Sydney ACM SIGGRAPH » Speakers Bios

Daniel Heckenberg

sydgraph — Wed, 21 Sep 2011 00:04:13 +0000

R&D Lead Developer

Daniel is a software developer in the R&D department at Animal Logic
where he works on graphics tools. His recent contributions may been seen
in Sucker Punch and Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole.

Shilo McClean

sydgraph — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 00:15:06 +0000

Dr. Shilo McClean is the author of the books: The Digital Playing Fields: New Rulz for Flm, Art and Performance (Currency House, July 2010), Digital Storytelling: the narrative power of visual effects in film (MIT Press, 2007; 2008; 2009) and So What’s This All About Then: a non-user’s guide for digital effects in film (AFTRS, 1998).
She designs and conducts seminars, workshops, and lectures for industry and tertiary courses in filmmaking, digital visual effects, architecture and storycraft.
She is a consultant to the Screen NSW Digital Visual Effects Scheme and produced and directed two documentary videos on digital visual effects on their behalf.
Shilo is the Vice Chair of Sydney ACM SIGGRAPH (Professional Chapter). Her consulting and editorial work ranges from digital image curation for games developers, strategic advice on educational/media ICT development and digital content, and the development of strategy documents and reporting in the areas of digital media/ICT.

Nomination Statement:
My goal as Vice Chair has been to ensure that our program makes access to the digital visual effects industry as great as possible for people of all backgrounds. Since its establishment as an industry, the diversity that we draw from in terms of talent, training and experience has enriched the field and our strength lies in continuing to nurture and develop the potential of our membership for a role in digital visual effects.

Kit Devine

sydgraph — Mon, 24 Nov 2008 03:26:37 +0000

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.

Paul Debevec

sydgraph — Thu, 26 Jun 2008 11:39:22 +0000

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 FaÃ§ade, an image-based modeling and rendering system for creating photoreal virtual cinematography of architectural scenes from photographs. Using FaÃ§ade 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.

http://www.debevec.org/Bio/bio-short.html (Bio)

http://www.debevec.org/

Ruth Saunders

sydgraph — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 02:14:30 +0000

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

sydgraph — Thu, 27 Sep 2007 02:12:45 +0000

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

sydgraph — Mon, 02 Apr 2007 13:48:16 +0000

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!