In the programme
BEYOND THE GREEN SCREEN
Virtual Production, VFX and Generative AI
- Virtual production on a real budget
- Where generative tools enter the VFX chain
- In practice: one shot from start to finish
Who's on stage
Oscar Burgos
VFX Supervisor · Director
Character and creature animator with around sixteen years of experience, credited across major studio blockbusters. He worked in the animation department on Marvel's Avengers: Infinity War and The Suicide Squad, contributed to Tom and Jerry and Dolittle, and served as a lead animation artist at MPC on Disney's Mufasa: The Lion King. His recent work includes visual effects for Predator: Badlands at Framestore. His craft centres on bringing digital characters and creatures to life for photoreal feature films.
Stuart Cripps
Supervisor · VFX / AI
Stuart Cripps is a Visual Effects and AI Supervisor with more than 20 years of experience at the forefront of feature film production. His credits include Harry Potter, The Revenant, Black Hawk Down, Pirates of the Caribbean, and numerous other productions. Throughout his career, he has worked at leading studios including The Mill and Industrial Light & Magic, and has held supervising roles at Pixomondo and Sony Pictures Imageworks. Recognized for bridging cutting-edge technology with cinematic storytelling, Stuart has become a driving force in the application of artificial intelligence to filmmaking. As AI Development Supervisor at Flawless, he led the team behind the company's pioneering visual dubbing technology. He has also overseen AI initiatives for clients including Meta and currently serves as Head of AI Film Innovation at Los Angeles-based production company 30 Ninjas, where he leads the development and integration of AI-driven workflows for feature films.
Matt Tokarz
VFX Supervisor · Creative Director · Poland
Co-founder of the startup Animatica.ai, Head of CG in the animation and VFX department at Platige Image, previously at Alvernia Studios. Close to two decades in the industry as an artist, manager and creative director. He ran the CG side of cinematics the whole game world has watched: the Witcher IV reveal at The Game Awards, the Saros announcement for PS5, Secret Level for Prime Video and Exoborne. He came into the profession from both sides at once: he finished a technical degree with a thesis on video-based camera tracking, then left his first games job for the Academy of Fine Arts. He still works hands-on in Maya, Nuke and Unreal Engine, and writes pipelines and in-house tools in Python with AI support. Today he is focused on developing Animatica AI, a control layer for generative animation. On AI in production he speaks without overstatement: a tool that opens things up and speeds them up, and that still needs a human answering for the result.
Pawel Pierzchlewicz
CEO · Scientist · Poland
A researcher and AI engineer working on probabilistic machine learning, motion modelling and inverse problems. CEO and co-founder of Animatica.ai, previously Head of Artificial Intelligence at TeaCode, where he led R&D teams on AI applications in animation and computer graphics. He began in science as a doctoral student with Professor Fabian Sinz at the University of Göttingen; his thesis, Deep Probabilistic Priors for Solving Inverse Problems, put deep probabilistic models such as normalising flows and diffusion models to work on inverse problems in neurobiology and human motion modelling. His research has been presented at NeurIPS and ICLR and published in journals including Cell Reports, and he is a co-author of Platypose, which gives calibrated multi-hypothesis 3D human pose estimates zero-shot, and of Energy Guided Diffusion, which uses diffusion models to generate neuron-stimulating images. Today he builds tools for generative character animation and works on getting AI into the pipelines film and games already run.
