Mark Chataway

Background

About Mark Chataway

I have over 20 years of experience in high-end VFX work, ranging from feature films, to international TVC campaigns, through to long-form television series, and more recently games development. I left my position of eight and a half years as Senior FX Technical Director at Industrial Light & Magic to pursue traveling interests and personal projects, and since then having been living and working remotely for multiple studios, from my home office in the Gold Coast. While essentially an all-rounder, I excel in the complex technical areas of VFX, specializing in Houdini FX simulation, Unreal Engine Niagara FX, lighting, scripting, rendering with Redshift, and originally honed my skills in the tight deadlines of TV commercial production. I have worked on many first class big budget feature films, including Dungeons & Dragons, the 3 newest Star Wars movies, 3 Transformers movies, Jurassic World, Star Trek Into Darkness, The Avengers, and several other 'VFX heavy' blockbusters. In July 2005 I co-founded Rocket Squad VFX in Adelaide, Australia with my business partner Andrew Kunzel (of Weta Digital) and two post production companies. We ran the successful VFX company for nearly two years, during which time I had the roles of Company Director and VFX Supervisor, employing a combination of core full-time staff and project-related teams of freelancers. In late 2006 we sold the company to the Kojo Group (kojo.com.au), one of Australia’s most highly regarded media production companies, which merged Rocket Squad’s assets and staff into their corporation. At this time I left to pursue personal traveling interests overseas, which included a six month contract at Framestore in London, before starting my childhood dream job at ILM.