Technical Advisory Council

Bill has worked in media for over 30 years. Upon graduation from Ryerson University, Bill began his career as a radio producer, later he migrated into TV Production and ultimately editing news and documentary content for CTV (Bell Media).  In 1994 Bill moved from user of technology to creator – his career has spanned roles anchored in Product Management and Business Strategy for Avid, Autodesk, Unity and Adobe, where Bill currently heads up Industry Strategy. Bill is also a small scale investor and mentor as part of TechStars and Ryerson’s Tri-Mentoring program.

Bill lives in Montreal with his wife and kids.

Brian is a Senior Software Engineer at Google and a Tech Lead on the Google’s Cloud Media team, where he oversees and develops various products and solutions for media and entertainment customers.

Carol is a Imaging Technologist at Netflix, Inc.

Cary Phillips is R&D Supervisor at Industrial Light & Magic in San Francisco, where he has worked since 1994. He holds a PhD in computer graphics from the University of Pennsylvania. Cary is a member of the VFX Branch the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and he serves on the Academy’s Science and Technology Council as well as the Academy’s Scientific and Technical Awards Main Committee. He has received three Technical Achievement Awards from the Academy for technology related to digital character animation. He has over 20 screen credits, and he’s worked on films from the Star Wars, Avengers, Pirates of the Caribbean, Harry Potter, and Transformers franchises.

Christopher Kulla leads the Open Shading Language project and is a Senior Rendering Programmer at Epic Games. In the past he was a principal software engineer at Sony Picture Imageworks where he has worked on the in-house branch of the Arnold renderer since 2007. He focuses on ray-tracing kernels, sampling techniques and volume rendering. In 2017 he was recognized with a Scientific and Engineering Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences for his work on the Arnold renderer.

Cory Omand is a Supervising Lead Software Engineer at Pixar Animation studios, responsible for Pixar’s internal software development and deployment platform, used by R&D and production teams to produce high-quality film production pipelines.

Eric Enderton is Director of Film Rendering Technology at NVIDIA, developing and supporting the use of GPU ray tracing for visual effects and animation. He is a founder of DigiPro, the Digital Production Symposium.

Eric is the Sr. Software Engineer, Video Engineering. He is one of the co-creators of OpenTimelineIO.

Gordon joined Alias Wavefront in 2002 to work on Maya, where he had an intense introduction to sub-zero temperatures, shovelling snow and hockey. He’s currently the architect for Autodesk’s entertainment products, including Maya.

Greg is a Senior Program Manager at Microsoft Azure where he focuses on enabling cloud workflows for Media and Entertainment customers. Prior to joining Microsoft, he worked building software and cloud rendering pipelines at a number of VFX and animation studios as well as Google and Nike.

Jean-François Panisset has been a member of the Visual Effects Society Technology Committee since 2013. The VES Technology Committee was involved in the process leading to the creation of the ASWF and has been responsible for the closely related VFX Reference Platform project. Jean-François was previously Chief Technology Officer at Psyop, an animation and visual effects studio in the commercials market, and has previously worked at Moving Picture Company, A52 / Rock Paper Scissors, Sony Pictures Imageworks, and Autodesk / Discreet Logic where he worked as a developer on the Flame compositing system. He is currently on hiatus which is allowing him to spend time on open source projects. His main interests lie in the intersection of application software, operating systems and hardware.

Jean-Michel is an engineering director at Epic Games for the Unreal Editor where he focuses on low-level editor systems, UI tech, UX, and content interoperability. He led the development of Unreal Datasmith and the integration of USD into Unreal. Prior to joining Epic, He worked at Ubisoft as a generalist programmer on the Assassin’s Creed game engine.

Joshua is the Pixar Studio Tools Story/Editorial/VR Previs Tech Lead and OpenTimelineIO TSC chairperson

Ken Museth is the Senior Director in Simulation Technology at NVIDIA. He was previously Head of Research & Development in Simulations at Weta Digital, focusing on developing state-of-the-art VFX for the Avatar sequels. He is the founding developer of OpenVDB, the first open source project to be adopted by the ASWF, and the chair of its Technical Steering Committee. Additionally, Ken works part-time for SpaceX on large scale fluid dynamics simulations of the new Raptor rocket engine powering the main stage of the BFR for human settlements on Mars. Before to joining Weta in 2017 he worked for a decade at DreamWorks Animation and Digital Domain, and prior to that for a decade as a researcher and full professor at Caltech and Linkoping University. He holds a PhD in quantum dynamics from Copenhagen University and has been awarded a Technical Achievement Award from The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences . Ken is on the SIGGRAPH 2019 Technical Paper Committee.

Kimball Thurston is a senior researcher at Weta Digital Ltd. in New Zealand, focused on rendering and related imaging areas. For more than 20 years, he has provided software for the visual effects and general film industry. In 2012, he and his colleagues were awarded a scientific and engineering award by the Academy of Motion Pictures, Arts and Sciences for image processing software used for film restoration and image reparation.

Dr. Larry Gritz is the Software Engineering Architect for Sony Pictures Imageworks, developing rendering technology as well as managing SPI’s open source efforts. Larry has a BS in computer science from Cornell University, MS and DSc from the George Washington University, and has held engineering management positions at Pixar, Exluna, and NVIDIA prior to joining Imageworks in 2008. Larry is the administrator and lead author of two open source projects widely used in VFX: OpenImageIO, and Open Shading Language, for which he won an Academy Sci-Tech award in 2017. Larry is a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Mark leads the team developing animation- and VFX-related features for the Unity Editor.

Matthew Low is a Principal Engineer and Technical Lead at DreamWorks Animation, focusing on technical strategy and integration efforts for USD and real time game engine technologies within the feature film pipeline, as well as representing DreamWorks to the Academy Software Foundation on the Technical Advisory Council. Matthew graduated from Cornell University with a degree in Engineering Physics and Computer Science, and a M.S. in Computer Graphics.

Sean and his team focus on cloud-centric technology exclusively for content creation industries. Over nearly 20 years in VFX and Animation, Sean has held software engineering positions within studios such as DreamWorks Animation, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Method, and R!OT where he has driven initiatives including global production pipelines to high-performance distributed lighting and rendering systems.

Sean McDuffee is a Graphics Software Engineer at Intel with the Advanced Rendering and Graphics Architecture Group. His interests and work cover all things rendering and simulation. Prior to Intel he spent 10 years in the R&D department at Blue Sky Studios where he worked on many films and the industry’s first production ray tracer, which won an Academy Sci Tech Award in 2017. He has an MS in Computer Science from Columbia University and a BS in physics. Before getting into the film industry, he worked for a number of years in the High Energy Density Physics Group working on the Inertial Confinement Fusion research arm at MIT.

Sean O’Connell is a Member of Technical Staff at Advanced Micro Devices with the Software Performance Engineering team, responsible for improving performance across AMD’s line of client processors.

Tony is Director, Product Development at DNEG