Impossible Objects, a virtual production company, has hired visual effects supervisor and commercial director Ruel Smith to oversee VFX and animation. Smith brings to his new roost more than 15 years of experience in film, television and virtual production, and will be based in Los Angeles.
Smith began his career at Digital Domain creating award winning VFX for advertising and film, always with an eye to the next evolution in production. His passion for real-time filmmaking was sparked when he joined the virtual production team for the award-winning Disney’s Jungle Book, which is considered a milestone film showcasing the creative potential of real-time. Smith was also an integral part of the visual effects teams for films such as Flags of Our Fathers, Black Panther and Captain Marvel.
Most recently Smith served as head of VFX and animation as well as a VFX supervisor at Stept Studios.
Smith will be working alongside Impossible Objects founders Joe Sill and Jerad Anderson in his new role where he hopes to build out expanded visual effects and animation teams along with a pipeline and internal infrastructure to support real-time virtual production workflows using off-the-shelf and internally developed creative tools.
“I’m looking forward to taking the lead on building a team and leaning on best practices from my experience in both traditional visual effects and the rapidly evolving tools methodologies in real-time production and in-camera visual effects. Impossible Objects has an incredible portfolio of work and truly represents the state of the art in virtual production today,” said Smith.
Sill added, “Ruel is a natural leader and after working with him on an incredibly ambitious project earlier this year, we knew he’d be the perfect fit for developing the visual effects and animation teams for our quickly expanding virtual production company. He is an inspired and powerful manifester, and is fueled by a curiosity that we all share here at Impossible Objects.”
With his own career being dramatically influenced when receiving mentorship early on by some of the VFX industry’s most brilliant minds, Smith is thrilled about doing the same for a new generation of artists, guiding them into the future of virtual production.
Impossible Objects was founded in 2019 by Sill and Anderson. A self-described world-building lab, the company is made up of a team of artists and engineers who specialize in building projects that marry the physical and digital worlds to build commercial projects and original IP.
Changing OpenAI’s Nonprofit Structure Would Raise Questions and Heightened Scrutiny
The artificial intelligence maker OpenAI may face a costly and inconvenient reckoning with its nonprofit origins even as its valuation recently exploded to $157 billion.
Nonprofit tax experts have been closely watching OpenAI, the maker of ChatGPT, since last November when its board ousted and rehired CEO Sam Altman. Now, some believe the company may have reached — or exceeded — the limits of its corporate structure, under which it is organized as a nonprofit whose mission is to develop artificial intelligence to benefit "all of humanity" but with for-profit subsidiaries under its control.
Jill Horwitz, a professor in law and medicine at UCLA School of Law who has studied OpenAI, said that when two sides of a joint venture between a nonprofit and a for-profit come into conflict, the charitable purpose must always win out.
"It's the job of the board first, and then the regulators and the court, to ensure that the promise that was made to the public to pursue the charitable interest is kept," she said.
Altman recently confirmed that OpenAI is considering a corporate restructure but did not offer any specifics. A source told The Associated Press, however, that the company is looking at the possibility of turning OpenAI into a public benefit corporation. No final decision has been made by the board and the timing of the shift hasn't been determined, the source said.
In the event the nonprofit loses control of its subsidiaries, some experts think OpenAI may have to pay for the interests and assets that had belonged to the nonprofit. So far, most observers agree OpenAI has carefully orchestrated its relationships between its nonprofit and its various other corporate entities to try to avoid that.
However, they also see... Read More