Speakers
Espen Nordahl
Head of VFX, Storm Studios, Oslo
Espen Nordahl is an Emmy Award-winning and Academy Award-nominated VFX Supervisor and Head of VFX at Storm Studios in Oslo — a studio where his career began in 2005. Among the early collaborators on landmark Norwegian productions including Free Jimmy, Max Manus, Trollhunter, and King of Devil's Island, he went on to develop his craft at leading international facilities — Image Engine, MPC, and Weta FX — before returning to Storm in 2013. Since then his credits have ranged from Black Panther: Wakanda Forever and Invasion to Monarch: Legacy of Monsters and The Last of Us, for which he received the 2023 Emmy Award for Outstanding Special Visual Effects in a Season or a Movie. Most recently, he served as VFX Supervisor on Sinners, earning an Academy Award nomination for Best Visual Effects in 2025.
Tahir Tanis
Creative Director for ARC Raiders, Embark Studios, Stockholm
Tahir Tanis is Creative Director for ARC Raiders at Embark Studios in Stockholm, where he is responsible for overall world design, art direction pillars, and visual consistency. Originally from Pergamon, Turkey — a landscape that runs deep in his personal work — he began his career as a freelance concept artist before joining EA DICE as a senior concept artist from 2015 to 2019. In May 2019 he joined Embark as one of the artists on what would become ARC Raiders, contributing hundreds of concept works as the project grew from early exploration to full production. The real world was always central to that process: from location capture to cultural reference, the game’s environments are grounded in places that exist. Launched in October 2025 on Unreal Engine 5, ARC Raiders won Best Multiplayer Game at both The Game Awards 2025 and the BAFTA Games Awards 2026, and has sold over 16 million copies.
Theodor Groeneboom
VFX Supervisor and Founder, Rebel Unit, Bergen
Theodor Groeneboom is a visual effects supervisor and co-founder of Rebel Unit, a Bergen-based creative boutique specialising in visual development and procedural and algorithmic computation. He spent six years at Framestore in London, where his credits included Alfonso Cuarón's Gravity — on which he co-designed the studio's Lightbox real-time on-set lighting technology and served as sequence lead through post-production — and Guardians of the Galaxy. He received a VES Award for Outstanding Compositing in a Feature Motion Picture for Gravity in 2014. In 2015 he co-founded Rebel Unit, which has since contributed to Doctor Strange, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Fantastic Beasts, Christopher Robin, and Robert Zemeckis's Allied, among others, as well as the Norwegian productions The Burning Sea — which earned the Amanda Award for Best Visual Effects in 2022 — and The Ugly Stepsister, nominated for the same award in 2025.
Morten Moen
Associate Professor, Kristiania University College, Oslo
Morten Moen is Associate Professor in Visual Effects at Kristiania University College in Oslo, where he heads the Bachelor's programme in Visual Effects. He holds a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Oslo and has worked as a compositor and VFX Supervisor in the Norwegian film industry since 2001. His credits span over 60 feature films, short films, and television productions — including Free Jimmy, Max Manus, Kon-Tiki, Trollhunter, and The 12th Man — primarily through Storm Studios, and his collaborators include directors Joachim Rønning, Espen Sandberg, Harald Zwart, and Tommy Wirkola. In 2015 he received the Amanda Award for Best Visual Effects for Captain Sabertooth and the Treasure of Lama Rama. A founding Chair of the Norwegian VFX Association, Moen has been a central and consistent advocate for formal VFX education in Norway.
Stephanie Erso
Chair, Norwegian VFX Association; CEO, Vespertine FX, Oslo
Stephanie Erso is a CG generalist, compositor, and CEO of Vespertine FX, a 3D, motion graphics and VFX studio she co-founded in Oslo in 2019. She trained at the Copenhagen Academy of Digital Arts — where her thesis focused on VFX curricula and teaching practices — and has been teaching VFX since 2019. Her production credits include Beforeigners and Flights, and she has been increasingly active in virtual production as the field has matured. With a background spanning communication, media studies, and marketing management, she brings an unusually broad perspective to the industry. She currently serves as Chair of the Norwegian VFX Association, where she continues to advance accessibility and professional development across the Norwegian VFX community.
