Advisory board

Paul Franklin is the Creative Director of Double Negative Visual Effects, one of the world's leading visual effects studios with credits on over 150 films.

Paul first became involved in digital graphics and cinema whilst studying Fine Art at Oxford University. Working with a group of fellow students Paul discovered that he was able combine his love design and storytelling in the newly emerging field of computer animation. The visuals he created for a series of short films at the beginning of the 90s eventually brought him to the attention of the London post production community and he joined the team at the Moving Picture Company in 1994 to work on a string of high profile television commercials and station identities.

In 1998 Paul joined with a small team of visual effects artist and producers to found Double Negative Visual Effects (Dneg), a new VFX studio dedicated solely to feature film work. Paul set up the Dneg 3D department, managing it for the first six years of the company’s existence.

In 2003, Paul served as Dneg's VFX supervisor on BATMAN BEGINS, marking his first collaboration with director Christopher Nolan. Over the next decade Paul worked on another four films with Nolan, winning Academy Awards for the visual effects of INCEPTION in 2011 and INTERSTELLAR in 2015.

Shelley Page trained in the UK as an illustrator and has been working in the field of feature animation since 1986.

She was one of the first group of artists hired to establish DreamWorks Animation in Los Angeles in 1995. As Co-Head of Artistic Development she was responsible for setting up artistic training programs for the animation artists. Her credits, on over 30 feature films to date, include “Shrek 1-4”, “Shark Tale”, “Madagascar 1-3”, “Kung Fu Panda 1-3”, ‘The Croods’ and 'How to Train Your Dragon 1-2'. Her present responsibilities at DreamWorks Animation include building relationships with schools and events worldwide and sourcing new talent for future projects. She has a particular interest in student animation and is a member of the graduation juries and advisory boards of leading animation schools and festivals worldwide.

Since 2006 Shelley has been closely involved with the development of the animation team at the DreamWorks Dedicated Unit at Technicolor, Bangalore. She is also associated with several of the leading academic institutions and festivals in India.

Since 2011 Shelley has been engaged with the creation of the Oriental DreamWorks studio in Shanghai. She has also become associated with several of the leading academic institutions and festivals in China.

Shelley is a Visiting Professor to the MA Animation departments at Central Saint Martins (London) and the University of Teesside (UK) – and also at CUC (Beijing) and the Beijing Film Academy. She is a member of the graduation juries of leading international animation schools Les Gobelins, Supinfocom, LISAA, ArtFx and ESMA in France, School of Visual Arts, New York, the NCCA at Bournemouth University (UK) and the Animation Workshop in Denmark.

Lee has over 25 years of experience in the high-end graphics business within M&E. He was on the development team at Alias|Wavefront for Maya 1.0 and he was awarded Maya Master status in 2007. He has held numerous positions at facilities, such as Deputy Head of 3D at The Moving Picture Company, Head of 3D at Smoke + Mirrors, Training Development Director at Escape Studios, CG supervisor at the Film Factory and more recently CTO at Red Dot Square Solutions where he utilised VR technologies for car research. Lee is now CTO at Escape Technology consulting on major pipelines, fixing complex hardware and software issues as well as overseeing the support and engineering team.

Tara has a background studying art, design and animation, she graduated from the National Centre of Computer Animation with an MA in Computer Animation in 2000. Tara has been in the games industry since and joined Sony Computer Entertainment’s London Studio at the launch of the PlayStation 2. Since then she has been involved in many of the studio projects, most recently working on the studio endeavours into Virtual Reality gaming. Her career has seen her grow from a Junior Artist to her current role as a member of the studio management team, responsible for the art discipline within her studio. During her career Tara has been an active member of Bafta and has made a conscious effort to support the game developers of tomorrow through links with academia.

Pete Ridgway is a graduate of Bournemouth University where he studied Computer animation and Visualisation, graduating with a 1st class (Hons) Degree in 2001. From there he joined Sony Cambridge working on various PS2 games as and Environment Artist. During his time at Sony, Pete started to develop tools in Maya for the rest of the artists. This quickly escalated in to creating Character Rigs, Optimisation Tools, Spherical Harmonic lighting Editors, Shader tools etc...

