Our team is international and passionate about animation!
Pablo Vazquez. Director, Lighting (Argentina)
Born and raised in southern Patagonia, Argentina, Pablo has been involved in cartoon feature and short movies for the last 10 years.
Francesco Siddi. Pipeline Developer (Italy)
Francesco works as layout artist and freelance multimedia producer. He has worked at the Blender Institute on the Mango Open Movie Project and collaborated with the Blender Institute on other projects. For Caminandes he is responsible for all organisational and financial tasks, and ensure the project targets are met.
Hjalti Hjálmarsson. Layout, Animator (Iceland)
Hjalti has been working as a character animator for 8 years, primarily working in Blender. Since 2007 he’s worked on the biggest animated ad campaigns in Iceland, many of which have been nominated and awarded at the Icelandic Advertising Awards. Hjalti was part of the Blender Institute Open Movie Cosmos Laundromat.
Andy Goralczyk, light and compositing (Germany)
Andy has been using blender for quite a while now, about 12 years give or take! He took part in Elephants Dream, Big Buck Bunny and most recently Tears of Steel. Gee, he must be getting old!
Usually he likes to light and comp stuff, but occasionally does other crazy things as well, like baking cookies or blending smoothies.
Sarah Laufer, Character Artist, Animator. (Belgium)
Born in Brussels, raised in Costa Rica. Sarah together with Hjalti form the animation team in Caminandes 3. Before jumping into animation she drew the penguin character sheets and modeled them based on concept art from Matias Mendiola. Sarah was also part of the Blender Institute Open Movie Cosmos Laundromat.
Juan Pablo Bouza, rigger (Argentina)
Juan is a 3d generalist who specialises in rigging and character modelling. He is the creator of BlenRig rigging system and in Caminandes 2 he is making use of the upcoming BlenRig 5. Juan is also working in two Blender features films, “Kiribati” and “Cronopios and Famas”.
Matias Mendiola, Story Artist (Argentina)
Matias Mendiola, Storyboard Artist Also going by the catchy moniker “Mendio,” Matias is a freelance artist from Argentina with about 20 years of expereince. He’s been drawing for as long as he can remember, a pencil in his hand almost since birth.
Sergey Sharybin, technical director (Russia)
Sergey is an active Blender developer since 2009 and since 2011 he is working part time for the Blender Foundation in developer support. Besides from general development tasks, his main focus is motion tracking. Sergey has worked 4 months in Amsterdam as studio TD for Project Mango – Tears of Steel, and Cosmos Laundromat.
Torin Borrowdale, Music (United States)
Torin grew up in Northern California, spending equal time playing both the family piano and VHS tapes. He studied film music at USC where he scored over 80 projects. While attending USC, Torin was mentored by his favorite film composer and childhood hero: James Newton Howard. He loves movies and is also not too bad at ping-pong.
Sander Houtman, Sound (The Netherlands)
Based in Utrecht, Sander has worked in the dutch film and television industry for over 10 years. His main focus is on creative sound creation and mixing in post production for live-action and animation.
Additional team members on episodes 1 (Llama Drama), and 2 (Gran Dillama)
Jan Morgenstern, music and sound (Germany)
During his 10 years of working as a full-time composer for media, Jan has written music for more than 200 shorts, documentary features, TV commercials, and video games. Among these, he provided the music and sound for the Blender Foundation Open Movies Elephants Dream, Big Buck Bunny, and Sintel.
Beorn Leonard, story artist and animator (Australia)
Beorn has worked in 3D and motion graphics for 18 years, recently specialising in character animation. Beorn’s work can be seen on Warner Brothers’ “Happy Feet 2”, the Blender Institutes’s “Sintel” and the first episode of Caminandes. He has contributed the story for this episode.