The Visual Effects Society has named the first honorees who will be feted at a special event in October. Avatar co-producer Brooke Breton , a former SVP Production at James Cameron’s effects house Digital Domain who also worked on three Star Trek movies from 1986-91, will receive the 2024 VES Founders Award. The group also named Reid Paul and Ronald B.
Moore as Lifetime VES Members and posthumously will induct Tim McGovern , Thad Beier , Maya Deren and Dorothy Davenport into the VES Hall of Fame. Read more about them all below. “Our honorees represent a group of exemplary and pioneering artists and innovators who have had a profound impact on the field of visual effects,” VES Board Chair Kim Davidson said.
“We are proud to recognize those who helped shape our shared legacy and continue to inspire future generations of VFX practitioners.” The 23rd annual VES Awards will be handed out Tuesday, February 11, and the nominees will be revealed January 14. Here is more about the Visual Effects Society’s honorees revealed today, per the group: Brooke Breton, Founders Award Honored for her sustained contributions to the art, science or business of visual effects and meritorious service to the Society.
Breton has been principally involved in a wide variety of prominent live-action films, animated films, television series and theme park projects which have received Academy, BAFTA, Emmy, Annie and VES awards and nominations. Key projects include: Avatar, Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World, Sky Captain and The World of Tomorrow, Solaris, Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home, Star Trek VI: The Undiscovered Country and Dick Tracy. During her career, Breton played an instrumental role in launching James Cameron’s effects house Digital Domain, where she served as SVP Production, and was Senior Production Executive and in-house producer for Illumination Entertainment, where she produced the film content for the Annie- and VES Award-winning Despicable Me theme park attraction, Minion Mayhem.
Recently, Breton served as a producer for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences Museum, where she focused on modern filmmaking techniques and acquisitions. Breton is a Visual Effects Branch governor for the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences and currently serves as VP on the Academy Foundation Board. She also serves on the AMPAS Visual Effects Branch Executive Committee and the Science and Technology Council.
Breton is a VES Fellow, Lifetime VES Member and has served as a three-term member of the global VES Board of Directors. In current development under the Breton Productions banner are three feature film projects. Reid Paul, Lifetime VES Member Honored for meritorious service to the Society and the global industry.
Paul has more than 40 years experience as an artist, producer, supervisor and manager of visual effects for television, feature film and special venue production. His tenure in the industry includes roles at Liberty Studios, The Optical House and Broadcast Arts; director of award-winning interactive educational videos at ComputerSmarts; Commercial Director represented by Major League Productions; Camera Operator at Cinema Research Corporation; VFX Supervisor and Producer at Pixel Magic; Head of Production and VFX Producer/Supervisor at Stargate Studios; and VFX Producer at Netflix. He is currently a Senior Bidding Producer in the Los Angeles office of Crafty Apes.
Paul has traveled extensively to train crews, manage productions and learn new things including 3D Filmmaking and Virtual Production. Proud of his longtime involvement with the Visual Effects Society, Paul has been a Co-Chair of the VES Los Angeles Section, and a member of the VES Awards Committee since 2003, and its Co-Chair from 2019-2024. Ronald B.
Moore, Lifetime VES Member Honored for meritorious service to the Society and the global industry. Moore is an acclaimed Visual Effects Producer who worked in the field for 30 years. He is a VES Award winner, five-time Emmy Award winner, and 11-time Emmy Award nominee for his VFX work on the series Star Trek: The Next Generation, Star Trek: Voyager and Star Trek: Enterprise.
Moore’s work includes time at Boss Films under Richard Edlund, on Ghostbusters , 2010 and a number of TV series. He joined the team on Star Trek: The Next Generation working on the pilot episode, and continued to work on the series through seven seasons, and on the first feature, Star Trek: Generations as Visual Effects Supervisor. He then joined the team on Star Trek: Voyager and when that ended, switched to Star Trek: Enterprise.
