The Allan McKay Podcast

Respeecher uses deep learning (AI) techniques to produce high quality synthetic speech.  The company was launched in 2018 by Alex Serdiuk, Dmytro Bielievtsov and Grant Reaber. In March 2020, Respeecher received $1.5 million in startup funding from ff Venture Capital, Acrobator Ventures, ICU Ventures, Network VC, and several angel investors. A year later, the company launched the beta of Voice Mark...

The mission of Monsters Aliens Robots Zombies (MARZ) is to deliver feature-film quality visual effects on television timelines by harnessing GPU clusters, game engine technology, AI and senior industry talent. Leveraging these pillars allows us to consistently execute with both speed and quality for our premium television projects. Lon Molnar is the Co-President of MARZ. With more than 20 years of...

Stability AI is the company behind Stable Diffusion, a powerful, free and open-source text-to-image generator that launched in August 2022. Since launching, Stable Diffusion has been downloaded and licensed by more than 200,000 developers globally. Stability AI's consumer-facing product DreamStudio quickly grew to well over a million registered users from more than 50 countries who collectively ha...

The most commonly asked questions that get asked are:  "Should I go to school to study VFX?"  "Should I study online?"  "What school / online community should I join?" Attending a school is a more traditional way of learning. However, because of the speed at which technology is changing, school is not always the best route. Throughout the history of this Podcast, Allan has interviewed many artists...

Brendan Kane is the Bestselling Author of ONE MILLION FOLLOWERS: HOW I BUILD A MASSIVE SOCIAL AUDIENCE IN 30 DAYS and HOOK POINT: HOW TO STAND OUT IN A 3-SECOND WORLD, as well as the Founder and Managing Director of Hook Point. Since 2005, Brendan has helped the largest brands and celebrities in the world to reverse engineer how to make content go viral. He has worked with major corporations MTV,...

Perfectionism holds artists back. It gets the best of us, both junior and senior artists like. It's part of the inability to manage ourselves.  It also ends up costing more: You're spending so much time on the project, you burn through the budget. You end up paying the client for the privilege of working on their project. There is a famous quote from Leonardo da Vinci, "Art is never finished, only...

Chris Bailey is a Productivity Expert and the bestselling Author of two books about productivity: The Productivity Project and Hyperfocus: How to Be More Productive in a World of Distraction . Chris writes about productivity at www.alifeofproductivity.com and speaks to organizations around the globe on how they can become more productive, without hating the process. Chris was born in Red Deer, Alb...

We all have doubts if we're on the right path. Being an artist requires a lot of patience, perseverance and skill. In addition, we have to continue learning and innovating.  There is this inner voice that asks, "Am I investing my time into something that's going to pay off?" It weighs on you. It doesn't help when we have people around us, telling us to give up. There is so much negativity on the i...

Tim Miller is a Film Director, Animator, Creative Director and VFX Artist. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film for the work on his short film Gopher Broke . He made his directing debut with Deadpool . He is also known for creating opening sequences for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Thor: The Dark World . In 1995, Tim co-founded Blur Studio with David Stinnett...

AI is exploding everywhere. There are so many technological innovations that use AI in visual effects. You might be already following the massive growth of AI. For VFX artists, the question is: Is AI taking over the art world? Will art be replaced by AI? Are artists' careers over? In 2010, deep learning changed everything. AI became the revolutionary thing we can utilize. But the big part of preve...

ActionVFX creates the world's largest library of visual effects stock footage elements for professional VFX Compositors. From Fire, Smoke, and Explosions, to People and Crowds. ActionVFX's mission is to provide artists with the best VFX assets in the world. ActionVFX's footage has been used in films like: Avengers: Endgame, Spider-Man: Far from Home, Jumanji: The Next Level;  television shows like...

EveryPoint combines photogrammetry techniques with the iPhone Pro's LiDAR scanner to fill in the gaps, as well as utilizes the positional / accelerometer data from the Apple AR toolkit. When combined, this delivers color 3D models that are said to be more accurate than simply using the iPhone's LiDAR scanner alone. EveryPoint is not an end user product in itself, but a technology layer on which de...

