Allan McKay

McKay developed an interest in filmmaking early on, when he got exposure to POVray, Vista Pro and the 3D Studio R3 for DOS. He got his first big break working for Team Fortress Software working on Team Fortress 2. At the age of 18, he moved to Sydney to work for Ambience Entertainment.

At seventeen, McKay started teaching advanced courses on game development and 3D animation at QANTM College, as well as evening classes on visual effects. During his time there, he became involved in building the curriculum for Queensland College of Art’ Bachelor of Interactive Entertainment, the first university level curriculum aimed for video games development.

Meanwhile, he continued learning animating, texturing, modeling and lighting, and building his reel. In 2005, he launched his own studio Catastrophic FX. Within this company, he worked on dozens of game cinematics, TVCs and films.

In 2009, McKay worked on an Australian-American science fiction horror film Daybreakers, as a senior technical director.

Working on the film Priest, in 2011, McKay had to come up with a pipeline for doing a massive sequence of realistic explosions, at a time when that wasn’t too common. Michael Bay’s Transformers: Dark of the Moon (also released in 2011) brought on a challenge of building tools that would construct max files from scratch and FumeFX simulations from that. He used a combination of FumeFX and Karatoa, along with Max’s built-in particle system Particle Flow.

In 2012, McKay worked on Flight, directed by Robert Zemeckis, in which he had to create a giant plane crash which contained over 2,500 frames.

In 2013, he worked on Metallica Through the Never, as well as J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek Into Darkness. He was an FX Animation and Simulation Lead on 2014’s The Equalizer, directed by Antoine Fuqua.

Video Games

At the age of 14, McKay worked on this first video game project Team Fortress 2. It was originally envisioned as an add-on for Quake. After securing a license to Quake engine by Valve Corporation, the release of the game was delayed by a decade. On April 8, 2008, Team Fortress 2 was finally released as a standalone title for windows. It was developed on the modified Quake engine utilized by Half-Life.

In 2010, McKay joined Prototype, a 2009 open world action adventure video game developed by Activision, as a special effects supervisor and an art guru.

His project BioShock won Game Trailer of the Year award in 2011.

McKay’s most exciting video game project to date has been God of War, the commercial for which played during Super Bowl 2013. He was working on location in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, when he received the call with the job offer, in 2012.

Soon after, he joined the team working on Destiny, also published by Activision in 2014. That same year, he contributed to Halo, 10th Anniversary Edition. In January 2015, he worked on a new project, Call of Duty: Black Ops. III.

Teaching

In addition to his VFX work, McKay runs many courses, as well as a mentorship with over 1,000 members. Throughout the past two decades he has appeared as a speaker at events in over 15 different cities including Paris, Sydney, Los Angeles, New York, Vancouver, Singapore, Helsinki, as well as master classes at SIGGRAPH.

• In 2006, McKay won an Emmy Award for Super Bowl XXXIX (2005 TV Special).
• He received an Autodesk 3ds Max Master Siggraph Award in 2007, for his contribution to the advancement of computer graphics.
• In 2001, he won Gold at Promax Award in New York, for the Best TV ID (Channel 9 Xmas ID).