The Allan Mckay Podcast

Christopher Zammit is a VFX Supervisor and Art Director. He’s worked on many films like Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Tomorrowland, Ghostbusters, and of course films in the Transformers franchise Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Transformers: Age of Extinction and Transformers: The Last Knight.  In this Podcast, VFX Supervisor and Art Director Christopher Zammit about his work on TOP GUN: MAVERICK, THE BOYS, GHOSTBUSTERS, THE THING, GODZILLA; as well as how to make production constraints work in your favor as a VFX Artist. For more show notes, visit www.allanmckay.com/394.

It is amazing how far Artificial Intelligence has progressed just in the last year! No one could’ve predicted the speed of this innovation. A lot of artists are now worried about being replaced with machine learning. While AI can automate and speed things up, it is still up to us as artists to know how to use it as an extension of their ability. Before, we couldn’t talk to computers. We could only program computers via 1’s and 0’s. When GPTs came along, we started communicating with a computer and giving AI commands. AI is also able to read the internet and interpret the data it consumes. It knows that it also has to fail in order to succeed. Eventually, it will perform the task correctly. That alone changes the playing field!  But what does that mean for artists? We used to think AI would be assigned repetitive tasks. But now AI is able to create art using the style of another artist. Things like that disrupt the industry. It’s a threatening time for a lot of artists. With the advent of Stable Diffusion, Mid

Respeecher uses deep learning (AI) techniques to produce high quality synthetic speech.  The company was launched in 2018 by Alex Serdiuk, Dmytro Bielievtsov and Grant Reaber. In March 2020, Respeecher received $1.5 million in startup funding from ff Venture Capital, Acrobator Ventures, ICU Ventures, Network VC, and several angel investors. A year later, the company launched the beta of Voice Marketplace, a democratized version of Respeecher’s tech available for small creators. In September 2021, Respeecher was awarded with an Emmy for their work on In Event of Moon Disaster. Since then, the team at Respeecher has worked on the following projects: The Book of Boba Fett and The Mandalorian (synthetic voice of young Luke Skywalker), Aloe Blacc’s tribute to Avicii (cross-lingual Avicii’s singing voice cloning), collaborated with 72andSunny, NFL, Digital Domain on the Super Bowl commercial (voice of Vince Lombardi / 2.1B impressions), Disney’s Obi-Wan Kenobi Series. In February 2022, Respeecher team, most of whic

The mission of Monsters Aliens Robots Zombies (MARZ) is to deliver feature-film quality visual effects on television timelines by harnessing GPU clusters, game engine technology, AI and senior industry talent. Leveraging these pillars allows us to consistently execute with both speed and quality for our premium television projects. Lon Molnar is the Co-President of MARZ. With more than 20 years of experience, Lon has contributed a vast amount of visual effects to film and television as an Artist, VFX Supervisor, and former CEO of the award winning VFX company Intelligent Creatures. Inspired by the magic of TOY STORY, Lon attended the Vancouver Film School with the single goal of opening up his own VFX studio. As he built his resume, he became dissatisfied with working on VFX for tv, and set his sights on feature films. He became a VFX generalist, working in animation, lighting, compositing and modelling, while using a vast array of software.  After serving as the CG Supervisor on the groundbreaking films CHIC

Stability AI is the company behind Stable Diffusion, a powerful, free and open-source text-to-image generator that launched in August 2022. Since launching, Stable Diffusion has been downloaded and licensed by more than 200,000 developers globally. Stability AI's consumer-facing product DreamStudio quickly grew to well over a million registered users from more than 50 countries who collectively have created more than 170 million images. Headquartered in London with developers distributed across the globe, Stability AI was founded by Emad Mostaque as the first open-source, artificial intelligence (AI) company developing breakthrough technologies for the benefit of humanity and the world.  In this Podcast, Creative Director for Stability AI Bill Cusick talks about the creative vision behind Stable Diffusion and its potential application in art and filmmaking, the meaning of AI in the history of humanity; and why artists should get excited about the existence of AI art (instead of viewing it as competition)! For

