Nik Brownlee, Visual Effects graduate from 2005, is currently a compositor at Double Negative in the UK, has worked on 25 feature films since graduating from VanArts. He recently shared his story with us about how he broke into the industry after completing our program, and it's great to read about how hard work and dedication to the craft has paid off for his career.

Nik says, "After graduation I moved to London, UK, as it seemed many of the biggest companies were there and I was able to get an ancestry visa.  I had no experience and no job lined up, but I took a chance.  After the first week taking my demo reel around to all the companies, I found that most of them were full on positions and wouldn't be hiring for at least 3 months.  Realizing how expensive rent was in London, I decided I would need some kind of minimum wage job until a junior VFX position opened up.  I spoke to a few companies about this and managed to get an agreement with Double Negative to hire me as a runner, with the deal that I would get moved up to a junior position when it came available.

My first week on the job, I asked one of the 2D supervisors on Harry Potter: Goblet of Fire if I could work on anything during the evening.  I was eager to learn and didn't want to waste too many months making coffee, so the supervisor gave me a job doing 'spot removal' (digital zit removal on the film's teen actors), which was essentially junior compositing work.  Everyone was happy with what I turned out and I managed to get moved up to a junior artist position within a few months.

My next big break as a junior artist came from working on United 93, when the same supervisor asked me to finish comping backgrounds (for blue-screen outside the plane windows) into the first shot I was doing roto on.  What I didn't know at the time was that we received nearly double the amount of shots we originally bid on, and had no extra time to do it.  Upon turning in the shot, my supervisor told me I was becoming a compositer for the rest of the show, as he needed all the people he could get.  I ended up comping about 25 shots, and since that big break have moved from junior to senior compositor, most recently working on films like IronMan 2 and Inception.

5 years working at Double Negative has been some great times, running down the hall wearing Batman's cape and IronMan's mask, meeting some celebrities and attending cast & crew screenings for films I've worked on.  The screening of The Dark Knight, before anyone knew how good it would be, was insane with the buzz of my co-workers coming out of the theatre!" 

Nik Brownlee credits at IMDB

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