Duane Powell Email & Phone Number

Culver City, California, United States

After joining the company in 1994, I grew Blur from a small, $500K startup to a $50M industry leader. During this time, I developed and executed the strategy to build out the IT department’s software and hardware functions to support 200+ employees and deliver special effects/animation projects for Fortune 500 clients.While serving in this role, I directed IT system support for 12 departments and ensured performance, security, and uptime of key systems and infrastructure. Additionally, I designed, procured, built, and tested state of the art edit bays for feature films. I implemented security standards to pass audits for Disney, Marvel, Fox, and Paramount. Also notable, I used the DevOps methodology to run a production pipeline and render farm (VFX computer cluster) built using PostgreSQL, Perl, Jenkins, Git, and others.In order to achieve Blur’s goal of creating a global team, I launched the “Studio Without Walls” infrastructure strategy to support 50+ remote team members and enable 3TB of daily data transfer. Additionally, I migrated the company’s communication tools to the cloud and setup capabilities to calculate cost and add cloud-computing power on demand. Equally important, I reduced costs 35% and eliminated overpriced 15% yearly support fees by building 500 high-end computers from separate parts.Notable Projects:== Gaming Cinematics: Honor of Kings, League of Legends, Halo Wars, Star Wars Series, Elder Scrolls Online, Destiny 2, and DC Universe.== TV/Commercials: Love, Death + Robots, Titanfall, Doom, GMC, Mini Cooper, Samsung, Toshiba, Intel Branding, Apple Music Festival, Victoria's Secret, and Goldfish Crackers Campaign.== Special Venue: One World Observatory, SpongeBob SquarePants, Niagara Furry, and Ferrari World Abu Dhabi.