6:00-7:00pm PST / 9:00-10:00pm EST
Presented by Harvardwood in Partnership with The Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California
The Entertainment Technology Center, part of the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts (ETC@USC), explores the technology that is on the edge of changing an industry. Pioneered on The Mandalorian, the technique known as ICVFX utilized the Unreal game engine (à la Fortnite) to build photo-realistic backgrounds that played back on LED Volumes or giant immersive TVs. This talk will focus on the winner of ETC@USC’s 2021/2022 Innovation Grant, Fathead, and how it is achieving next-level filmmaking using this technique among others.
Guest Speakers:
Kenneth S. Williams, AB '78, Executive Director and CEO
Ken is a longtime entertainment and media professional including an almost 20-year career at Columbia Pictures and Sony Pictures, where he founded the Digital Studios Division and co-founded Sony Pictures Imageworks, the Academy Award winning visual effects, animation and multimedia company. For the past two years, he has been a private investor and consultant in the entertainment and media space. Previously, Ken held C-level positions with Captive Media LLP, Ascent Media Group, and Technicolor Digital Cinema, LLC.
Erik Weaver, Director, Adaptive Production
Erik Weaver, a specialist focused on the intersection of cloud and the media and entertainment industry, is currently director of ETC’s Adaptive Production project and special projects. Prior work at ETC includes “Production in the Cloud” that encompassed many aspects of the cloud, including transport, security, metadata, long-term storage, and the formation of an agnostic framework that unites key vendors and studios. Erik was also global M&E strategist for Western Digital. Weaver has fostered and achieved many accomplishments in the M&E market including executive producer of “The Suitcase,” (CAA’s People’s Choice award, 2017 Tribeca Film Festival), a project focused on HDR, cloud-based workflows and Live 360; executive producer of “Wonder Buffalo” (2017 SXSW Interactivity competition) that focused on an HRD first, Cloud, & Volumetric capture. The project brought together by Volumetric capture, Photogrammetry, Ambonisic(?) sound, and interactivity. He chaired/programmed NAB’s “Next Generation Media Technologies” Conference 2014-2017, as well as vNAB/vETC 2015-2019. Erik also led the SMPTE C4 MR30 Standards group, which oversaw and helped educate the M&E industry on using C4, Semantics, and NoSQL for Managing Motion Picture Data. He has spoken at dozens of M&E conferences and tradeshows.
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