Governing Board

Andrew Pearce is VP of Global Technology at DreamWorks, where his projects have included establishing an analytics infrastructure at the studio, establishing technology
platforms for DreamWorks TV, and spearheading Open Source initiatives such as ASWF, and OpenVDB which won a Sci/Tech Academy Award for its inventors. Andrew has 26
film credits in Visual Effects R&D.

Before joining DreamWorks 2004, Mr. Pearce spent 3 years as Head of Production Technology at ESC, the visual effects house behind the Matrix sequels. He started his career at Alias developing technologies such as Paint Effect, Maya, Alias Ray Tracer and delivering Maya for Mac OSX as Director of Maya Technologies. He shares a Sci/Tech Oscar for his part in the development of Maya, received 3 U.S. patents, and is equally proud of his 1999 CBC sketch comedy television special Fred’s Bicycle Repair Shop.

Andrew received his M.Sc. from the University of Calgary where he studied Computer Science specializing in multiprocessor ray tracing.

Andy Maltz is the founding Managing Director of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ Science Technology Council. He developed and implemented the Council’s operational plan, oversees the Council’s day-to-day operations, leads several Council projects and represents the Academy on science and technology matters at industry, government and academic forums in the U.S. and abroad. Prior to joining the Academy, Andy worked in the commercial world for over 20 years developing and deploying digital cinema servers and mastering systems, professional media authoring systems, nonlinear editing systems as well as working in film, television and commercial production. Andy also serves as ISO TC 36 Cinematography chair and is a member of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) Journal Board of Editors.

Chris Vienneau, senior director for Autodesk Media & Entertainment products, joined Autodesk in 1995. Chris has acted as product manager for Autodesk Toxik, Autodesk Combustion and Autodesk Cleaner, as well as product designer for Autodesk Toxik. He began his career at Autodesk in product support.

Prior to Autodesk, Chris worked with major broadcasters such as NBC, ABC, CNN, Fox, Home Shopping Network and TF1 France, and assisted high-profile productions like the 1999 Super Bowl, Daytona 500, Australian Open, 2000 US elections and the Indian elections. He holds a professional writing degree from Université de Sherbrooke.

Daniel Heckenberg is R&D Supervisor – Graphics at Animal Logic, responsible for research and development in procedural geometry, rendering and animation engineering and tools. Working at Animal Logic since 2007, he has made significant contributions to the studio’s character tools for fur, hair and feathers and production renderer ‘Glimpse’. He is an enthusiastic participant in industry open source projects and is currently chair of the ASWF’s Technical Advisory Council.

Darin Grant has over 20 years experience in the industry, holding a variety of senior positions as a technologist including Head of Production Technology at Dreamworks Animation and more recently as the Global CTO at Digital Domain and Method Studios where he drove innovation and operational excellence across engineering and operations.

Dave is Chief Architect at Cisco Systems, responsible for architectural governance, defining strategy, development of new technology and leading use-inspired research. Working via tight partnerships with customers, partners, developers and academia he is also leading co-development and co-innovation initiatives. He has been the Routing Area Director at the IETF and chair of four Working Groups: IS-IS, HIP, BFD and Softwires and worked with the ITU-T, ONF and several Open Source consortia. David was also a Juniper Fellow and Chief Architect working on the operating system and next-generation routing systems. Dave has a small vineyard in the Santa Cruz Mountains, an heirloom tomato farm along the St. Croix River in Somerset, Wisconsin.

Erik Strauss is Director of Post Production Engineering at Netflix, where he leads a group of software engineering teams focused on media workflow across all of Netflix’s original content production. Erik’s teams strive to innovate the processes and technology supporting content creation with the goal of removing the logistics of digital workflows and maximizing the opportunity for collaborators to pour creativity into their content at Netflix.

Gerald Tiu is Director of Media and Entertainment for Microsoft Azure focusing on Content Creation. He has spent most of his career working in the Visual Effects and Animation industry building production tools for companies such as Pixar, ILM and Disney’s ImageMovers Digital. His cloud journey began at Amazon Web Services as a Professional Services Consultant working in large fortune 500 companies to build out fully functioning application clusters with minimal code. Gerald has spent the last 5 years at Microsoft following his passion in working to enable the best content creation platform for Media and Entertainment customers and partners.

Graham Jack is DNEG Chief Technical Officer. He is leading the company’s technology team to ensure the smooth day-to-day running of its global pipeline and infrastructure, identifying and implementing measures to improve its efficiencies and help it reach its business objectives, and driving the on-going development of its technology strategy. Prior to his current role, Graham was DNEG Head of 3D and played an instrumental role in both setting up the lighting and rendering pipeline at DNEG and influencing the development of technology in all areas of the company.

Dr. Hank Driskill is the Chief Technology Officer at Blue Sky Studios, and is thrilled to be a part of Blue Sky’s team. Hank has encouraged a philosophy that innovation in our field should always be in service of making movies that matter; sharing technology across our industry through mechanisms like the ASWF will only help every studio tell stories that mean something. Hank grew up in the small town of Gardner, Kansas. He received bachelor degrees in both Computer Science and Astronomy from the University of Kansas, going on to earn his PhD in Computer Science from the University of Utah. He embarked on his professional career at Digital Domain, where he helped bring films such as Apollo 13, Dante’s Peak, Fifth Element and Titanic to life. Hank then spent 20 years at Walt Disney Animation Studios as part of the studio’s leadership, most recently serving as Technical Supervisor on Big Hero 6 and Moana.

