Interview Allan Mckay

AN INTERVIEW WITH Allan Mckay

Please tell something about yourself, family and your background in the CG.

My name’s Allan McKay – I’m a visual effects Supervisor and Technical Director, originally from Australia – although a majority of my work up until now has been in Los Angeles and Canada primarily. I recently left Los Angeles to come back to Australia to work on Superman Returns at Fox Studios in Sydney. Prior to that I worked on a lot of films like Blade Trinity, Paycheck, Scooby Doo , Warhammer: Dawn of War, In the Rough and various other projects – as well as a lot of TV commercials, music videos etc.

I recently launched Catastrophic – my own visual effects studio/freelance site, specializing in visual effects, which right now is more for outsourcing effects from other studios who need high quality effects and with a set budget etc. Which has been working out great – I’ve primarily worked as a freelance throughout this but taken on a number of CG features, game cinematics and music videos, as well as various TV Commercials and what not. And so far it’s been a great experience.

In community you are known as “Particle FX Guy”, what u want to say?

Yeah it’s funny, I do get a lot of people coming up to me wherever I work – asking whether I can actually do anything other than effects. As much as I’m so happy to have established a bit of a name in various communities it also does pigeon hole me slightly to one area of it. Now that I’m complaining ;) I still found it enjoying when one of my mates last year from Digital Domain introduced me to another guy at Pixar as “The Particle Ninja”.