Alumni Spotlight - Brent J. Zorich
After graduating St. Charles in 1993, Brent studied industrial design at The Ohio State University, graduating as the design undergraduate class president, and did independent thesis work for Nike and Reebok. Once completed, he worked as an architectural designer for the two largest architecture firms in the world: Gensler and NBBJ. Due to his love of computers, he went back to graduate school and completed a master’s in computer visualization at the Ohio State ACCAD program where computer graphics were invented in the 1960s. His thesis in school focused on automation of character technical direction in the programming language PYTHON. While in school, that was applied to a sponsored “Walking with Dinosaurs” type project that aired on the Discovery Channel in prime time. In the creation of that special, his team worked with Steven Spielberg’s paleontology team from Jurassic Park.
During his tenure at ACCAD as a student he was also in a twenty week DreamWorks Outreach Program being trained by computer graphics supervisors whose portfolios ranged from Spider-Man 2, to Shark Tale, to Shrek, to Finding Nemo, and Madagascar. Although working in film could have been an option, he chose to focus on video gaming. After graduation he went to Take Two Interactive and concentrated my efforts on award winning NBA 2K Franchise (working with the mocap data of Shaquille O’Neal). Then he moved on to EA SPORTS where he accomplished several big feats including Superman Returns as well as redesigning the rigging system on Electronic Arts top title, Madden NFL 09. He also helped with a few other titles at EA including NCAA Football and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09. Around that time, in 2008, is when Lucasfilm called about coming on board. He couldn’t turn down the opportunity. He left the United States and moved to Singapore where he was in film game convergence r and d plowing through all of the characters like Ahsoka Tano, Jango Fett, General Grievous, Anakin Skywalker, etc, optimizing techniques and figuring out ways to rebuild them more efficiently so the same digital character asset could work on both Xbox and in film thereby cutting costs, not needing two separate divisions to build two separate characters.
After the work he did, it was shown directly to George Lucas himself, and then was relocated to San Francisco where I applied technical efforts to intellectual property including Indiana Jones, Star Wars The Clone Wars, Star Wars The Force Unleashed, and monthlies editing for Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. Brent was also an executive trainee and the Best Practices Review Committee of Lucasfilm (1 of 10 members). After doing that for a year or two, unfortunately both of his parent’s health faded causing him to leave San Francisco to come home to be a caregiver. They are both in heaven now. Once back in Columbus, he formed a computer animation plugin company called BZP PRO with a few alums from Harvard that featured an auto rigger plugin that he authored that automates 80 hours of computer graphics rigging into about 15 minutes at the level of Industrial Light & Magic/ Lucasfilm, a previous employer. This technology has been featured in three worldwide magazines, cover included, and has been under acquisition review several times with three Fortune 500s carrying a price tag of about 20 million dollars. He is still, currently, working on the formula and to assist and has started taking remote class at Stanford University in linear algebra. While he was primarily working on this technology, he was doing freelance work for both Walt Disney Animation (T.O.T.S. and VAMPIRINA), as well as Sony Pictures on Marvel Intellectual Property (Drax the Destroyer in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2). Lastly, due to him also assisting Adobe with QA on Adobe Photoshop, he took the test drawings he had completed and placed them on his own apparel line called “Sketches of Brent Zorich.” Both the apparel and the technology he is treating as cash cows that sell products via e-commerce with little to no maintenance. On the apparel line, he was featured in The Wall Street Journal Market Watch and was even contacted by Michael Jackson’s Public Relations about representing him after they saw how he had set everything up. He believes the goal would be, after one of these two ventures could be sold, would be to set up his own private equity investing in video game technology. Brent would do that in addition to still working in games. In 2021, Brent won an award at The Intercon Conference sponsored by Facebook and Amazon in Las Vegas where he was named one of the top 100 tech influencers worldwide. Really exciting! For those interested in seeing more, you can check out his portfolio at this following address: brentzorich.com/brentZorichPortfolio.pdf
"St. Charles is an amazing school that provided me the discipline to stay focused, and stay strong, even when trying to run two companies while caregiving for two terminally ill parents. I’m hoping these cash cows get sold off. Thank you again for this opportunity to share my story."
During his tenure at ACCAD as a student he was also in a twenty week DreamWorks Outreach Program being trained by computer graphics supervisors whose portfolios ranged from Spider-Man 2, to Shark Tale, to Shrek, to Finding Nemo, and Madagascar. Although working in film could have been an option, he chose to focus on video gaming. After graduation he went to Take Two Interactive and concentrated my efforts on award winning NBA 2K Franchise (working with the mocap data of Shaquille O’Neal). Then he moved on to EA SPORTS where he accomplished several big feats including Superman Returns as well as redesigning the rigging system on Electronic Arts top title, Madden NFL 09. He also helped with a few other titles at EA including NCAA Football and Tiger Woods PGA Tour 09. Around that time, in 2008, is when Lucasfilm called about coming on board. He couldn’t turn down the opportunity. He left the United States and moved to Singapore where he was in film game convergence r and d plowing through all of the characters like Ahsoka Tano, Jango Fett, General Grievous, Anakin Skywalker, etc, optimizing techniques and figuring out ways to rebuild them more efficiently so the same digital character asset could work on both Xbox and in film thereby cutting costs, not needing two separate divisions to build two separate characters.
After the work he did, it was shown directly to George Lucas himself, and then was relocated to San Francisco where I applied technical efforts to intellectual property including Indiana Jones, Star Wars The Clone Wars, Star Wars The Force Unleashed, and monthlies editing for Harry Potter and the Half Blood Prince. Brent was also an executive trainee and the Best Practices Review Committee of Lucasfilm (1 of 10 members). After doing that for a year or two, unfortunately both of his parent’s health faded causing him to leave San Francisco to come home to be a caregiver. They are both in heaven now. Once back in Columbus, he formed a computer animation plugin company called BZP PRO with a few alums from Harvard that featured an auto rigger plugin that he authored that automates 80 hours of computer graphics rigging into about 15 minutes at the level of Industrial Light & Magic/ Lucasfilm, a previous employer. This technology has been featured in three worldwide magazines, cover included, and has been under acquisition review several times with three Fortune 500s carrying a price tag of about 20 million dollars. He is still, currently, working on the formula and to assist and has started taking remote class at Stanford University in linear algebra. While he was primarily working on this technology, he was doing freelance work for both Walt Disney Animation (T.O.T.S. and VAMPIRINA), as well as Sony Pictures on Marvel Intellectual Property (Drax the Destroyer in Guardians of the Galaxy Vol 2). Lastly, due to him also assisting Adobe with QA on Adobe Photoshop, he took the test drawings he had completed and placed them on his own apparel line called “Sketches of Brent Zorich.” Both the apparel and the technology he is treating as cash cows that sell products via e-commerce with little to no maintenance. On the apparel line, he was featured in The Wall Street Journal Market Watch and was even contacted by Michael Jackson’s Public Relations about representing him after they saw how he had set everything up. He believes the goal would be, after one of these two ventures could be sold, would be to set up his own private equity investing in video game technology. Brent would do that in addition to still working in games. In 2021, Brent won an award at The Intercon Conference sponsored by Facebook and Amazon in Las Vegas where he was named one of the top 100 tech influencers worldwide. Really exciting! For those interested in seeing more, you can check out his portfolio at this following address: brentzorich.com/brentZorichPortfolio.pdf
"St. Charles is an amazing school that provided me the discipline to stay focused, and stay strong, even when trying to run two companies while caregiving for two terminally ill parents. I’m hoping these cash cows get sold off. Thank you again for this opportunity to share my story."
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