Rosenbaum began his career in visual effects at the reconstructed Computer Graphics Department of Lucasfilm's effects division Industrial Light & Magic in 1989. The previous members of this department moved to the building next door and formed the company Pixar. This new group of artists received their first chance to make a computer generated character when James Cameron asked them to create the Pseudopod water creature for The Abyss. Cameron followed with Terminator 2: Judgment Day and the group expanded the artist base and created one of the first digital manipulations of a human character. The artists continued to thrive with opportunities to animate and render the seminal dinosaurs in Jurassic Park. Rosenbaum then oversaw the digital excision of Lt. Dan's legs, Forrest's mastery of ping pong, and the fanciful feather animations in Forrest Gump. These movies help spark the rapid evolution of traditional film-processed visual effects and inspired an industry-wide shift in filmmaking methodologies[6] and commercial digital imagery manipulation.
Rosenbaum spent several years working on various projects at Weta Digital, and in 2007, he began work on Avatar. For two years, Rosenbaum worked with Cameron in Los Angeles during performance capture and in New Zealand during live action photography. For the third year of the project he returned to New Zealand to help complete the CGI on the movie.[7]
Since Avatar, Rosenbaum has been immersed in Virtual Production and the persistent drive toward realtime visual effects and more believable digital characters. His focus has been on capturing and faithfully reproducing actor performances of recognized personalities, including famous musicians such as Michael Jackson and the band ABBA.
In 2010, Rosenbaum was hired[8] by Digital Domain to start a character animation development group. He brought together some of the best computer graphics geeks, and they built a modernized approach to creating physically and behaviorally realistic digital humans and creatures. Leveraging the new pipeline, he designed and supervised the giants for the movie Jack the Giant Slayer.
In 2014, Rosenbaum directed the creation of a virtual Michael Jackson posthumously performing a previously unreleased song live at 2014 Billboard Music Awards.[9] He then spent the next two years creating the reimagined King Kong for the movie Kong: Skull Island.
Rosenbaum then partnered with acclaimed music luminary Simon Fuller to recreate the band ABBA as their younger digital selves performing a new song. He established a virtual musician production company of 50 plus, built a cloud-first production pipeline, and in 2018 they completed an eight minute promotional video of the photo-real virtual band members talking and singing.
Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) is an American motion picture visual effects, computer animation and stereo conversion digital studio that was founded on May 26, 1975 by George Lucas. It is a division of the film production company Lucasfilm, which Lucas founded, and was created when he began production on the original Star Wars, now the fourth episode of the Skywalker Saga.
Wētā FX, formerly known as Weta Digital, is a New Zealand–based digital visual effects and animation company based in Miramar, Wellington. It was founded by Peter Jackson, Richard Taylor, and Jamie Selkirk in 1993 to produce the digital special effects for Heavenly Creatures. The company went on to produce some of the highest-grossing films ever made, such as the Lord of the Rings trilogy and the Avatar series. Considered one of the most influential film companies of the 21st century, Wētā FX has won several Academy Awards and BAFTAs. The company is named after the New Zealand wētā, one of the world's largest insects, which was historically featured in the company logo.
Richard Baneham is an Irish animator and visual effects supervisor, who has worked on several film series, including The Lord of the Rings film trilogy, the Chronicles of Narnia films and the Avatar franchise. Amongst other awards, Baneham has received a BAFTA Award for Best Special Visual Effects and an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects in 2009, both for his work on Avatar, and a further Academy Award in 2023, for visual effects on Avatar: The Way of Water.
Doug Chiang is an American film designer and artist. He is vice president and executive creative director of Lucasfilm and previous Chief Creative Officer (CCO) at Lucasfilm.
Dennis Muren, A.S.C is an American film visual effects artist and supervisor. He has worked on the films of George Lucas, Steven Spielberg, and James Cameron, among others, and has won nine Oscars in total: eight for Best Visual Effects and a Technical Achievement Academy Award. The Visual Effects Society has called him "a perpetual student, teacher, innovator, and mentor."
Nuke is a node-based digital compositing and visual effects application first developed by Digital Domain and used for television and film post-production. Nuke is available for Windows, macOS, and RHEL/CentOS. Foundry has further developed the software since Nuke was sold in 2007.
Kenneth Ralston is an American visual effects artist, currently the Visual Effect Supervisor and Creative Head at Sony Pictures Imageworks. Ralston began his career at the commercial animation and visual effects company, Cascade Pictures in Hollywood, where he worked on over 150 advertising campaigns in the early 1970s. In 1976, he was hired at Industrial Light & Magic by Dennis Muren to help George Lucas create the effects for Star Wars. He remained at ILM for 20 years before joining Sony Pictures Imageworks as president. Ralston is best known for his work in the films of Robert Zemeckis.