Other projects include supervising the visual effects on the music video for the Michael Jackson single “Black or White” and the Alejandro González Iñárritu film Birdman . He also formed OMR Productions with Dan Curry, acclaimed special effects colleague from his Star Trek creative family. Moore has served on the VES global Board of Directors and the Membership Committee and is proud to be one of the earliest members of the VES.
Tim McGovern (1955-2024), VES Hall of Fame McGovern was an Oscar-winning VFX Supervisor and founding VES member, and in 2023 was named a VES Fellow, VES Lifetime Member and recipient of the VES Founders Award. An acclaimed VFX Supervisor and Creative Director, McGovern began his career at the inception of digital/computer visual effects, doing groundbreaking work in VFX and Computer Animation. In addition to winning an Academy Award for Digital Visual Effects for Total Recall , he garnered five Clios, a Hugo and a Mobius award.
He was a founding member of Sony Pictures ImageWorks, and ran it as Senior VFX Supervisor, as well as the SVP Creative and Technical Affairs. He flourished as a filmmaker all over the world, and later worked at DNEG Mumbai until his passing. McGovern played a number of key leadership roles with the VES, as a member of the global Board of Directors for almost 20 years, as the Board’s Vice Chair, a founding Co-Chair of the VES Awards Committee and member of the Virtual Production Committee.
His insights and volunteer leadership were key to the Society’s global expansion as the founding Chair of the VES Committee for Outreach to Developing Region, where he greatly contributed to the VES’ growth in multiple regions on four continents, including helping to form Sections in Washington State, Georgia, France, Germany, India and assisting to help Montreal and Toronto establish local VES Sections. Thad Beier (1960-2024) , VES Hall of Fame Beier was a Visual Effects Supervisor, known for films including U-571, Eight Legged Freaks, Deep Blue Sea and The Core. Beier left Johns Hopkins at the age of 18, and started working at New York Institute of Technology Computer Graphics Lab.
He spent five years there doing innovative CG software and animation and then went to Pacific Data Image as they were just starting doing computer graphics commercial work, again writing software and creating animation, and began leading teams in both of those fields. He then started Hammerhead Productions to do visual effects work in Hollywood, and was a Visual Effects Supervisor on a dozen films, including Fast and Furious 4 for Universal Pictures. After his work as the technical leader and VFX Supervisor at Hammerhead and Universal, Beier served as the Chief Technology Officer and VFX Supervisor at Digital Domain.
He most recently served as the Director of Image Platform Workflow, overseeing high-dynamic-range content creation at Dolby Laboratories. Maya Deren (1917-1961) , VES Hall of Fame Deren was a Ukraine-born iconic American experimental filmmaker and an important entrepreneurial promoter of the avant-garde in the 1940s and 1950s. She was also a choreographer, dancer, film theorist, poet, lecturer, writer, and photographer.
She combined her expertise in dance and choreography, ethnography, the African spirit religion of Haitian vodou, symbolist poetry and psychology in a series of perceptual black-and-white short films. Using editing, multiple exposures, jump-cutting, superimposition, slow-motion, and other camera techniques to her advantage, Deren abandoned established notions of physical space and time, innovating through carefully planned films with specific conceptual aims. Meshes of the Afternoon , her collaboration with her husband Alexander Hammid, was one of the most influential experimental films in American cinema history.
Deren went on to make several more films, including At Land, A Study in Choreography for Camera and Ritual in Transfigured Time. Dorothy Davenport (1895-1977) , VES Hall of Fame Davenport was an American actress, screenwriter, film director and producer. Born into a family of film performers, Davenport had her own independent career before her marriage to film actor and director Wallace Reid.
After Reid died following an addiction to morphine, Davenport took her own story as source material and co-produced Human Wreckage , in which she was billed as Mrs. Wallace Reid and played the role of a drug addict’s wife. She advertised the film in terms of a moral crusade.
Davenport followed its success with other social-conscience films on a variety of topics, including Broken Laws about excessive mother-love and The Red Kimono about white slavery. While Davenport’s own production company dissolved in the late 1920s, she would later direct Linda, Sucker Money, Road to Ruin and The Woman Condemned and worked as a producer, writer and dialogue director..
