John Gaeta

Some areas included multi platform "co presence" formats, giga-smart city scaled holo(hunger games like xr mmo) interfaces, high fidelity "cinematic reality" for persistent living immersive content layers, premium xr world creative ip development and the advanced envisioning of The Magicverse. The latter initiative was first unveiled by Neal Stephensen(Snowcrash Author), Rony Abovitz and John Gaeta at Magic Leap's 2018 conference. Magicverse envisioning is conducted through a special projects/moonshot division he initiated called IPL which produces strategic analysis, concept, visualization/simulation and leading edge prototypes which depict future use cases, experimental interface and compelling human experiences.

In October 2017, as a direct report to CEO Rony Abovitz, John Gaeta took on the executive role of SVP of Creative Strategy at Magic Leap with a mission focus to collaboratively conceive and advise corporate direction on mid term emergent spatial computing, spatial web, massive xr platform strategies and premium content/worlds.

John Gaeta is a founding member and Executive Creative Director of Lucasfilm's new Immersive Entertainment division: ILMxLAB, a joint venture between the Lucasfilm Story Group, Industrial Light and Magic and Skywalker Sound. ILMxLAB was launched in 2015 with a mission to develop, produce and release premium Star Wars Immersive Entertainment within emergent platforms. Other founding members include Vicki Dobbs Beck(Executive in Charge) and Rob Bredow(Lucasfilm CTO).

In late 2012, at the onset of Walt Disney's acquisition of Lucasfilm, John Gaeta was invited to join at the invitation of Kathleen Kennedy(President of Lucasfilm) to help catalyze next generation creative innovation. He would do so in collaboration with Rick Carter (Academy Award-winning Production Designer), Kiri Hart (SVP Development, Head of Story Group), Doug Chiang (SVP Head of Creative), Kim Libreri (Chief Strategy Officer) and the remarkable talent of Industrial Light and Magic during the next contemporary expansion of Star Wars.

In 2009 he had formed a new type of development company, FLOAT (hybrid) and was its acting Chief Creative Officer from 2009-2012. Float (hybrid) specializes in discovering and developing intuitive "Natural and Human Interfaces" in an effort to change the way people engage, relate to and interact with live generated entertainment.

The years 2005–2008 marked a deepening of the pursuit of sample cinema with new ground covered in the feature Speed Racer. The advent of a new genre type, dubbed "Photo Anime", was the centerpiece of a retro-modern universe in which optimistic pop art design ("Poptimisitic") threaded through dramatic collage based editing and motion graphic heavy kung fu car action. Inspired in part by the production attitude of Sin City, the expressive animated cinema of Hayao Miyazaki and Andy Warhol, The Wachowskis focused Gaeta's sensibilities once more toward new forms of post cinematography, deploying end to end high definition pipelines, comprehensive greenscreen/virtual set processes, fully computer generated race worlds, "2 and 1/2 D" layering methodologies, "faux lensing" as applied to VR location photography (360 degree spherical capture) and "techno color" in pursuit of a different movie experience. In addition to visual effects design for the film, Gaeta was additionally enlisted to creatively produce the Wii game counterpart.

In 2000, Gaeta was brought on as the senior visual effects supervisor to complete the Matrix trilogy including The Matrix Reloaded and The Matrix Revolutions. This pair of films were created in parallel and featured over 2000 visual effects shots. Many photographed and post processed at a custom built complex called ESC, located at the Alameda Naval Base near San Francisco. Overall conceptual design as well as research and development was initiated for the final two installments in January 2000. There were a wide range of effects content from large-scale man vs. machine-type battles, to anime-styled hyper-real moments. The centerpiece innovations and new methodologies presented through the Matrix universe was the creation of "Virtual Cinematography" and "Virtual Effects," phrases coined by Gaeta in 1999 and 2000.

Since 2000, Gaeta has been an avid proponent of image based universal capture, also known as volumetric capture and deploying it within next generation of immersive entertainment.

After co-supervising development for 3-D paint effect stylizations and LIDAR laser scanning(Reality Capture) for What Dreams May Come (1998 Visual Effects Oscar winner), Gaeta began his first solo effects supervision project for The Wachowskis' science fiction film, The Matrix.

Designing and testing The Matrix bullet time effects began in early 1996. This work directly overlapped R&D for What Dreams May Come. Shortly after the release of the original Matrix in 1999, Gaeta continued his exploration of content design through CGI visualization with longtime colleague Kim Libreri (Lucasfilm, Current CTO of Epic Games) by developing fully "virtual" scene and action layouts for use in realtime interactive composition. Scenes ran on the GS Cube, a machine consisting of 16 parallel processors each based on a PlayStation 2 and rendering at, then groundbreaking, HD resolution. The research was demonstrated at SIGGRAPH 2000. Later, he partnered with colleague Rudy Poat (Microsoft, Amazon VR), returning to real time cinema experimentation by inserting, possibly the first ever, real time composed and rendered, full resolution/2k content into a theatrically released movie, Trapped Ashes.

Following this special venue period (1991–1994), Gaeta became interested in applying computer-generated animation as a means of visualizing content and visual effects concepts for directors as well as for custom camera-path planning. This led to experimentation with emerging forms of space analysis including photogrammetry, stereo and laser radar. Trumbull Company was renamed Mass Illusion and started feature film effects for movies.

John Gaeta was born in New York City and grew up in Shoreham, Long Island. He eventually grew an interest in photography and the films of Stanley Kubrick and Ridley Scott. He entered New York University's Tisch School of the Arts to study film, and acquired a BFA degree with honors in 1989. He was introduced to the industry as a staff production assistant for the Saturday Night Live film unit, as well as doing camera and lighting work for a variety of media types and makers. Some of these early work experiences included holography with Jason Sapan, stop-motion animation with Peter Wallach, motion control with Bran Ferren, nature documentary, filming birdlife for National Geographic Explorer, timelapse and experimental photography in Namibia, Africa on Miramax's first feature, Dust Devil.

John C. Gaeta (born 1965) is a designer and inventor best known for his work on the Matrix film trilogy, where he advanced methods and formats known as Bullet Time, Volumetric Cinematography and Universal Capture (UCAP). He is also known for exploring emergent and expressive new media platforms such as Photo Anime, NUI, HoloCinema and the Magicverse.