John Clark

John has been in the film industry since 1994, working in live action, visual effects and animation. He specializes in Cinematography, Previs Supervision, Animation and Story Development, and has decades of experience leading vfx and animation teams teams large and small. John has had leading roles on animated movies including Surf's Up, Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, The Smurfs, Hotel Transylvania, Smurfs 2 and Rock Dog and Spongebob Squarepants 3. He received a prestigious Annie Award for his camera and animation work on Surf's Up after animating all the waves on the movie and personally designing all of the surfing action, animation and shots for the film. John grew up surfing in Cocoa Beach, Florida, then studied theater, art and history at the University of Central Florida. He began his career in film as an actor, but soon grew to love the cameras that were trained on him. He acquired an internship with a top film director and began to work behind the scenes on commercial productions, working his way up from PA to eventually directing VFX commercials. He took an opportunity to work on a dream project at Sony Pictures on Surf's Up (John was a former competition surfer), changing his career to focus on animated features where he used his live action experience to bring authentic cinematography into CG animated film making. John lives in Los Angeles with his wife and daughter, surfs in Malibu and plays a lot of Dungeons & Dragons.