Visual effects house Zoic Studios has added veteran VFX supervisor Stephan Fleet. With a diverse background in VFX and digital media, he has held posts as a visual effects supervisor for such top TV titles as “Extant,” “The Whispers” and “Scorpion.” Fleet will work on projects across Zoic’s Culver City, New York City and Vancouver studios. He comes to Zoic from Encore Hollywood, where he served as executive creative director.
Growing up between Los Angeles and Poland in a highly creative family, Fleet gleaned an interest in storytelling at an early age. While earning an MFA in Film Production from the University of Southern California School of Cinematic Arts, he amassed an in-depth knowledge of television development and production through a class and subsequent internship with producer Ian Sander. After spending a couple of years working in development, Fleet leveraged his background in graphic design to apply his production prowess to the world of visual effects, fusing his technical skills with his knack for efficient production flow as Master Key Visual Effects’ VP of operations. While there, he led a team of over 30 artists on a wide range of projects, including creating the VFX on the 2008 NBC thriller series “Knight Rider.”
Fleet made the move to Encore Hollywood in 2009 and since then has worked as a VFX supervisor and artist on a vast array of television series. He was later promoted to executive creative director, working alongside network creative teams to lead his in-house team of artists on the execution of VFX work at a superior technical and creative level. Outside of VFX, Fleet is a director and has several projects currently in development.
From Restoring To Hopefully Preserving Multi-Camera Categories At The Emmys
When Gary Baum, ASC won his fourth career Emmy Award earlier this month, it was especially gratifying in that the honor came in a category--Outstanding Cinematography for a Multi-Camera Half-Hour Series--that had been restored thanks in part to a grass-roots initiative among cinematographers to drum up entries. Last year the category fell by the wayside when not enough multi-camera entries materialized.
In his acceptance speech, Baum appealed to the Television Academy to keep multi-camera categories alive. He later noted to SHOOT that editors also got their multi-camera recognition back in the Emmy competition this year. Baum hopes that after resurrecting multi-camera categories in 2024, such recognition will be preserved for 2025 and beyond.
A major factor in the decline of multi-camera submissions in 2023 was the move of certain children’s and family programming from the primetime Emmy competition to the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences’ (NATAS) Emmy ceremony. For DPs this meant that multi-camera programs last year were reduced to vying for just one primetime nomination slot in the more general Outstanding Cinematography for a Series (Half-Hour) category. It turned out that this single slot was filled in ‘23 by a Baum-lensed episode of How I Met Your Father (Hulu).
Fast forward to this year’s competition and Baum won for another installment of How I Met Your Father--”Okay Fine, It’s A Hurricane,” which turned out to be the series finale. Two of Baum’s Emmy wins over the years have been for How I Met Your Father, and there’s a certain symmetry to them. His initial win for How I Met Your Father was for the pilot in 2022. So he won Emmys for the very first and last... Read More