Executive Team
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Peter Oberdorfer
PresidentNo stranger to successfully launching new companies, Peter Oberdorfer was one of the partners of the San Francisco-based visual effects company Giant Killer Robots (GKR). During its 10+ years of operation, GKR was highly regarded within the industry and enjoyed many creative successes doing visual effects work for prominent feature films, including The Fountain, Fantastic Four, Matrix: Reloaded, Matrix: Revolutions, Scooby Doo, Poseidon, World Trade Center, Terminator 3: Rise of the Machines, and notably, What Dreams May Come, for which Giant Killer Robots shared an Academy Award with other visual effects companies.
Prior to GKR, Peter and three other partners started Pixel Liberation Front in 1995. PLF was one of the first companies that focused its attention on pre-visualization, creating virtual environments, camera moves and animation prior to shooting, allowing for elaborate shot planning and integration for technically complicated sequences within films. PLF is currently a market leader in the pre-visualization niche, and still operates a large office in Venice, California.
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Mimi Medel
Executive ProducerWith over fourteen years of experience, Mimi Medel ably represents the client side of the industry. Most recently serving as the Vice President of Visual Effects at New Line Cinema, she oversaw visual effects on films from pre-production through post-production, with credits on many feature films, including Academy Award winner The Golden Compass, Snakes on a Plane, Rendition, Little Children, and Rush Hour 3. Previously she worked at Warner Brothers Studios on such key projects as Matrix: Reloaded, Matrix: Revolutions, A.I. and The Perfect Storm, among many others.
Mimi was also part of another Academy Award-winning team for What Dreams May Come while working for MassIllusion in San Francisco. Prior to that, she worked at Warner Digital in Hollywood, CA.
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Paul Hettler
Head of ProductionPaul comes to Slash-FX bringing over 25 years of experience in film production. Most recently as Senior Producer at San Francisco based The Orphanage, where he produced live action and visual effects feature and commercial projects on stage and on location all over the world. He has held Senior Producer roles at the top studios in the business including: Industrial Light & Magic, Dreamworks Animation, Digital Domain, Metrolight and Colossal Pictures.
Working with A-list commercial directors, Paul's commercial work has earned 5 Clio nominations and 4 wins. With producer and production executive credits on such feature films as Pirates of the Caribbean 2 & 3, Night at the Museum 1, Shrek 2, The Host and over 300 commercials, he is a veteran of the industry.
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Alex Laurant
Senior Art Director & Concept ArtistAlex‘s experience spans two decades of entertainment media, including feature films and video games as well as commercials, motion graphics, interactive exhibits, theatrical scenic design, print illustration & graphic design.
Alex has worked with some of the industry’s most prominent studios, directors and artists providing design leadership from blue-sky conceptual development through all phases of production. As a former senior visual effects art director and concept artist at Industrial Light & Magic he oversaw The Empire Strikes Back – Special Edition, Saving Private Ryan, Minority Report, The Mummy, Mission to Mars, Peter Pan, The Day After Tomorrow and others. Alex was co-nominated for Best Visual Effects Art Direction by the Visual Effects Society for his work on Minority Report. He has most recently worked as a conceptual designer for Warner Brothers’ 2011 release, Green Lantern.
On the interactive side he worked for Electronic Arts’ London studio on the ‘Harry Potter & the Goblet of Fire’ game, for Germany’s Crytek studios on their award-winning ‘Crysis’ and for LucasArts developing new projects.
Alex has given numerous presentations worldwide on art direction and visual storytelling. He is a member of the A.D.G. (Art Directors Guild), the V.E.S. (Visual Effects Society), the A.I.A.S. (Academy of Interactive Arts & Sciences) and serves on the advisory committee of the 5D Immersive Design Conference.
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Sean Schur
Visual Effects SupervisorAs a 20-year veteran in the fields of visual effects and CG feature animation Sean Schur has worked in nearly every possible role in computer graphics: from Creative Head of Digital Effects Departments and Visual Effects Supervisor to lighting TD, compositor and matchmove artist. Throughout his career working at a variety of studios around the world including Industrial Light & Magic, Weta Digital, Moving Picture Company and Dreamworks Animation, he has gathered a wealth of experience and knowledge that he brings in solving the most complex VFX problems, coming up with unique creative solutions, and developing ground-breaking new technologies.
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Tau Gerber
Senior Compositing SupervisorAfter spending several years as a motion graphics designer, animator and occasional director at music video production company H-Gun Labs in the late 1990's, he made the jump to visual effects compositing for features on the film, Rat Race in 2001. Since then, he has gone on to work at WildBrain, Pixar, Evil Eye Pictures, Giant Killer Robots and Industrial Light and Magic on films including The Fountain, Blade 3, Fantastic Four, Happy Feet, Spider Man 3, Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Spiderwick Chronicles, Speed Racer, and Star Trek (2009).
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Paul Van Camp
Pipeline SupervisorPaul Van Camp has an extensive high-end visual effects and computer graphics career as both a computer programmer and an artist. Since his first film, Brainstorm, was released in 1983, he has acquired 17 screen credits: ten as a software developer, five as an effects animator, one as an actor and one as a CG pipeline supervisor. In 2001 the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences honored Paul with a Technical Achievement Award for contributing to the development of Nuke with software that they categorized as an "original accomplishment that contributed to the progress of the industry."
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Scott Smith
IT DirectorScott views technology and art as inseparable in this industry and has developed and supported imaging technology since the birth of the modern PC. After working in the digital imaging world for close to 10 years, Scott was hired into Lucas's Industrial Light and Magic. At ILM, Scott supported the special effects camera department in modernizing and digitizing their technology and pipelines which was later used (under his support) on two Star Wars movies, Pirates of the Caribbean I, II and III and 21 other VFX heavy films. While at ILM, Scott had his hand in hundreds of projects from digital video capture to the earliest evolutions of Previz.
Most recently, Scott had been an executive and founder with Lightstream Animation in the San Francisco Bay Area. There he directed the ground-up technology infrastructure design and implementation of a world-class Animation studio, providing him with a founder’s perspective on leveraging the latest technology for use in the modern digital arts studio.