back The Official Guide to Randy Just the last 45 yrs or so ....... Having worked in film, television and theatre for the past 45 odd years, I have done quite a few different jobs, mostly arty, ranging from scenic artist to VFX art director. Theatre The theatre work consisted for several years of amateur productions as mainly actor, some set design and one time as director for a children's production ... occassionally designing covers for programmes or billboard signage for productions. On auditioning for the state theatre company QTC, I somehow ended up doing paintings for a touring show which then lead to some set design for the next two years productions. I then did scenic art for several of their productions before I got a permanent job as set designer for a local TV station. As I shifted gears the work divided into essentially two phases ... Art Dept and VFX Art Dept Principally being US TV drama series and Movies of the Week, I was focussed mainly on graphic design, gradually moving to assistant art direction and finally, for a very short period, art direction. During this time, I also provided both paintings and concept artwork for several TV Series and Feature Films. The highlight of this phase and probably of my career was working on the Street Fighter movie with Raul Julia and JCVD. As well as designing everything graphical, and there was a lot that made it to the screen, I also painted two portraits of Raul Julia ... one as a Bonaparte wannabe Crossing the Alps and a John Wayne Gracy "clown" style "selfportrait" that was supposed to be a work in progress by the General/Dictator. There was also some money designed, which I was never happy with, but apparently has gained some noteriety and taken it's place in the memosphere along wit the painting. Not only but also ... it was such a pleasure working for William J. Creber a living legend who had Art Directed three of the Planet of the Ape movies as well Voyage to the Bottom of the Sea. As Production Designer ... forget that he helmed Towering Inferno and Poseidon Adventure ... they pail compared to ... Flight of the Navigator and Any Which Way You Can ... the world is a lessor place for his passing. Many years later I got to work with one of the cast of Flight of the Navigator being Ethan Hawke. Co-incidentally my son is named Ethan but named more because my wife chose it and I agreed because ... duh ... Ethan from The Searchers ... which came out in 1956 and my son was born at 19:56 ... it's like it was meant to be. Just keeping a family tradition alive ... I was named Randy after Randy Stone a radio character in the fifties from a show called Night Beat ... I am fairly certain my middle name Shane is also from the movie of the same name. VFX or Visual Effects ... a fancy term for a branch of Post Production When they say "We'll fix it in Post" this is what they'll be referring to. Although qualified as an artist through dint of a Diploma in such, I had also studied Engineering, so computing didn't seem that foreign to me. I had been reading SciFi since I was 12 and grew up watching Lost in Space ... wasn't this the future? I remember visiting the "mainframe" which looked like a room at NASA with cabinets of tape machines whirring away but totally failed at programming, in Fortran or Pascal or some such ... can't remember which but I still have the instruction book somewhere. A mere 7 years later I bought one of the first personal computers in 1982 ... being a Sinclair ZX81 (I still have it also). In 1986, not so soon after, in the scheme of things, I got a job at a company that had a "million dollar" state of the art graphical computer ... a Quantel paintbox at Channel Ten in Brisbane. I jumped on it any chance I could get. I ended up doing the occasional graphic for the news reports (on top of my job as set designer) and used it to create the credits for a children's cartoon hosting, I co-produced, as well as using it to create my first digital matte painting for one of the shows. After initially dabbling with digital effects at Channel Ten I began in earnest in 1996 when I started work at what was then Photon Stockman (possibly the first VFX House in Australia and located at the Movie World Studios on the Gold Coast) as a junior compositor/matte painter. Since that time I have worked on close to 70 productions (if you count the episodes ... more like 120 "shows") with various VFX companies and in various roles from matte artist to VFX Supervisor. In 2010 I had the good fortune to be nominated for work on one of those productions, in the end winning an AFI for Visual Effects for the movie DayBreakers Of the others I am only aware of Superman Returns being nominated for an Oscar and Moby Dick for an Emmy ... both unfortunately unsuccessful in their bids. My name wasn't on the line but always nice to be associated with something of peer recognised quality. But there's more Outside of the film & television industry, I have completed several commissions for the Sheraton Hotel Group ... but sadly no gallery showings to date. Awards 2010 Samsung Mobile AFI Award - Visual Effects Daybreakers. Peter Spierig, Michael Spierig, Rangi Sutton, James Rogers, Randy Vellacott Education 1974 QIT Engineering 1975 QIT Architecture 1976-79 Queensland College of Art Diploma of Art (Visual Communications) Majoring in Film & TV and Animation Minor in Painting back