About Conrad Dueck and Visual Effects Mine Inc.
The following summarizes who I am, how I got here, and what skills I have acquired which may help bring success to your next vfx or animation production.
Growing up, I always had a creative side that often found me sitting in front of the TV on Saturday mornings drawing the characters I saw in cartoons. I remember spending time drawing comic books or writing stories while stuck inside on cold or rainy afternoons when the best choice of our 3 “farmer vision” channels was old Thunderbirds movies while wishing it was more like Harryhausen’s sword wielding skeletons!
My first experience with computers was teaching myself how to code in BASIC on a Tandy TRS-80 connected to our family’s tv in the early 80s. While teaching myself enough to write a few small video games, the lack of peers and my own evolving interests over the years took me away from programming, and computers in general, until the mid-1990s, when I took a multimedia course and met Chris Bond. At the time he was a local award winning animator teaching 3d animation, using 3ds-DOS-r4, and later started Frantic Films with partner Ken Zorniak, where I got my first job in CG.
During 12 years with Frantic Films (then Prime Focus), as their first employee, I progressed from 3d generalist to facility CG supervisor, actively contributing to almost every production task along the way. As part of the core team, we grew the studio to more than one hundred staff, spread through Winnipeg, Vancouver, Los Angeles, and Sydney for a short time.
When Prime Focus decided to close their Winnipeg facility, two fellow long-time employees, Mike Shand and Chrstine Albers, myself and Phyllis Laing of Buffalo Gal Pictures partnered to form Opus Visual Effects where I served as director and vice-president while performing duties as 3d/cg supervisor, technical director and lead 3d artist. Opus started out with some basic television VFX, video game intros/cut scenes, logo/commercial work and evolved to again produce high end film VFX.
After 5 years of rebuilding, 2014 came with not many opportunities across the industry, and we found sustainability through partnering with a Toronto company to produce the first feature length animation made in Manitoba, on a shoe-string budget. While not visually stunning, this will still be a point of pride for me, as it’s successful completion led to a second animated feature and the creation of Tangent Animation. A great many thanks to Jeff Bell for helping to foster this industry in Manitoba and to Ken Zorniak for helping grow the animation industry locally, with projects like “Ozzy”, “NextGen” and “Maya and the Three”, the latter two shows now or soon to be on Netflix.
Most recently in my time with ScanlineVFX, initiating a new role as Generalist Supervisor for the North American and Korean offices, I was able to help to set the groundwork for future success in helping update tooling and processes for the benefit of the generalist teams. As my contract came to an end, it’s very encouraging to know the 3 long standing employees taking over the role will be set up to use their years of SCL pipeline knowledge to drive the studio on to even greater success as a subsidiary of Netflix.
These experiences have allowed me to grow from a newbie CG generalist to a supervisor to a business owner in VFX and then translate those skills to longform animation, as a seasoned supervisor, manager and technical artist. Developing pipelines and workflows has always been a strong part of that growth, and the business experience has really helped cement the need for efficiency through innovation.
My hands on specialties are strongest in particle animation, volumetric simulation and other technical director tasks (including but not limited to scripting and pipeline planning) and support.
Through the Visual Effects Mine, I can provide a wide range of freelance services from VFX consulting and CG supervision to hands on production generalist support for your in-house teams or to complete work for your productions.
Thank you for taking a moment to read this far and get to know me.