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Jon Gress With over 25 years of digital & visual special effects, film, video, audio, and multimedia production experience, writer/producer/director and visual effects producer Jon Gress is one of the new breed of independent filmmakers who can write, shoot, direct, edit, and produce Hollywood sized digital & visual special effects. Jon has been on the cutting edge of digital production technologies since their beginnings and has taught production and software applications courses in Visual Effects, Compositing, Filmmaking, VFX Supervision, the entire Adobe Production Suite, Nuke, Fusion, Lightwave 3D, 3D Studio Max, PF Track, Boujou, Mocha Pro, RealFlow, Turbulence FD, Digital Matte Painting and UDK & Unity game engines. |
Q: Jon Gress you are a writer, producer, director, and visual effects producer. Please tell us a bit about yourself, how you started, and your extensive background. Q: You have trained hundreds of visual effect artists, who have gone on to top visual effects companies for blockbuster films, and you have created productions for many multinational and Fortune 500 clients. Please tell us a bit about your work and the movies you have contributed directly and indirectly to. Over the years I produced everything from motion pictures, television, music videos, radio shows and advertising to full interactive multimedia architectural, previz, visual effects and even medical training curricula. In the late 1990's I decided to turn my focus to my original love and passion, motion pictures. I quickly realized, while training dozens of new artists on all of this cutting edge technology, that I needed to somewhat formalize what I was teaching in order to streamline this start-up time (and save me from having to repeat this training over and over again). So I began production of an comprehensive all-inclusive video and book Special Effects & Visual Effects curriculum which I began posting some for free online in around 1997. The series was very popular and I would regularly receive emails from all over the world, so I knew I was onto something. In 2004, while scouting a location at Universal Studios Orlando , I saw a sign for The Digital Animation & Visual Effects School . I had noticed over the past few years that many of the best demo reels I had received while hiring, were grads from this school so I decided to stop in and let the owners know they were doing a great job teaching their students. I met Jeff and Anne Scheetz, the owners, told them who I was and what I did and told them how their grads really shined above the other candidates I'd received over the years. About 6 months later, I received a call from Jeff asking if I'd like to be the guest Director for their award winning live action space adventure movie "NASA Seals" (right down my alley, how could I refuse?). It was a fantastic experience and I truly loved the working + teaching environment. About a year and a half later Jeff called me to see if I'd be willing to come back on an open-ended basis to direct projects for them. The timing was perfect for me so I accepted. As the school was retooling their VFX curriculum, the academic director (my dear friend, the amazingly talented artist William Vaughan) suggested to the school that I be allowed to implement my VFX curriculum, which was a perfect symbiotic relationship. The school got my curriculum and I got to test and refine these training methods over the next 7 years while getting input from hiring VFX supervisors from many major VFX houses along the way. After talking with Mike Seymour and John Montgomery, (the incredibly talented and just genuinely all-round great guys from FXPHD) I became a professor for them teaching a synthesis of the "Crash UDK real-time game engine course" and the "cutting edge guerrilla tech previz" courses I had developed. After that I was approached to put my entire course curriculum into book form which I had started way back in 1997, but was now a proven and refined curriculum with hundreds of grads now VFX artists, Leads, Supervisors and even Emmy Award winners at virtually every major VFX company in the world. The book is being released this coming week, worldwide through Pearson, in booksellers and on Amazon. Q: You are an academic at FXPHD.com, an online vfx, production, and post-production training program. Tell us about the courses that you teach and the tools that you use. Fast track curriculum for learning the Epic Games Unreal Development Kit - UDK 3 game development environment. The course is a fast paced introduction to the UDK 3 game development environment and engine covering the basics of the entire suite of UDK development tools. It takes the student from zero to building their own freestanding game and movie Pre-viz in UDK in this one course. http://www.fxphd.com/fxphd/courseDetails.php?idCourse=413&v=popup Course covers all of the essential facets in the creation of an effective Previz, from 360 Degree Backdrops, Interior and Exterior Location Sets, Custom Terrains using DEM & Procedural Extraction & Modeling techniques, Props, Custom Character and Lightning Fast Actor Cloning, Creating and Using your own Home Mocap System, Virtual & Motion Tracked Cameras, Bringing External Compositing VFX Tricks into UDK and much more. http://fxphd.com/fxphd/courseDetails.php?idCourse=425&v=popup Q: Everyone might be wondering how a hugely successful professional as yourself uses iClone in his work. Talk to us on how, and when you learned about iClone, and why it is now a tool in your arsenal. Over the years, I've learned that effective production is all about constantly re-evaluating your workflow and keeping an open mind to any and all possibilities that might improve efficiency and performance. I've used some very unlikely tools over the years to great success. Working with companies who are open to ideas and who aren't bogged down in set pipelines, like some of the larger companies tend to get. Sometimes we can spark amazingly innovative solutions such as we did in 2004 with Animator DV, which was an inexpensive stop motion tool with a live preview system that I had asked the developer if he could implement a rough chromakeyer into - within a day he had and we were using it to amazing success as an on-set previz tool, when other companies were stunned to see the technology we somehow managed to obtain - http://animatordv.com/anunnaki.php.
Q: You have written a book titled " Visual Effects and Compositing". In your book you have a section where you talk about the uses and benefits of iClone. Can you briefly talk about these? Q: What other works/projects can your students and fans expect from Jon Gress in the near future? ================================================================ |
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