Mike Bantick
Tuesday, 09 December 2008 10:52
Opinion and Analysis
Page 1 of 5
Appearing at the Game Connect Developers conference last month, Mary Beth Haggerty, Autodesks’ Senior industry manager for video games sat down with iTWire to talk all things Autodesk product wise, as well as video gaming industry trends.
The skies were stormy in Brisbane last month, but it did not halt the gathering of game development minds at GCAP08. Amongst the international guest speaker line-up was Mary Beth Haggerty from Autodesk. Mary-Beth took some time-out to recap her career so far and to talk passionately about the games industry.
iTWire: Tell me a little of your background prior to Autodesk
Mary-Beth Haggerty: “When I first entered my career I started at ILM (Industrial Light & Magic), my background is quite technical education wise, I have a bachelor of computer science and a masters in scientific visualisation.”
“I was really lucky when I was doing my masters, as this was when film studios were staffing up their visual FX areas, and I was lucky enough to be brought onto ILM, and I got there at the heyday. Tons of fun, my first film there was Twister, where we were doing visualisations of tornadoes.”
iTWire: Did you get the cow scene?
M-BH: ”No I didn’t get the cow, I was straight out of college, you can’t get the cow shot straight out of college, and in fact my very first shot I finalised was ‘Horse snot removal’”
“Gradually I worked my way up in ILM, in the beginning it was ‘Horse snot removal’, getting into programming, but also I moved more into the visual side, working with directors and bringing their vision to the R&D teams, and the computer graphics teams to be able to create some incredibly compelling visual images, ending up on the big screen and also in commercials.”
“I started on Twister, went on to Mars Attacks, Men In Black, Spawn. When I worked on commercials I did one for First Union Bank, which was very Terry Gilliam, Bladerunneresque set of commercials, incredibly fun to do, where the person was plunged into the financial world. Had a blast working on those commercials, we actually won a few Clio’s for those.”
