Steve Weymouth, Lecturer at CoFA’s School of Media Arts builds on his professional industry experience at Sony PlayStation to focus his research on various aspects of 3D animation development, including techniques, software (mechanics), historical precedents (traditions and principles) and contemporary products.
Archive for the 'Bios' Category
Kit Devine has 20 years experience as a 3D animator using packages including Softimage, Alias Power Animator and Maya. She has worked on film and TV projects in both the UK and Australia at companies incuding Photon, Rushes, GMD and Animal Logic. Her movie credits include Super Mario Brothers and Inspector Gadget 2. Her commercial work has won a large number of awards at festivals including The New York Festivals, BDA Promax Asia Hong Kong, Australian Television Awards, The Australian Effects and Animation Festival and the New York CLIO Awards. Kit has trained as a graphic designer and has completed post graduate study in Computer Science. Her short film Womb with a View was screened at the 1992 London Film Festival. Kit is currently working as a lecturer in 3D at the Australian, Film, TV and Radio School (AFTRS). She is also working on a Phd at the College of Fine Arts (COFA) in collaboration with the iCinema.
Valerie Allerton coordinates the New South Wales Film & Television Office’s Emerging Filmmakers Fund and Digital Visual Effects Scheme. She has been working in the Development and Investment Branch of the FTO since 2004. Prior to working in Australia, Valerie worked with the Aspen Music Festival and School (AMFS), a world-renowned classical music training and performing institution. A classically trained musician herself, Valerie has expertise in grant development and fundraising and has worked with Board Trustees and National Council level management in these areas. She also has worked in journalism and silkscreen and textile design.
Andrew Taylor is a student at Qantm College in Surry Hills, where he is currently completing a Bachelor of Interactive Entertainment. He is due to complete his studies in November 2008. Andrew has recently been accepted to start an internship at Fuel VFX’s starting in September.
Andrew is passionate about 3D animation and all things computers. In his spare time Andrew is a keen Archer and Clay Target Shooter. He has been working with Murray Odyssey, a charity supporting Medecins san frontieres, assisting them with their web presence for an upcoming charity expedition down the Murray River.
Andrew has been a member of Sydney ACM Siggraph since March 2007 and is keen to expand his participation in the visual effects industry
Paul Debevec is the associate director of graphics research at the University of Southern California’s Institute for Creative Technologies (USC ICT) and a research associate professor in USC’s Department of Computer Science. His Ph.D. thesis at UC Berkeley presented Façade, an image-based modeling and rendering system for creating photoreal virtual cinematography of architectural scenes from photographs. Using Façade he led the creation of a photoreal animation of the Berkeley campus for his 1997 film “The Campanile Movie” whose techniques were later used to create virtual backgrounds for the “The Matrix”; he went on to demonstrate new image-based lighting techniques in his animations “Rendering with Natural Light”, “Fiat Lux”, and “The Parthenon”. Debevec led the design of HDR Shop, the first widely used high dynamic range image editing program and co-authored the recent book “High Dynamic Range Imaging. Debevec received ACM SIGGRAPH’s Significant New Researcher Award in 2001 and recently chaired the SIGGRAPH 2007 ComputerAnimation Festival.
Paul led the design of HDR Shop, the first widely used high dynamic range image editing program and co-authored the recent book High Dynamic Range Imaging. He received ACM SIGGRAPH’s Significant New Researcher Award in 2001 and recently chaired the SIGGRAPH 2007 Computer Animation Festival. He is also involved in the inaugural SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 conference as one of the Computer Animation Festival jury members. More information on SIGGRAPH Asia 2008 can be found here: www.siggraph.org/asia2008.
Ruth Saunders has a BA (Hons), a Postgraduate Certificate in Education and a Graduate Diploma in Library Science. None of these qualifications have been much help in her career as a plastic pipe salesperson, travel booker or film distributor. She started working at AFTRS in the Film Library then moved into distribution and marketing, honing her skills in film festival entry form completion while learning about incompatible video formats, copyright, royalties, music licenses, accounting and how to wrap parcels that will stand up to international transportation.
