Cinesite Hollywood has appointed David Remba as manager of research and development, and Ray Mitchell, Jr. as director of engineering. They will report to Daniel Rosen, chief technology officer. Remba has been the managing technical director at Cinesite since the beginning of 2001. He worked with the character setup team on Megiddo and guided and assisted the development of the water animation and rendering pipeline for Cinesite Orange County. In his new role, Remba will be responsible for all software activities at Cinesite Hollywood. Prior to joining Cinesite, he was a senior technical director for The Secret Lab (TSL) where he worked on such films as Reign of Fire and Wild Life. At TSL, he researched a Computational Fluid Dynamic (CFD) simulator to create fog, fire and smoke, and wrote tools to resize skeletal rigs for re-use on different characters. He has also served in various technology support roles during the production of Dinosaur, Mulan, Pocahontas and Final Approach. On Dinosaur, he created Lightmix, an interactive lighting tool for balancing and color adjusting CG lights using high fidelity Renderman images, and assisted the modeling group by creating new software for complex jaw envelopes on several lemur characters. Remba is also an instructor of a CGI technical course series at UCLA Extension. Mitchell brings 25 years of leading-edge technology experience to Cinesite. He was vice president of engineering at Audio Plus Video/West, director of video engineering for Consolidated Film Industries and director of engineering at Vidfilm, Inc. In those capacities, he built a new post-production facility, planned and installed an IT infrastructure, designed and installed telecine suites, redesigned and rebuilt a video duplication area, and was involved in strategic planning and the hiring of engineer teams. He is a member of the Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers (SMPTE) and the Society of Television Engineers, Los Angeles.
