Sam Richards

Work History

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  VFX Design Manager

  Walt Disney Imagineering

  June 2014 - Present
• 

  Pipeline Architect

  Sony Pictures Imageworks

  January 2007 - June 2014

  Managed a team of 18 software engineers developing asset-management, production-management, cue and other infrastructure tools.
  
  Worked with DFX Sups, CG Supervisors, Producers and DPM’s to identify potential problems, with a focus on hand-offs from team to team, developing new pipelines and prioritizing requests between the many concurrently running productions for tasks related to the middle-tier team.
  
  Principal developer of TrackIt the internal production management tool, as well as a developer of the in-house review tool (itview) and artwork managem

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  

  
• 

  CG Supervisor/Lead Technical Director

  Sony Pictures Imageworks

  January 1997 - December 2006

  As well as shot production, I developed the facility backup pipeline, and disk space management tools, lineup database and first generation of production tracking database. Additionally worked with the software department on the facility asset-management tools.
  For spiderman we developed the building pipeline, that developed into the assembly component system that continues to be used at Imageworks today.
  
  Movie credits include:
  2004 The Polar Express (Pipeline Engineer)
  2002 Spider-Man (Development CG supervisor)
  2000 Cast Away (Technical Director)
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• 

  Managing Technical Director

  Blue Sky Studios

  January 1994 - December 1997

  Digital Effects Supervisor for “Joe’s Apartment”. This included on-set supervision as well as the overall pipeline design, crew hiring and procedural animation.
  
  Developed lighting GUI for Blue Sky’s renderer, as well as providing procedural animation and lighting on numerous commercials.
  
  Managed the design, setup and move of Blue Sky into a new building at Harrison NY.
  Supervised all technical directors, pipeline engineers and systems engineers, including hiring, reviews, planning, and equipment purchases.

  

• Animator

  CAL Videographics

  June 1987 - December 1993

  Modeling, texture painting, animation and lighting for numerous commercials and title sequences.
  Developed procedural animation system that could drive many types of simulations from water, spring-systems and particle systems. Wrote a polygonal modeler for the Sun3 workstations.