Independent production, design, effects and post finishing house Guerilla FX (GFX) has signed Vance Miller as Character Animator/Technical Director.
"Vance is one of these very special talents. He is a triple threat -- a technically strong 3D artist, a tremendous compositor and a wonderful character animator," explained Partner/Creative Director Thor Raxlen. "I have worked with him for a dozen years now and he has a really fine mind, a fabulous eye for detail and he comes up with tremendous solutions. When you have someone with all these skills leading a project, it makes for a strong overall piece because he has done all of the jobs, he knows exactly what needs to be done and is leading by experience. I am really excited about adding more character animation talent to our CG team."
Miller comes to Guerilla FX from the graphic design company Eyeball (New York, New York) where, for the last two years, as the company's Technical Director, he was the lighting and rendering specialist on most of their 3D projects, supervised and fine tuned their rendering pipeline, and filled roles as both 3D animator and 2D compositor on a variety of projects including AT&T, Best Buy, Bioshock, Cinemax, Cingular, Country Music Channel, Jeep, McDonald's, MTV, Mystic Aquarium and VH1, among others.
A freelance gun, from September 1996 through May 2005 he lent his considerable talents to a variety of New York area firms including Chelsea Digital, Edgeworks, Eyeball, the now defunct Pitch, and others, as an Animator/Modeler/Lighter. He provided complete design and execution of animation for commercials; created special effects for music videos and television ads; supplied graphics and animation for high end corporate projects and created models and animation for mass market computer games.
Earlier in his career, as VP of CGI Operations for Pixel Light Communications (New York, New York), Miller served as Chief Animator on all in-house projects, oversaw the graphics creation for multimedia productions, and worked with design firms on animation concepts and storyboarding. He was a Computer Graphics Artist at Electric Image Center (Edgewater, New Jersey) where he created computer graphics for film, video and print output, demonstrated software to prospective system sales clients and provided training to clients on software usage. Miller also spent a number of years freelancing as a Computer Graphics Artist supervising graphics editing sessions, creating artwork for magazine covers and product packaging, and producing 3D animations for corporate and broadcast clients.
On joining the GFX family Miller said, "I've worked with Thor Raxlen in the past on many successful projects. After spending a few years in the interim as a freelancer and on staff at other companies, I jumped at the chance to join the team at Guerilla FX. I believe they have the right mix of creativity and drive and this is the place I want to be."
Over the course of his career, Miller's work has earned honors from SIGGRAPH for the lighting, textures and animation he created for an indie short, PROTEST; a SMPTE Student Film Honorable Mention for a stop-motion film, OUT OF SYNC; a NCGA Third Place Secondary/Undergraduate Level for an early computer animated film, CONSCIENCE OF THE KING. In addition, he was Lead 3D Animator/Artist for a Warner Music interactive CD that won both the NJ Business Association Award for Best Multimedia Presentation and HOW Magazine's 1995 International Design Award of Merit for Multimedia.
Miller earned a Bachelor of Applied Science in Film and Video from the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York. He recently completed a two-year online program through Animation Mentor in Character Animation.
