Seth Rosenthal has joined Tweak as a partner and director of business development. Rosenthal wrapped up six years at Industrial Light & Magic in order to make the jump. He will contribute to Tweak's efforts to expand its visual effects business for feature films and commercials and will help launch a new division to distribute Tweak's proprietary software applications for visual effects and media production.
At ILM, Rosenthal supervised a department that stood out for its innovative efforts to merge elements of live production and computer graphics into to new production methods. He supervised various projects, including motion capture (THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW, STAR WARS: EPISODES I and II and THE MUMMY), realtime virtual set integration with first unit photography (ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE: AI), multi-camera photography for 3D reconstruction (LEMONY SNICKET and MINORITY REPORT) and photogrammetric set reconstruction and high dynamic range photography (HULK).
Rosenthal commented: "ILM has an amazing breadth of resources under one roof; there's nowhere else like it. Tweak is remarkable in a different way, they have an incredible concentration of talent and energy in the last few years with a small crew they have created an unbelievable amount of proprietary technology while turning out high-end vfx work."
According to Hourihan, Rosenthal will add considerable live action production experience to Tweak in addition to his technical skills and entrepreneurial attitude. "Tweak puts a lot of value on inventiveness and Seth has come up with some cool stuff; among other things, he got a patent for the facial motion capture technology he co-invented at ILM. He also proved that he could pull off very technical live production projects. He has worked on feature film visual effects, on character animation, on commercials, and even on software projects, so he can contribute to everything that we do at Tweak."
Prior to joining ILM, Rosenthal worked at Microsoft's Digital Backlot, where he co-supervised 3D media creation for games and multimedia projects.
Tweak Films (www.tweakfilms.com) is an award-winning character animation and visual effects company that combines cinematic artistry with advanced graphics research to create characters and images that are beyond the scope of off-the-shelf approaches.
Tweak has quickly made a name for itself with work on feature film projects such as Zhang Yimou's epic HERO and commercial work for agencies such as BBDO and Saatchi & Saatchi. Tweak has tackled high-profile challenges such as waves destroying New York City in THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW and the massive destruction sequences in THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE RETURN OF THE KING by creating proprietary software for simulation, particle effects and fluids.
Tweak co-founder Hourihan has received two Academy Awards for Scientific and Technical Achievement, the first for inventing Dynamation and the second for his collaboration on ILM's creature dynamics system. Tweak Films is located in the Presidio of San Francisco.
Bill Desowitz, former editor of VFXWorld, is currently the Crafts Editor of IndieWire.
