ANIMEWOOD 2020 eCONFERENCE

Stuart Forrest is the CEO of South African animation studio Triggerfish and producer of the continent’s two most commercially successful animation films, Khumba and Adventures in Zambezia. Now, Triggerfish is playing the role of facilitator for young screenwriters and would-be producers in Africa who are keen to develop local animation projects for the international market. A new initiative, Animate Africa will host a series of online seminars where people can experience masterclasses from Forrest and his colleagues based on their experience with major film distributors and their collaboration with the Disney company.

Her educational background is in Fine arts studying at the Savannah College of Art and Design and then the Academy of Art college in San Francisco. Life and work have helped expand on that education, she started producing art work for shows and galleries in the San Francisco bay as well as shows in New Zealand. As well as being a muralist both for commercial murals and public art projects, she is a award wining digital matte painter in the film industry. One of Yvonne’s proudest moments was when she was awarded the mural commission for the Blair Caldwell African American Museum and Library in the city of Denver. Her pieces have been collected by several collectors and two of her sold pieces are in a group collection ‘The Chemistry of Color’ which is housed at the Philadelphia Fine Art Gallery.

​Several years ago Yvonne transitioned into digital matte paintings working for world renowned Academy award winning directors on several high profile movies. In 2009 she, with her coworkers, were awarded the Visual Effects Society award for Matte painting for their work on Avatar.

Jamaal Bradley is a Senior Animator at Valve Software and former Supervising Animator at Dreamworks Animation. Over the past 20 years he has worked in feature film, video games, commercials, and directed video game cinema-tics. He has used his talents in games such as Left 4 Dead 1 & 2, Team Fortress 2, Medal of Honor: Breakthrough, and many others. Jamaal has also worked at various studios including; Walt Disney Animation, Valve Software, Sony Pictures Imageworks, and Electronic Arts. He has been a senior animator on Oscar Nominated films such as, Disney’s Tangled (2010), Dreamworks’ Puss in Boots, The Croods (2013), Penguins of Madagascar (2014), Sony Imageworks’ Surf’s Up (2007), and Monster House (2006). Jamaal is working on VR development and directing a short film slated for a 2019 release.

David began his career as a Designer and Class A Surface Modeller working for Ford in Detroit and later Mercedes-Benz in California. His illustrious career took him to Weta Digital as a Senior Character and Environmental Modeller where he worked on Peter Jackson’s Oscar-winning blockbuster trilogy The Lord of the Rings, King Kong, and Alex Proyas’ I-Robot. He later joined EA’s Sports Division as a Supervisor where he helped develop proto-type modeling tools to more efficiently create photorealistic facial likeness for FIFA and NBA games. A Co-founder/ Creator of Mudbox, later acquired by Autodesk, Dave developed sculpture and texture painting tools used at some of the world’s leading visual effects companies today including recently on Avengers Endgame, Thanos. Following his success with Mudbox, Dave took his talents to Apple USA as the Imaging Specialist Manager for Watch, Home Pod, Mac Book, and the entire visualization team. Since then, he has successfully directed and distributed several games and mobile visualization products and, in 2014, received the Academy’s prestigious Technical Achievement Award, honoring pioneers who have contributed in significant and lasting ways to motion pictures. He has continued his pursuit of visualization technologies, expanding his experience into real-time asset creation, texturing, shading and animation, now in his capacity as Co-Founder & Product Director for SpinVR where he has developed BRIO for web-based AR, VR & 3D content creation.