Demo Reel
I used to work on effects in the entertainment industry and when you’re in effects, you create demo reels to show what you worked on. This was mine from 2002 (plus some other stuff).
Most of the footage comes from this movie called Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within. If you haven’t heard of it, it’s because nobody went to see it in the theaters (it premiered in third place after Legally Blonde and Cats and Dogs), and so the studio I worked for closed down which is why I needed to make a demo reel in the first place. The rest of the stuff came from a short film called Final Flight of the Osiris, which was part of a series of animated shorts in the world of The Matrix.
It was a lot of fun working in computer graphics those days. It was early enough that you could pretty much do anything in that area and be the first person to do that thing. Like, I think I might have written the first volumetric shader with lighting used in a feature film. But there were only, like, 5 other CG feature films out by that point. Making iPhone apps in 2008 and working on virtual reality stuff now feel kinda similar. There’s something exciting about being on the frontier and exploring, working with other people trying to figure out how it all works. It’s a little scary and exhilarating at the same time.