The most commonly asked questions that get asked are:  “Should I go to school to study VFX?”  “Should I study online?”  “What school / online community should I join?” Attending a school is a more traditional way of learning. However, because of the speed at which technology is changing, school is not always the best route. Throughout the history of this Podcast, Allan has interviewed many artists and VFX supervisors and they attest that: Learning on the job — is the best and the fastest route to learn! The biggest myth in VFX is that you need a diploma in order to get a job. But in reality, the most important thing in getting hired is knowing that you can do that job, even if you were to get hired tomorrow. The only place where a diploma actually matters is when you’re applying for a work visa in a different country. Otherwise, the most important tool in getting hired – is your REEL! If you spend 4 years at a college, you could've spent that time getting experience in the industry. In addition, the price t

Brendan Kane is the Bestselling Author of ONE MILLION FOLLOWERS: HOW I BUILD A MASSIVE SOCIAL AUDIENCE IN 30 DAYS and HOOK POINT: HOW TO STAND OUT IN A 3-SECOND WORLD, as well as the Founder and Managing Director of Hook Point. Since 2005, Brendan has helped the largest brands and celebrities in the world to reverse engineer how to make content go viral. He has worked with major corporations MTV, Viacom, Vice Magazine, Paramount Pictures, IKEA and Sketchers shoes on their digital strategy, as well as celebrities like Taylor Swift, Rihanna and Adriana Lima. In addition, he developed the first ever influencer campaign on YouTube in 2007; oversaw $200 million in marketing spend and generated $1 billion in revenue. In this Podcast, Bestselling Author of ONE MILLION FOLLOWERS Brendan Kane talks about how-to’s of creating content that serves your viewers – and the algorithm, maximizing your followers’ engagement, content vs context, chaos as part of the creative process and so much more! For more show notes, visit

Perfectionism holds artists back. It gets the best of us, both junior and senior artists like. It’s part of the inability to manage ourselves.  It also ends up costing more: You’re spending so much time on the project, you burn through the budget. You end up paying the client for the privilege of working on their project. There is a famous quote from Leonardo da Vinci, “Art is never finished, only abandoned.” But if you’re creating art as a business, you need to know when enough is enough. You’re the one who has to give yourself the constraints. Your goal is to create the best work within those constraints. All of this can be avoided if you: Track your time; and Have a clear target of what you aim to deliver.  Failure is also part of the process. It helps you identify the dead ends in the process and to avoid them. But the ego sometimes gets in the way and forces you to avoid admitting defeat. In addition, if you do your art every day – like Goro Fujita or Beeple (see links below) – you can see your progres

Chris Bailey is a Productivity Expert and the bestselling Author of two books about productivity: The Productivity Project and Hyperfocus: How to Be More Productive in a World of Distraction. Chris writes about productivity at www.alifeofproductivity.com and speaks to organizations around the globe on how they can become more productive, without hating the process. Chris was born in Red Deer, Alberta and raised in Ontario, Canada. He first became interested in productivity in high school after reading David Allen’s Getting Things Done. He graduated from the Sprott Business School of Business in 2013. After college, he started researching productivity and conducting experiments, while documenting his experiences on this blog A Year of Productivity. Insights and strategies learned from these experiments were compiled into his 2016 book The Productivity Project. His second book Hyperfocus: How to Be More Productive in a World of Distraction was released in August 2018. Most recently, Chris wrote his third book

We all have doubts if we’re on the right path. Being an artist requires a lot of patience, perseverance and skill. In addition, we have to continue learning and innovating.  There is this inner voice that asks, “Am I investing my time into something that’s going to pay off?” It weighs on you. It doesn’t help when we have people around us, telling us to give up. There is so much negativity on the internet – and on social media – as well, and it’s hard to weed out that noise. Everyone is opinionated and not everyone knows what they’re talking about. It makes us double guess our path and sometimes even give up! It’s tough to keep going when you’re alone. The best thing is to find our circle: A group of people excited about our one thing. If you’re an artist, you need to have people who support you and lift you up. You have to find your community. There is a concept of something called “monk mode”: It’s about eliminating the noise and getting focused. Get focused and surround yourself with people who help you ris

