2019 Guest Speakers
John Pomeroy
President of John Pomeroy Productions
In 1973, John Pomeroy began working at the Walt Disney Company as a background artist, and after only a year earned the role of full animator to work on Winnie the Pooh and Tigger Too—a beloved classic that went on to earn an Academy Award Nomination.
During his time at Disney, he met fellow animators Don Bluth and Gary Goldman and set to work on an independent short film entitled, Banjo the Woodpile Cat. That labor of love paved the way for John, Bluth, Goldman, and several other Disney animators to form Don Bluth Productions—which, later, became Bluth Group. Together, they went on to produce The Secret of NIMH (1982), as well as the animation for the laserdisc video games Space Ace and Dragon’s Lair—which was most recently highlighted in Netflix’s Stranger Things.
In 1986, he worked as the directing animator and producer on An American Tail and, shortly thereafter, The Land Before Time, before he moved back to America in 1989 to form a new U.S. wing of Bluth Group, which eventually became Sullivan Bluth Studios.
When Sullivan Bluth Studios closed in 1995, he returned to Disney to work as the supervising animator on Pocahontas, where he also designed and led a crew of fourteen animators to create the character of John Smith.
He was also a supervising animator for Fantasia 2000, and an animator for Treasure Planet, Curious George, The Simpsons Movie. He was the lead character designer for Milo Thatch on Atlantis: The Lost Empire.
Outside of illustration and animation, he’s a storyboard artist. He loves to sculpt, and has created busts that animated film artists use to visualize 3-D character models. He’s also a painter of historical events and a builder of historic weapons that are actually used as props in Hollywood movies. Additionally, he’s an oil painter, portrait artist by commission, lecturer, and college professor.
KEYNOTE SPEECH: JOHN POMEROY, A CAREER IN THE ANIMATION INDUSTRY
This presentation spans John’s 46 year career beginning with his start at Disney Studios in 1973. Then his departure with Don Bluth & Gary Goldman to start their own animation studio in 1979 where they created animation features such as The Secret of Nimh, An American Tail, The Land Before Time & many more. Then John will discuss his return to Disney Studios in 1992 to be Supervising Animator on Pocahontas, Supervisor on Fantasia 2000, Atlantis : The Lost Empire & more. Currently John works as a storyboard artist on the DisneyJr hit TV show “Fancy Nancy”.
For links of John’s work go to:
Instagram : johnpomeroyart
Wikapedia : John Pomeroy Animator
DisneyWiki : John Pomeroy Animator
Allan McKay
Website: http://allanmckay.com/
Allan has worked in Visual Effects for over 20 years. Originally from Australia, his main work is now as a VFX Supervisor and FX Technical Director in Los Angeles.
He’s worked with directors Michael Bay, Tim Miller, Roland Emmerich, Robert Zemeckis, M Night Shamayalan, Brian Singer and studios such as Industrial Light + Magic (ILM), Blur Studio, Prime Focus, Catastrophic FX, Atomic Fiction, Pixomondo, and lots of others. Some of the more recent projects he’s worked on include Transformers 3, The Equalizer, Star Trek Into Darkness, Flight, Superman, Metallica, 2012, The Last Airbender, Daybreakers, and many others.. Projects he has worked on have earned Emmys, Oscars, VES awards, and ProMax. He is particularly proud of being awarded Autodesk Master in 2007.
Game projects include Call of Duty, Halo, Prototype, Team Fortress 2, Destiny, Bioshock, and lots of others. Though he’s not a huge gamer, but he’s loved getting to work on these titles.
He started building tutorials, training content, writing for magazines like 3D World and others in the 90s. He’s been published in many books, and for over the past decade he’s been speaking all over the world at various big conferences like SIGGRAPH, Autodesk University and various others, as well as collaborating with Autodesk on a lot of projects.
He enjoys training with studios, as it’s a chance to meet new teams and work with them for a few days or weeks on various problems or areas they want to learn more about, and help them grow their skill-sets within their team. He’s done intense training sessions, talks etc. at ILM, Ubisoft, Activision, Frantic Films, Prime Focus, Remedy Games and many others.
He recently launched the Allan McKay Podcast which is ranked in the top 100 on “What’s Hot” section of iTunes.
He is also proud of his Technical Director Mentorship, which started last year. He works closely with a select number of people over the span of a year, doing live sessions, reviews, webinars, and delivering the latest training every 2-3 weeks (there’s now over 700+ hours of video training in the membership vault and growing).
Steve Wang
Website: http://www.onyxforge.net/
As a veteran special makeup FX artist and creature designer, Steve has worked with Academy Award winners Stan Winston, Rick Baker and the legendary Dick Smith.
At Stan Winston Studios, Steve was the lead concept designer, sculptor and painter behind one of Hollywood’s most memorable creatures, “The Predator.” From there, they say the rest is history.
