Jalloo Guest Speakers
Lynn Rogoff - Games Keynote
CEO and Founder Lynn Rogoff has been in the forefront of the confluence of art, technology, communications and business with ground-breaking multimedia content. Rogoff founded AMERIKIDS USA developing, AMERIKIDS ® as a pilot television series for ABC-TV. These Weekend Specials dramatize the true adventures of heroic American teenagers. AMERIKIDS USA, ventured into the realm of edutainment in its CD-ROM game series entitled, "AMERIKIDS." AMERIKIDS USA received a grant from ORACLE Corporation to produce a prototype of her interactive series. In both New York and Los Angeles, she created and produced PC games. The first in this series, Pony Express Rider was published and released by McGraw-Hill Home Interactive for Christmas 1996 to critical acclaim. The multi award winning Pony Express Rider was the flagship product to launch McGraw Hill Home Interactive, the new division at McGraw- Hill. You can visit www.AMERIKIDS.com to learn about her company and their live action, $1.5 million dollar blue screen-3-disk adventure. For the past two years, Rogoff has been leading a 3D game team developing GreenKids Media as a worldwide game to find an save endangered species.( www.gkmnyit.com) Green Kids Media recently won the People's Choice Award at the NY State Business Competition. She serves as an adjunct professor at NYIT, where she teaches Game Design and Digital Storytelling, Communication for Technical Professions, Writing for the Mass Media, Screen Writing, Social Media for Business. . She created online courses such as Discover New York in Film, Television and New Media and is developing a Games Center and International Games Conference. Specialties: Rogoff was writer, producer and director on: Sesame Street, Big Blue Marble, and Watch Your Mouth here in the US and Rehov Sum Sum in Israel. She was a WGA, East Fellow, dramatizing two American icons. This passionate love story LOVE, BEN LOVE, EMMA is based on correspondence between Emma Goldman and Dr. Ben Reitman. Tom Bancroft - Animation Co-Keynote
President of Creative Craziness Tom Bancroft has almost 25 years of experience in the animation industry, most of which was for Walt Disney Feature animation where he was an animator for 11 years. He has been nominated for Annie and Rueben awards, spoken at the Kennedy Center and awarded an entry into the Chicago Children's Film Festival. While at Disney, Tom had the opportunity to contribute animation on 10 animated feature films, 5 animated shorts, and numerous special projects and commercials. Some of the classic films include, "Beauty and the Beast," "The Lion King," "Aladdin", "Mulan", and "Brother Bear". He was also a character designer and director for Big Idea Entertainment, makers of the family-friendly "Veggietales" video series. In 2005, Tom had his popular art instruction book, "Creating Characters with Personality" published by Watson-Guptill Publishers. With "guest" contributors like Glen Keane, Jack Davis, Peter de'Seve, and Butch Hartman, it has already become the most recognized book on designing characters for animation, video games, comic books, and cartooning. It has become a required textbook at many art schools around the United States. His second book, "Character Mentor" will come out in April, 2012 from Focal Press. Tom co-founded Funnypages Productions, LLC and ran it for eight years. Throughout that time and now, he has provided direction, art direction, illustration, character design and animation development for clients like Disney Feature films, Disney Licensing, DC comics, Marvel Licensing, Big Idea Entertainment, Warner Brothers, CBN, Scholastic, NavPress, Thomas Nelson, and Zondervan. He has also illustrated over 50 children's books. Recently, he provided character art and art direction to help launch the popular kid's educational website ABCMouse.com. Tom and his family reside in Franklin, Tennessee. You can see a gallery of some of Bancroft's work at http://tombancroft.designbinder.com. Tony Bancroft - Animation Co-Keynote
Animation Director Tony Bancroft is a creative artist and director with over 20 years experience in the animation business. Most of that time was spent at Disney Feature Animation where he created Pumbaa in The Lion King and Kronk in The Emperor's New Groove and co-directed Mulan. Since then he has directed films, commercials, and character animation in both 2D and 3D. Tony has a book just out in 2012 called "Directing for Animation" from Focal Press. As a California Institute of the Arts (CalArts) student, Tony's talent was recognized very early on. As a result, his college career was cut short upon immediately being “drafted” to the big leagues of Walt Disney Animation Studios. His ability to quickly adapt his skills to any given project led him to work on such legendary animated productions as The Rescuers Down Under, Beauty and the Beast, and