Tim Miller is a Film Director, Animator, Creative Director and VFX Artist. He was nominated for the Academy Award for Best Animated Short Film for the work on his short film Gopher Broke. He made his directing debut with Deadpool. He is also known for creating opening sequences for The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo and Thor: The Dark World. In 1995, Tim co-founded Blur Studio with David Stinnett and Cat Chapman. Blur is where animators and artists can collaborate and be in control of their creative destinities. Since then, the Studio has evolved into an award-winning production company with work spanning the realms of game cinematics, commercials, feature films and more. Committed to their clients, artists and to the telling of great stories, Blur continues to grow not only as a high-end animation studio, but also as original content creators, having recently helmed Netflix’s first animated anthology Love Death + Robots. In this Podcast, Allan McKay deconstructs his interview with Film Director and Co-Founder o

AI is exploding everywhere. There are so many technological innovations that use AI in visual effects. You might be already following the massive growth of AI. For VFX artists, the question is: Is AI taking over the art world? Will art be replaced by AI? Are artists’ careers over? In 2010, deep learning changed everything. AI became the revolutionary thing we can utilize. But the big part of preventing AI growth was processing power and storage. With technological innovations, we’re beginning to experience AI for the first time. How exciting it is to be alive right now!  Machine learning is feeding machine information. With machine learning, the more AI gets corrected, the more it can learn on its own. The disadvantage is that it does take some hand holding to teach AI, in the beginning. There is different machine learning based on neural networks. It thinks similarly to the human brain, it analyzes every little detail. With deep learning, we tell what we want it to do – and the AI figures out how to get th

ActionVFX is a website that provides stock footage for visual effects, from smoke plumes to fire, from sparks to explosions. Before the company was launched in 2016, its CEO Rodolphe Pierre-Louis, along with Joe Camarata (Marketing Manager) and Luke Thompson (COO and Co-Owner) conducted an extensive survey among visual effects artists, which determined the type of files the site would contain and its content. After only a year, ActionVFX’s footage has been used in television shows like Flash, Fear of the Walking Dead, Legends of Tomorrow, How to Get Away with Murder, Narcos, Series of Unfortunate Events; as well as in video games, music videos and the live Lady Gaga performance at this year’s Grammys.  In this Episode, ActionVFX CEO Rodolphe Pierre-Louis and COO / Co-Owner Luke Thompson talk about launching the company, the lessons they learned along the way, upcoming technology and the importance of consistent learning, willingness to fail fast, leadership advice and so much more! For more show notes, visit

EveryPoint combines photogrammetry techniques with the iPhone Pro’s LiDAR scanner to fill in the gaps, as well as utilizes the positional / accelerometer data from the Apple AR toolkit. When combined, this delivers color 3D models that are said to be more accurate than simply using the iPhone’s LiDAR scanner alone. EveryPoint is not an end user product in itself, but a technology layer on which developers can create their solutions, in construction and other industries. In this Podcast, Jonathan Stephens, the Chief Evangelist and Marketing Director at EveryPoint, talks about EveryPoint, the possible applications of photogrammetry, AI and machine learning – and the future of EveryPoint. For more show notes, visit www.allanmckay.com/381.  