Joseph Bruce Letteri is a senior visual effects artist, winner of five Academy Awards, four BAFTA awards and four VES awards. He is the current Senior Visual Effects Supervisor of the Academy Award-winning Wētā FX having joined the company in 2001. He has received several awards and nominations as visual effects supervisor, the latest being Avatar: The Way of Water, and previously for War for the Planet of the Apes. He attended Center High School (Pennsylvania) in 1975 and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley in 1981. He gave the keynote address at UC Berkeley's December Convocation on 19 December 2010.
Danny Gordon Taylor was an Animation Supervisor in the Visual Effects industry. He started his career at Industrial Light and Magic in 1994 working on "The Mask" and animated or supervised on several ground breaking visual effects movies through to "Alita: Battle Angel" in 2019. He worked at several of the leading visual effects houses including ILM, Digital Domain and Weta Digital.
Dan Lemmon is a New Zealand visual effects supervisor. In 2012, he was nominated for an Academy Award for the movie Rise of the Planet of the Apes. This was in the category of Academy Award for Best Visual Effects, his nomination was shared with Daniel Barrett, Joe Letteri and R. Christopher White.
Gregory S. Butler is an Academy Award-winning American visual effects supervisor. He graduated from Suffield High School in 1989 and afterwards entered Hampshire College. Despite his initial plans to study history, a work-study job with the audiovisual equipment in the library made him interested in film production. Butler graduated in 1993 with a major in film, television and theater design. Afterwards he moved to California to work for Industrial Light and Magic for 9 months, where after intern work he managed to become an assistant in the effects department, starting with assistant credits in The Mask and Forrest Gump. Following a job at Rocket Science Games until the company's bankruptcy in 1996, Butler went to Tippett Studio and did effects work in Starship Troopers and My Favorite Martian, rising up to a technical director job, and Cinesite for Practical Magic. While reluctant at the requirement of moving to New Zealand, Butler was convinced by his writer-actor brother to jump at the opportunity of working for Weta Digital in The Lord of the Rings. Among his achievements was working on the creation of Gollum. for which he was awarded a Visual Effects Society Award.
Christopher Townsend is a visual effects supervisor. He has worked in the visual effects industry for nearly 30 years. For over a decade, he was an artist and supervisor at Industrial Light and Magic, and in 2007 became a freelance visual effects supervisor. He worked on Journey to the Center of the Earth, the first ever stereoscopic motion picture shot and released digitally, The Wolverine, Ninja Assassin, Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief and Captain America: The First Avenger. He was nominated for a BAFTA and an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for his work on Iron Man 3, oversaw nearly 3000 shots on Avengers: Age of Ultron and was the overall supervisor for Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 2, for which he received his second nomination for an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. He was the overall Production VFX Supervisor on Captain Marvel, and following that, for his work on Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings, was once again nominated for an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. For his first foray into television and streaming, in 2024 he was nominated for an Emmy, for his overall VFX Supervising on the second season of the Disney+ show Loki.
Roger Guyett is an English visual effects supervisor and second unit director. Guyett and his fellow visual effects artists were nominated for an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects for the 2015 film Star Wars: The Force Awakens.
George Murphy is an American special effects artist. He is most known for his work in Forrest Gump for which he won an Oscar in the category of Best Visual Effects during the 67th Academy Awards. He shared his win with Allen Hall, Ken Ralston, and Stephen Rosenbaum. He also won the BAFTA award for Best Visual Effects at the 48th British Academy Film Awards for Forrest Gump.
Allen Hall is an American special effects artist who has won two Academy Awards and two BAFTA awards.
Rob Coleman is a Canadian animation director; he is currently the creative director at Industrial Light & Magic's Sydney branch. Previously, he was the Head of Animation at the award-winning Australian visual effects and animation studio, Animal Logic from 2012-2021.
John Bruno is an American visual effects artist and filmmaker known for his prolific collaborations with director James Cameron on films like Terminator 2: Judgment Day, True Lies, Titanic, Avatar, and The Abyss, for which he won the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.
Paul Kavanagh is a British visual effects artist who was nominated at the 82nd Academy Awards in the category of Best Visual Effects for his work on Star Trek. His nomination was shared with Burt Dalton, Russell Earl and Roger Guyett. In 2016, he and his colleagues Chris Corbould, Roger Guyett and Neal Scanlan received the BAFTA-Award in the category of Best Special Visual Effects for their work on Star Wars: The Force Awakens. They were also nominated for an Academy Award, but lost to Ex Machina.
Jerome Chen is a Chinese American visual effects supervisor and director. He is a founding member of Sony Pictures Imageworks.
Richard Bluff is an English visual effects supervisor. Known for his works in Disney's visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) as a digital matte artist and visual effects supervisor in acclaimed films such as Star Wars: Episode III – Revenge of the Sith (2005), The Island (2005), Transformers (2007–11), Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull (2008), Star Trek (2009), Avatar (2009), The Avengers (2012), Cloud Atlas (2012) Pacific Rim (2013), The Big Short (2015) and Doctor Strange (2016), for which he received an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects nomination at the 89th Academy Awards. He previously worked at Blur Studio as digital artist.
Note: The years are listed as per convention, usually the year of film release; the ceremonies are usually held the next year.
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