VFX software developer The Foundry has appointed Richard Shackleton as the new product manager for Nuke, its compositing system. Shackleton has more than 15 years experience of product development in the visual effects/editing markets, having previously worked in similar roles with well-known manufacturers, including The Foundry. He takes over from Matt Plec, who has become Nuke product designer.
Shackleton has a successful track record in the development of creative products for motion picture film and broadcast applications. He joins from Digital Vision (Nucoda group), where he was lead product designer on the company's range of Digital Intermediate products. He was formerly director of engineering at Nucoda, and provided senior software consultancy to Sony Corporation Japan.
Prior to that, Shackleton was lead development engineer at The Foundry, specializing in plug-in API-based image-processing technologies. He was also intimately involved in the conception of OFX (Open FX), the Foundry-driven open source standard for plug-in developers and host manufacturers that is now widely adopted worldwide. Shackleton was lead research and development engineer at Avid's Parallax Graphics group for four years and, whilst at Nortel, was involved in pioneering research into immersive 3-D visualization. He holds a first class masters degree in software engineering from Imperial College of Science, Technology and Medicine, London.
Bill Collis, CEO at The Foundry, said, "Our goal is that Nuke becomes the automatic product-of-choice for all visual effects companies as they build, or rebuild, their visual effects pipelines. Richard has enormous experience and capabilities in this arena, and is already well known by many of our customers. We have an ambitious road map for Nuke, and Richard will be instrumental in helping us achieve it."
Shackleton will immediately oversee the launch of Nuke 5.1, which features advanced 64-bit capabilities, a debut Nuke PLE plus support of the FBX 3D interchange format, and The Foundry's Ocula plug-ins for 3D stereo image-processing.
"I have known Simon Robinson and Bruno Nicoletti since they started in the visual effects business. Their approach has always been based on responding to user needs and this remains fundamental to all product development at The Foundry today," said Shackleton. "Nuke comes from a pedigree background, where it was inherently designed to handle large-scale projects with high pixel counts. Under The Foundry's auspices, Nuke has become a stronger and more viable product for the wider market. I want to see the worldwide user-base grow significantly and will directly handle the challenges this brings."
The Foundry's portfolio includes a trio of Academy Award-winning products: Nuke, the high-end compositing system; Furnace, the collection of powerful image-processing plug-ins and Keylight, the advanced keying application. The Foundry's products also include: Tinder plug-ins for creative and environmental visual effects; Forge, a command-line dust and dirt-busting application; plus Anvil colour manipulation tools. The company will shortly ship Ocula, its unique collection of plug-ins for 3-D stereoscopic post production.
For more information visit www.thefoundry.co.uk.
