Hi everyone,
My name is Harry Bardak and I have started in Visual Effects Industry in 2000. I had the privilege to work on many block busters features films, but also on many commercials during my career. My area of expertise is lighting, rendering and compositing.
I grow up in Meudon la Foret, a small town around Paris, France. I had a direct sight of the massive light beam from the Eiffel tower. My parents are from a modest background. They arrived in France during the 70s. My father was passionate about computers while my mom always wanted to learn playing Piano. Thanks to them, my life was a balance between Arts and Computers. I learnt to play Electronic Organ, and using a computer to draw my arts.
At the time the power available was nothing compared to today computers. I was lucky enough to have an ATARI ST with a bright 68000 8 Mhz processor. I was mainly using to do what we call today pixel arts and arranging music scores. I also discovered raytracing with a software called POV ( Persistence of Vision ). POV was fun, even if I had to wait a overnight render in a 320×240 resolution. Just to compare we today standard, we are rendering in UHD ( 3840×2160 ) which contain 108 more pixels than my debuts. I was indeed patient but also very motivated. Describing a 3D scene was as complex as writing some code to run program. I had no GUI, no preview of what my render of my model will looks like. I had to process my code and 8 hours laters I would know if I did a mistake or not. I was only in High School so that gave time to practice further Organ and doing sport.
Later I studied Computer Science at the university of Orsay. This demanded a lot of personal effort to get my diploma. I was living 2 hours away from the campus. 4 hours of commute didn’t discourage me but I had to give up playing Organ but never give up CG. I was really passionate about it.
Once I got my Computer Science Degree, I was in front a of two path. Carrying on with Computer Science ( at the time you just had to pick a job, as everyone was hiring, plus I was good at ) or follow an uncertain direction of this emerging industry called visual effects.
Gosh what a choice ! I have to work on many features and commercial that have been iconic when they have been released. I left Paris for London where I spent 12 years which a decade was at Framestore. 18 years later, I am proud to say that I am still passionate about CGI. Today I am back to Paris, I have integrated the team of Unit Image as VFX and Character supervisor.
As I am facing new challenges in my life, I decided to create this blog to share my best practices, my experiences concerning CGI in production. Sometimes it will a write on people I met that inspired me, sometimes it will be a technical post to help out.
Alone we are faster but together we go further.
VFX Harry's Desk 