Jenny Neighbour was born and raised in England. She studied film and fine arts at London University’s Goldsmith College. After working in arts administration at the Greater London Council, she emigrated to Australia in 1987. On arrival in Sydney she was employed as an exhibition organiser, working on Australia’s bicentennial projects, before joining the Sydney Film Festival in 1989. Jenny’s initial responsibility at the Festival was the administration of the Dendy Awards for Australian Short Films and the Festival’s selection procedures, she then moved into programming, beginning with retrospectives then festival programming generally. She was invited to join the jury of the Cork Film Festival’s international short film competition and the New Talent Award for the 2003 and 2004 IF Awards. She has also participated in seminars and forums on short film distribution and the film festival industry. Over the past eight years Jenny has attended - as a selector for the Sydney Film Festival - many international film festivals, including Berlin, IDFA (International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam), Rotterdam, Goteborg and London.
Bill is again working for the University of New South Wales (UNSW) as the AV Manager for the College Of Fine Arts (COFA), keeping the laboratories and studios running and assisting academic staff and students with the wide range of software and hardware that COFA uses. He brings with him 15 years of experience working for Apple as a Technical Support Engineer and later as a Systems Engineer, specialising in the Video, Broadcast and Publishing markets. Bill has been trained in Shake, Final Cut Pro, DVD Studio Pro, Motion, Combustion, Apple server products and Vectorworks, but is experienced in a wide range of other software packages.
Bill has worked on a review panel for the University of Wollongong Masters of Digital Media as well as spoken at the Australasian Music Business Conference. He has also acted as a consultant to Channel 7, Channel 9, and SBS. In the early days of Apple’s resurgent entry into the professional video market, Bill provided technical support for many of the Australia post-production houses such as Animal Logic, Rising Sun Pictures, and Fuel. The NSW RTA now uses Macintoshes as the point-of-sale terminals as well as multimedia driver testing stations: this Java/Director solution was developed with RTA over two years with Bill as the lead Apple engineer.
Before working for Apple, Bill was a Programmer/Engineer at the Defence Force Academy, working for the Department of Electrical and Electronic Engineering programming Macintoshes and learning about remote sensing, satellite images, and image processing. Before this in the early 1980s, he was a committee member of Opunka, the UNSW film group, for four years where he was able to indulge himself with showing six feature films a week, learnt how to drive 35mm projectors, and developed a critical eye for films.
Peter is the Director of the Digital Media Division at the Australian Film Television and Radio School (AFTRS) which runs Australia’s leading postgraduate and professional programs in Digital Animation and Emerging Media. Projects from these programs have won both national and international recognition for artistic and technical excellence.
Peter has produced projects for radio, television and interactive media and he has worked on a wide range of industry training initiatives. He is the past chair of the Sydney chapter of ACM SIGGRAPH.
Steve Murphy was given a book called What is Sound? in First Grade, and he is still asking that question. Soon after he won a reel-to-reel tape recorder in a competition, and used it to make his first sound recording: the theme to Green Acres, live from the family TV. His life in screen sound was just beginning.
In 1978 Steve entered the Australian Film and Television School and had the best education in sound anyone could have hoped for. After graduating, he worked on commercials, corporates, and short films, then moved on to the big time of telemovies, mini-series and feature films. He has worked on location and in post-production, enjoying the catering in the case of the former and the air-conditioning in the case of the latter. He has learned that films and celebrities come and go, while bacon and egg rolls pretty much stay the same, and one black hole of a sound studio is just like any other, no matter where it is in the world.
Thinking that others should learn the real truths behind film-sound, along the way he began teaching others how to work for more hours than is really healthy while complaining about how the sound department is, at best, taken for granted. From 1988 to 1994 he was Head of Sound at AFTRS, and is proud to say his best students didn’t listen to him and have gone on to be quite successful.
For 16 years Steve worked for Dolby Laboratories as a sound consultant, and, after his time at AFTRS, he continued to record, edit and mix sound for film and television productions of all formats and genres – a few were actually quite good.
Steve has returned to teaching, and now works for TAFE NSW, at North Sydney College. To ensure he is capable of completing a Sudoku puzzle in his retirement, he is keeping his mind in shape by undertaking doctoral studies at the University of Technology, Sydney.
Despite working in the industry for over a quarter of a century, Steve remains passionate about sound and film – so don’t get him started!
