Vesage ― The Art of the Visual Effects Society

Bernd Angerer
Bernd Aneger’s career started in 1987 when he jumped into the tiny, new CG market in Vienna, Austria, following his technical education, equipped with a big portion of artistic goals. In those years he learned the new craft practicing on TV commercials and music videos and as assistant animator for traditional animation projects. Over the following ten years he experimented with CG character animation, resulting in the first fully CG animated commercial in Austria and later in the first Austrian CG-short movie about wine. In 1997, Bernd followed a wonderful invitation to join the animation team for ?Titanic’ at Digital Domain and spent the following years creating animations for ?Little Vampire’, ?What Dreams May Come’, ?Grinch’, ?Timemachine’, ?Lord of the Rings’, ?Dare Devil’ and lately was lead animator on ?I, Robot’. In between these feature projects he worked as animation supervisor on many commercials, amongst them the VES-awarded ?Adidas?mechanical legs’ for David Fincher and most recently ?Disney Homecoming’ featuring 18 famous Disney characters brought into the 3D world. Besides his work in the CG industry Bernd currently produces large-format photo books about Los Angeles, photographed at night and enjoys painting digitally. Bernd Angerer is currently animation supervisor at Digital Domain.

Eran Barnea
A veteran digital artist, Eran Barnea has been working as a Visual Effects Supervisor on feature films and commercials for 14 years, including a lengthy stint at ILM. A native of Israel, Barnea started his career working in the field of architecture, but he soon discovered the world of digital arts. After first applying this new technology to architectural designs, he began working as a designer and animator for broadcast television in Israel.

Barnea eventually travelled to Europe and earned a Masters degree with distinction in Computer Animation and Image Synthesis from Middlesex University in London. He then spent a few years travelling through England, Spain, France, and Norway, working as a freelance digital artist on a wide range of projects. His work during this period won awards from digital imaging organizations Imagina and Art Futura, among others.

In 1996, Barnea came to the United States to work in ILM’s commercial division, where he worked as an animator and a technical director on several award-winning commercials. He also contributed on movies like ?Deep Impact’ and ?Star Wars, Episode I: The Phantom Menace’, among others.

Barnea later co-founded Palma Studio in San Francisco to create high-end, animated visuals for video games. During this period, he supervised the creation of cinematics for titles that included ?Pirates of Skull Cove’, ?James Bond’, ?Lord of the Rings’, and other interactive media projects.

Shannon Blake Gans
As co-founder and CEO of New Deal Studios, Shannon Blake Gans is the organizational spine of the most dynamic young company in motion picture visual effects. A love for the arts?and an eye for opportunity in the burgeoning field of visual effects?brought Gans into partnership with Ian Hunter and Matthew Gratzner in 1995. She combined her business experience and education with Gratzner and Hunter’s wealth of artistic talent and effects production experience. The result was Hunter/Gratzner Industries, Inc. (HGI), a miniatures and mechanical effects house offering pre-production design and on-set support services that fell outside the usual range of a model shop.

In 2001, Gans oversaw the acquisition of a neighboring production company’s assets. As a result, HGI more than doubled in size and became New Deal Studios, a full-service visual effects production facility. New Deal’s growth has progressed steadily since then, quadrupling in gross income and moving toward expansion into digital effects and film development and production. HGI/New Deal’s credit list includes HBO’s critically acclaimed se