Steve is one of the most respected make-up FX/creature designers in the movie business, and he keeps surprising the industry with his innovative works. Working for many decades as a freelance Art Director, Steve created the makeup for the character “Abe Sapien” for Guillermo Del Toro’s Hellboy for Spectral Motion as well as the lead villains “Marcus the Vampire” and “William Wolf” in Underworld Evolution for Tatopoulos Studios.
Steve is the Founder and Lead Art Director of Onyx Forge Studio, an entertainment design and build company. His current work can be seen at gaming conventions all over the world in the exhibit booths of Blizzard, Riot, and Tencent, including a life-size bronze statue of Kerrigan outside the offices of Blizzard France and a 14-foot-tall Bronze monument of Arthas the Lich King at Calligraphy Parkway in Taichung City, Taiwan.
STEVE WANG’S PRESENTATION: BRINGING FANTASTIC CHARACTERS TO LIFE
A brief overview of all the creature effects work Steve Wang has done for the film industry in his 35 year career with an emphasis on the larger than life statues he has created for the videogame industry. His talk will include a walk through of how a complex statue is created.
Mark Simon
Website: http://www.funnytoons.tv/
Animation director Mark Simon has worked in the entertainment industry for nearly 30 years. His background includes live action and animation production, print, writing and teaching.
Mr. Simon currently own three companies located in Orlando, Florida.
Sell Your TV Concept Now, Inc. helps people to sell their TV ideas by showing them how to develop, package and pitch concepts to Hollywood studios and networks.
Animatics & Storyboards, Inc., provides storyboards, illustrations, cartoons and comic book illustration to the entertainment and print industries. They are the largest storyboard supplier in the Southern United States having provided support on over 4,000 productions, ranging from feature films to television series, live action, animation, commercials, industrials, books, magazines, newspapers and more. Their clients include Disney, Universal, Viacom, Sony, HBO, Nickelodeon, Steven Spielberg, Fox, USA Networks, ABC, AT&T, Yamaha, NASA, The American Cancer Society and many, many others.
His other company is A&S Animation, Inc., an animation consultation, development and production house. They specialize in character animation. A&S Animation, Inc. has produced animated shorts which have won over 100 international awards. They also animated Disney’s iconic character, Tinker Bell, for the hugely successful Disney Cruise Line.
Mark has directed numerous projects such as the pilots for The Peculiar Adventures of Willow B Star, Enchanted Thyme, Creepers, Luke and Reece Save the World, Cyber Optics and others.
The series of animated shorts, Timmy’s Lessons In Nature, which Mark Simon developed, directed and produced, won Grand Prize in Nickelodeon’s first-ever Nicktoons Film Festival.
Mark is also the author of ten entertainment industry texts. Producing Independent 2D Character Animation showcases every step of production of an independent hand-drawn animation.
His book Storyboards: Motion In Art is used around the world to train storyboard artists and the his Facial Expressions series of books are the best-selling photo reference guide for artists.
He has also written hundreds of articles for Animation Magazine, Animation World Network (www.AWN.com), Cinefex and others.
Prior to producing animation, Mark was an art director in live action film and TV in Los Angeles, CA and Orlando, FL.
While in Los Angeles, he designed many feature films, music videos and commercials. He then became the second art director at the new Nickelodeon Studios in Orlando, FL in 1989.
He has also done Second Unit directing for Nickelodeon and on Steven Spielberg’s seaQuest DSV as well as working as a Special Effects Supervisor for NBC and Fox networks. Mark has taught at the Digital Animation and Visual Effects School located at Universal Studios, and at the University of Central Florida. His course on the Storyboard Pro software can currently be found at www.Lynda.com/MarkSimon. He currently lectures around the world at major conferences, conventions and schools.
MARK SIMON’S PRESENTATION: STORYBOARDING ALIVE AND WALKING DEAD
Story artist, author and director, Mark Simon, will share his path from art director at Roger Corman’s studio to designing at Nickelodeon to storyboarding The Walking Dead. He’ll also talk about how he landed his dream jobs and if you’re nice to him, he may answer some questions.
Grace Liu
Website: https://www.artstation.com/graceliu
Grace grew up in a seaside city in north-eastern China, and moved to the US after high school with her family. She received an undergraduate degree in graphic design in University of North Texas, and a graduate degree in game art in the Guildhall at SMU. She started her career as a 2D/3D game artist in Austin, followed by a 6-year tour in So-Cal at Blizzard then Riot before returning to Texas once again to join the then-start-up Airship Syndicate.
Frank Abney
Website: http://frankabney.com/
Frank began working in the entertainment world in 2007. He’s been fortunate to have worked in Film, Games, and TV, on a variety of projects including: Tomb Raider (2013), Disney’s Frozen and Big Hero 6, DreamWorks Animation’s Kung Fu Panda 3 and The Boss Baby, and Pixar’s Coco, Incredibles 2, and Toy Story 4. He is currently Directing a short film titled, Canvas.
