A celebration of the talent and legacy of important VFX projects with the creators who made them happen.
On the heels of the success of Mortal Kombat, director Paul W.S. Anderson had his choice of projects and he picked Event Horizon. Anderson envisioned the film as a “haunted house in space” and set off to make what is arguably one of the scariest sci-fi horror films ever made - not to mention one of the most expensive films of 1997.
While originally a box office and critical failure, Event Horizon has since gained cult-film status with critics and fans celebrating Anderson’s dark vision.
In this 25th anniversary celebration, we revisit the film’s technical achievements, production difficulties, and funny set-stories, with members of the technical team responsible for some of the film’s groundbreaking visuals.
Image Credit: © Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
SPEAKERS
Cristin Pescosolido
VFX Supervisor // Independent
(Mare of Easttown, Old, Star Wars: Rogue One, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows)
Cristin has been in the visual effects industry for over 25 years and has experience with light field cinematography, extremely high-resolution imagery and capture, and development of new formats and capture systems. She has credits on over 70 films and venue shows as a VFX supervisor, match-move supervisor, stereo supervisor, CG supervisor, and compositor. Some of her notable credits include 300, Space Jam, Mare of Easttown, and Old.
Cristin was classically trained in animation and cinematography at Harvard and CalArts where she studied under Derek Lamb, Janet Perlman, Suzan Pitt, and Jules Engel. She is active in the visual effects community and judges for the VES and Siggraph as well as reading papers for DigiPro.
Dan Piponi
(Star Trek, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, The Matrix Trilogy, Event Horizon)
Dan Piponi started work in visual effects in around 1996 working on Space Jam and Event Horizon as part of the R&D group at Cinesite London. Dan moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and worked at Mass Illusion and ESC developing technology for bullet time and motion capture for The Matrix Trilogy and then at ILM developing technology for particle and hair generation and fluid dynamics used on movies including Star Trek (2009).
Dan was awarded three Academy Scientific and Technical Achievement Awards for work in virtual cinematography, GPU-based fluid dynamics, and for pioneering work in markerless facial motion capture. Subsequently, Dan spent a number of years at Google and Alphabet, among other things being one of the original developers of Loon, the (now recently shuttered) project to provide wifi from stratospheric balloons, and more recently working on probabilistic programming in the machine learning group.
Dan now works for Epic Games.
Simon Eves
Senior Graphics Engineer // OmniSci
(Rango, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, 10,000 BC, Grindhouse)
Simon is a Software Engineer originally from the UK, and now living in Marin County, north of San Francisco, specializing in visual effects and graphics. He started at Cinesite in March 1996, and Space Jam was the very first movie he worked on.
He moved to the US in 2001, and has worked at Industrial Light & Magic, The Orphanage, Double Negative, Digital Domain, and Lucasfilm Animation. In 2011 he made the move out of VFX, joining Imagination Technologies to work on hardware ray-tracing solutions, and is now a Senior Graphics Engineer at OmniSci, a thriving database/analytics start-up.
MODERATOR
Marina Antunes
Festival Director, Film Critic, Podcaster // Spark CG Society
Marina joined the Spark Computer Graphics Society as Festival Director in 2014. Throughout her tenure, the festival has grown into Western Canada’s premiere animation festival, featuring a number of specialty programming including the “Made in Canada” program celebrating Canadian creators, “Mother of a Medium” featuring works from female filmmakers, and “Spotlight on France” which celebrates the best of French animation. In 2019, the SPARK ANIMATION FESTIVAL became Academy Award ® accredited, the only festival in British Columbia to hold that distinction.
Marina is also a writer and podcaster with over 15 years of experience, first on a personal blog followed by a decade-long tenure on the now-retired Row Three. In 2008 she joined the writing staff at Quiet Earth, becoming Editor-In-Chief in 2014, a role she still holds. Over the years, she has also produced and hosted a number of podcasts including Before the Dawn, a long-running podcast on the Twilight franchise, Girls on Pop, a podcast on film and popular entertainment from women’s perspective and After the Credits, bi-monthly film podcast with nearly 300 episodes.
Marina is a member of the Online Film Critics Society, Alliance of Women Film Journalists, and the Visual Effects Society is the President of the Vancouver SIGGRAPH chapter, and has served on juries for several film festivals including the DOXA, St. Louis International Film Festival, and the Whistler Film Festival.
A celebration of the talent and legacy of important VFX projects with the creators who made them happen.
