The Wellington and Auckland Branches of the Institution of Professional Engineers of New Zealand present

DR MARK SAGAR

ACADEMY AWARD WINNER

SPECIAL PROJECTS SUPERVISOR

Dr Mark Sagar specialises in facial motion capture, animation and rendering technologies and is currently the Special Projects Supervisor at Weta Digital.

In 2010 Mark was awarded a Scientific and Technical Academy Award for innovations in visual effects technology. The award recognises more than 10 years of research, development and application of technologies designed to help achieve the goal of photoreal digital actors.

Mark also developed the Performance Driven Facial Animation system for King Kong, which used actor Andy Serkis’s expressions to drive King Kong’s face.

Prior to Weta, Mark was Research and Development Supervisor at Sony Pictures Imageworks and developed the Image Based Rendering system for the Doctor Octopus and Peter Parker faces in Spider-Man 2 using Paul Debevec’s Lightstage, and the Performance Driven Facial Animation system for Monster House.

Mark was the technology co-founder and Co-Director of Research and Development for LifeFX which set milestones in realism for digital humans for film at Pacific Title Mirage, and then developed interactive Internet-based technologies for eCommerce and other Web-based applications such as FaceMail at LifeFX Inc.

Mark was a Post-Doctoral Fellow at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and holds a PhD. in Engineering from The University of Auckland, New Zealand, where he worked on Virtual Reality Surgical Simulation and Anatomic Modeling with Peter Hunter’s bioengineering group. Mark is an author on several patents and academic publications.

Wellington:

6.00pm, 10 June

Soundings Theatre, Te Papa

Auckland:

6.30pm, 01 July

20 Symonds Street, Engineering building, University of Auckland

with support from the Mechanical Engineering Group

FREE ENTRY