The Mission has brought VFX supervisor Patrick Ferguson on board. For the past five years, he has been at Method Studios as head of 2D, working on major commercial projects for Samsung, Kia, Sonos, and Verizon to name a few. He earlier worked at such effects houses as Digital Domain, Sony Imageworks and Asylum.
Ferguson started out as a still photographer in New York in 1991. He won several national awards with his mixed media creations of Polaroid, watercolor, transfer separation, and computer enhancement. In 1995, he crossed over to the moving image, becoming a visual effects artist working in After Affects, Flint, and Flame.
Ferguson has collaborated on a range of high profile projects with some of the industry’s best directors, including Noam Murro, Nicolai Fuglsig, David Fincher and Sam Bayer. His experience also spans a number of top feature films such as Pirates of the Caribbean, Alice in Wonderland, and he was part of the Academy Award-winning team on The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. He brings with him more than 20 years expertise in visual effects and has won a number of awards including several BDA, AICP Show and Clio awards.
Michael Pardee, founder/managing director of the Mission, said, “Patrick is an immense creative talent. We’ve wanted to work together again since our mutual days at Digital Domain.”
Ferguson rounds out a talented team at the Mission that includes animation director Piotr Karwas and fellow VFX supervisor/lead Flame artist Joey Brattesani.
South Korea fines Meta $15 million for illegally collecting information on Facebook users
South Korea's privacy watchdog on Tuesday fined social media company Meta 21.6 billion won ($15 million) for illegally collecting sensitive personal information from Facebook users, including data about their political views and sexual orientation, and sharing it with thousands of advertisers.
It was the latest in a series of penalties against Meta by South Korean authorities in recent years as they increase their scrutiny of how the company, which also owns Instagram and WhatsApp, handles private information.
Following a four-year investigation, South Korea's Personal Information Protection Commission concluded that Meta unlawfully collected sensitive information about around 980,000 Facebook users, including their religion, political views and whether they were in same-sex unions, from July 2018 to March 2022.
It said the company shared the data with around 4,000 advertisers.
South Korea's privacy law provides strict protection for information related to personal beliefs, political views and sexual behavior, and bars companies from processing or using such data without the specific consent of the person involved.
The commission said Meta amassed sensitive information by analyzing the pages the Facebook users liked or the advertisements they clicked on.
The company categorized ads to identify users interested in themes such as specific religions, same-sex and transgender issues, and issues related to North Korean escapees, said Lee Eun Jung, a director at the commission who led the investigation on Meta.
"While Meta collected this sensitive information and used it for individualized services, they made only vague mentions of this use in their data policy and did not obtain specific consent," Lee said.
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