With 15+ years of experience, the VFX supervisor and commercial director joins the virtual production studio to oversee the company’s visual effects and animation production.
Impossible Objects (IO) has brought on VFX supervisor and commercial director Ruel Smith to oversee the virtual production company’s visual effects and animation production as part of its strategic move to embrace next-generation real-time filmmaking. Smith boasts 15+ years of experience in film, television, and virtual production.
Smith began his career at Digital Domain, creating award-winning VFX for advertising and film. His interest in real-time filmmaking emerged when he joined the virtual production team of Disney’s Jungle Book - a film considered a milestone in showcasing the creative potential of real-time technology. He was also a key member of visual effects teams for the movies Flags of Our Fathers, Black Panther, and Captain Marvel.
In his new role, Smith plans to build expanded visual effects and animation teams along with a pipeline and internal infrastructure to support real-time virtual production workflows using both off-the-shelf and internally developed creative tools. Smith will be based in Los Angeles and work alongside IO founders Joe Sill and Jerad Anderson.
“I’m looking forward to taking the lead on building a team and leaning on best practices from my experience in both traditional visual effects and the rapidly evolving tools methodologies in real-time production and in-camera visual effects,” shared Smith. “Impossible Objects has an incredible portfolio of work and truly represents the state of the art in virtual production today.”
Sill added, “Ruel is a natural leader, and after working with him on an incredibly ambitious project earlier this year, we knew he’d be the perfect fit for developing the visual effects and animation teams for our quickly expanding virtual production company. He is an inspired and powerful manifester and is fueled by a curiosity that we all share here at Impossible Objects.”
Appreciative of the mentoring he received early on in his career, Smith looks to pay it forward by doing the same for a new generation of artists, guiding them into the future of virtual production.
Founded in 2019, Impossible Objects is a self-described world-building lab with a team of artists and engineers specializing in building projects that marry physical and digital worlds to create commercial and original IPs. Combining expertise in CG visualization and animation, real-time performance capture, and navigation of greenscreen and LED volumes, the company is well positioned to fill an ever-increasing demand for virtual production.
Source: Impossible Objects
Debbie Diamond Sarto is news editor at Animation World Network.