Artist Alley Artists
Brett Briley
I’ve been an 3d artist in the video game industry since 1999, after leaving Disney. I have worked with such talents as Redstorm Ent, Irock Ent, Sony Online Ent, Nerve Software, Liquid Development, Ensemble Studios, Id Software, Creative Assembly, Cloud Imperium, Reel FX, Whitemoon, Machine Games, Zynga, Triforce, Gearbox Software, Epic Games, and many others. Currently I am a Character Freelance artist available for work.
Some relevant titles I’ve worked on include “Freedom”, Ozzy’s “Black Skies”, “Planetside”, Doom 3’s “Ressurection of Evil”, “Oblivion”, “D&D Online”, “NWN2”, “Age of Empires 3”, “Age of Empires 3 The Warchiefs”, “Halo Wars”, “Rage”, “Wolfenstein”, “Doom 4”, “Lucky’s Tale”, “Total War Warhammer”, “Paragon”, Borderlands 3 along with other titles soon to be announced. In the past I have taught with The Art Institute of Dallas, TAD (www.theartdepartment.org), UArtsy.com/Zbrushworkshop.com, along with teaching one on one mentoring. Recently I have joined with a group of my friends (James Cain, and Maarten Verhoeven) to create Grim.LLC (www.wearegrim.com and instagram.com/wearegrim), an outsource house for those looking to get directly to the talent, along with creating our art to sell to those that love what we do. My personal portfolio also can be found at (www.bbriley.com) for those interested.
When I am not working, teaching, or sculpting, I can be found spending time with my wonderful wife and son, along with our 3 dogs.
https://www.artstation.com/spark
GEORGE TSOUGKOUZIDIS
My name is George Tsougkouzidis, Freelance Creature and Character Artist. I from Thessaloníki, Greece.
In 2014 I started following my dream to sculpting and creating my own fantasy world.
Huge thanks to everyone who supports my art and follows me in my journey though all those years .
https://www.georgetsougkouzidis.com/
George Tsougkouzidis on Artstation
Shiflett Brothers
Their sculptures have been featured in books and magazines worldwide, as well as in six separate volumes of the annual book Spectrum: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art. The Brothers’ work sits in video game design firms, special effects houses, and art departments across several industries, as well as the personal collections of film directors Peter Jackson and Robert Rodriguez, and Weta Workshop founder Sir Richard Taylor.
Brandon and Jarrod taught a Master Class on Sculpting for the Comic Book Industry at The Gnomon Workshop in Hollywood, California and then created an Instructional Sculpting DVD, produced and released by Gnomon, entitled “Fantasy Sculpting: The Dragon of Argos.” They were honored to sit on the jury for Spectrum 18: The Best in Contemporary Fantastic Art and were blown away a couple of years later when they received the Gold Award in Dimensional Work for Spectrum 21.
From their work on iconic Marvel super heroes to their original character concept pieces produced under the banner of Shiflett Brothers Originals, Brandon and Jarrod continue to love what they do: celebrating Science Fiction, Fantasy, and Comic Books through sculpture.
Kevin Chin
Kevin Chin is an experienced concept artist and illustrator in the industry since 2004, after graduating from the College for Creative Studies art school in Detroit, Michigan. He’s worked at studios like Disney Interactive / Junction Point Studios on the Disney Epic Mickey game series and for freelance illustration clients such as Blizzard, Upper Deck, Games Workshop and Fantasy Flight Games and previously featured on ConceptArtWorld, ImagineFX and Ballistic Publishing. Kevin currently resides in Austin, Texas working at KingsIsle Entertainment as a Principal Concept Artist.
Terry Parr
Shonuff! Studio consists of Partners and “draw-matic duo” Halo Sama and Terry Parr. With Halo’s cartoon anime style and Terry’s comic pin-up style, they can handle any art project thrown at them! They are currently working on their own comics; AEROBICIDE, The Extreme Ninja Workout (published by Antarctic Press) and The Essential Zombie Kitty Pet Guide, published by Dusk Comics. They illustrated & colored art for the El Peso Hero comic series and even had an award-winning design on TeeFury! Their clients also include the 4th largest anime convention in North America, Project A-Kon and the City of Fort Worth TX Parks Dept. You can also find their recently published art in Gold Digger, Mangazine, Shonuff Studio Presents, Moonlight Rrriot1&2 (Sailor Moon) fanzine and the Literati Presents book series. They also run the Sketch Dojo program that connects local and indie artists with each other to improve their skills and form a positive art community.
2019 Platinum Sponsorship
2019 Gold Sponsorship
2019 Silver Sponsorship
2019 Bronze Sponsorship
2019 Donations
