MARCUS STOKES: PERSEVERANCE POWERS SUCCESS OF VFX VETERAN TURNED DIRECTOR By TREVOR HOGG
Images courtesy of Marcus Stokes. TOP: Director Marcus Stokes OPPOSITE TOP: A significant experience for Stokes was teaching English to Japanese middle school students. OPPOSITE MIDDLE: Stokes proudly displays his favorite childhood toy. OPPOSITE BOTTOM: As a middle schooler, Stokes was part of a quiz bowl team.
Marcus Stokes describes himself on Twitter as a director, visual effects supervisor, screenwriter, surfer, snowboarder and martial artist whose personal journey has taken him from Atlanta to Tokyo to Los Angeles. “I was born in New Haven, Connecticut, and raised in Macon, Georgia, which is located in the suburbs of Atlanta. It was so different from Los Angeles. Nowadays, there is so much filmmaking in Georgia, they’re a lot more similar.” Stokes’ mother was an actress in Atlanta, but upon divorcing his father (a dentist who subsequently remarried a future state senator) she became an attorney. “At the time, Atlanta was a metropolis that had a lot of Black and white people but not much of anybody else, but has since become more ethnically diverse.” He had no intention to pursue a career in the film industry. “I got into filmmaking through visual effects and I got into visual effects through architecture. I don’t have this story where my father gave me a Bolex camera when I was seven and I made little movies with my friends.” His ambition was to be an architectural revolutionary like Frank Gehry and Richard Meier. “It didn’t matter if it was a big or small structure,” notes Stokes. “I just wanted to do artistic interpretations of livable spaces.” Upon majoring in architecture, the Georgia Tech graduate went to Japan for three years to teach English to junior high school students. “I didn’t want to be the foreigner forever, so I decided to go back to grad school and continue my architectural quest. While on a scholarship at the University of California, Berkeley, I realized that I didn’t want to do architecture anymore.” A new inspiration emerged upon seeing the walk cycle of a skeletal dinosaur at the computer lab. “It was the coolest thing that I had ever seen,” he remarks. “We had the option to start designing on the computer, and I found that I had some skill at it. We had one class in CG animation
34 • VFXVOICE.COM SPRING 2022
PG 34-38 MARCUS STOKES.indd 34
2/28/22 1:11 PM
