Sebastian Sylwan is the Chief Technology Officer at Weta Digital, a world leading visual effects studio based in Wellington, New Zealand responsible for The Lord Of The Rings trilogy and Avatar among many others. He first came to Weta as the Head of Research and Development and in these roles, he is helping bring structure and continued impetus to Weta Digital’s long tradition of Innovation in VFX.
Before joining Weta, Sebastian served as Autodesk’s Senior Film Industry Manager. helping set the strategy for Autodesk’s products in the global film market, including the first steps into stereoscopic 3D.
Previously, Sylwan was Director of Technology at Digital Domain, an Academy Award-winning VFX facility. He successfully renewed Digital Domain’s technology infrastructure while maintaining the legacy value of over 13 years and helped it venture into new areas like the development of the facility’s first stereoscopic rendition of a CG animated film.
Sylwan has also served as Principal Technology Advisor at USC’s Institute for Creative Technologies where he led the Light Stage 6 project, which entailed co-design and construction of the world's largest and most-advanced reflectance field capture device. Light stage technology is used for computer graphics research and is now present in many of the most advanced Hollywood feature films' visual effects pipelines.
While living in Italy where he grew up, Sylwan designed, built and acted as the CTO of Lumiq Studios, the country’s largest production, post-production and 3D character animation studio.
Sylwan also serves in numerous advisory boards and industry committees, such as the VES Technology Committee, the ASC-ADG-VES subcommittee on Previsualization, where he co-led the Previs 2020 group with Alex McDowell and the Virtual Production Committee amongst others..