Pete also started to get heavily involved in the rendering and memory management of the content, and quickly became somewhat addicted to ensuring the game ran in frame and had enough memory. After an amazing 5+ years at Sony he moved to Codemasters in Leamington Spa, working on the racing titles and eventually across all games in development. He initially joined as the Lead Environment Artist but quickly began falling into what was becoming the Technical Art discipline, working closely with the programmers on pipeline tools, rendering features and performance tracking.

Over his time at Codemasters he started to move into a more strategic role, looking at future technology and bringing all the studios workflows into alignment. After 6 great years at Codemasters he moved to Rare, just as the Next console platforms were coming into fruition. Pete has now been at Rare for over 4 years, absorbing the wonderful culture and heritage of the studio. In his current role as Technical Art Director for Rare, he helps drive the content pipelines, the tools and techniques we use and the final quality of the images on the screen.

Pete is still as enthusiastic for making games as the first day he started work. Pete loves the technical artist role, the combination of programming and art, the constant refinement of existing techniques and the blue-sky appeal of new challenges are what makes him tick.

Luke Whittaker is Creative Director of the BAFTA winning indie games company State of Play, based in London. He has a background in animation, illustration and games design and was recently named a BAFTA Breakthrough Brit.

State of Play was formed in 2008 to create beautiful handmade games and animations. The team is small, with a core of just three people.

For the last three years, State of Play has been working on a game called Lumino City. Since launching on Steam and iOS it has gone on to win multiple awards worldwide including the BAFTA for Artistic Achievement.

In the process of making Lumino City game they have worked with an architect, artists, model makers and props designers to bring their vision to reality: An adventure game set in a hand-crafted and fully working model city.

Eamonn started his career as a 2D animator on a Disney sponsored course in Dublin before moving onto work on the Teenage Ninja Mutant Turtles TV Series. Eamonn then spent 10 years with Disney Features as a 2D animator and quickly moved onto becoming a character supervisor on Dinosaur before becoming animation supervisor on Reign of Fire and Chicken Little. From there, Eamonn worked at Double Negative on box offices hits such as Batman and Harry Potter. For the last 4 years, he has been at Cinesite as an Animation Director! 

Patrick Burgoyne has been the editor of Creative Review magazine since 1999. Before joining the magazine (as Staff Writer) he worked in marketing, first for the Body Shop and later for the University of Westminster, whilst also moonlighting as a writer for magazines such as The Big Issue. He is also the author of several books on design and visual culture and has written for many publications, including The Guardian, The Independent, Scotland on Sunday, Arena and La Repubblica.

Max Howard created and ran studios for Disney in London, Paris, Orlando and Los Angeles, working on some of Disney’s most memorable films including Who Framed Roger Rabbit, The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin and The Lion King. As President of Warner Bros Feature Animation he oversaw such hit movies as The Iron Giant and Space Jam. At DreamWorks, he was co-executive producer for Spirit, Stallion of the Cimarron.



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Sara became the second-ever female VFX Oscar winner when she received a 2016 Academy Award for best visual effects in Alex Garland’s feature Ex-Machina, for which she also received a BAFTA Film Award nomination. Sara’s VFX and 2D Supervisor credits at Milk also include Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them, Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise, The Martian (20th Century Fox), Poltergeist (Fox/MGM), The Divergent Series: Insurgent, Brett Ratner’s Hercules (Paramount/MGM), Dracula Untold (Universal), Sherlock (BBC/Hartswood) and Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell (BBC).

Prior to the launch of Milk in 2013, Sara was Head of 2D at Mill TV & Film for seven years. During this time Sara worked as VFX Supervisor on feature films including Les Miserables, Dredd 3D; The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader (Walden Media / 20th Century Fox) and Jordan Scott’s directorial debut, Cracks (Scott Free).

Sara is a member of The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, BAFTA and the Visual Effects Society.

With a fine art background and a Masters in Computer Animation, Justin Summers’ animation career began at Sony Computer Entertainment working in video games as an animator. Since then, Justin has worked at some of the top facilities in the UK in commercials, TV and film. Justin’s passion for visual storytelling and cinematic language brought him to join The Third Floor London shortly after its inception in 2011, where he now works as both a talented Artist and inspiring Visualisation Supervisor.