Peones UNITED

Start with a Long Island high school student who has friends in theater arts. Send him to classes taught by an inspirational film criticism teacher named Bernard Shearer. Stir in a little civil disobedience by residents in his beautiful and tiny town, who fought a proposed nuclear power station. Send him to film school at NYU’s Tisch School of the Arts and encourage his experimental photography. Give him an apartment in Greenwich Village and a job in television as a PA for the comedy series ‘Saturday Night Live’. Let him hang out with Robin Williams, Tom Hanks, Steve Martin, and Al Franken.

Next, move him on to a second job as an assistant for Peter Wallach, a stop-motion animator, and Mike Sullivan, a cinematographer who created surreal sculptures of impossible looking cameras. Perch him in a bird’s nest high above a river between New Jersey and Staten Island, with plumes of fire from smoke stacks in the background, and hire him to film baby birds all day for National Geographic Explorer documentaries.



And then, give him his first big break: a job as camera assistant for a motion control shoot of the Enterprise for the film Star Trek V. And suddenly, you have a starting line for vfx supervisor John Gaeta’s career. Woven through that career are people and technologies that have forever altered visual effects and filmmaking. “Peter Wallach got the contract to shoot the Enterprise through Bran Ferren,” Gaeta says of that first job in visual effects. “There wasn’t much money, so I got to do everything.”

Twenty-some years later, Gaeta has become one of the most innovative visual effects supervisors on the planet, winning an Oscar and a BAFTA award for ‘The Matrix,’ supervising effects for the second two films in the ‘Matrix’ trilogy for which he won VES awards, and leading the game-changing effects in ‘Speed Racer.’





fonte: cgsociety.org