Houdini HIVE at FMX 2019

Kate Gabriel is a highly experienced VFX artist, having worked on some of The Mill's most challenging and high-profile projects - including the award-nominated Nike 'Awaken The Phantom' and The Chemical Brothers 'Free Yourself' directed by dom&nic, as well as Three 'Free Your Puggerfly'. Her creative highlights also include Formula E 'Battle Scars' directed by Russell Tickner at Mill+ and Guinness 'Discover Extraordinary Flavour'. Kate has also been a Chair of the London ACM SIGGRAPH for the past 4 years.

Suraj "Sid" Harrington-Odedra joined The Mill in 2006, and is a currently a Visual Effects Supervisor in the London studio. Most recently Sid led a music video for The Chemical Brothers called ‘Free Yourself’, as well as their prior multi-award winning "Wide Open". He has also worked on a range of high profile commercials including BBC’s pan-channel broadcast of ‘God Only Knows’, bringing together 27 world-renowned artists for an extra-ordinary re-working of The Beach Boys classic song. Other 3D credits include working on the Activision; Call of Duty ‘Ghosts’ in-game cinematic sequence, Sky's "Liquid Viewing" which involved a plethora of complex liquid simulations in photorealistic environments, Virgin Media's "Delivering Awesome" and the multi award winning Nike ‘The Next Level’ commercial directed by Guy Ritchie.

Simon is Head of CG at Electric Theatre Collective. Previously Head of CG / Creative Director at Framestore, Simon established his career in VFX working closely with highly regarded commercial directing duo Dom and Nic on projects such as the multi-award winning Chemical Brother’s ‘The Salmon Dance’ and Shelter’s ‘House of Cards’ campaign which went on to achieve meteoric success and become one of the most awarded commercial spots of the year.

Simon has a wealth of knowledge and experience as a VFX supervisor and CG lead with over 14 years experience. Simon was VFX supervisor and led the digital re-creation of Audrey Hepburn on the technically challenging ‘Galaxy Chauffeur’, which broke new ground for digital humans in the commercials world. Simon has worked closely with renowned director Danny Kleinman on many more projects including: James Bond ‘Spectre’ title sequence, Audi ‘Leap of Faith’, and most recently creating a photoreal lion head for the 2017 Mercedes S-Class commercial which received 2 VES nominations. In addition to Simon’s creative eye, he also brings with him a comprehensive technical skill set, building bespoke tools and pipelines that can be put in place to tackle the most complex of projects.

Electric Theatre is an award-winning collective comprised of a super-talented, diverse bunch of artists, makers and innovators. We’re obsessed with producing the most creative, visionary and quality work in the industry. In 7 years we’ve grown from 4 people to having studios in London, LA and Bristol. Electric is home to the best talent in the business, across all visual creativity disciplines; CGI, 2D, animation and colour grading. Since setting up shop in 2011, Electric has established itself as one of the world’s foremost VFX companies garnering accolades globally.

Moritz Schwind still thinks “Space: 1999” is the coolest thing that ever happened on German TV. Be it pixels, hardware, code or cameras – if it’s interesting, Moritz is gonna take it apart. And sometimes even reassemble it. In his spare time he likes to dabble with code and create generative artwork. He claims his early exposure to QBasic is no help at all when working in Houdini, Cinema 4D, Processing or Arduino. But it might have been what started his fascination for the boundaries of code and art. When not wreaking havoc to any intriguing devices around him, he works as a Technical Director.  

Simon Holmedal is a Partner and Director at Panoply. Over the last few years he has worked on countless ambitious projects crossing and merging the borders of design and visual effects. He’s also a global leader in VFX led motion design, speaking at international conferences such as OFFF, UsByNight, Playgrounds and FMX about his exceptional love of anything procedural.

