Featured Sessions

Retraining Creative Industries: Unreal Fellowship For Virtual Production

Speaker:
Brian Pohl, Epic Games, United States of America
Linda Sellheim, Epic Games, United States of America

Abstract: The Unreal Fellowship program has been created to support the entertainment industry in retooling and upskilling artists to make the transition from traditional pipelines to virtual production. The Fellowship is a five week course focused on Engine fundamentals, model ingestion, linear animation, mocap integration, and basic look and lighting development. Participants are required to commit to 40 hours a week and must have a minimum of 5 years of production experience in film, broadcast or game construction to be considered for the program. The program provides financial assistance to assure participants are able to dedicate the time to complete the course helping them acquire these high demand skills. The fellows demonstrate their newly acquired knowledge by completing a short film for the film festival finale.

Speaker(s) Bio:
Brian J. Pohl has over seventeen years of experience as a Visual Effects Artist and Previsualization Supervisor. A veteran of George Lucas’ previs team and Industrial Light and Magic's art department, Pohl is credited for creating or supervising previs on over twenty-eight feature film and television productions. Pohl has also served multiple years within the software development industry designing new tools that assist the digital artist's workflow. In 2017, Pohl joined Epic Games as a Technical Account Manager to provide media and entertainment clients the support they need to integrate Unreal Engine into their creative workflows and technical pipelines. Based in Los Angeles, CA, Pohl is a member of the Visual Effects Society, Previs Society and the Joint Technology Subcommittee on Virtual Production and the VR Committee.

Linda Sellheim is the Education Lead for Epic Games, she has a passion for teaching people how to create and collaborate at the intersection of physical and digital spaces. Linda is an educator at heart with a background in illustration and visual storytelling who has been working and teaching in art, design, games and interactive 3D for many years. Prior to coming to Epic she managed the Design & Engineering learning content for LinkedIn Learning and from 2008 to 2012 was the global lead for secondary education at Autodesk.