Graduate Program Alumni Girish Balakrishnan presented his award-winning Drexel thesis work on SmartVCS, a previz tool for a production environment at the LA Animation and VFX Pipeline Developers Group Meetup hosted at Framestore LA on October 16,2013. You can see an overview about Girish’s presentation in the video linked here.
The LA Pipeline Meetup group was organized by Fran Zandonella (who’s film credits include Mulan, Tarzan, Red Riding Hood and the Academy Award winning Life of Pi) and Dane Bettis, head of Pipeline Development at Framestore LA (who’s feature film credits include The Golden Compass, Hop and Snow White and the Huntsman). Fran and Dane formed the group to build a strong local community of people interested in Pipeline topics, reaching out to others interested in creating awesome pipelines for animation and vfx.
Girish met Fran and Dane during his presentation at the 2013 SIGGRAPH Conference and invited him to discuss and demonstrate his SmartVCS to their fellow industry colleagues. The SmartVCS is a unique animation and cinematography tool Girish developed during his studies at Drexel which utilizes off-the-shelf technologies such as the iPad and Sony Playstation hardware to create a Virtual Camera System that allows for rapid and dynamic capture, collaboration and pre-visualization of cinematography for film, animation and game productions.
