31 Oct 07 Weta Digital's Matt Aitken gives us an insight into what he'll be presenting at the Games, Animation and Visual Expo, Animfxnz, next month.

Matt is speaking at the Animfxnz symposium in November, and chats to us about his work at Weta.

Weta Bug: what do your role and responsibilities include at Weta Digital?

"I am one of the supervisors here at Weta Digital. On 'Lord of the Rings' and 'King Kong' I was the digital models supervisor, responsible for creating Gollum, 1933 New York and Kong for example. On 'Bridge to Terabithia' I was the vfx supervisor with overall responsibility for all Weta Digital's creature and environment work on that film."

Weta Digital VFX Supervisor, Matt Aitken.

What cool projects have you worked on while at Weta?

"I've worked on most of the films that Weta Digital has been involved with over the years. Highlights for me have been the 3 "Lord of the Rings" films of course and "King Kong", the work on that show was all-encompassing and we got great support to produce work at the highest level. I had a great time on "Bridge to Terabithia", there were great creature designs to work with there and 'The Frighteners' will always hold a special place in my heart, it was our first opportunity to really flex our digital fx 'muscles' here at Weta."

What will you speak about at the upcoming AnimfxNZ conference?

"I'll be talking about some of the work we have done with digital environments including the techniques we used to recreate 1933 New York for 'King Kong'."

What advice would you give to people wanting to get into your line of work?

"There are some great courses available at a tertiary level that are specifically geared towards computer animation and digital effects work. Those courses allow you to work towards producing a showreel of your work, which is one of the main things we look at here when we are hiring new artists. At a high school level I would advise people to look at maths, graphic design, art, science and computer programming. Good computer animators tend to have both technical and artistic skills."

Matt will be speaking at the Animfxnz conference next month, to read more about the Animfxnz conference here.