Areito Echevarria

Areito Echevarria is an Academy Award winning artist and researcher with over 21 years of Visual Effects experience. His passion is for storytelling and world building approached through the lens of computational design.

As a Senior Lecturer in the School of Design Innovation at Victoria University of Wellington, he specializes in procedural content generation and generative systems for cinema, games, and virtual worlds. Areito’s research deals with motion capture and generative deep learning approaches to synthesizing animation and human motion for interactive experiences. This interdisciplinary work explores methods for generating physically plausible, emotionally engaging human performances for real-time, interactive experiences, and sits at the intersection between psychology, computer science, theatre and design.

As a VFX artist, Areito was previously Head of Weta Digital’s industry leading FX Department where he supervised a team of FX artists, animators and software developers. Prior to that he held roles as Compositing Supervisor at Weta Digital, Framestore, The Mill, and Iloura. Areito has three Visual Effects Society Awards nominations for outstanding FX Animation and Compositing. His feature film experience includes work on films such as War for the Planet of the Apes, Godzilla, The Hobbit Trilogy, Avatar and Black Hawk Down. In 2014 Areito was awarded the Scientific and Technical Academy Award for his work inventing Deep Compositing, an imaging technology that fundamentally changed the nature of compositing workflows in the feature film industry.

In 2020 Areito co-directed MINIMUM MASS, an interactive narrative experience for Virtual Reality. Minimum Mass won the 2020 Annecy International Animation Film Festival Crystal Award for “Best VR”, was winner at ANIDOX Denmark, and has played at the Tribeca, Cannes, and Venice International Film Festivals. Areito is a 2018 Sundance New Frontier Story Lab Fellow, and Turner Fellow.