Cinesite has brought Jesper Kjölsrud aboard its London office as VFX supervisor. The 20-year industry veteran has successfully led teams both as a VFX and CG supervisor on many award-winning projects.
Kjölsrud has worked on a wide range of feature film and episodic television fare. His credit list includes Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan, Outlander, The Lone Survivor, The Thing, Alice Through The Looking Glass and District 9.
Kjölsrud is well known in the industry for his mastery of CG. Having initial studied in northern Sweden, he then moved to the UK in 1997 where he worked as a 3D Artist at MPC before becoming one of the original members of Double Negative when they opened for business as a small boutique in 1998. Over 10 years at DNEG, Kjölsrud supervised CG and VFX on many projects including Enemy At The Gates, The Chronicles of Riddick, Doom, The Da Vinci Code and 10,000BC. In 2009 he made the move to Vancouver joining Cinesite’s partner company Image Engine as sequence supervisor on District 9. Kjölsrud went on to work as both production side VFX supervisor on The Thing and Lone Survivor as well as facility VFX supervisor for Image Engine’s work on The Losers, R.I.P.D and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. Kjölsrud returned to the UK in 2016 to supervise a number of projects at Goodbye Kansas including Robin Hood, season 2 of Tom Clancy’s Jack Ryan and seasons 3 and 4 of Outlander.
Kjölsrud’s appointment comes at a busy time for Cinesite, which is in production on various projects, including The Witcher & Lost In Space (season 2, Netflix), Outlander (season 5, Starz) and a special live action experience project based on a high-energy franchise for Universal Studios. Recent VFX credits include Avengers: Endgame (Marvel), Rocketman (Paramount Pictures) and Murder Mystery (Netflix).
Review: Malcolm Washington Makes His Feature Directing Debut With “The Piano Lesson”
An heirloom piano takes on immense significance for one family in 1936 Pittsburgh in August Wilson's "The Piano Lesson." Generational ties also permeate the film adaptation, in which Malcolm Washington follows in his father Denzel Washington's footsteps in helping to bring the entirety of The Pittsburgh Cycle — a series of 10 plays — to the screen.
Malcolm Washington did not start from scratch in his accomplished feature filmmaking debut. He enlisted much of the cast from the recent Broadway revival with Samuel L. Jackson (Doaker Charles), his brother, John David Washington (Boy Willie), Ray Fisher (Lymon) and Michael Potts (Whining Boy). Berniece, played by Danielle Brooks in the play, is now beautifully portrayed by Danielle Deadwyler. With such rich material and a cast for whom it's second nature, it would be hard, one imagines, to go wrong. Jackson's own history with the play goes back to its original run in 1987 when he was Boy Willie.
It's not the simplest thing to make a play feel cinematic, but Malcolm Washington was up to the task. His film opens up the world of the Charles family beyond the living room. In fact, this adaptation, which Washington co-wrote with "Mudbound" screenwriter Virgil Williams, goes beyond Wilson's text and shows us the past and the origins of the intricately engraved piano that's central to all the fuss. It even opens on a big, action-filled set piece in 1911, during which the piano is stolen from a white family's home. Another fleshes out Doaker's monologue in which he explains to the uninitiated, Fisher's Lymon, and the audience, the tortured history of the thing. While it might have been nice to keep the camera on Jackson, such a great, grounding presence throughout, the good news is that he really makes... Read More