October 9, 2008

RAINMAKER ANNOUNCES PROMOTIONS AND NEW HIRES

Also announced is the addition of Kimberly Dennison, who joins Rainmaker as director of development, and Barbara Dawson, who returns to the company as director of talent relations and recruiting. Both are newly-created positions.

Dennison comes to Rainmaker after 13 years at The Walt Disney Company, where she worked in a variety of capacities, gathering experience in animation story development, production pipeline set-up, casting, voice direction and post supervision. She will act as the point person for pitches and potential projects.

Dawson started her career at Mainframe 12 years ago and quickly moved from production assistant to producer on the first all-CG television series, ReBoot. Her skills led her to a production manager position at Industrial Light & Magic. After her return to Canada, she was hired at the Vancouver Film School to teach in their 3D Animation and Visual Effects Department. In addition to her teaching duties, she recruited for LucasArts and for Lucasfilm Animation and the new Lucasfilm Animation Singapore studio. This led to a position as studio recruiter at Vanguard Animation for their 3D animation feature Space Chimps. She will oversee artist relations and training, as well as managing the studio's talent requirements.

And Tony Pelle has been promoted to director of technology, also a newly-created position. Pelle began his career as a senior software developer at Mainframe in 1996 and later moved to Industrial Light & Magic as a CG software engineer. He returned to Vancouver with stints at Mainframe and Vanguard Animation, where he served as senior tools developer/pipeline architect for the feature film Space Chimps before coming to Rainmaker as co-CG supervisor on Escape from Planet Earth.  In his new role, he will set the direction for technology and pipeline development within the company
and work with producers, CG supervisors and production staff to plan future productions, allocate resources, address technology issues and manage the production technology staff.