Michele Alessi

CG Supervisor on Finch, a touching story starring Tom Hanks. The main job here was bringing Jeff to life, driven by Caleb Landry Jones’s performance: an intricate piece of pure, functional, believable robot that somehow also had to carry a fictional soul. Getting that balance right was recognized and rewarded by the VES. Amazing teamwork all round.

Sets Lead and Sequence Supervisor on Warner Bros.’ Pokémon: Detective Pikachu, brought on for one sequence in particular: the Torterras, where the environment itself sits on the backs of moving giant turtles. Chaos and destruction on a huge scale, and a genuinely rewarding sequence from a pure VFX standpoint.

CG Environments Supervisor on Disney’s Maleficent: Mistress of Evil, building a whole world around her. Maleficent’s own castle and the Queen’s castle were the two biggest pieces, each the work of a large, talented environment team, from modelling through look development and rigging.

Visual Effects Supervisor on Kraven the Hunter, overseeing 500+ shots split across several vendors. Every creature sequence in the film was ours outright; the Rhino itself was a build shared with another vendor. I worked closely with the Creature team on every animal in the film, on top of the usual VFX Supervisor’s job of overseeing the full batch of assigned shots.

DFX Supervisor on Robert Zemeckis’s Pinocchio, a wild mix of technical and artistic exploration: building the previs and production workflows, bridging Unreal to Maya, standing up the creatures and the locations around them. The real star of the show was always the performance though, animation crafted by a hugely talented team working directly under Zemeckis himself.

Sets Lead and Lead Technical Animator on Jon Favreau’s Lion King, a journey of discovery from day one. I led both sides of the show’s creature and environment work: researching a new fur-simulation setup, water interaction and custom wind in Houdini, then the large-scale environments themselves. A tremendous showcase of the talent on that show, all in service of a perfectionist’s vision.

Senior Technical Animator on The Jungle Book, which pushed what was truly possible: one of a kind at the time, almost no real set, everything else built and extended by the team. I was responsible for advancing the environment dynamics for the show, at a scale that had never been attempted before. A true masterpiece that pushed the boundaries of both creatures and environments, and deservedly won the Academy Award for Visual Effects.

Lead Creature FX on Disney’s Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales, covering both characters and boats. The ships alone were a serious challenge: an intricate rig of sail, rope and seaweed. The real test was Captain Salazar and his crew, standing in the real world but reading as if underwater, hair and clothing floating exactly as they would below the surface.

CG Supervisor on Bullet Train, tasked with building two 180-degree moving environments projected onto volumes around the train set. That meant more than long-running plates: the content had to sit correctly on a specific LED wall layout from any angle, so the camera stayed free to move rather than being locked flat to the screen.

CG Supervisor on WandaVision, across two episodes: a short but sweet dive into episodic television, following Wanda and Vision as they live out a surreal, trapped existence inside a magical dimension. Magic effects and the desiccated witches behind it all were ours to bring to life, reshaping our workflows on the fly to fit an accelerated streaming schedule.

CG Supervisor on Cats, an average of 14 cats in every shot, each dancing and singing. That needed full fidelity on both body and facial performance, but also total freedom of movement: no markers, no head-mounted camera, so the dancers could actually dance. The markerless capture system we built to solve it was the first time I used machine learning in a production pipeline, and the technique was published.

Lead Creature FX on Paramount’s Transformers: The Last Knight, a short, single-sequence effort: leading the creature and prop FX for a stretch of underwater action built from jellyfish and an enormous amount of seaweed, each with its own behavior to mix together believably. Short, but a genuine thrill working alongside a legend like Michael Bay.

Senior Creature FX on 20th Century Fox’s Alien: Covenant, a brief participation on the Engineers sequence: creature FX on every one of them as they’re wiped out by the black liquid swarm.

Senior Creature FX on Paramount’s Terminator Genisys, a brief participation working on the creature dynamics behind Arnold Schwarzenegger’s T-800.

Cloth Supervisor on Asterix: The Mansions of the Gods, a charming adventure in the Asterix world. I supervised the cloth setups and shots for half the show: stylized but detailed was the real challenge, since the snappy, funny animation the film needed often worked against an easy simulation result. It looks simpler than it was to get there, and I’m happy with how clean the result came out.

Cloth Supervisor on Admiral (Michiel de Ruyter): sails, everywhere. A massive build of every kind of sail and rope needed to populate each ship in the battle sequence, with intricate furl-and-unfurl rigs to carry the fidelity and detail the shots demanded.