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Vizwhiz
Tim Mclaughlin was an artist in Hollywood when artists took over the big screen.
By: Lindsay Anderson
Issue date: 6/12/08 Section: News
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Visualization sciences, known as Viz Lab by its constituents, is a nascent masters department headed by former Industrial Light and Magic employee Tim McLaughlin, class of 1990. Hired in September to be Viz Lab's first department head since its evolution from a program offered by the College of Architecture, McLaughlin returned to his roots in Aggieland.
The Longview, Texas, native attained his first degree, an associate's of arts, at Kilgore College in Kilgore, Texas. His bachelor's of environmental design and master's of science in visualization sciences came from A&M. For a brief time, he worked as a draftsman for two Dallas companies, Cunningham Architects and HKS Inc., between his degrees at A&M.
At the time McLaughlin was finishing his master's work in 1994, "Jurassic Park" was making cinematic and technological history. The movie, renowned for innovative special effects with animatronics and computer animation, showed the entertainment industry how much visual artists could bring to the movie-making table.
By the mid-1990s, many movie production teams had thrown their doors open to special effects artists who could effectively breathe life into the sophisticated animation of computer graphics. "I entered the industry at a time when digital effects were just beginning to boom -- just after the success of 'Jurassic Park,'" McLaughlin said. He was hired by ILM in 1994 and moved out to San Rafael, Calif., to work on his first movie, "Jumanji," for which he animated the monkeys that terrorize the city.
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