Cogswell College to Host Wajid Raza, A Lighting Technical Director at Industrial Light & Magic, for Special Guest Lecture March 5

Cogswell College, a leading educational institution offering a unique curriculum of Digital Art & Animation, Digital Audio Technology, Game Design & Development, Digital Media Management, Engineering, and Entrepreneurship & Innovation, will host Industrial Light & Magic (ILM) Technical Director Wajid Raza for a Special Guest Lecture. Karen Keister, Cogswell's Program Director and Assistant Professor in the school's Digital Arts & Animation Dept., made the announcement. Keister's department regularly features one guest speaker each semester who has prominently established him/herself within the entertainment and digital arts industry.

The lecture, entitled The VFX Pipeline, will take place on Wednesday, March 25, from 7:30-9:30pm in the Dragon's Den Theatre on the Cogswell College campus. Raza will discuss how the work of each artist on a large project fits into a chain of complex tasks that, when brought together, will create the ultimate visual effects. He will also cover how a visual effects studio is structured and what contributions are made by each of the studio's different departments.

ABOUT WAJID RAZA:

Wajid Raza is currently working as ILM's Lighting Technical Director on the upcoming Marvel Entertainment motion picture Avengers: Age of Ultron (2015.) He first joined the renowned and multi-award winning visual effects company Industrial Light & Magic in 2009 as part of its technology group. Since then, he has worked as an Assistant Technical Director, Production Engineer and Technical Director on many of ILMs tent-pole projects. Raza was an integral part of the team behind the Academy Award winning film Rango (2011) and the Academy Award nominated film Star Trek Into Darkness (2013.)

For the film Rango, Raza wrote software for the Layout Team and served as a Final Layout artist to bring the directors vision from concept art to digital 3D scenes. He helped troubleshoot issues in a newly developed monolithic-process for working in multiple shots at the same time. One of the tools he wrote for Layout enabled them to create specialized cameras for the locked-off static shots in the movie. This technique enabled the addition of a micro-float treatment to the CG cameras, so their movements mimicked real-life camera movements.

Similarly, for the movie Star Trek Into Darkness, Raza led efforts in developing new software and production workflows tailored for the film. He helped set up a distributed fracture system pipeline that was employed in key scenes.

Raza is a graduate of Savannah College of Arts and Design (SCAD) where he received his MFA. Earlier, he completed his BS Degree in Computer Science from Government College University in Lahore, Pakistan, the city in which he was born. Currently, he is a resident of San Francisco.

WAJID RAZA'S CREDITS WITH ILM:

2015 AVENGERS: AGE OF ULTRON (currently in production) - Lighting Technical Director

2014 TEENAGE MUTANT NINJA TURTLES - Production Engineer (Technology)

2013 NOW YOU SEE ME - Production Support (Technology)

2013 STAR TREK INTO DARKNESS - Digital Artist (Technology)

2012 BATTLESHIP - Assistant Technical Director

2011 PIRATES OF CARIBBEAN: ON STRANGER TIDES - ATD

2011 RANGO - Layout Artist

ABOUT COGSWELL COLLEGE:

Designed as a fiercely collaborative, living laboratory, Cogswell College is located in the heart of the legendary Silicon Valley in Sunnyvale, California. The school is a WASC accredited, four-year institution of higher education with a specialized curriculum that offers programs in Digital Art and Animation, Digital Audio Technology, Game Design & Development, Digital Media Management, Engineering, and Entrepreneurship & Innovation.

Numerous alumni of Cogswell College have secured prominent positions within the entertainment, videogame, technology, computer, animation, and motion graphics industries throughout California and beyond. Several of these alumni have established careers with such high profile companies as Activision, DreamWorks Animation, Disney, Electronic Arts, Pixar, and Microsoft Game Studio. Many other alumni have launched their own creative ventures.

Recently, several Cogswell alumni have been a part of the Academy Award-winning production teams behind the blockbuster films Frozen and Life of Pi, and the production team behind the 2015 Golden Globe Award winning Best Animated Feature Film How to Train Your Dragon 2. Other well-known entertainment projects to which Cogswell alumni have contributed include the feature films Big Hero 6 and The Avengers, and the popular videogames Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare, Halo 4 and Battlefield Hardline.

Additionally, animated short films conceived and produced by Cogswell students have gone on to win prestigious awards, including those presented by the California International Animation Festival, the Colorado Film Festival, the Oregon Film Festival, the Miami Film Festival, the Philadelphia Film & Animation Festival, the San Jose Short Film Festival, and Canada's International Film Festival.

Cogswell College is located at 1175 Bordeaux Drive, Sunnyvale, California, 94089. For more information, please call 1-800-264-7955 or visit: http://www.cogswell.edu/

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