VARUN MEHRA / Programmer & Technical Artist
Varun is an artist with a background in software engineering. He has worked in the software industry for nearly five years. As an artist, he has practiced in traditional media like oil and acrylic.
Currently, Varun is a graduate student at Carnegie Mellon University’s Entertainment Technology Center (ETC), where he is attempting to combine his passion for the two disciplines as a technical artist for game and film projects.
YANG LIU (KEVIN) / Programmer
Kevin Liu is a prospective graphics programmer passionate about creating innovative experiences and tools with real-time rendering and computer animation. He enjoys writing shaders, exploiting parallelism and making tools for everything while listening to Vocaloid songs.
ARNAV BANERJI / Co-producer & 3D Artist
Arnav Banerji is a 3D artist and animator with an interest in working in the feature film industry as a Previz/Layout artist. His goal at the Entertainment Technology Center is to bring together his interests in film-making, cinematography and 3D world building to explore new possibilities in storytelling.
JIEWEN CHEN (ANGELA) / Co-producer & Designer
Angela is a filmmaker, storyteller and experience designer studying at Entertainment Technology Center(ETC) of Carnegie Mellon University. She is most interested in exploring the possibilities of cinematic languages with the emerging technologies, and create immersive experiences that tell compelling stories.
XINRAN ZHAN (SHERA) / Designer & Artist
Xinran(Shera) Zhan is a designer majoring in entertainment technology at Carnegie Mellon University. She wants to engage in interaction design, game design, visual graphic design or UX design industries. For her, design is a type of communication engaging users to talk to the object.
ADVISORS
MOSHE MAHLER
Moshe Mahler is an award-winning professional innovator and storyteller whose work has been featured in attractions at Disney Parks and Resorts and shown worldwide at prestigious venues including SIGGRAPH, UIST, Comic Con, and Ars Electronica. For nearly a decade, Mahler led The Creative Technology Team at Disney Research of The Walt Disney Company, where he served as the Principal Artist. Under his supervision, the team worked hand in hand with elite Research Scientists to invent and utilize new technologies across the Walt Disney Company, collaborating with Pixar, Walt Disney Animation Studios, Disney Consumer Products, Disney Television Animation, Imagineering, and more. Mahler has authored more than 10 technical paper publications at premiere conferences and is an inventor of four issued patents. He has also contributed to dozens of publications in the computer graphics and animation fields. Mahler’s art works and animated films have been featured in a number of venues internationally, including SIGGRAPH 2005, 2007, 2011, 2013, 2015, and 2017.
CHRIS KLUG
Trained as a theatrical lighting designer, Chris Klug began his career in the arts working on Broadway, in regional theater, and toured with various 70’s rock n’ roll bands. Then, at the invitation of a fellow photographer, Chris transitioned into a career as a Game Designer. Starting with Simulations Publications, Inc., in 1981, he was first Assistant Designer on Universe (a sci-fi role playing game), then was Lead Designer for the 2nd edition of DragonQuest (a fantasy RPG), Horror Hotel (something’s lurking in the shadows of an old Victorian mansion) and Damocles Mission (a sci-fi strategy game about exploring an alien artifact). While at SPI he edited the role playing section of Ares magazine.
When TSR bought SPI in 1982, Chris and the rest of the SPI staff moved on to start-up Victory Games. While at Victory, Chris managed the role playing games product line, and designed the James Bond 007 role playing game (a winner of a H.G. Wells RPG Game of the Year Award as well as the winner of TSR’s RPGA award). This game has been hailed as one of the first RPGs to emphasize story and narrative.
He also designed a number of adventures based on the movies (Live and Let Die won RPG Adventure of the Year), followed up by a solitaire board game — Open Fire — based on Victory’s Ambush system.
After a time as a Macintosh consultant to New York City’s magazine publishing industry, Chris moved on to freelance video game design and worked for SegaSoft, TSR, Hasbro Interactive, 3W, THQ, Simon and Schuster Interactive, Target Games, h2o Interactive, and Gizmo Games In that industry Chris has more than a dozen titles to his credit, including “RPG Story of the Year” award for Aidyn Chronicles: First Mage. Some of his computer game credits include Star Trek DS9: Dominion Wars, Europa Universalis, Duke Nukem: Time to Kill, and Diamond Dreams Baseball.
Chris then joined EA’s Westwood Studios full-time as a content and story specialist, leading the narrative team for EA’s first MMO, Earth & Beyond, for which Chris later became Creative Director.
Chris then became Creative Director at Cheyenne Mountain Entertainment in Mesa, Arizona, designing Stargate Worlds, an MMO based on the Stargate television franchise. Chris also worked closely with Brad Wright and the Stargate writing staff on efforts to sync up the evolving story in both the TV series as well as the MMO.
While teaching at the ETC, Chris secured an $8 million investment in an innovative social game / mobile game platform, Dream Wedding Planner, and launched the product in the spring of 2014.
In addition to teaching story, game design and creating writing at CMU, Chris consults with game publishers around the world.
Chris is a playwright and member of the Writer’s Guild of America West.
