Joshua Kolden
C4 Framework Architect
Entertainment Technology Center at the University of Southern California (ETC@USC)
Joshua Kolden is a pioneer of entertainment technology in Hollywood. A Visual Effects professional for more than 20 years, Kolden has credits in some of the most successful films of all time. In 1999, Kolden led a team of artists at Digital Domain to produce the world’s first digital human face replacement–a technique later popularized with projects such as “The Curious Case of Benjamin Button.”
In 2002, Kolden started Crack Creative to apply leading-edge real-time technologies to the filmmaking process. Crack Creative developed a number ground breaking technologies, and worked on many commercial and feature projects. The most well-known of Crack Creative’s innovations is the “Virtual Production” process originally created for James Cameron’s “Avatar” in 2005. Four years ago, Kolden launched “Studio Pyxis,” a production studio specifically designed to employ the latest filmmaking technologies, including cloud-based rendering, automatic pixel accurate camera tracking, online services, and many other tools in addition to Virtual Production.
Currently, Kolden is a production technology consultant and the architect of the Cinema Content Creation Cloud, or C4, an open-source framework designed specifically for media production that harnesses distributed resources to provide scalable storage and computing, and remote collaboration.
