Ahmed Barakat

Ahmed Barakat is a Polish/Egyptian VfX/CGI supervisor, character artist, generalist, and educator, a "Pixel Wrangler." as he likes to refer to himself.

Barakat studied traditional animation and stop-motion receiving his MFA at Egypt's Higher Institute of cinema in 2003, he quickly moved into digital art as well, ahead of the traditional- curve he created the first 3d animated film produced by the institute in 1999 where he went on to subsequently teach a 3D digital arts course.

In his 25+ years in the industry, Barakat created 3D animated computer graphics and VFX for film, TV commercials, and series in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA) region for both local and international brands, he worked on 22 feature films. He has worked on several award-winning commercial productions, including Friska Diego, the 2015 Bronze winner in the film category at Dubai Lynx.

In 2006, he was part of the team that worked on the first two films to use Digital Intermediate workflow in Egypt and the MENA region, in collaboration with Technicolor studios in London. During this time Barakat also freelanced for prestigious post-production studios in the UK and Denmark.

In 2013, Barakat co-founded GLounge, providing visual effects supervision and 3d animation consultancy in the MENA region, adding to his extensive experience in handling and managing creative teams.

Passionate about sharing his skill and extensive knowledge of diverse tools, Barakat has always paired his commercial work with work in education, both with formal institutions (such as his own alma mater) and informal education NGOs working with creative expression.

A big proponent of open-source software, Barakat integrates and encourages the use of many such tools into professional and educational pipelines.

Barakat's experience covers a wide range of post-production and CG production workflows in Animation, Modelling, Rigging, Photorealistic and stylized Lighting and Shading, Pipeline Design, Camera Tracking, Compositing, On-film Set Supervision, Designing and deploying Render farms for Batch Processing.