Aladdin. His diligence and a meticulous eye for character performance were rewarded when he became the Supervising Animator for both The Lion King and The Emperor's New Groove. Memorable characters such as Pumbaa, the lovable warthog and spinach puff specialist, Kronk were two of the comedic creations that Tony brought to those Disney classics. He capped a successful 12-year career at Disney, being named co-director of the award-winning feature Mulan; adding to his list of credits, "youngest director in Disney's history" and an Annie Award for Best Director that year. With a desire to broaden his horizons, Tony was tapped by Sony Pictures to become the Animation Director for their summer release, Stuart Little 2 and then briefly returned to Disney to direct the English-language voice talent for the U.S. release of Miyasaki's Porco Rosso. The culmination of his talent and experience led Tony to found his own animation studio - Toonacious Family Entertainment - where he specialized in DVD feature development and commercial production. Toonacious also produced their own original DVD series called Lenny and Sid. "I love any medium (traditional or CG) that can bring engaging stories to life for a universal audience.". Ileana Dana DARIE
Professor -3D Animation, Rigger, and Traditional Animation Born in Bran, Romania in the shadow of Dracula's castle, Dana started her 3D animation career in 1999, in Romania at Tiny Creatures, an animation and visual effects studio where she was in charge of rigging, facial expressions and modeling. Her career led her to Montreal where she first worked as a modeler and texture artist for a film production company, Galafilm & Lone Monkey Company Inc. and a game company, Side City. She next worked as a rigger at Meteor Studios on different film productions. In May 2008, the Mel Hoppenheim School of Cinema awarded her the Fuji Award in Film Animation for her short film Spherationships. In August of 2008, she debuted her film “Abstract Trilogy” at the World Film Festival in Montreal. In 2010, her short animated “The Cage That Is My Beauty” was screened in numerous festivals and received two international awards. In April of 2012, she graduated her master in Arts at University of Quebec at Chicoutimi studying “The metaphor in animation: how to trigger emotion”. Manny Elawar
BlackBerry Developer Evangelist Manny Elawar is a BlackBerry Developer Evangelist at BlackBerry. His main focus is reaching out to the developer community and getting them excited about generating top quality apps for the BlackBerry 10 Platform. Manny graduated from the Software Engineering program at Western University, and the Honors Business Administration program at the Richard Ivey School of Business. His primary work at BlackBerry has involved software development in the Enterprise department, where he developed internal simulation tools that simulated up to millions of BlackBerry devices. These tools were used in the functional and performance testing of Enterprise server products before their release to corporate customers. Manny recently joined the Developer Relations team at BlackBerry as an Evangelist to share his passion for BlackBerry with the developer community. In his personal time, Manny enjoys playing music, organizing social events, travelling, and spending time with friends and family. Fun fact: he can solve a Rubik’s cube in under a minute; track him down and get him to show you! See it on gingle.tv Melani Flanagan
VP Operations “I like to keep busy and I am crazy about content creation. While I maintain a full time position as a writer of video game content and manage a portion of the studio with Gogii Games, I still find time to contribute as a writer and/or producer on projects for which I have a passion. I have been freelancing since 2004. Some key projects I was happy to be a part of in 2012 included two documentaries: The Paramount, CBC, 2012, Winner of Best Documentary, The Silverwave Film Festival [Writer] and Sext Up Kids, CBC Doczone, 2012 [Researcher].” Brenda (Bailey) Gershkovitch
CEO Brenda Bailey Gershkovitch was previously the C.O.O. of Deep Fried Entertainment, a PSP, DS and Wii development studio in Yaletown, Vancouver. As C.O.O. of Deep Fried, Brenda oversaw all operations of the studio and brought five console games to market for publishers Sega and Take Two Sports. Bailey Gershkovtich’s newest endeavor is Silicon Sisters Interactive, a female focused studio building games for Women and Girls. Launched in May 2010, the studio will bring three games to market in fall 2010. Bailey Gershkovitch is frequently speaks at Conferences on a wide range of issues including: Women in Games, Change Management, and Studio Culture. She is the Chair of Women in Games Vancouver, a board member of the Canadian Video Game Awards and an Advisory Board member of GDC Canada. Erin Glidden
