London, February 24th 2009. Leading visual effects software developer, The Foundry, (www.thefoundry.co.uk) today announced the appointment of new sales and product management staff to help boost global sales of the company’s successful Nuke VFX compositing and image-processing plug-ins products, and maintain the focus on customer-driven product development for which The Foundry has always been renowned.

Joining the company are: Michael Bailey in the role of director of sales, worldwide, who has responsibility for expanding global sales; Schel Kuehnert, who becomes the new director of sales for the Americas; and Tom Cowland, who takes on a customer-facing role as plug-ins product manager.

Bailey, who will be is based in Toronto, Canada, has a successful track record in both the sale and development of creative products for motion picture and broadcast applications, plus comprehensive knowledge of high-performance post production pipelines. As well as working alongside The Foundry’s existing sales force, Bailey will spearhead the company’s sales drive into territories such as India and SE Asia, plus associated markets including games.

He joins The Foundry from Eyeon Software Inc, where he was senior director of sales for the company’s VFX compositing and editing products. Prior to that he worked ATI Technologies, Matrox Electronics and 4D Vision. He holds a Master of Science degree in computer-aided graphical technology applications from University of Teeside, a premier university for digital media and technology studies in the UK.

Kuehnert arrives at The Foundry from Swedish image-processing and digital intermediate software manufacturer Digital Vision, where he was director of sales, Americas. He will be based out of The Foundry’s offices in Venice, California, and assumes this role from Pierre Wooldridge who has taken up new career opportunities in Europe.

Kuehnert has extensive knowledge of modern VFX and DI pipelines, as well as the wider entertainment industry. Prior to his successful two and a half year stint at Digital Vision, he held sales roles at The Post Group in Hollywood, Wexler Video in Burbank and Variety magazine. He holds a Bachelor of Arts in Radio, Television & Film from University of Houston, Texas.

Bailey and Kuehnert will be immediately involved in the launch of Nuke 5.2, a point release featuring new pre-comp tools, Python UI and metadata improvements, plus support for 3D LUTs and OpenGL GLSL shaders, Blackmagic cards and a RED R3D Redcode format-reader enabling full 32-bit floating point processing. The Foundry is also soon to release new Furnace and Tinderbox-for-Nuke plug-ins.

Reinforcing The Foundry’s pedigree in, and commitment towards, customer-inspired products, it has also appointed Tom Cowland as plugs-in product manager. Cowland, who is based at the company’s HQ in London, will liaise between worldwide users of The Foundry’s Furnace, Tinder, Ocula and Keylight plug-ins and the company’s Academy Award-winning R&D team.

Cowland previously worked for three and a half years at The Moving Picture Company, a leading VFX post-production facility in London. As a lead developer of the company’s bespoke lighting and rendering pipeline, he gained experience of feature-scale software and workflows for motion picture production, and designed software tools for The Chronicles of Narnia, Tim Burton’s Sweeney Todd and several Harry Potter films. Prior to that he enjoyed freelance IT and engineering consultancy roles with Mac-based post-production companies in London.

Bill Collis, CEO at The Foundry, commented: “We have ambitious plans for all of our products in visual effects post production and associated markets. Mike, Schel and Tom will play key roles in helping us to expand our business worldwide, whilst making sure we stay in tune with what people really want. They each have highly pertinent experience and technical capabilities, but above all they are enterprising characters with unbounded enthusiasm for the modern world of VFX and post production, which I am sure our customers will greatly appreciate.”

The Foundry’s portfolio includes a duo of Academy Award® winning technologies: Nuke, the high-end compositing system; and Furnace, the collection of powerful image-processing plug-ins. The Foundry’s products also include: Tinder plug-ins for creative and environmental visual effects; Keylight, the advanced keying application; Forge, a command-line dust and dirt-busting application; plus Anvil colour manipulation tools. The company recently shipped Ocula, its unique collection of plug-ins for 3D stereoscopic post production.

About The Foundry
The Foundry is a world-leading innovator of visual effects and image processing technologies that boost productivity in motion picture and video post production. On February 10th 2007, the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences awarded a Sci-Tech Award® to The Foundry’s development team for the Furnace image processing suite. The company now holds two Academy Award® winning products including the high-end compositing system Nuke.

The Foundry’s products support a wide range of host platforms including After Effects, Autodesk® Media and Entertainment Systems, Avid DS, Baselight, Film Master, Fusion, Nuke, Scratch and Shake. The company has also driven OpenFX, an open standard for visual effects plug-ins, now broadly adopted by host and plug-in developers such as Autodesk®, Assimilate, FilmLight, Digital Vision, eyeon Software Inc, Grass Valley, Soluciones Graficas por Ordenador (S.G.O.), Photron and others. Customers include: Digital Domain, The Moving Picture Company, Sony Pictures Imageworks, Warner Bros and Weta Digital Ltd. The Foundry is headquartered in London, and has offices in Los Angeles. For more information visit The Foundry’s website at www.thefoundry.co.uk, or call +44 20 7434 0449.