Impossible Objects, a virtual production company, has hired visual effects supervisor and commercial director Ruel Smith to oversee VFX and animation. Smith brings to his new roost more than 15 years of experience in film, television and virtual production, and will be based in Los Angeles.
Smith began his career at Digital Domain creating award winning VFX for advertising and film, always with an eye to the next evolution in production. His passion for real-time filmmaking was sparked when he joined the virtual production team for the award-winning Disney’s Jungle Book, which is considered a milestone film showcasing the creative potential of real-time. Smith was also an integral part of the visual effects teams for films such as Flags of Our Fathers, Black Panther and Captain Marvel.
Most recently Smith served as head of VFX and animation as well as a VFX supervisor at Stept Studios.
Smith will be working alongside Impossible Objects founders Joe Sill and Jerad Anderson in his new role where he hopes to build out expanded visual effects and animation teams along with a pipeline and internal infrastructure to support real-time virtual production workflows using off-the-shelf and internally developed creative tools.
“I’m looking forward to taking the lead on building a team and leaning on best practices from my experience in both traditional visual effects and the rapidly evolving tools methodologies in real-time production and in-camera visual effects. Impossible Objects has an incredible portfolio of work and truly represents the state of the art in virtual production today,” said Smith.
Sill added, “Ruel is a natural leader and after working with him on an incredibly ambitious project earlier this year, we knew he’d be the perfect fit for developing the visual effects and animation teams for our quickly expanding virtual production company. He is an inspired and powerful manifester, and is fueled by a curiosity that we all share here at Impossible Objects.”
With his own career being dramatically influenced when receiving mentorship early on by some of the VFX industry’s most brilliant minds, Smith is thrilled about doing the same for a new generation of artists, guiding them into the future of virtual production.
Impossible Objects was founded in 2019 by Sill and Anderson. A self-described world-building lab, the company is made up of a team of artists and engineers who specialize in building projects that marry the physical and digital worlds to build commercial projects and original IP.