Jim Jeffers, Sr. Principal Engineer and Sr. Director of Intel’s Advanced Rendering and Visualization team, leads the design and development of the open source rendering library family known as the Intel® oneAPI Rendering Toolkit. This toolkit is used for generating animated movies, visual special effects, product design and scientific visualization. Jim joined Intel in 2008 and has co-authored 4 books on Intel Architecture parallel programming. Jim’s experience includes software design and technical leadership in high performance computing, graphics rendering, digital television, and data communications. Jim’s notable work prior to Intel includes development for the Tech Emmy winning virtual ‘First Down Line’ technology seen on live American football TV broadcasts.

John Ison serves as Director, Media and Entertainment Partnerships of NVIDIA, Inc. He joined NVIDIA in 2012 after successful tenures at Omneon, Inc., where he was VP Marketing and Avid Technology, where he was VP, Product Management. Mr. Ison is responsible for managing most of NVIDIA’s relationships with software developers of applications used by the media and entertainment industry. He also served as VP, Product Management at Brooktrout Technology, CEO at Newfire, as well has holding senior management positions at Autodesk, Silicon Graphics and NeXT earlier in his career. He holds engineering and graduate business degrees from Dartmouth College and MIT.

Julie Truong joined Epic Games in 2016, where she is the Executive Producer in charge of Technology, overseeing product management for the Unreal Engine. Prior to Epic, Julie was at Ubisoft for 6 years, leading the Central Technology teams and working on games like Far Cry. Beforehand she was a product manager at Autodesk on several products such as Motionbuilder and games middleware. Julie holds a bachelor in Electrical Engineering and an MBA.

Luca is the lead architect of Weta Digital’s next-generation proprietary renderer, Manuka. This renderer is the culmination of a three-year research endeavour involving over 40 researchers and continues to allow Weta Digital to produce highly complex images with unprecedented fidelity. Luca joined Weta Digital in 2004 and has also worked for Pixar Animation Studios. Through a partnership with NVIDIA, Luca co-developed the GPU-based PantaRay that was instrumental in the making of the movie Avatar, and (since 2011’s The Adventures of Tintin) also became the foundation of volumetric shadow support within the Weta pipeline. Luca was recently recognized with a Scientific and Engineering award from the Academy of Motion Pictures for his work on FACETS, Weta’s facial motion capture system.

Michael Ford is VP, Head of Software Development at Sony Pictures Imageworks where he oversees the technology and software development of the award winning studio. Throughout his 20+ year career, Ford has fostered a close connection of the creative process to innovative technology in feature animation and VFX production. Ford was the VFX supervisor on the animated feature film Hotel Transylvania 3 and Smurfs: The Lost Village for Sony Pictures Animation. While at Imageworks, Ford also served as a supervisor on Concussion, Storks, Hotel Transylvania, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs 1 & 2 and the Academy Award® nominated film Surf’s Up.

Rob Bredow runs Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) with a particular focus on the creative strategy for the storied visual effects company. He brings an innovative focus to the role, with a background in technology and hands-on experience both as a visual effects supervisor, technology executive, and production partner. As SVP, Executive Creative Director and Head of ILM, Bredow is responsible for the company’s overall creative strategy and global operations. Bredow recently served as the Visual Effects Supervisor and Co-Producer on Solo: A Star Wars Story. He served as a creative partner to the filmmakers throughout the production, from the earliest story meetings to the final frames of visual effects. He leveraged his background in innovative technology to help tell the story of the film, creating grounded images with a unique shooting style designed for the movie. Bredow joined Lucasfilm in 2014 as Vice President of New Media and Head of Lucasfilm’s Advanced Development Group. He helped launch ILMxLAB in 2015 and co-wrote and directed Trials on Tatooine, a story-based virtual reality experiment created in collaboration with Lucasfilm’s Story Group, ILMxLAB and Skywalker Sound. In his former role as Lucasfilm Chief Technology Officer, Bredow oversaw all technology development for Lucasfilm and ILM. Previously, Bredow was CTO and Visual Effects Supervisor at Sony Pictures Imageworks. He has contributed as a supervisor on films such as Independence Day, Godzilla, Stuart Little, Cast Away, Surf’s Up, Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs, and others. Bredow is a member of the VFX Branch of Academy of Motion Pictures Arts & Sciences and the AMPAS Science and Technology Council.

Todd oversees the media and entertainment rendering and content creation roadmap for the Google Cloud Platform and works closely with major studios to develop solutions to extend their existing pipelines. Todd joined Google via the acquisition of Zync Render, a turnkey cloud rendering solution, at which he led product and business strategy. Prior to Zync he held numerous product development and technology roles in computer graphics at GenArts, Inc.

Will McDonald is Head of Product Management – Studio Technology for Amazon Web Services (AWS), where he is responsible for the roadmap and strategy for products and services relating to content creation. Prior to joining AWS in 2018, Will held a variety of both creative and engineering leadership roles at Autodesk, Electronic Arts, Industrial Light & Magic, and was most recently VP of Product & Engineering at Conductor Technologies. Will holds a M.S. in Software Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University and a B.F.A. in Visual Effects from the Savannah College of Art + Design.