Phil Parsonage is the Chief Engineering Officer at Foundry, who have been developing creative software for the digital design, media and entertainment industries for more than 20 years. Their clients include major feature film studios and post-production houses such as Pixar, ILM, MPC, Walt Disney Animation, Weta Digital, DNEG, and Framestore.
Phil tells Client Server Marketing Manager Michael Oliver about what Foundry looks for when hiring engineers and how a little bit of C++ can make a huge difference on the big screen.
Michael Oliver: You’ve been with Foundry for more than 15 years – can you tell me about your current role?
Phil Parsonage: I'm chief engineering officer and have been in a variety of jobs, through starting off as a C++ developer, then running different departments and through to my current role where I look after product engineering across the media and entertainment part of the business, plus some of our internal technology teams.
MO: What does Foundry do?
PP: Foundry is a creative software developer for anything that involves pixels and beautiful pictures and products. Our company’s brand platform is “Imagination engineered” which is all about advancing the art of technology and enabling more and better creativity, faster. And our mission is to help customers meet the demands of their markets by helping them bring incredible ideas to life, faster and better. We work across two main industries - media and entertainment - where we do a lot of work in both post-production and pre-production in visual effects, animation, gaming etc. And the second one is in digital design, where we help our customers visualise photo-realistic designs efficiently using digital tools.
MO: Foundry software is a mainstay of the film industry, isn’t it?
PP: At a basic level, one of our products - Nuke - manipulates pixels to form the images used in the films and tv shows that we all know and love. It’s used pretty widely!
MO: Do you ever get to see what your work looks like on the big screen?
PP: No, funnily enough. If we can tell that our tools have been used in a film, we've probably not made the tool as well as we’d like to. I love going to see our customers, that's probably the highlight for me. We're really lucky - they’re some of the biggest VFX houses in the world and seeing what they're doing, and hearing about what they're working on, and being able to work with those guys is a privilege. Being able to tell your daughter that you went to see the people that make Star Wars is a nice feeling.
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