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.
These are our confirmed speakers as of August 19, 2026