Scribble Pad Studios with over 15 years of design experience. Scribble Pad Studios under the direction of James Paick has been responsible for creating some of the most memorable designs and moments in entertainment design.
James has developed many projects within the gaming, film, theme park, illustration, entertainment space and advertising fields. His clients range from Riot Games, Naughty Dog, EA, Sony, Respawn, Epic Games, Activision, NC Soft, Crystal Dynamics, Magic the Gathering and many many more.
James Paick is also heavily involved in education, educating the future of the entertainment industry since 2008.James has recently founded Brainstorm School, in California which concentrates on concept design education. James has also taught at many design institutions such as Art Center College of Design, Otis, FIDM, Concept Design Academy, CGMA master academy and multiple workshops both in the U.S. and internationally.
James is currently working with his team of designers at Scribble Pad Studios on many unannounced projects, from new next-gen games, MMO’s, books, film, and more!
Sam Nielson is a concept artist and illustrator whose diverse experience has given him an in-depth view of creativity and artistic storytelling. His 20+ years of work in the animation industry have included game, film, and television work for studios such Disney, Blizzard Software, Dreamworks, Sony Pictures, and many others. His work has been published via Spectrum Annual, ImagineFX, 3DTotal, Scholastic, HarperCollins, and many others.
Sam currently teaches for the award-winning animation program at BYU and online classes for Schoolism. His classes cover lighting, digital painting, character design, visual development, gesture drawing, digital sculpting, and animation. He has also taught these subjects at workshops around the world.
Victor Navone is a traditional artist and computer animator. He hads a degree in Fine Arts from the University of California, Irvine and worked for several years as a Conceptual Designer and 3D Artist in the computer games industry. In 1998 Navone began studying 3D character animation in his spare time.
One of his early animation exercises, “Alien Song,” went on to become a viral internet clip and caught the attention of Pixar Animation Studios, who hired him as a full-time animator in 2000. His feature animation credits include “Monsters, Inc.”, “Finding Nemo,” “The Incredibles,” “Cars,” “Toy Story 3”, “Brave,” “The Good Dinosaur,” and “Finding Dory.”
For his work on “WALL-E” he received and Annie nomination and won an award from the Visual Effects Society. He also co-directed a series of short “Cars Toons” for television, and was a Supervising Animator on “Inside Out.” He is currently animating on Pixar’s 2017 feature, “Coco.”
Jama Jurabaev is a professional concept artist, illustrator and a matte painter currently working at ILM as senior concept artists.
Jama’s talent contributed to a number of massively popular box office hits including Marvel’s Avengers: Age Of Ultron, X-Men: Days of future past, Guardians of the galaxy, Kong Skull Island.
Michael Defeo is a sculptor whose specialty lies in translating 2-D character designs into fully-fledged 3-D models. He hand-built the modeling and sculpting studios at Blue Sky Studios and served as the head of each for 15 years. While with his pals at Blue Sky, Michael brought countless characters to life for ICE AGE, ICE AGE 2, ICE AGE 3, ICE AGE 4, ROBOTS,HORTON HEARS A WHO, RIO, and EPIC.
To enable him to pursue more freelance and personal work, Michael decided to strike out on his own in 2010; while a spooky prospect to leave the warmth and safety of Blue Sky, Michael had always dreamed of working in Paris and determined to make a go of it.
With the help of Illumination Entertainment, Michael spent the better part of two years in the city of light, helping to create characters for DESPICABLE ME 2, THE LORAX, MINIONS and THE SECRET LIFE OF PETS as well as characters for French impresario Joann Sfar and others. He has cemented an exclusive relationship with Galerie Arludik in Paris, for whom he has created many homages to his animation roots, most recently featured in the venerable Cornette St. Cyr auction of modern art.
Pascal Campion is a prolific french-american artist, illustrator, concept designer, character designer and animator whose clients include: Dreamworks Animation, Paramount Pictures, Disney Feature,Disney Toons, Cartoon Network, Hulu, and PBS.
Passionately inspired by his wife and kids, he is best known to his tens of thousands of fans and followers for “Sketch of the Day”, a ritual of drawing a new image first thing in the morning from his home studio in the San Francisco Bay Area. Recently, Pascal expanded into fine art with a solo show at Galerie Arludik in Paris, France.
Wondering who’s the next speaker to be announced ? 20 internationally renowned will take part of IAMC 18