Member Profile: Olly Glenn
1, What do you do, and how long have you been doing it?
I’ve been a platform engineer and render wrangler for the past year and a half, but I’ve been creating games and animated shorts my whole life.
2. What was your first job?
My first job was as a driver engineer for a biotech startup. I reverse-engineered the communication protocols for lab instruments, which was really fun. Those machines had very strange ways of communicating!
3. Where did you complete your formal education?
Northeastern University
4. How did you first get involved with ACM SIGGRAPH?
I started as a student volunteer at SIGGRAPH 2023.
5. What is your favorite memory of a SIGGRAPH conference?
At SIGGRAPH 2024 in Denver, there was a party hosted at the local Meow Wolf installation. It was the most incredible thing I’ve seen in my entire life.
6. Describe a project that you would like to share with the ACM SIGGRAPH community.
When I was working on a mixed 2D/3D short film, I designed my own displacement system that encoded displacement vectors as HSV color to automate lighting effects on the 2D animated character. The idea was to create an intuitive system that artists could use to manually create displacement maps without sacrificing machine readability. It ended up working really well, and saved me a ton of time in production.
You can check it out here:
Directional Displace Gizmo.
7. If you could have dinner with one living or non-living person, who would it be and why?
I’d want to have dinner with my favorite musician, Jean-Jacques Perrey. His music is incredibly whimsical and silly, and from what I’ve gathered so was he. He was one of the pioneers of electronic music, and I’m sure he would be a very interesting person to talk to.
8. What is something most people don’t know about you?
I can read and write in Gregg shorthand.
9. From which single individual have you learned the most in your life? What did they teach you?
My animation professor, Jason Donati. His courses changed the way I think about production, media, and especially critique, and have given me a framework I’ve used for every project I’ve worked on.
10. Is there someone in particular who has influenced your decision to work with ACM SIGGRAPH?
My friends and colleagues–they’re the people that keep me coming back every year.
11. What can you point to in your career as your proudest moment?
Finishing my animated thesis film. There is truly nothing like the experience of creating something from nothing, and seeing something that only existed in your head becoming real.