Company veteran will head the newly reorganized technology group that combines, IT, production technology and business system departments.
After more than 13 years as a company executive, Jeff Stringer has earned a well-deserved promotion to Chief Technology Officer at Oregon-based animation studio LAIKA. Reporting directly to the President and CEO, Travis Knight, Stringer now heads the newly created Technology Group (a combination of the previous IT, Production Technology and Business Systems departments).
Said Knight, “The fusion of art and technology has been essential to our company since its founding and since 2008 Jeff has been central to that creative effort. As our studio grows, technology is increasingly important to achieving our goals and vision. The work of our technology teams is more critical than ever before, particularly as they face the challenge of our latest feature, Wildwood, the most ambitious film we’ve ever taken on, which we believe will set new standards for artistic and technical achievement in stop-motion/CG hybrid filmmaking. I can’t think of anyone more able than Jeff to lead us into an increasingly complex and challenging technological future.”
Stringer joined LAIKA in 2008. In his capacity as Director of Production Technology, he led the development of the company’s enterprise digital scheduling system for stop-motion fabrication and stage planning, and in partnership with Head of Production Arianne Sutner, conducted studio-wide postmortems after each film to capture new production methods and set goals for improvement, among many other impactful contributions. He currently leads LAIKA’s efforts to integrate virtual production and game engine technology into its filmmaking tools.
The award winning studio was founded by Knight in 2005, and has produced numerous Academy Award nominated animated features, including Coraline, ParaNorman, The Boxtrolls, Kubo and the Two Strings, and Missing Link. Upcoming project Wildwood, based on the book series by Colin Meloy and illustrator Carson Ellis, is currently in production.
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