Animation Supervisor
His team uses a wide variety of techniques to create fresh, believable performances for characters.
Mike has been working in visual effects for 20 years. He spent three years as Lead Animator on multiple sequences on James Cameron's Avatar and went on to supervise the extended edition of the film. He worked as a Senior Animator on the first two films in Peter Jackson’s Hobbit trilogy before moving into the role of Animation Supervisor on The Hobbit: The Battle of the Five Armies. In between The Hobbit films, he was Animation Supervisor on Ridley Scott’s Prometheus and James Mangold’s The Wolverine.
Mike is from Vancouver. He grew up in an artistic environment with his mother designing clothing for Christine Lingerie and his father a creative director and partner in a successful advertising agency. His father studied design at Art Center in Los Angeles in the 1960's and was a friend of Marv Newland, a well-known Canadian animator. When Mike was a kid his father would take him to animation festivals to see Marv's films. This was a big inspiration to where Mike’s artistic energy would later land. He went on to study classical animation in 1999 and completed a CG short called Broker in 2000, which played on the festival circuit and was nominated for several awards.
Mike’s most recent work as Animation Supervisor has been David Lowery’s Pete’s Dragon, Avatar: Flight of Passage and Robert Rodriguez’s Alita: Battle Angel.