Craig "Xray" Halperin hopes to entertain as much as educate with an opinionated presentation on his personal professional journey.  Beginning with an explanation of his background and how he ended up with a career in visual effects through a series fortunate accidents, he'll talk about what it's like to live in Los Angeles and work on blockbuster films at major visual effects studios.

He will present stories about some of the projects he has worked on and break down some of the techniques used in films such as Titanic, X-Men 2, The Sum of All Fears, Bee Movie, Kung-Fu Panda and the upcoming A Christmas Carol. He will spend some time going over the changes that he's seen in the industry, both from the technological and creative side of things.

While some material may be of a technical nature the talk is meant to be accessible to anyone with an interest in computer graphics. Students of computer graphics, computer graphics professionals and people interested in a behind the scenes look at visual effects for live action and animated feature films may enjoy this presentation. 

Topics include: Background (Inspiration, Chronology); Procedural approaches to FX animation;  Compositing for visual effects; and Three techniques for crowd animation.