Kit Devine has 14 years experience as a 3D animator using packages including Softimage, Alias Power Animator and Alias 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.
Archive for the 'Speakers Bios' Category
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.
Kit Devine has 14 years experience as a 3D animator using packages including Softimage, Alias Power Animator and Alias 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.
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.
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!
Shilo completed her PhD in Digital Effects in Filmmaking at the University of Technology, Sydney. She also is a graduate of the Australian Film Television & Radio School. In 1996 she was awarded the Kenneth Myer Fellowship to undertake research in the use of computer generated images in filmmaking and is the author of the books: So What’s This All About Then: A Non-User’s Guide to Digital Effects In Film. (1998) and The Digital What? A Filmmaker’s Non-Technical Guide to Digital Effects (USA 2000). Her latest book, Digital Storytelling: the narrative power of visual effects in film is being published by The MIT Press in October 2006.
In 2006, she curated the Digital Strand of the 53rd Sydney Film Festival and produced/directed a series of podcasts for the Festival site. Her consulting work ranges from digital image curation for games developers to strategic advice on educational, industry development and digital content. She is the editor for the Network Insight Institute and the author of various articles for industry publications. She has lectured in producing and digital effects production at the Australian Film Television & Radio School, for post-graduate writing students at the University of Technology, Sydney, and for the film course at Macquarie University. She is a consultant to the New South Wales Film and Television Office’s (FTO) Digital Effects Traineeship Scheme. She is the author of the chapter on digital visual effects for the Australian Film Commission’s production management ‘Satchel’ and worked with Ausfilm in the development of its international Factsheet series for filmmakers. She has also designed and conducted the professional industry training seminars How Long Is A Piece of String and Adding Strings To Your Bow on digital effects for filmmakers on behalf of the FTO and produced/directed the documentaries on the seminars’ highlights. She is the Vice Chair of ACMSIGGRAPH (Sydney Professional Chapter), the international association for computer graphics.
Her film credits include: Adding Strings To Your Bow (60 minute documentary, Producer/Director). How Long Is A Piece Of String (50 minute documentary, Producer/Director). The Tichborne Claimant (UK feature film, 2nd Unit production), The Zipper (digital short, Post-production Producer, selected Cannes Film Festival 1999), Dreaming of Freedom (Independent short film, Writer/Director/Producer), The Beat Manifesto (Producer - short film - Winner 3 AFI Awards, screened Cannes, Venice, Cork, Aspen, Singapore, Montreal, Toronto, Dakino, Goteborg, St. Kilda and Henri Langlois International Film Festivals), Out (Line Producer - short film, nominated Dendy and AFI awards), Desire Lines (Producer - short film, NSWFTO Young filmmakers fund).
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