According to Ed Kramer, the new Chair of the SIGGRAPH Pioneers Group, the keynote speaker for the 2019 Pioneers Reception is JEFF KLEISER. The reception will be held on July 30 at this year’s SIGGRAPH Conference in Los Angeles, in the Gold Ballroom of the JW Marriott at 6:00pm.
Jeff Kleiser has been at the forefront of computer animation since the beginning of the industry, having started his career as an animator on the early analog system called Scanimate. He went on to found a number of groundbreaking companies, including Digital Effects which opened in New York in 1978, where Kleiser contributed the opening titles and the animated character “Bit” to the original Disney film Tron (1982).
Together with his long-time partner Diana Walczak, Jeff founded Kleiser/Walczak Construction Company in 1987. They went on to create some of the world’s first human character animation using CGI, including the music video Don’t Touch Me (1989). Later, they rebranded as Synthespian Studios, a word Kleiser and Walczak invented to describe their synthetic CGI actors.
Jeff has contributed to numerous films with groundbreaking visual effects including Stargate, Judge Dredd, Clear and Present Danger, Mortal Kombat Annihilation, X-Men and X-Men United. He served as senior visual effects supervisor on The One– a film in which martial arts master Jet Li battles his evil doppelganger – that required the development of innovative digital face replacement techniques. More recently, Kleiser has supervised visual effects in Exorcist The Beginning, Son of the Mask, Fantastic Four, Scary Movie 4 and X-Men: The Last Stand.
Jeff has presented papers at many international events including the London Effects and Animation Festival, SIGGRAPH, INA Imagina, NAB, Opera Totale and the Virtual Humans Conference. He has served as an industry expert in interviews with The Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and The ABC Evening News with Peter Jennings. Kleiser serves on the board of directors of the Visual Effects Society, the board of trustees of The Norman Rockwell Museum, and the Board of Advisors to the Center for Integrated Media at the California Institute of the Arts. In addition, he is a founder and trustee of the Williamstown Film Festival, a member of the CGSociety Advisory Board, a Fellow of the Grid Institute, and a member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.
-ed kramer, from information at the IMDb (Internet Movie Database)