COVID-19 created havoc in people’s lives and for a while, we thought it would shut down the VFX industry. But it turned out to have the opposite effect. As productions shut down, the studios sent artists home and their equipment to their homes, allowing for artists to work from home. That also means that studios could now hire from artists from anywhere, turning the industry into a truly global one. Which also meant incredible opportunities for artists anywhere. In addition, VFX has become a booming industry. That gives opportunities for smaller studios to compete. There is so much work out there – and not enough artists to do that work. Which means that artists are in demand. The technological innovations, like virtual production, got sped up. For the studios, their overhead has gone down. For artists, VFX has become a healthier culture. Because artists work from home, they can spend time with their families and no longer need to commit long commutes to work. Because artists now have stations at home, they c

Epic Games CTO Kim Libreri is responsible for continuing Epic’s tradition of fusing state-of-the-art technology with the pinnacle of visual artistry, and for defining the studio’s Unreal Engine as the platform of choice for all types of interactive experiences including games, movies, visualization, augmented reality and virtual reality.  Prior to joining Epic Games, Kim was the Chief Strategy Officer at Lucasfilm, where he was responsible for the company’s STAR WARS technology strategy and innovations in interactive storytelling, including the highly-awarded 1313 prototype. Kim’s career in digital technology and visual effects spans over 20 years, and he has credits on more than 25 films including SUPER 8, SPEED RACER, POSEIDON and THE MATRIX TRILOGY. He led the development team for the award-winning WHAT DREAMS MAY COME, as well as for the original MATRIX, developing the now-legendary Bullet Time technology.  Kim is a respected member of many visual effects bodies, including the visual effects branch of the

At the beginning of your VFX career, things can seem so hard and so stressful. As a junior VFX Artist, you may feel like everyone is out to get you. Here are some powerful mindset shifts that will change your outlook and how you feel about your career. A lot of artists have a struggling artist mentality. Once you understand that you’re in a commercial industry – and you are a commercial industry of Hollywood movies and AAA games – you also understand that your client’s vision is the most important. It is your job to deliver the result. As a VFX artist, you are in a service industry. Which means that your project is a director’s vision and you have to respect that. Another shift happens when you over-communicate everything. You have to communicate to your Producers or Heads of 3D – where you are in your progress and where you’re storing the files. It’s a great habit to get into the habit of communicating that information at the end of the day, via an email. That way you’re creating a massive log of your work.

Christopher Zammit is a VFX Supervisor and Art Director. They've worked on many films like Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Godzilla: King of the Monsters, Tomorrowland, Ghostbusters, and of course films in the Transformers franchise Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Transformers: Age of Extinction and Transformers: The Last Knight.  In this Podcast, VFX Supervisor and Art Director Christopher Zammit gives advice to artists about getting the foot in the door, short deadlines and working overtime, how to negotiate in your favor – as well as the experience working on The Transformers, Man of Steel and so much more! For more show notes, visit www.allanmckay.com/377.

Darin Moran has been making movies for over 20 years. While he studied design & photography at The Academy of Art in San Francisco and film theory and cinematography at the Tisch School of the Arts at NYU, he dropped out of school after a few years to learn in the field by actually making films. Exposed to a wide variety of processes and styles across multiple disciplines, Darin’s eclectic work experience with many talented cinematographers and directors informs his vision now as a DP. Specializing in working with natural light, Darin’s focus is creating powerful imagery using photography that’s hidden in the story rather than presented upfront. His recent work includes AGE OF SUMMER, BANANA SPLIT, and the streaming series THE FALCON AND THE WINTER SOLDIER. RUN HIDE FIGHT is his sixth feature film as a Director of Photography. In this Podcast, Allan McKay interviews Cinematographer Darin Moran about the path of becoming a Director of Photography, soft skills versus hard skills, the importance of relations

Chris Ume is a visual effects expert with many years of experience in entertainment and corporate projects. In 2020, he began experimenting with deepfake technology, sourcing AI models from obscure Russian websites, and experimenting with new techniques. That led to a collaboration with an American actor known for Tom Cruise parody videos and Deep Tom Cruise was born. Since then, Chris has worked on titles like South Park and Sassy Justice.  Following the viral success of those deepfake videos and others, Ume co-founded Metaphysic.ai in 2021. The company recently closed a $7.5 million funding round. In this Podcast, Allan McKay interviews VFX and Deepfake Expert Chris Ume about the process, challenges and the future applications of Deepfakes, his experience working on SOUTH PARK, as well as the ethics of this revolutionary technology. For more show notes, visit www.allanmckay.com/375.