Jesse Toves Email & Phone Number

Los Angeles

Currently employed as a previs/postvis artist at The Third Floor.

Supervising all aspects of CG production for various clients, I also often serve as the lead CG artist for a small team of highly experienced industry artists. These tasks can be as varied as rebuilding historic portions of cities to combining live action prosthetic monsters to cg bodies to designing animated caricatures.

Universal Studios Backlot

Served as VFX generalist and character artist for the television show Defiance under the late Gary Hutzel. Gary was one of my most important mentors and I worked directly with him as he often was not merely the on-set visual effects supervisor, but a creative force in all the projects he worked on.I would often be tasked with large portions of the performance aspects of projects but Gary would also leverage my design background and hand me set designs, unusual props or creatures for me to handle.

Pasadena Ca

At Stargate I worked on a pilot for a never seen Beauty and The Beast re-imagining. It was touted as a cross between The Lord of the Rings and (at the time) the emerging hit Game of Thrones. I was brought on to design and animate various creatures for the world they were creating which included a full live action replacement of a horse with a half elephant half buffalo inspired creature. Sadly, the show was never aired like many pilots. But the footage still exists on my reel of at least one of the creatures I designed and animated.

Universal City Ca

Served as VFX generalist and character artist under the late Gary Hutzel. Gary was one of my most important mentors and I worked directly with him as he often was not merely the on-set visual effects supervisor, but a creative force in all the projects he worked on.

Complete character animation duties fro the SyFy Original series Caprica. Finished 18 episodes creating animation rigs, tracking live action plates, pre-visualization often including environment design and layout, and finished character animation.

AP had the distinction of being the most difficult technical job I ever worked on - it required the creation of a one-shot, massive projection film to play on a 200 foot wide dome in a Casio. I had to animated - initially - sixteen mermaids playing traditional Chinese acoustic instruments, and I handled their rigging as well. Unfortunately, AP was never able to deliver final rendered images of my work to me in any form but portions of the show still exist online in early videos uploaded to Youtube. It represents one of the largest gaps in my presentation of work as I left the company before completion of the project to pursue another opportunity to work on the finale of Battlestar Galactica.I didn't take doing so lightly - it required that I train another animator and technical director about the work I had done, passing on duties to them before I left. One of the things which weighed heavily into my decision was the unfortunate lack of leadership on the project on the client side - it led to a drastic drop in morale company-wide.

As the senior member of the company, founded to produce motion pictures from the winners of Project greenlight, I helped model, rig, animate and composite the creatures required. Many of the members of the team were just starting out in visual effects and animation so it was important to have someone experienced lead the team's efforts.

UFO produced many of the weekly broadcast science fiction weekend films on the previously named Sci Fi Channel, now the Sy Fy channel. Working quickly and independently, UFO required artists to tackle entire sequences of films and often tackling all aspects of those sequences.Creature design, storyboarding, modelling, texturing, rigging, animation, tracking, lighting and compositing

At RnH I was a member of the "Box" - a special unit of the company set up as an experiment using off the shelf software and tools instead of the company's of proprietary software. It primarily worked on commercials and special venue projects. I had been hired to be a CGI generalist and tackled projects as far reaching as cel shaded anime vehicles and settings, a Nascar re-imagining of Ben Hur, and the christening of a cruise line by the Statue of Liberty.

Foundation Imaging had various teams dedicated to episodic television - much like the platoons in the show they were creating. Instead of a large pool of specific talents working on shows, smaller teams tackled episodes with "special teams" providing additional support.At FI, I did the following in varying amounts:Lighting, effects animation, modelling/texturing, prop modelling, vehicle modelling, character animationConceptual art for various pitch documents

CG generalist and freelance artist for modelling, texturing, rigging, and animation, conceptual design

Partnership in a full service advertising and marketing company, providing art direction and graphic design for clients in numours industries including:McDonald's Corp.NextelDensoOnsite EnergyPANC

Provided illustration and graphic design for advertising specialties, trade shows, and marketting materials for various clients in high-tech electronics, beverage and consulting industries.

Overall editorial art director, managing as well as creating illustrations, page layout and art direction as well as special feature art direction and digital output for publication.