Dan Kaufman
Dan Kaufman is a special effects artist, who in 2010 was nominated for the movie District 9 in the category Best Visual Effects Oscar.
Life
He grew up in Newport Beach, California and has studied computer science and electrical engineering at the University of California, Berkeley. Already during his studies he worked as a developer of graphical user interfaces for software from Commodore 64 computers. After that he worked for the computer game developer and publisher Spectrum Holobyte as a programmer and project manager. Then followed a job in software company Pacific Interactive.
Through the wife of Richard Hollander, founder of the Visual effects company VFIX he came to his first job in film animation. He remained until 1996 when VFIX and worked in the time on such films as Outbreak - Silent Killer, Power Rangers: The Movie, Operation: Broken Arrow and the television series The Shining. He went to Australia for a few months to work on the thriller Dark City. Upon his return to Los Angeles, he worked for various visual effects companies such as Cinesite, Digital Domain and Sony Pictures Imageworks. In 2002, he finally went to CIS Hollywood, for which he as head of digital effects in movies such as The Matrix Revolutions, The Core - The inner core and X -Men: The Last Stand. In 2009 he went as a visual effects supervisor at Image Engine to work on the Sciense fiction film District 9. Together with Peter Muyzers, Robert Habros and Matt Aitken he was nominated for this film for the Academy Award for Best Visual Effects.