Game Designer Erin was born in St John's, Newfoundland. She grew up there with her mother, Dawn, and her grandparents, John and Marina, before moving to New Brunswick. She attended Memorial University of NL then moved to Fredericton to begin anew at art college to study game design. She worked at FatKat animation for 3 years. These days she lives in Moncton, NB, working as a game designer at Gogii Games. She also runs her own online store called Blind Leviathan. Michael Ludden
Senior Technical Marketing Manager Michael Ludden heads up the Developer Marketing team at Samsung Developers, Samsung’s new developer relations program based in the heart of Silicon Valley. A one-time developer, Michael is a frequent speaker at conferences such as CES, Mobile World Conference, IFA, DroidCon, Appsworld, GDC, SXSW, TechCrunch Disrupt and more. In a previous life Michael was a developer evangelist at HTC and was involved at various times in development, product marketing, co-founding startups, tech show hosting, and even cruise ship singing (don’t ask). Michael has a degree from UCLA and is thrilled to share his vision for Samsung Developers. Jeff Mundee
Department Head - Game Design After graduating from the Art Institute's Game Art and Design program, Jeff did his internship with Factory1 Games learning the ropes of game design and environment modelling. He then worked with Electronic Arts for 3 years as a motion capture specialist, and was able to produce animation for almost every major EA franchise from 2006-2009. Most notably, Fight Night, Deadspace, FIFA, Dragon Age, Medal of Honor, Madden, Skate, Tiger Woods, and Need For Speed. It was at that time he began teaching level design at the Art Institute of Vancouver. He has taught a wide range of production and design courses and mentored hundreds of students at all levels since 2007. While teaching, he has continued to work on independent projects such as Red RollingHood and as a mission designer for Sleeping Dogs, published by Square Enix. Currently Jeff is the Game Design Department Head for the Gaming and Animation Institute of Fredericton and a professor of game studies at the University of New Brunswick. On the production side, he is working with local author Sheila McPhee on the Eco ABC 123 game for young children, and is involved with other gamified learning and instructional design projects. Kirsten Tomlinson
President/CEO Kirsten began her media career 14 years ago as a freelance production assistant on hectic live action television and movie sets. Not satisfied with the real world drama of the movie business and craving the sort of creative absurdity one could only find amongst unwashed animators, she made the move to become a production coordinator at Collideascope Digital Productions in Halifax. In the animation world she had the opportunity to work on numerous award winning and critically acclaimed series as she scaled the monkey bars upwards earning more responsibility as an associate producer, and eventually as a producer. Loved by her crew, and integral to the successful planning and execution of tight budgets and schedules, Kirsten learned a lot about the artistic process and how to organize large teams of creative individuals towards a common goal by building stable productions and fostering an atmosphere of respect, teamwork, and productivity. Always up for a new challenge, Kirsten decided to leave the industry she loved to take on a new role as a video game Producer for HB Studios in Lunenburg. She accepted the challenge of learning an entirely different production model in a new technology sector, quickly rising to the role of Senior Project Manager. During her time with HB Kirsten successfully produced a number of world-class console games with top clients from around the gaming world, and helped the company expand their business while managing numerous productions at two separate facilities. After experiencing work-life in a large gaming facility, Kirsten decided to make a sideways swing into a smaller boutique gaming and e-learning environment. Acting as Senior Production Manager for Raised Media, she has immersed herself in the world of education based games and online branding, all the while learning how to make a smaller company perform like a well oiled multi-national brand. Kirsten’s in depth and rounded work experience in media, television, feature films and games gives her a stunning array of skills and attributes any client will find indispensable. She has evolved her career towards serving the interests of her clients and her craft, and she represents the missing link between left-brain artistic creatives and goal-focused executives. Kirsten’s professional, positive attitude and her infectious humour make her a joy to work with, and we are proud and fortunate to have her as Fourth Monkey’s top banana. |
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© 2012 Jalloo Foundation
© 2012 Jalloo Foundation
