Los Angeles, CA, February 1, 2019– The International Press Academy will present its prestigious TESLA AWARD honoring Visionary Achievement in Filmmaking Technology to Kevin Baillie. A Visual Effects (VFX) Supervisor and entrepreneur, Baillie is recognized for his innovative approaches to story-driven VFX that blend invented techniques with emerging technology to support pioneering filmmakers.
Baillie’s feature film VFX career started at age 18, when he joined Lucasfilm’s JAK Films on Star Wars: Episode I. In the two decades following, he helmed VFX at The Orphanage on features including Pirates of the Caribbean: At World’s End, Night at the Museum, Superman Returns, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and Hellboy. He supervised cutting-edge motion capture for features at ImageMovers Digital, and in 2010 co-founded the VFX studio Atomic Fiction, which was recently acquired by Deluxe/Method Studios.
Baillie’s work on The Walk, Allied, and Flight garnered awards recognition from the Visual Effects Society, and he received Satellite Awards in 2012 and 2015 for Best Visual Effects (for Flight andThe Walkrespectively). A member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, Baillie also led VFX teams on two Star Trek movies, two Transformers films, and most recently was the VFX Supervisor on Welcome to Marwen, another title in his long collaboration with Director Robert Zemeckis. Welcome to Marwenis now nominatedin three categories at the upcoming Visual Effects Society awards.
To achieve Zemeckis’s vision, Baillie broke new ground by designing a unique virtual production process that used game engine technology to help all departments collaborate on set, evolved traditional photographic tools by co-inventing a digital ‘variable diopter,’ and advanced the state of the art for digital humans with a new technique that fused live action footage and computer-generated imagery. Get a look behind the scenes here.
Beyond pushing technological boundaries on individual films, Baillie is recognized as a leader in advancing the technological landscape for the industry overall. Most notable are his efforts to lead the VFX industry’s movement toward modern cloud computing, a technology that promises virtually unlimited computing power whenever and wherever it’s needed. He pioneered cloud rendering with Flight, the first major motion picture to extensively use the cloud. In 2015, he founded Conductor Technologies, a cloud rendering software service that enables creative teams to harness the power of the cloud.
Baillie said, “I believe that efficiencyis the next uncharted frontier for the VFX industry to conquer. It may not sound snazzy on the surface, but efficiency is inextricably linked to creativity. It can be a linchpin of helping any filmmaker with a risky, previously unaffordable storytelling idea to bring their vision to the screen. I’m passionate about helping original stories to be told, so I’m also passionate about filmmaking technology!”
Baillie joins past Tesla Award recipients including his first ‘boss,’ Star Wars mastermind George Lucas, legendary director Richard Donner, Steadicam inventor Garrett Brown, VFX pioneer Douglas Trumbull, nine-time VFX Oscar winner Dennis Muren, master special make-up effects creator Stan Winston,acclaimed cinematographer Roger Deakins,and the birthplace of the VFX industry: Industrial Light & Magic.
About the International Press Academy
The International Press Academy (IPA) is a global association of professional entertainment journalists representing a multitude of print, broadcast and digital media outlets. Fedora, the Federation of European and Mediterranean Film Critics, joined the IPA in 2011 extending the IPA’s membership of foreign and domestic correspondents, whose markets reach millions worldwide via print, television, radio and the Internet.
