Today we’d like to introduce you to Kevin Shimamoto.
Kevin, we appreciate you taking the time to share your story with us today. Where does your story begin?
My career in VFX started not long after I graduated from the Art Institute of California Los Angeles. I was able to find a job pretty quickly after graduating as a Matchmove artist at Hydraulx. I was there for about six months. In that six months span, I worked on a few movies, the big one being “Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 2”. After my time at Hydraulx, I found myself working at a small animation studio called Cosmic Toast Studios after my college friend Jorge Zavala tipped me off about them needing compositors. They were known for creating web-based animations such as “Lalaloopsy”, “Pugatory”, “Skechers: Twinkle Toes the Movie” and a handful of other projects. The compositing work I did there was fairly simple. I would take flash animations and composite them on top of Photoshop backgrounds using after effects and have the characters move around while matching their walk cycles and create any kind of lighting effects or other kinds of effects that were needed for the shows. There was a brief period where Jorge and I switched over to one of Cosmic Toast’s sister companies Cinipix to work on an independent film called “Raze”.
After that, it was back to compositing webisodes again. I was there from 2012 until early 2016 when the studio was forced to close its doors due to financial trouble. That next year was definitely a rough year for me solely because I had spent the last three and a half to four years compositing flash animation shows. My ultimate goal however was to work on live-action movies and I was far from qualified to do so. So I spent the better part of 2016 teaching myself how to use the industry standard compositing software Nuke while picking up small side projects as a matchmove artist on commercials and creating personal projects for my demo reel. However, around the fall of 2016 my unemployment ran out and I was forced to find some kind of job for the time being. That job ended up being at an Amazon warehouse working graveyard shifts. I would work my ten-hour shifts, sometimes twelve, and have to drive an hour home, to sleep eat and do it all over again, all the while trying to find time to spend with my wife, who was pregnant at the time, and time with my two other kids. This went on for about six months until a recruiter I had connected with on LinkedIn named Susan reached out in February 2017 looking for someone with experience in matchmoving to sign on to a two weeks contract. I knew this opportunity was a gamble, as did my wife because I would likely lose my job at the Amazon warehouse, but I took the offer anyway in hopes that it would pay off in the long run. The job was for a tech vis artist at a studio called Proof Inc. on “A Wrinkle In Time”.
During that two weeks spans, I did eventually lose my position at the Amazon warehouse, but my contract with Proof Inc. flourished into a month. After my one-month contract there, I was hired by Mammal Studios as a Compositor. My time there would last for about five months, and then I would once again find myself back at Proof Inc to finish helping out on post vis work for “A Wrinkle In Time” and then on to a few other movies. Once I finished up at Proof Inc., my good friend Jorge Zavala once again put a good word in for me with a guy named David Van Dyke. David had just started his own VFX studio, Van Dyke VFX, and was looking to expand his team of artists. So shortly after my interview, I was added to his growing team. Since then I have been happily working at Van Dyke VFX as a Nuke Compositor. We primarily work on HBO content, and it’s just about all 2d and 2.5d VFX compositing. There was however that covid pandemic that put a halt on just about everything for a year. And during that time, Dave was forced to cut back on staff. So I used the pandemic to spend as much time as possible with my family and try to stay up to date on my skills. But as we all know, the bills didn’t go away during that time.
Thankfully we had enough savings put away to help keep us afloat, along with the unemployment check for 1099 workers. That was a real lifesaver for us. Dave wasn’t quite ready to run his studio at full capacity yet, so in March 2021 I took a compositing job with Digital Frontier as a Nuke Compositor. It was here that I was able to get my feet wet with CG Compositing and using render layers and a whole bunch of other cool tools. I really did enjoy my time there as it was always my dream to do CG compositing while attending school, but eventually Van Dyke VFX was ready to get things into high gear and I was more than happy to rejoin his team. And that is where I have been since. It’s definitely been a long journey for me, but I truly do believe that all of my hard work and staying connected with people in the industry have been the reason that I’m where I’m at today.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
It most definitely was not a smooth road. I faced quite a bit of obstacle on my journey. While working at Cinipix, Cosmic Toast’s sister company, Jorge and I were pretty naive and new to the VFX industry, therefore we were taken advantage of by working 100+ hour weeks, not going home for days and opting to sleep at the studio. We definitely learned our lesson after that. And then starting in the summer of 2015 paychecks at Cosmic Toast Studios were starting to come in late and things just went downhill from there until they were forced to close up shop in early 2016. Cartoon Brew did an article about it too. You can read up on it here https://www.cartoonbrew.com/artist-rights/l-studio-cosmic-toast-shut-without-paying-artists-cartoon-brew-investigation-140053.html. To this day the CEO Alan Andersen still owes me quite a bit of money, along with many other artists who worked there. And then 2016 – February 2017 was pretty rough as well. That was when I was pretty much starting from scratch and teaching myself the industry standard software Nuke and trying to get a good demo reel put together while working a graveyard shift and spending time with my family. But my gamble on Susan’s offer did end up paying off in the long run. I give Susan a lot of credit for kickstarting my VFX Compositing career. Because since then I’ve been working pretty consistently.
Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
So I currently work as a VFX Compositor at Van Dyke VFX. I would say that our work is more in the realm of invisible VFX. What is mean by that is we mostly work on productions that don’t feel like they have VFX, but in fact they do. We specialize in things like background extensions or compositing a phone screen on a cell phone when the actor is making a phone call or texting. A lot of that stuff is added in VFX. We have to go in and match move the phone screen and then add the phone insert and make sure the colors match the rest of the shot and then add in any reflections or scratches to help make it feel like it’s part of that world. We also remove crew members from the background or enhance prosthetic wounds, or work on beauty work on the actor or actresses. We will sometimes go in and stitch two different shots together to make it look like one seamless take.
There’s a very long list of things that I have had to do while working as a Compositor. I would say I’m really proud of my work that I’ve done throughout most of my career, but if I had to choose I would say that I’m most proud of my work on “Euphoria” “Our Flag Means Death” and “Happier Than Ever: A Love Letter To Los Angeles”. Those three are the recent ones that really stand out to me. I have definitely grown the most here at Van Dyke VFX and am continuing to learn new stuff with each and every project. I guess the thing that set me apart from the others is that I always give it my all, no matter what. I will do whatever it takes to make sure that my shots are done on time. I’m also always looking at the glass half full, or at least I try to. So I always try to stay positive no matter what. I love the work that I do and I’m always willing to teach others when I can because at the end of the day we’re all on the same team with the same goal and that is to get the project done in a timely manner.
What are your plans for the future?
My plans for the future are to continue to create great content no matter what the project is. I would love to stay where I’m at. Van Dyke VFX is a great place to work. Dave really does believe in a healthy work and life balance and it definitely shows. He also has a family so he knows how important it is to have that balance. And my supervisor and our producer both also have families of their own and feel the same way. So we definitely do our best to maintain that balance but we also know that there will be times where we will be required to put in some extra time to hit our deadline. And now that I think about it, I’ve been pretty fortunate in the sense that just about all of the studios I’ve worked at really did believe in having a good work, life balance. As of right now, I don’t really see any big changes for me, unless I win the lotto.
Contact Info:
- Website: http://kevinshimamoto.weebly.com/
- Other: https://www.imdb.com/name/nm4922467/?ref_=nv_sr_srsg_0