COVID-19 created havoc in people's lives and for a while, we thought it would shut down the VFX industry. But it turned out to have the opposite effect. As productions shut down, the studios sent artists home and their equipment to their homes, allowing for artists to work from home. That also means that studios could now hire from artists from anywhere, turning the industry into a truly global on...

Epic Games CTO Kim Libreri is responsible for continuing Epic's tradition of fusing state-of-the-art technology with the pinnacle of visual artistry, and for defining the studio's Unreal Engine as the platform of choice for all types of interactive experiences including games, movies, visualization, augmented reality and virtual reality.  Prior to joining Epic Games, Kim was the Chief Strategy Off...

At the beginning of your VFX career, things can seem so hard and so stressful. As a junior VFX Artist, you may feel like everyone is out to get you. Here are some powerful mindset shifts that will change your outlook and how you feel about your career. A lot of artists have a struggling artist mentality. Once you understand that you're in a commercial industry – and you are a commercial industry o...

Christopher Zammit is a VFX Supervisor and Art Director. They've worked on many films like Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Tomorrowland, Ghostbusters , and of course films in the Transformers franchise Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Transformers: Age of Extinction and Transformers: The Last Knight .  In this Podcast, VFX Supervisor and Art Director  Christopher Zammi...

Darin Moran has been making movies for over 20 years. While he studied design & photography at The Academy of Art in San Francisco and film theory and cinematography at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, he dropped out of school after a few years to learn in the field by actually making films. Exposed to a wide variety of processes and styles across multiple disciplines, Darin's eclectic work ex...

Chris Ume is a visual effects expert with many years of experience in entertainment and corporate projects. In 2020, he began experimenting with deepfake technology, sourcing AI models from obscure Russian websites, and experimenting with new techniques. That led to a collaboration with an American actor known for Tom Cruise parody videos and Deep Tom Cruise was born. Since then, Chris has worked...

Emily Dean is an Asian-Australian writer, director, and artist living in LA. Emily holds a BA (Honours I), History and English Major, from the University of Sydney. Following her academic studies, Emily pursued a career in animation first at the Australian Film TV Radio School (AFTRS) and earned a Graduate Certificate in Animation Directing, then further at the California Institute of the Arts (Ca...

You need to be ultra specific in how you define yourself when you're applying for jobs as an artist. It's the difference between being front-of-mind and standing out -- or blending in with all the other applications. And it's something that none of us do. By not niching down -- by not being a specific brand -- you're missing out on an opportunity to make yourself the ideal candidate for the job. S...

Evan Carmichael #BELIEVES in entrepreneurs.  At 19, he built and then sold a biotech software company.  At 22, he was a venture capitalist raising $500k to $15M. He now runs a YouTube channel for entrepreneurs with over 2 million subscribers, wrote 4 books, and speaks globally.  He wants to solve the world's biggest problem.  He's set 2 world records, uses a trampoline & stand-up desk, owns Canada...

The WHAT IF? Scenario: It's an addictive concept for all of us. What if you give up on a career before you ever got started? Fear is just your mind trying to prevent you from change because change is unknown. It doesn't want you to risk safety for something new. But the big growths and breakthroughs are on the other side of that fear.  If you aren't willing to put in the extra work and see what it...

Scott Rosekrans is a VFX Supervisor and Virtual Production Supervisor for the Real Time Group at Zoic Studios. He's been working to integrate Unreal Engine into every facet of the facilities post production workflow, from previz and on-set virtual production to final renders. He is also Unreal Authorized Instructor Partner for Epic Games. Scott graduated in 2005 from Savannah College of Art and De...

DI4D the world's leading 4D facial performance capture service that specializes in animation for digital doubles. Their proprietary technology is derived from over 30 years of cutting edge research and development dating back to their own PhD research. Since then, the company has consistently innovated at the cutting edge of what is technically possible in the field.  With bases in the UK and US,...

Eloi Andaluz Fullà is a visual artist with over 18 years of experience in 3D. He's worked in architecture, motion graphics, advertising, mappings, interactive installations and movies. He is specialized in particles and dynamics simulations. He has worked as a freelancer for different VFX studios, providing tools and workflows for specific shots.  For the last 7+ years, he's been working for Scanl...