Jury Alumni

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  Alex Hulme

  Co-founder & Creative Director, Approach Studio

  2024 Emerging Technologies Jury Captain

  Alex is co-founder of Approach Studio and has been designing and manufacturing products for over 20 years. He spent the best part of a decade at Map Project Office, where as studio co-director he oversaw the studio's creative output including projects for Sky, Google and Deutsche Telekom
  Since 2020 his focus at Approach has been on crafting tomorrow’s technology products. Approach’s clients are a mixture of big tech (Google, Logitech, Nothing) and upcoming hardware startups.

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  Julie Arrivé

  Co-founder & Design Director, Approach Studio

  2024 Emerging Technologies Jury Captain

  After many years working for industrial design consultancies worldwide and across a wide range of scales, Julie is now the co-founder of Approach Studio. Approach is a design agency developing hardware solutions using emerging technology for a mixture of startups and larger established brands. At Approach she also experiments on speculative and future technology usage.

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  Matt Brown

  Designer, Extraordinary Facility

  2024 Emerging Technologies Jury Member

  Matt Brown is an independent designer based in Los Angeles. Most of his work is in early-stage invention and prototyping in software and hardware for new products, services, media and environments. Recent clients include Google X, R&D at The New York Times, and The Berggruen Institute. He also runs Extraordinary Facility, a small design studio focused on learning and play.

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  Beau Perschall

  Director, Omniverse Sim Data Ops, NVIDIA

  2023 Emerging Technologies Jury Member

  Beau is a 30+ year 3D animation industry veteran and respected management professional with a long track record of delivering high-quality tools, services, and support on his partners' behalf. He's developed and maintained deep relationships with all of the major players in the 3D arena including NVIDIA, Amazon, Autodesk, Adobe, Apple, Microsoft, Maxon, Epic Games, and Unity just to name a few, and has been deeply involved in helping bring standards to 3D over the past 20 years as part of TurboSquid, which was acquired by Shutterstock in 2021. He was instrumental in the development of both the CheckMate 3D modeling standard and StemCell initiatives to help train artists on how to create visual content in a more consistent and professional manner so it could be utilized in multiple projects easily. In his role at NVIDIA, he is building a new 3D content creation standard called SimReady to help ensure that 3D art assets can be utilized across a wide range of machine learning, AI and simulation platforms in a consistent and predictable manner.

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  Jeff Olm

  Colorist, Director, Filmmaker, and Editor, Perfect Pictures

  2023 Emerging Technologies Jury Member

  Jeff has over 35 years of experience in editorial, color correction, VFX, virtual, and augmented reality. He has worked on over 100 films and numerous award-winning productions including: Titanic, Guardians of the Galaxy, The Fifth Element, Avengers, Spiderman, Harry Potter, and Armageddon.
  
  Jeff has worked as part of the creative, production, and post-production teams for numerous companies including Disney, Dreamworks Animation, Marvel, Sony, Warner Bros., Digital Domain, Universal, and New Line. Jeff has also worked on virtual reality projects for the NFL, NBA, and MLB. He is an expert at creating workflows for media projects.
  
  Jeff also worked for Autodesk and was part of Flame, Smoke, and Lustre product launches. He has lectured for universities all over the world speaking about post-production and virtual reality.
  

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  Dan Lion

  Senior Director, Business Development + Sales, 3D, Shutterstock

  2023 Emerging Technologies Jury Captain

  A self-described “technology junkie”, Dan Lion works with major Brands to chart their transition into an immersive 3D future.
  
  Dan has held leadership roles with companies including Kodak, Autodesk, TurboSquid and Technicolor. He co-founded Creative Bridge, a digital location based post-production services business for feature film and television production. He currently serves on the management team for Shutterstock 3D.

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  John Siczewicz

  Lighting & Compositing Artist, Skydance Animation

  2023 Emerging Technologies Jury Member

  An early adopter of digital content creation, John was at the forefront of technology in the late 1980s and 1990s. Utilizing platforms such as Quantel Paintbox and Kodak Cineon for high-end image manipulation, and soon embraced Discreet Logic’s (now Autodesk) Flame and Inferno systems.
  John found a home at the CGI pioneer Blue Sky Studios. Starting there with just a small handful of wildly creative thinkers and stayed on for twenty-six years until the studio’s closure in April of 2021.
  With close to 40 credits over the years, mostly in animated feature films, John has contributed to many of the family favorites that have entertained millions. He currently continues this path as a lighting and compositing artist at Skydance Animation.
  Always with an eye toward the future, he feels it’s essential to remain informed about emerging technologies and how they’ll affect and influence what we’re exposed to, and how we chose to access them.

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  Brian Gaffney

  Professional Artistry Team - Weta tools, Unity Technologies

  2023 Emerging Technologies Jury Member

  Brian Gaffney is a seasoned workflow specialist working alongside media and entertainment companies over the last 25 years, including Technicolor, PIX System, CODEX, Turbo Squid, and Autodesk in support of Visual Effects, Games Development, Content Management and real-time 3D virtual production. Brian is a creative technologist who assists artists and engineers in realizing their creative visions and currently works at Unity 3D with the Professional Artistry team.