NICK PARK
Nick Park is a director, writer and animator from Preston, Lancashire. He studied Animation at the National and Television school in Buckinghamshire, where he created the characters for Wallace & Grommit for a graduation project and used traditional stop motion techniques to bring them to life. He did not finish the episode he had begun in time for his deadline, however, during this time he invited Aadman's Peter Lord and David Sproxton to the school as guest speakers. They then invited him to spend two summers with them to help them with various projects. He began prop-making for Morph and then moved on to animating Morph. The team at Aardman then took on his unfinished Wallace & Grommit project and when finished, was nominated for an Oscar in the short animated film category. They have since won 3 Oscars for the Wallace & Grommit films. His most recent film is the stop motion Early man.
Katherine Safarian
Katherine Safarian holds an MA in Film and Television Critical Studies, and a BA in Communication studies from the Universtiy of California, Los Angeles. She has taught undergraduate film and television courses and has represented PIXAR at film festivals throughout Japan, Europe and the US. She joined PIXAR as a production coordinator on Toy Story. She holds leadership role in PIXAR as the Producer and vice president of production. She produced the Academy Award-winning film, Brave.
RenderBurger (Farid Ghanbari)
Farid Ghanbari is from Iran and now lives in Virginia, USA. He achieved his bachelors of Architecture in 2009 and has worked as a 3D CG Generalist and Lighting artist for 10 years. From 2015 he has been a CG Supervisor at Lexip Games. He has experience in games, architectural vizualisation, advertising, motion design and VFX mostly created in MAYA, Realflow, Marelous Designer, Cinema 4D, Substance Painter, Photoshop and After Effects.
Tim Burton
Tim Burton is an American film director, producer, writer and animator born in 1958. He is known his eccentric, dark, Gothic films such as The Knightmare Before Christmas, Beetlejuice, Edward Scissorhands and Sleepy Hallow. He studied Character Animation at the California Institute of the Arts. The shorts he made at this school attracted the attention of the Animation division at Disney, which offered Burton an apprenticeship in the studio.
Seth MacFarlane
Seth MacFarlane is an American writer, actor, animator and producer. He studied animation at the Rhode Island School of Design and was recruited based on his writing skills to work on Hanna-Barbera. He is the creater of Family Guy from 1999 and is co-creater of American Dad. He won several awards for his work on Family Guy including four Primetime Emmy Awards and an Annie Award.
John Lasseter
John Lasseter was born in California in 1957. He studied Character Animation at the California Institute of the Arts. In 1975 he enrolled as the second student in the CalArts Character Animation programme created by Disney Animators. During his time here he produced two shorts - The Lady and the Tramp and Nitemare, both of which won the Student Academy Award for Animation. His success with Lady and the Tramp is what got him his job with Disney once he had graduated in 1979. He also went on to work with PIXAR on Toy Story, A Bug's Life and Cars.
