Talks

The Wild Robot

Jeff Budsberg most recently served as visual effects supervisor on the critically acclaimed  DreamWorks Animation film The Wild Robot, for writer/director Chris Sanders.  Previously, Budsberg served as Head of Look on The Bad Guys, and as Head of Effects on Abominable. His additional visual effects credits include The Croods: A New Age, How to Train Your Dragon 2, Mr. Peabody & Sherman, and Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, and he served as an Effects Lead on Kung Fu Panda 3, The Croods, and Shrek Forever After.

Budsberg’s work has earned him numerous accolades including an Annie Award for Outstanding Achievement in Animated Effects from ASIFA-Hollywood for The Croods, an Annie nomination for Kung Fu Panda 3, and two nominations from the Visual Effects Society (VES) for Outstanding Effects Simulation and Outstanding Effects for The Croods and Shrek Forever After.

In 2015, Budsberg received a Technical Achievement/Sci-Tech Award from the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences for his groundbreaking work on the development and implementation of DreamWorks Animation’s foliage toolset. The foliage system was first development in 2001 for the Academy Award® winning film Shrek, where it was used to create more than 10,000 trees, the largest deployment of digital vegetation in any film at that time.  In addition, Budsberg has been involved with OpenVDB (an open-source software library developed at DreamWorks Animation), which has also been recognized the Academy  of Motion Picture & Sciences. 

With a career spanning seventeen years at DreamWorks Animation, Budsberg has developed a reputation as a respected leader who fosters new technical developments across the studio. His peers have acknowledged his leadership with ten DreamWorks Technical Awards and Budsberg has often represented both his own work and the studio at leading industry conferences such as Siggraph and DigiPro.

Passionate about proliferating knowledge to his peers, Budsberg excels at standardizing common practices and documenting solutions and workflows. He shares this knowledge by teaching numerous courses as part of the DreamWorks Animation training department.

Budsberg is a graduate of Cornell University, where he received both a Bachelor of Fine Arts with a concentration in painting, and a Master of Science, computer graphics, with a minor in computer science.