Craig Caton

Born in Portland, Oregon, Craig Caton-Largent has been creating visual effects (VFX) for the motion picture industry for over forty years and has contributed to over 100 films. Caton has worked with highly acclaimed directors like Tim Burton, Steven Spielberg, and James Cameron, and has been a contributor to no less than six Academy Awards for best visual effects. Caton is the most famous for creating and puppeteering some of the most iconic creatures in Hollywood film history: the Slimer ghosts in Ghostbusters (1984), the penguins in Batman Returns (1992), the raptors in Jurassic Park (1993), and countless others. He also was Steven Spielberg's trusted keeper and puppeteer of the E.T. puppet in 1994 until E.T retired in 2010. As Hollywood started to transition to digital effects in the mid-90s, Caton was quick to embrace the new technology and was one of the co-founders of Digital Domain, where he created one of the earliest performance capture stages. Caton later went on working for Disney Feature Animation and DreamWorks as a developer of digital animation and character rigging systems. He is also one of the original alpha testers of the 3D software Autodesk Maya for animation and rigging workflows. Caton also invented and programmed several VFX software, such as Animservo, which is used by film studios and theme parks, such as Disneyland and Jurassic World, across the United States to digitally animate live puppets. Today, Caton is the Chair of the Visual Effects and Animation Department at The New York Film Academy in Los Angeles and is a frequent guest speaker in motion capture technology at film festivals and universities around the world. He is also the founder of DragonEye 3D, a reality capture company based in Hollywood.