Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1536119
Then I came back to Nova Scotia. I was the executive director of the Jazz Festival in Halifax, which is incredibly small potatoes, but it was huge for me at the time because I was really young in my exec- utive-level career. I came on originally with that organization as the communications manager, and then before that as a volunteer. Be- tween all of these career shis, I was always a bartender. I would say that defining the development curve for all of those jobs, whether it was in hospitality, music, production, arts adminis- tration, or now in this iteration, I always just showed up and started doing whatever jobs weren't getting done—quickly learning how to make myself indispensable, and then eventually kind of running the show. What brought you to your current position as CEO of JALI Re- search? Sarah Watling: When the company first started, it was a group of academics whose pedigree was impeccable. They're all former Alias Wavefront R&D team. Alias Wavefront was acquired by Autodesk, and that early development team were the inventors and developers of Maya 1.0, which as we know is now still industry standard. The CTO, Pif Edwards, was doing his research in computational linguistics. He ended up as a student in Chris Landreth's facial ani- mation class when Chris was a research scientist at DGP [Dynamic Graphics Project] at the University of Toronto's department of com- puter science. Eugene Fiume, former Director of Research at Alias, and Karan Singh, whose contributions at Alias included the Acad- emy Award-winning development of blendshape technology, were both graphics professors at DGP, and they, along with Pif and Chris, formed the original founding team, and were co-authors on that original publication. Pif wanted to create a computational model that would allow you to animate and direct complex character performances from script. That's still basically what we're doing now, but we had to start with speech. In a play or a game or wherever there's moments of drama, people are talking. So that's how we started making this lip sync and speech animation tool. I came on board in the background to try to help make connec- tions stick for them because they were getting all this interest. I think it's not an uncommon thing for technically focused inventor or ac- ademic types to not also be sales front-facing types. So I became their first sales person. I managed their tech transfer out of U of T and assisted with early contract negotiations. At that point, I had hired some people for them and got their banking organized, and I was starting to help with creating their orig- inal brand—messaging and look and all that kind of stuff. So eventu- ally we had the conversation. Actually, it was Chris that suggested my appointment, since I was already doing the job. Which led to the discussion with the founders that resulted in my confirmation as CEO. And that's how that happened. It's an unorthodox path, but I'm here now. Can you tell us about the publication of JALI's SIGGRAPH pa- per and the early partnership with CD Projekt Red (CDPR)? Sarah Watling: The publication was 2016 at SIGGRAPH. I think one 16 cgw a p r i l • m ay • j u n e 2 0 2 5 VIDEO: JALI Research Demo Reel 2025 Avowed, developed by Obsidian Entertainment (above & below)