Diego Garzón

Director Técnico de Arte para Xbox

A 32 year old Colombian, with a huge passion for computer graphics, and art. Diego moved to the United States at age 18, with the sole purpose to pursue a career in film-making and video-games. After studying computer sciences in Colombia he joined the Visual Game Programming bachelors program at the Art Institute of California San Francisco. After a year in the program he was given the opportunity to intern in the Research and Development department at Giant Killer Robots during the day and Render Wrangler at night. During this time he developed an immense curiosity for Visual Effects, and focused his research on this field. After 6 months he was hired as an Effects Technical Director for the films “Happy Feet”, “Fantastic Four-Rise of the silver surfer” and “Mimzy”.He then moved to The Orphanage, where he produced work for the movies “Grind House”, “Die Hard”, “Sin city”, and “Don’t you mess with the Zohan” as a Shader Programmer and Effects Technical Director. This eventually landed him a job at Pixar Animation Studios as an Effects Technical Director for the movie “Wall.E”.He then left to pursuit a 4 year unique venture to help set up a studio from the ground up to produced motion capture animated films. This studio led by Disney and Robert L. Zemeckis came to be known as Image Movers Digital and grew from 20 people to a 700 people facility. The studio produced the movies “Disney’s a Christmas Carol” and “Mars Needs Moms”. After Disney shutdown of the studio, Diego, left to Australia to help on the production of “Zucker Punch” and “Legend of the Guardians” at Animal Logic. He was then, invited to join the Cinematic team at Blizzard Entertainment to work on the visuals of Diablo 3 and Start Craft 2, his two favorite games of all time. 6 years ago he joined Blue Sky Studios, where he has worked as an Effects Technical Director on our last three films “Ice age continental Drift”, “Epic”, and “Rio2”. During this time he was the co-author of the Siggraph publication “Directable Fluids for the Distinct Worlds of Epic” for fluid development work for which he was also nominated for an Annie in the category of “Best Animated Effects In An Animated Production”. Diego is now a Technical Art Director for Microsoft working and researching new technologies for Xbox, HoloLens and Real Time Awesomeness.