Olaf Wendt is a visual effects supervisor, designer and director with a broad base of experience in film, design, music videos and computer games.

Olaf Wendt is a visual effects supervisor, designer and director with a broad base of experience in film, design, music videos and computer games.

Born and educated in Germany he travelled to the UK to read Maths and Computation at Oriel College, Oxford. Soon after college he co-founded one of London’s first multimedia production companies, ZapFactor where he combined his understanding of new technologies with his strong visual design sense to produce innovative and ground-breaking work across moving image and interactive platforms for advertising clients such as Rolling Rock, Reebok, McCann-Erickson and music clients such as Erasure and Duran Duran.

He continued this work on a bigger scale by designing and producing computer games through a new venture, TripMedia Ltd. The first of these, Burn:Cycle, an award-winning tech noir action adventure set in a Blade-Runner style future metropolis, seamlessly fused storytelling with game- play in one of the first ‘interactive movies’ and allowed Olaf to develop a distinctive visual style. In the title Virtual Nightclub Olaf fashioned a cross between MTV and a computer game and he worked and directed recording artists such as Redman, Herbie Hancock, PM Dawn, the Stereo MCs and many others for the project.

This led to Olaf directing music videos for other artists. He became involved in conceptual art projects and made a number of experimental short films. His short film ‘Performer’ was selected for over a dozen film festivals around the world and won several awards. At the same time he continued to work as a designer and vfx artist and became more and more involved with work on his first love - feature films, working with directors such as Mike Nich- ols, Paul Verhoeven, Peter Yates, lending his hand to the ever evolving process of creating new worlds for the screen.

He developed a on-set previsualisation system allowing the real-time display of computer-graphic characters through the camera viewfinder for Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Olaf has given lectures on his work internationally; he has been asked to judge awards shows and also has taught extensively. developed a vfx and animation programme for Escape Studios in London.