Imageworks - Jim Berney

Visual Effects Supervisor

Sony Pictures Imageworks

Jim Berney is currently working on Eagle Eye as visual effects supervisor.

Berney recently completed work on the highly anticipated film I Am Legend as visual effects supervisor.

Since joining Sony Pictures Imageworks in 1996, Berney has served as visual effects and CG supervisor on a number of notable projects. He supervised the creation of over 500 shots for the Academy Award® nominated The Chronicles Of Narnia: The Lion, The Witch, And The Wardrobe.

In 2004, Berney was visual effects supervisor on the IMAX version of the state-of-the-art performance capture feature The Polar Express. He was responsible for supervising the conversion of over 780 shots from the beautiful traditional 2D version of the film into the large format 3D IMAX version.

Previously, Berney was the visual effects supervisor on The Matrix Reloaded, The Matrix Revolutions, The Lord Of The Rings: The Two Towers And Harry Potter And The Sorcerer’s Stone. Berney also served as CG supervisor for Hollow Man (2000 Academy Award® nominee, Best Visual Effects).

In 1998, Berney was an invaluable member of the Imageworks team as CG supervisor on the feature film Stuart Little (1999 Academy Award® nominee, Best Visual Effects), having been involved in the development of the costuming technology. The cloth dynamics utilized on the film enabled the design, building, and simulation of 13 costumes for three CG characters. Berney also supervised the development of the versioning and publishing system and co-supervised the development of the lighting pipeline, which facilitated the seamless integration of the Stuart Little character into live action scenes.

Before the groundbreaking Stuart Little, Berney served as CG supervisor on the feature film Godzilla and was lighting lead on Contact, Starship Troopers (1997 Academy Award® nominee, Best Visual Effects) and Anaconda, during which he developed rendering tools and the pipeline for photorealistic lighting techniques.

Prior to joining Imageworks, Berney worked at MetroLight, where he was a research technical director and part of the software development team, authoring flocking software for Batman Forever and procedural natural phenomenon lighting software for Under Siege 2 and Mortal Kombat.

Berney began his career working for DARPA as an ADA programmer for a large software engineering consortium. He received his Master’s degree in Computer Science from California Polytechnic, San Luis Obispo, specializing in the research and development of a new global illumination paradigm. He holds two undergraduate degrees in Computer Science and Economics from the University of California, Irvine, focusing in AI research. Berney also studied computer architectures at the Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm, Sweden.