Rahul Thakkar(I)
- Visual Effects
- Actor
- Additional Crew
Rahul Thakkar is an Academy Award® winning engineer, inventor, and global technology executive.
Born in UK, he was raised in Mumbai all of his early life, until he graduated from Mumbai University. In 1992, with a dream of working on VFX for films in Hollywood, he moved to the US to study towards a Master of Science degree in computer graphics and animation technology at Utah State University. He spent over a decade in the entertainment industry working as a VFX software developer at Post Perfect in NYC and later at Pacific Data Images (PDI). At PDI (acquired by DreamWorks in 2001), he was part of their R&D team that created the technology used on all of DreamWork's animated features starting with ANTZ. Among his technical contributions, he designed and authored the DreamWorks Media Review System for which he received a SciTech Technical Achievement Academy Award in 2016, and the PDI/DreamWorks Particle Rendering System.
Since then, he has served as a President, Managing Director, GM, VP, Executive Director, or Chief Engineer in various sectors, including VFX & film, defense, GIS, aerospace, cloud computing and simulation. He is the inventor of over 65 patents and disclosures globally, and has edited technical books and web standards documents.
He is an active member of the Visual Effects Society and continues to support the motion picture industry in several capacities. Growing up in India, since age 4, he has appeared multiple times on Mumbai TV, film, and radio, and has worked as a voice-artist. His partial filmography is on IMDb.
In January 2016, at the 88th Annual Academy Award, Thakkar received an Academy Award - Technical Achievement Award (Oscar®) citing "To Richard Chuang and Rahul Thakkar for the groundbreaking design, and to Andrew Pilgrim, Stewart Birnam and Mark Kirk for the review workflows and advanced playback features, of the DreamWorks Animation Media Review System."
Born in UK, he was raised in Mumbai all of his early life, until he graduated from Mumbai University. In 1992, with a dream of working on VFX for films in Hollywood, he moved to the US to study towards a Master of Science degree in computer graphics and animation technology at Utah State University. He spent over a decade in the entertainment industry working as a VFX software developer at Post Perfect in NYC and later at Pacific Data Images (PDI). At PDI (acquired by DreamWorks in 2001), he was part of their R&D team that created the technology used on all of DreamWork's animated features starting with ANTZ. Among his technical contributions, he designed and authored the DreamWorks Media Review System for which he received a SciTech Technical Achievement Academy Award in 2016, and the PDI/DreamWorks Particle Rendering System.
Since then, he has served as a President, Managing Director, GM, VP, Executive Director, or Chief Engineer in various sectors, including VFX & film, defense, GIS, aerospace, cloud computing and simulation. He is the inventor of over 65 patents and disclosures globally, and has edited technical books and web standards documents.
He is an active member of the Visual Effects Society and continues to support the motion picture industry in several capacities. Growing up in India, since age 4, he has appeared multiple times on Mumbai TV, film, and radio, and has worked as a voice-artist. His partial filmography is on IMDb.
In January 2016, at the 88th Annual Academy Award, Thakkar received an Academy Award - Technical Achievement Award (Oscar®) citing "To Richard Chuang and Rahul Thakkar for the groundbreaking design, and to Andrew Pilgrim, Stewart Birnam and Mark Kirk for the review workflows and advanced playback features, of the DreamWorks Animation Media Review System."
