DOUG CHIANG

  Production Designer

Academy Award®-winning artist, production designer, and author Doug Chiang began his expansive career as a stop motion animator on the Pee Wee’s Playhouse TV series soon after studying film at UCLA. Before long, he rose to become a Clio Award-winning
commercial director and designer for Rhythm and Hues, Digital Productions, and Robert Abel and Associates. At Industrial Light and Magic, where he became the creative director in 1993, he built his filmography as visual effects art director on such blockbusters as Terminator 2, Ghost, The Doors, The Mask, and Robert Zemeckis’s Forrest Gump and Death Becomes Her (for which Doug earned his Oscar and second British Academy Award®), thus beginning a long and fruitful collaboration.

In 1995 Chiang moved to Lucasfilm LTD to work as design director on the first two of the three Star Wars prequels before forming IceBlink Studios, his Marin County film-design studio, where he cemented his relationship with Zemeckis and their commitment to performance capture motion pictures. From 2002 to 2007, he has served as Production Designer on the Zemeckis-directed films The Polar Express and Beowulf, and designer on “Monster House,” produced by Zemeckis.

As an independent filmmaker and director, Chiang has received numerous awards including First Place in the FOCUS Awards for his film Mental Block. And his teaser films for Robota, based on the book he created and co-authored with Orson Scott Card, was awarded both the Prix Du Rendu award at the Imagina 2003 Film Festival and the Best Advertising/Promotional Film in the 2003 Annecy Animation Festival.

Chiang’s paintings have appeared in worldwide exhibitions at the Brooklyn Museum, Chicago’s Field Museum and the Kyoto and Tokyo National museums (among others), and he has a new book due in 2008 entitled Mechanika: Creating the Art of Science Fiction with Doug Chiang, in which he shares his traditional and digital techniques.

And so, in 2007, when Robert Zemeckis decided to embark on his most ambitious endeavor to date, the creation of Imagemovers Digital, LLC, his performance capture studio in partnership with Disney Studios, Chiang was the natural choice to help lead it. Serving as the company’s Executive Vice President, Chiang is also currently the Production Designer for “A Christmas Carol,” Imagemovers Digital’s first film due to be released in 2009.