An Evening with Distillery: The VFX of “The Last of Us”

Originally from Halifax, Nova Scotia, Jon moved to the west coast of Canada in 2008 to continue his career in visual effects, moving from freelance for commercials and music videos to feature film work.

With over a decade of experience in feature films, Jon has worked on over 25 movies, including notable franchises: Star Wars, Jurassic World, and the Marvel Cinematic Universe. He specializes in generalist workflows, from creating high end digital environments to rigid body FX simulations.

A Frantic Films and Scanline VFX alum, Jon joined Industrial Light & Magic in 2014 as a Generalist Artist for two years before becoming a Generalist Supervisor for ILM’s environment team for an additional four years.

In 2016, Jon was the recipient of the Visual Effects Society Award for Best Digital Environment in a Feature Film for his work on Dr. Strange. Jon is now a VFX Supervisor for Distillery VFX, having most recently supervised Distillery’s work for HBO’s The Last of Us.

Pedro started his career as a 3D artist in the Arch Vis industry in Portugal and in 2009 joined Double Negative in London UK. He worked his way through the VFX pipeline from Matchmove, Layout, PostVis, Lighting, Environments and found his passion in the Generalist department. Pedro has led artists for over five years and has been supervising teams at DNEG, ILM and Distillery VFX for over five years.

Throughout his career, Pedro has worked and supervised teams in feature film and episodic such as Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, The Dark Knight Rises, Star Wars: The Force Awakens, Doctor Strange, Ant-Man and the Wasp as well as the VES, Bafta and Oscar VFX-winning feature Dune. Most recently Pedro and his team had their work on Star Wars: Andor nominated for the Outstanding Created Environment in an Episode, VES award.

Aaron has been in the visual effects industry for 17 years. He started in animation, after completing a digital character animation course at Sheridan College in Oakville, Ontario. He then worked as a character artist for animated feature films for 10 years at studios like Rainmaker Animation, Animal Logic, and Pixar Canada.

He transitioned out of animation in 2013 and moved into creature and environment work as a Generalist. In this new discipline, he worked at Image Engine, Scanline, and Industrial Light & Magic, before moving to Distillery VFX in 2021.

Aaron has worked on many notable projects, including but not limited to, Aquaman, Rogue One: A Star Wars Story, Spectre, Captain America: The Winter Soldier and Game of Thrones. In 2019, Barr was nominated for a Visual Effects Society Award for Outstanding Created Environment in a Photoreal Feature for his work on Aquaman.