Vincent Truitner - Animation/CGI Artist

Vincent is a native of Los Angeles but grew up in Minnesota, graduating from Ramsey (now Roseville) High School in Roseville, MN. He always had artistic leanings and was fascinated with fantastic stuff -- monsters, aliens, starships, robots, you name it, as long as it wasn't mundane. He was 9 years old when Star Wars came out and to him, that was really the ultimate. "I wondered if I could ever work on something like that," says Vincent.

After some years at the U of M, Vincent transferred to the Rhode Island School of Design (RISD), sometimes referred to as the "Harvard of art schools," and received a BFA in Illustration, while minoring in Animation. Vincent calls RISD "The opportunity that changed everything for me, and I received my best years of art training there."

After graduating from RISD in 1996, Vincent landed an animation internship at Pixar Animation Studios, which had just released their ground-breaking CGI animated feature Toy Story. "There I learned how to bring virtual characters to life on the computer, and this has led to my present career as an animation/FX artist in film," says Vincent.

After doing early development work on Toy Story 2, he was hired by WB animation to help bring to life the title character of The Iron Giant, and returned there to animate the CGI character Drix in Osmosis Jones and the CGI demons in the live-action Scooby-Doo. In between those projects he also worked on two independent animated shorts, and at Cinesite Digital Studios (FX studio of the X-Men films) on a CGI Satan in what Vincent calls "A bad, little-known Christian apocalypse film called Megiddo."

He's now a senior animator at Sony Imageworks, and was an animator on the squid-like robot Sentinels for "The Matrix Revolutions." He's currently an animator on "Spider-Man 2," working on the digital versions of Spidey and his next nemesis, Doctor Octopus.

Vincent notes that during his days as an aspiring artist back in Minnesota, he displayed and sold art at the Minicon art show for several years. "My style has changed radically since then, and I am hoping to display some of my current work at next year's CONvergence."