VFX Tech Meetup: Ideate, Collaborate and Share

I had for many years wanted to create a space where the visual effects community — from studio owners to pipeline technologists — could come together to share their knowledge, exchange ideas, and discuss the opportunities that lie ahead in the dynamic world of media technology.

This July I finally got around to creating the VFX Tech Meetup where visual effects, film and animation technologists meet every fortnight to deliberate over exciting new developments in the technical aspects of film production.

We held our first meetup this Thursday at the AWS Pop-up Loft in San Francisco where I had the opportunity to deliver a talk titled ‘Behind the scenes with ILM — “Powering the World’s Leading Visual Effects Studio”’.

If you’re not already familiar with the AWS Pop-up Loft, it is this wonderful space where startup entrepreneurs and technology professionals get free access to hands-on advice from expert architects and engineers from Amazon Web Services. Events, boot camps, one-on-one consultations, hands-on labs — the Loft is always buzzing with action.

The intention of the talk was to introduce the SF startup community to the core technology of visual effects production. We discussed the infrastructure of Industrial Light and Magic (ILM) — the global leader in feature film visual effects technology, and my personal favorite — the VFX cloud stack and the tremendous scaling opportunities it presents for VFX studios worldwide.

We spoke about what a next generation VFX cloud stack would look like and it’s potential in uplifting the VFX industry as we know it.

I believe the talk, which was also our first VFX Meetup event, achieved its purpose as I have been inundated with questions from engineers who are eager to know more about VFX technologies. Many engineers have shown interest in learning more about our production stack at ILM, the open source tools we use, what our VFX pipeline looks like and so on.

This is incredibly motivating as the very objective of holding such events is to get more startup entrepreneurs to understand the finer nuances media technology and initiate conversations around its evolution.

I am frequently asked what it feels like to work in such a creative environment.

If I had to sum it up, all I would say is that I love VFX. It is the meeting ground where art and technology unite to create imagery that’s nothing short of magic. A rewarding profession where you get to relish the best of both worlds and get paid to do it — I am not complaining!