On the heels of the success of Mortal Kombat, director Paul W.S. Anderson had his choice of projects and he picked Event Horizon. Anderson envisioned the film as a “haunted house in space” and set off to make what is arguably one of the scariest sci-fi horror films ever made - not to mention one of the most expensive films of 1997.
While originally a box office and critical failure, Event Horizon has since gained cult-film status with critics and fans celebrating Anderson’s dark vision.
In this 25th anniversary celebration, we revisit the film’s technical achievements, production difficulties, and funny set-stories, with members of the technical team responsible for some of the film’s groundbreaking visuals.
Image Credit: © Paramount Pictures. All Rights Reserved.
SPEAKERS
Cristin Pescosolido
VFX Supervisor // Independent
(Mare of Easttown, Old, Star Wars: Rogue One, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles: Out of the Shadows)
Cristin has been in the visual effects industry for over 25 years and has experience with light field cinematography, extremely high-resolution imagery and capture, and development of new formats and capture systems. She has credits on over 70 films and venue shows as a VFX supervisor, match-move supervisor, stereo supervisor, CG supervisor, and compositor. Some of her notable credits include 300, Space Jam, Mare of Easttown, and Old.
Cristin was classically trained in animation and cinematography at Harvard and CalArts where she studied under Derek Lamb, Janet Perlman, Suzan Pitt, and Jules Engel. She is active in the visual effects community and judges for the VES and Siggraph as well as reading papers for DigiPro.
Dan Piponi
(Star Trek, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, The Matrix Trilogy, Event Horizon)
Dan Piponi started work in visual effects in around 1996 working on Space Jam and Event Horizon as part of the R&D group at Cinesite London. Dan moved to the San Francisco Bay Area and worked at Mass Illusion and ESC developing technology for bullet time and motion capture for The Matrix Trilogy and then at ILM developing technology for particle and hair generation and fluid dynamics used on movies including Star Trek (2009).
Dan was awarded three Academy Scientific and Technical Achievement Awards for work in virtual cinematography, GPU-based fluid dynamics, and for pioneering work in markerless facial motion capture. Subsequently, Dan spent a number of years at Google and Alphabet, among other things being one of the original developers of Loon, the (now recently shuttered) project to provide wifi from stratospheric balloons, and more recently working on probabilistic programming in the machine learning group.
Dan now works for Epic Games.
Simon Eves
Senior Graphics Engineer // OmniSci
(Rango, Hellboy II: The Golden Army, 10,000 BC, Grindhouse)
Simon is a Software Engineer originally from the UK, and now living in Marin County, north of San Francisco, specializing in visual effects and graphics. He started at Cinesite in March 1996, and Space Jam was the very first movie he worked on.
He moved to the US in 2001, and has worked at Industrial Light & Magic, The Orphanage, Double Negative, Digital Domain, and Lucasfilm Animation. In 2011 he made the move out of VFX, joining Imagination Technologies to work on hardware ray-tracing solutions, and is now a Senior Graphics Engineer at OmniSci, a thriving database/analytics start-up.
MODERATOR
Marina Antunes
Festival Director, Film Critic, Podcaster // Spark CG Society
Marina joined the Spark Computer Graphics Society as Festival Director in 2014. Throughout her tenure, the festival has grown into Western Canada’s premiere animation festival, featuring a number of specialty programming including the “Made in Canada” program celebrating Canadian creators, “Mother of a Medium” featuring works from female filmmakers, and “Spotlight on France” which celebrates the best of French animation. In 2019, the SPARK ANIMATION FESTIVAL became Academy Award ® accredited, the only festival in British Columbia to hold that distinction.
Marina is also a writer and podcaster with over 15 years of experience, first on a personal blog followed by a decade-long tenure on the now-retired Row Three. In 2008 she joined the writing staff at Quiet Earth, becoming Editor-In-Chief in 2014, a role she still holds. Over the years, she has also produced and hosted a number of podcasts including Before the Dawn, a long-running podcast on the Twilight franchise, Girls on Pop, a podcast on film and popular entertainment from women’s perspective and After the Credits, bi-monthly film podcast with nearly 300 episodes.
Marina is a member of the Online Film Critics Society, Alliance of Women Film Journalists, and the Visual Effects Society is the President of the Vancouver SIGGRAPH chapter, and has served on juries for several film festivals including the DOXA, St. Louis International Film Festival, and the Whistler Film Festival.
