CAREER STORIES
With credits on several huge blockbusters, triple Academy Award winner Paul has enjoyed an illustrious career, working on films including Dune and First Man P aul Lambert studied aeronautical engineering at university, but decided instead to go to art school on a part-time basis where he learned how to sculpt. “I also had to work, so I was a courier for about two years,” he explains. “It was there I kept doing these pickups for a production company that hired out editorial systems. They dealt with Moviolas, Steenbecks and Kems; it was at the transition point when Avid and Lightworks were starting to come into the film industry. I then went on to work at this hire company for just under two years. During this time, I started to learn about the film industry and eventually, visual effects. Up until then, I had loved watching movies but I never thought it was something I could do. VFX seemed like the perfect balance of artistry and technology so I quit my job and took a week’s course at SGI in Soho Square. I was applying to all the post-houses in Soho; it was only by chance that I had reapplied to Cinesite and I came in for a two-week stint. I was super eager and they took me on full-time. At night, I would teach myself how to use the Infernos there – I was 26 so I got into it quite late. “When I joined Cinesite, they had two Infernos and one Fire; by the time I left, they had six Infernos,” Lambert continues. “I’d developed that department to a place where we could work on feature films. I got to a certain stage where I wanted to go off to the centre of the film industry. I went to SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles and spoke with Sony, ILM and Digital Domain. I chose DD because their culture seemed like a good fit for me
SAVING FACE Bennett’s work on Ex Machina in 2014 won her an Academy Award for best visual effects
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