SUNNYVALE, CA — Cogswell College (www.cogswell.edu) will host Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) technical director Wajid Raza on Wednesday, March 25. The special guest lecture will take place from 7:30pm to 9:30pm in the Dragon’s Den Theatre and will focus on “The VFX Pipeline.”
Each semester, the school’s Digital Arts & Animation Department features a guest speaker who has prominently established himself/herself within the entertainment and digital arts industry. Raza will discuss how the work of each artist on a large project fits into a chain of complex tasks that, when brought together, will create the ultimate visual effects. He will also cover how a visual effects studio is structured and what contributions are made by each of the studio’s different departments.
Raza is currently working as ILM’s lighting technical director on the upcoming Marvel Entertainment motion picture Avengers: Age of Ultron. He first joined the visual effects company in 2009 as part of its technology group and has since worked as an assistant technical director, production engineer and technical director. He was an integral part of the team behind the Academy Award-winning film Rango (2011) and the Academy Award-nominated film Star Trek Into Darkness (2013).