David Morin, Industry Manager for Media and Entertainment, Epic Games// Executive Director, Academy Software Foundation, Epic Games

David serves as the Executive Director of the Academy Software Foundation, a non-profit focused on developing open source software for the motion picture industry. David is also Industry Manager at Epic Games, where he works with the Unreal Engine team to develop virtual production tools for film and television. He is also chairman of the Joint Technology Committee on Virtual Production, and a past co-chair of the Joint Technology Subcommittee on Previsualization. He has a computer science degree from Laval University up in Canada, and has participated in the development of motion capture and 3D software since “Jurassic Park” at companies such as Softimage, Microsoft, Avid Technology, Autodesk, and now Epic Games.

Nick Cannon, Chief Technology Officer, Walt Disney Animation Studios

Nick has served as CTO of Walt Disney Animation Studios since 2016 where he is responsible for technology and innovation across the studio and has credits including Moana and Ralph Breaks The Internet.    Prior to Disney, Nick spent 13 years at MPC leading technology for all feature film visual effects work on over 100 productions from Harry Potter And The Chamber Of Secrets to The Jungle Book.   As an active member of the visual effects and animation community, Nick is passionate about cross-industry collaboration and innovation. As part of the VES Technology Committee Nick helped found, and still co-leads, the VFX Reference Platform initiative which drives software harmonization and interoperability across digital content creation software.   Nick has a computer science degree from Royal Holloway, University Of London, and is a member of ACM SIGGRAPH, BAFTA, AMPAS and the Visual Effects Society.  

Kimball Thurston, Head of Engineering, Wētā FX

Fabien Castan, R&D Engineer, Technicolor Production Services

Fabien Castan is specialized in Computer Vision for Visual Effects. Graduated from IMAC engineering school (Image Multimedia Audiovisual and Communication), he previously worked at Duran Duboi, Ubisoft Motion Pictures and Mikros Image. He has worked on several research projects (French ANR and European projects) in the field of photogrammetry.

Benoit Maujean, Global Head of Research, Technicolor Production Services

Graduated from École Supérieure des Ingénieurs de Marseille and École Nationale Supérieure des Télécommunications, Benoit Maujean is dealing with the general management of R&D team and projects supervising, to enable the development of innovative services and production solutions. Benoit is also a board member of Cap Digital, the French business cluster for digital and ecological transformation.

Allan Johns, Lead Core Pipeline Engineer, Method Studios

Allan has been working as a pipeline developer in the VFX industry for 15 years. He started at MPC London and found his way a few studios later to Method Studios, where he has been working on various backend systems for the last 8 years. He has worked on build systems, asset management systems, package managers, configuration managers and various other things. These days he continues development of the rez package manager, while developing services that operate across Method's various locations in North America and beyond.

James Jeffers, Sr. Principal Eng., Sr. Director, Adv. Rendering & Visualization Arch. Intel Architecture, Graphics & Software, Intel Corporation

Sean McDuffee, Graphics Software Engineer, Intel Corporation

Developer for the Intel oneAPI Rendering Toolkit.  Passionate about all things film, graphics, and open source.

Larry Gritz, Software Engineering Architect, Sony Pictures Imageworks

Larry Gritz is a software engineering architect at Sony Pictures Imageworks, creating technology for rendering, shading, texturing, and image processing, as well as being responsible for software development methodology. His open source involvement includes being the Sony Pictures representative to the ASWF and the architect of two open source packages widely used in VFX: OpenImageIO, and Open Shading Language, for which he won an Academy Sci-Tech award in 2017.

 

M.S. in Digital Cinema, M.F.A. in Animation Karen Ruggles, Assistant Professor of Digital Art, DeSales University

Karen Ruggles has spent the last 8 years teaching and is currently an assistant professor of Computer Science with specialties in Digital Art and 3D Animation at DeSales University in Center Valley, Pennsylvania, USA. Karen has also served her University for the past 3 years as the Program Director for Varsity Esports where students compete at the varsity level in Overwatch, League of Legends, and Hearthstone. Karen is involved with the Academy Software Foundation (ASWF) where she works with the Diversity and Inclusion group to open spaces for learning to the public.