Top flame artist/vfx supervisor Ponzoni joins Fin Design & Visual Effects from Animal Logic LA
After almost 10 years at Animal Logic, Senior flame artist/vfx supervisor Nicolas Ponzoni has returned to his Sydney home to join Fin Design & Visual Effects.
Ponzoni spent the last two and a half years with Animal Logic based in Los Angeles where he was a key part of the founding crew in building and growing AL’s business in the US. His recent credits have been projects working with top directors Steve Ayson, Mike Maquire and Noam Murro.
Ponzoni is clearly passionate about VFX but more than that, loves the production process from start to finish, building relationships that see him jump on board projects from an early stage working closely with directors in shaping their vision from day one.
Working closely with Noam Murro of Biscuit Filmworks over the past 5+ years, Ponzoni has supervised and composited a number of high profile projects including: HBO “Voyeur” campaign for BBDO New York, awarded Advertising Excellence in the 2008 AICP Next awards, Comcast “Rabbit” for Goodby Silverstein, honoured for Visual Effects, 2009 AICP Awards and Kaiser “Emerald Cities” for Campbell Ewald, honoured with a VES in 2010 and the much anticipated spot for the lastest release for the Halo franchise – “Birth of a Spartan”.
Just prior to joining Fin, Ponzoni was on location in Miami with Noam Murro and the team at Wieden Kennedy shooting the latest campaign for Nike Jordan featuring Miami Heat star Dwayne Wade, delivering two action packed spots prior to Christmas.
He has hit the ground running, currently working with directors Sam Bennetts at Plaza, and Steve Rogers at Revolver. He joins Fin’s 2d visual effects team: Justin Bromley, Christophe Allender, Maxence Peillon and Blake Druery.
15 Comments
Fonzi is good, but Lambert will be greatly missed!
Nice one Em et al. Welcome Fonzi.
Flame still relevant?
It’s a bit odd for what sounds to be a very talented compositor and supervisor to define themselves by a bit of hardware/software from a bygone era. Can he work in floating point yet 🙂
3:49 You are obviously a compositing newbie that doesn’t know too much about flame or TVC post production. For a start, Flame can deal with 16bit floating point, and has been able to do so for a few years now. Secondly, Flame still has the best toolset for TVCs and the best rendering capabilities of all the compositing packages out there. I’d also like to see someone do some quick changes on Nuke, After Effects or whatever system you are working on during a client attended session. Nuke is awesome for features, or on large multi-seat compositing jobs as a one shot box, but for client attended sessions is still leaves a lot to be desired. After Effects is a tool used by try-hard compositors. Sure, it will eventually get the job, but after loads of dicking around that clients definitely don’t want to pay for!
One last thing, don’t forget that Mike Seymour uses Flame and the last time I heard, he was still the 3rd best compositor in the world 😉
3.49 You are a twat! Make a comment when you grow up!
Anonymous the Nuke Artist, dont you know using flame is the best way to get your own office?
You probably have to share a cubical.
No doubt decorated by Starwars figurines and a life size replica of a District 9 weapon.
ha ha….nothing stirs the pot more than a snipe at Flame. Everytime we have dug deep under the hood you find the speed comes at a tradeoff. Pushing everything to the video card to keep it fast has mean’t a lot of quality compromises over the years, sure it gets to half float and it they talk about it as some huge achievement when this is like years overdue, full float will be coming someday I’m sure. The latest presentation they talked about all this 3D stuff that now renders so much better because the lighting engine has finally been fixed (I think it used to line skip or something). They are always happy to talk about the old tradeoffs once they’ve finally been fixed but all the license owners and marketing peeps pretend there not there at the time. IMO they are struggling to keep the product relevant in today’s climate and the way work is done and they know it, Smoke and Flame software versions out now, just the 1998 license model to update now.
With that said I think 3.49’s point was we don’t see too many Henry artists around now, would you want that as your title? Seems like a valid point, surely it’s the artist that is difference and creates the value.
The new Fin team will be awesome for the couple of directors who enjoyed working at Animal Logic. But what about all the people who liked working with Richard Lambert…?
We miss Richie,
Flame artist, Shake artist, Nuke, AFX WTF! Great compositors should be able to use any software package. Branding yourself by a piece of software is ridiculous. I’m guessing 3:49 had his tongue firmly in cheek which is preferable to the respondents with heads firmly up a….s!
As they say, it’s not the tools, just the tool using them.
Flame, Nuke, Smoke, Polaroid – who gives a shit. People who crap on about tools obviously rely on them a little too much.
Polaroid rocks!!! End of discussion.
Wow, look what I started.
Not a newbie, just not stuck in the past and wise to what most of the industry has worked out for itself –
And not a figurine in sight.
It’s not about how big your tool set is but how you use it. (so I’ve been told) (by some someone with a tiny tool set)
NukeX is good, flame is so much more refined and just far better. It’s like comparing a ford k car ( nuke) to a Ferrari ( flame). I personally use both but when it comes to clients you need a flame. Period. Unless you work on both then your opinions are invalid and ignorant. Commercials are big money and features have no money. This is the difference and why flames are not used as much in features. Althought almost all features use flames at the deadline time to save the films ass. Flame guys have a kick ass fancy suite and make twice as much as nuke guys in there sweat shop environment and I prsonally like money and being treated like an artist and not a tradesman! In the end though nuke will win unfortunatly simply because most new compositors are idiots and will work for crumbs making all of us eventually work for crumbs.
Nuke = Loser