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Hello – I’m John-Mark, thanks for stopping by.

A bit of my background – I was formally trained as a graphic designer at John Brown University and subsequently worked with a number of fortune 500 companies developing various marketing solutions. As my dream was to work in film, my wife and I decided to take a leap of faith and move to British Columbia so that I could attend the Vancouver Film School. I then broke into the film industry and discovered my love for rigging, simulation, and development.

I’ve worked at MPC, Rainmaker Entertainment, ILM, and Hybride on a number of notable projects including The Mandalorian, Aladdin, Thor: Ragnarok, The Mummy and Valerian. My tasks included rigging, hair & muscle simulation, crowd simulation, destruction and shot finaling.

In 2019 I decided to shift my career focus to pursue my passion for development and R&D. I currently work at Digital Domain as an Animation and Rigging TD, where I build and maintain various tools for the rigging and animation teams.

In the past couple years, I have been exploring Machine Learning and its untapped potential for rigging and animation. This is a very exciting time to be in visual effects and I’m happy to be a part of bringing these tools into artists hands.

Want to know more – or just want to chat? Feel free to shoot me an email. Cheers!

[email protected]

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Awards

Featured In

Still proud of my short film from VFS.

This was my ticket into the film industry and I am still quite proud of it. It’s the final project of my year at the Vancouver Film School. I created everything except the sound edit. It was a lot of hours and a lot of fun, and where I realised I was not an animator.

DINO BABY

This began as a ZBrush sculpt of a monster tearing up a city, then I decided scary things are overrated. I rendered all the passes in ZBrush then combined them in Photoshop. This illustration was featured in the August 2011 issue of 3DCreative Magazine.

Mercedes-Benz 540K

I modeled this Mercedes-Benz 540K using some good blueprints for it online. I worked in Maya and rendered all the passes using Mental Ray. This was a fun project that allowed me to experiment with the default mia_material_x shader as well as 32-bit OpenEXR files and with using a linear workflow.

GREAT FALLS BALLOON FESTIVAL

This was an assignment from my time at JBU. I had to make a series of advertisements for any event. After some searching, I found the Great Falls Balloon Festival. The event really inspired me and the existing advertisements weren’t as fun and colorful as I would have liked. I started to picture lots of multicolored balloons in various sizes floating across the sky, and found myself sketching out ideas and researching the event. The project was completed in Illustrator.

DISPLAYS

While working at New Creature, I designed a number of displays and marketing solutions for many Fortune 500 companies. Including Sony, Bayer, Disney, Lionsgate, and many more.

MOANDA COFFEE

The goal for this project was to invent a competitor for Starbucks. I fabricated a story about a small village in the Congo named Moanda, I then created the brand identity based on that story. The project also involved creating dry and wet packaging for the company. I used Photoshop and Illustrator for the design work, and Maya for rendering.

MUSTANG VIEWBOOK

The assignment was to create a viewbook for a vehicle of our choice. I art directed the photoshoots and edited the images. This isn’t the full book, but here are some of the pages.

PRESENTATION SLIDES

I’ve designed a number of presentation slides for my church. I enjoy these tasks as typically I know what the speaker wants. In this instance I know he just wanted an anchor, but I try to find the non-obvious solutions.

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