Angel Ivanov | CG Supervisor - Angel Ivanov has been part of the Worldwide FX team for more than 12 years and three years ago he became the studio's CG Supervisor. Before that, he led the Lighting and lookdev department and has also worked on RND/Pipeline development.With a solid background in VFX, and with hobbies in visual arts, such as photography, drawing, and painting, Angel is known for his ability to express his creative ideas effortlessly using advanced technical tools.What especially interests Angel in the work on creating VFX is the lighting and rendering process. And this is no accident because he likes to work with light in all of its forms - natural, artificial, virtual. He enjoys "painting" with light, observing its characteristics and studying its behavior. Angel says himself that "light is essential to creating an image, be it a picture, a photo, or a CG render." That is why he is so excited about rendering and manipulating light in order to achieve a level of realism that is indistinguishable from reality.

Alexander Dimov | VFX TD - Creating breaking destruction or beautiful imagery isn’t just a nine-to-five job for Alex – he loves what he does. He uses his artistic talents combined with his deep and ever-growing knowledge of cutting edge technology to deliver high quality and unique natural phenomena effects such as smoke, fire, clouds, water, steam and explosions using Maya and Houdini as his main weapon of choice. Most importantly, being passionate is the driving force for him to be a better learner, problem solver and to try to be as much as a creative person as much as possible.

Tim van Helsdingen is a freelance Houdini artist with a passion for all things CG. Mainly focused on the FX part of things, but he also loves lighting and shading. Apart from working for a wide range of clients, he also tries to make time for personal projects to push his skill and get to do stuff he'd never be able to do for work. With personal work he loves trying to take ordinary stuff and try to make it into CG with all the imperfections it has have in real life. Some may call it pointless, he call it FUN. Apart from that, he loves helping other people learn Houdini by putting out regular tutorials or fun experiment.

Sarah Forcier joined Pixar Animation Studios last year as the lead developer for the new RenderMan for Houdini plugin, which is a complete rewrite supporting the latest features of RenderMan, including fast interactive workflows. Prior to Pixar, Sarah studied at Cornell University and the University of Pennsylvania. Sarah's favorite Toy Story characters are Peatey, Peatrice, and Peanelope.

Jeff "Old School" Wagner has been a part of the SideFX Software support team from the early days of PRISMS leading up to today's Houdini. Over the years he has accumulated a vast wealth of knowledge and insight and is regarded by many as a true Houdini Guru. If you've encountered him online or watched one of the tutorials then now is the opportunity to meet him in person.

Ahmed Gharraph returned to Framestore as Joint Head of CG in 2017, after a brief absence working on Star Wars: The Last Jedi and Ready Player One as Lead FX artist at ILM. Ahmed’s Framestore credit list includes major advertising hits such as McDonald's 'Reindeer Ready', Sainsbury’s  ‘Mog’s Christmas Calamity’ and Shell V-Power ‘Shapeshifter’. After gaining a BSc in 3D Computer Animation at University, Ahmed moved straight into the CG department at MPC, in 2007. He built up his skills as part of the commercials team, helping to win numerous accolades, including VES Awards for the iconic Cadbury ‘Spots v. Stripes’ campaign. In 2011 he made his move into film, working at Double Negative on several high profile projects including Captain America, Skyfall, Godzilla and Thor: The Dark World.

Andreas Giesen works as CG/FX Supervisor at RISE | Visual Effects Studios with his latest work being Hellboy (obviously). He is considered one of RISE’s swiss army knives who can take a shot, no matter how complex, from concept, through blocking, lighting, shading and rendering to final. However his focus are of course FX simulations - no matter if it’s fluids, crowds, rigid body sims or pipeline tools that help facilitate standard tasks for other artists. His previous work includes the complex crowd simulations for Babylon Berlin and FX Supervision for Captain America: Civil War.

Keith Kamholz is a Lead FX Technical Director at DNEG, and he has previously worked at Industrial Light & Magic, Blue Sky Studios, Tippett Studio, and Framestore NY. He also teaches a Destruction FX class online for CGMA. He's worked on ~20 feature films, with credit highlights including Pacific Rim: Uprising, Venom, Transformers: Age of Extinction, Captain America: The Winter Soldier, & Ice Age: Continental Drift. Keith has also presented some of his destruction techniques at SIGGRAPH 2018, courtesy of SideFX. He earned a dual-major B.A. in Computer Science & Media Study at SUNY Buffalo, and an M.S. in Digital Imaging and Design at NYU's CADA.