Brad Blackbourn

Previs Artist, Bad Fairies

Starting out directing animation, Brad has enjoyed constantly swapping creative and technical hats during his career.

He fell in love with the early cinematic exploration process of filmmaking and spent a number of years supervising visualisation teams and developing new CG filmmaking tools at various studios such as DreamWorks Animation, Framestore Animation, DNEG and The Third Floor, as well as his own Visual Story Development company at Pinewood Studios, IO Entertainment. In recent years he has been focused on adapting Virtual Production tools into new, fast-iteration, cinematic workflows.

Back in 2009, Brad's passion for innovation resulted in an invitation to join BAFTA due to his contribution to filmmaking in the area of Virtual Cinematography and over the years he has supervised or designed workflows for a plethora of animated and live-action films including Shark Tale, Flushed Away, Kung Fu Panda, The Tale of Despereaux, Avatar, Harry Potter, Dark Knight, Les Misérables, Spectre, Aladdin, Doctor Strange, The Witcher, House of the Dragon.

In his spare time, when not sipping Rye Whiskey based cocktails or paddleboarding, Brad can be found writing his own diffusion based model and cobbling together generative AI based creative exploration tools.