Gerard Keating BA MSc

Summary: A strong academic background, with a degree in Computer Science from the prestigious Trinity College Dublin and a Master of Science in Computer Animation from the NCCA in Bournemouth University and solid proven production experience on such major films as the Oscar winning Golden Compass, the record breaking The Dark Knight and new James Bond film, The Quantum of Solace. Motivated, fast learner, team player, hard working with great problem solving ability.

Professional Experience

September 2007-Now: Framestore,Wells St., London.
Assistant Technical Director on the:
The Golden Compass, The Dark Knight, The Quantum of Solace, Me and Orson Welles and Australia.

• Responsible for pipeline maintenance for these major show.
• Programming and maintaining both bespoke Framestore CFC systems and off the shelf industry standard programs such as PRMan, Maya, Houdini, Nuke and Linux administration programs.
• Liaise with systems and render support to help technical directors to complete their shots.
• Refactoring and re-writing tools in python.

Summer 2006: Double Negative, Soho London
Tech. Runner

The position involved IT support and helping to expand the IT infrastructure for a rapidly expanding Linux based pipeline.

Winter 2005: Ocuco, Dublin, Ireland
First Line Customer Support

The position entailed troubleshooting IT issues of Occuco’s pharmaceutical and optician software.

• Completed a Masters Project on hair creation pipeline which involved creating a hair modelling system in Houdini 8.0, writing an interpolation program in C++ that generated geometry at render time. A hair shader was also written in sl for PRMan and example passes were composited in Shake.
• The course covered all technical areas required to work in Computer Animation including Houdini, RenderMan, Maya (including Mel and the Maya API), Shake, scripting in languages such as python and shell scripting, advanced C++ programming for computer graphics and Linux, creating physical simulations, rendering and lighting theory.

Projects completed include:

• A group project to create a short film entitled “Ratpack” in which I created the RenderMan shaders, the fur modelling system in Houdini and the fur pipeline.
• A real time particle simulation and a real time hair simulation in C++ using the OpenGl libraries.
• A crowd simulation using Massive as part of research into crowd simulations and their history.

2001-2005: Trinity College Dublin, Dublin, Ireland

Honours Degree in Computer Science BA(Mod.)

• Completed the four year degree course with a second class honours.
• The course covered every aspect of computing including software design, programming in many languages including C++, networking, hardware, databases and mathematics.
• In my final year I specialized in Computer Graphics and Computer Vision and did a substantial project researching methods of smashing brittle objects in real-time computer graphics.

1996-2001: Salesian College Celbridge, Co.Kildare, Ireland

Honours Irish Leaving Cert. (495 CAO Points)

• Received Honours in English, Mathematics, Accounting, Physics, French and Applied Mathematics.
• Obtained top marks (A1) in both Mathematics and Applied Mathematics.

Achievements

• I was chairman of the Dublin University Computer Science Society and Student Representative for my class in the academic year 2004/2005. This gave me great experience in project and people management. I was employed by the Trinity College Computer Science Department to tutor other students on programming in a workshop environment. This not only helped me become a better programmer but helped me better communicate abstract technical problems.