Eric Hanson
CEO, Blueplanet VR, Los Angeles; Co-founder, Digital Storytelling
Eric Hanson is Professor of the Practice of Cinematic Arts at the USC School of Cinematic Arts in Los Angeles, where he leads curriculum in cinematic VR and visual effects in the Hench Division of Animation and Digital Arts. A co-founder and co-director of Digital Storytelling, he has been the event's primary bridge to the international VFX community since its founding in 2006, drawing on an extensive network built over three decades in the industry. His feature film VFX credits include The Fifth Element, Fantasia 2000, Cast Away, and The Day After Tomorrow, with work at facilities including Digital Domain, Sony Imageworks, and Walt Disney Feature Animation. As CEO of Blueplanet VR, he currently creates volumetric VR content for the Apple Vision Pro, spanning landscape, natural history, and cultural heritage, with recent collaborations including the Dunhuang Foundation, Frontline/PBS, Björk, and Ai Weiwei.
Stuart Penn
VFX Supervisor, Framestore, London
Stuart Penn is a Visual Effects Supervisor at Framestore in London, where his path into the industry was an unusual one; he spent ten years as a research physicist, establishing a new research department at London South Bank University while studying superconductors and dielectric materials, before turning to visual effects. Since joining Framestore in 2000 he has worked on some of the most celebrated films and franchises of the past two decades, from Christopher Nolan's The Dark Knight to Marvel's Guardians of the Galaxy and Alfonso Cuarón's Oscar-winning Gravity, where he helped develop the techniques used to shoot its zero-gravity scenes, working with motion-control robots and the film's innovative LED lighting stage. He went on to supervise Ridley Scott's Alien: Covenant, the BAFTA-nominated Paddington 2, and Marvel's record-breaking Avengers: Endgame. Most recently he led Framestore's work on Bong Joon-ho's Mickey 17 and brought his scientific background to bear on Phil Lord and Chris Miller's adaptation of Andy Weir's Project Hail Mary.
Paul Debevec
Fellow, Content Production Research, Netflix
Paul Debevec is Fellow, Content Production Research at Netflix and Adjunct Research Professor at the University of Southern California. A leading figure in filmmaking technology, his pioneering work in high dynamic range imaging, image-based lighting, photogrammetry, and volumetric capture has become foundational to how digital characters and environments are created for film, television, and games. At USC's Institute for Creative Technologies he led the development of the Light Stage systems used to build photoreal digital faces and performances for many of the most demanding productions of the past two decades, and at Google Research he developed new techniques for immersive video and portrait relighting. He is a three-time recipient of the Academy's Scientific and Technical Awards — most recently in 2026, for his work on image-based lighting — as well as the SMPTE Progress Medal and, in 2022, the Charles F. Jenkins Lifetime Achievement Award at the Television Academy's Engineering, Science and Technology Emmy Awards..
Jim Thacker
Editor, CG Channel, Bath
Jim Thacker is one of the most widely read journalists in computer graphics, and Editor of CG Channel, the international CG news website, where he writes the site's news and interview features. Formerly Editor of 3D World magazine, he has spent his career at the centre of the VFX, animation and games industries, following the tools, techniques and people that shape them. His writing has appeared across publications including Creative Bloq, ArtStation, Computer Arts and net, and he has worked with many of the field's leading technology companies, among them Autodesk, Foundry, Maxon and the Blender Institute. He has also edited books for Focal Press and Design Studio Press, and lectured on 3D and visual effects internationally, at venues ranging from the UK's National Portrait Gallery to the Norwegian Film Institute.
