brings together the world’s premier creators of digital visual effects, animation, and interactive experiences.
Scientists, engineers, artists, and producers share ideas, insights, and techniques that bring innovation to real-world production.
Walt Disney Animation Studios
Kelsey began her career at Walt Disney Animation Studios as an intern and has been there ever since. She was most recently the Technical Supervisor on Disney’s 100 year anniversary film, Wish. Before that, she was the Head of Workflow: Environments for the studio where she investigated different workflow capabilities and served as an advocate for Environment artists. She was also the Technical Supervisor for Raya and the Last Dragon where she helped lead the effort for the studio to adopt USD throughout the entire pipeline. Other credits include Technical Supervisor on Inner Workings, Associate Technical Supervisor on Ralph Breaks the Internet, and Technical Director on: Strange World, Encanto, Frozen II, Moana, Big Hero 6, Frozen, and Wreck-it Ralph.
Kelsey loves the bridge between art and technology, problem solving, and leans in to change. She looks forward to collaborating with her team, developers, and artists to find the most efficient workflows & enable any creative needs.
Unity Technologies
Eva began her VFX career in Vancouver, Canada, interning on District 9. She is self-taught in Nuke and Houdini and has juggled between technical and production roles, often stepping up during crunch times. Her contributions to Rise of the Planet of the Apes and Edge of Tomorrow are among her most cherished accomplishments.
After her 12-year tenure in Canada, Eva has lived in Germany, Austria, Norway, and Switzerland. She has shifted her focus to bridging the gap between scientific research and industry needs, specifically in the fields of Computer Vision and Machine Learning.
Eva is currently a Senior Technical Product Manager at Unity Technologies, where she plays a key role in making Wētā Technology accessible to a wider audience.
She is an avid skier and a traveler with a passion for embracing and managing chaos, finding her balance in the stunning backdrop of the Swiss Alps.
Pixar Animation Studios
Per Christensen is a principal scientist in Pixar’s RenderMan group. His main research interests are efficient ray tracing and global illumination in very complex scenes. He received an M.Sc. degree in electrical engineering from the Technical University of Denmark and a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of Washington in Seattle. Before joining Pixar, Per worked at Mental Images (now part of NVidia) in Berlin and at Square USA in Honolulu. He has contributed to several generations of Pixar’s RenderMan renderer, including the next-gen version, RenderMan XPU. His movie credits include every Pixar movie since Finding Nemo, and he has received an Academy Award for his contributions to efficient point-based global illumination and ambient occlusion.
Apple
Lee has been playing around in the world of computer graphics for over 25 years. Realizing, at Oxford University, that a career in visual effects would mean he wouldn’t have to wear a tie to work, Lee went to study for a MSc in Computer Animation at the National Center for Computer Animation at Bournemouth University.
Lee started work in London at The Moving Picture Company. Working on movies including Harry Potter : The Prisoner of Azkaban and Harry Potter : The Goblet of Fire. Lee then moved to California to work at Sony Pictures Imageworks where he contributed to more than a few different Spider-Man movies, starting out as a Shader Writer and ending up as a Pipeline Architect responsible for most things Look Development, Shading and Rendering. Lee is now a software engineer at Apple.
Lee’s motivations come from solving interesting technical problems, and helping artists achieve their creative visions. He is also actively involved in and contributes to multiple open source projects that support the visual effects and feature animation industry. Lee sits on the technical steering committee of both the Open Shading Language and MaterialX Academy Software Foundation projects, and is actively working to improve the open source computer graphics ecosystem.