David was born in London, England on the 29th October 1956, and has
since remained a British Citizen, resident in Italy since 1975. He
studied Arts and Sciences at Bishop's Stortford College in
Hertfordshire, UK until 1974. While still a student, he lived in Norway
in 1969, and then moved to Mexico City between 1970-75. From 1975 to
the present day he has lived in Genoa, Grottaferrata, Milan, Recco,
Rome in Italy, and London.
David started his career as a stills
photographer for TV movies in Rome, and from 1975 to 1985 worked as a
long form editor on a large number of tv programs and documentaries,
gradually becoming more specialized in creating graphics and titles.
His graphic, aesthetic, and editing talents were used on many important Italian
National Television broadcasts in those years in a broad range of
different programmes; from "Disco-Ring", "Domenica In", "Mr. Fantasy",
"Marco Polo" and "Appuntamento al Cinema", to the RAI's main national
news programmes TG1 and TG2.
This was followed by a move to Milan and a
period spent mainly on high-end commercials prevalently sourced in
Milan, and shot in Cape Town, Johannesburg, London, Los Angeles, Milan,
Paris, and Rome - where he developed his visual effects supervision
skills working on many hundreds of different commercials, often using
motion control rigs, blue and green screens, and ever more
sophisticated combinations of cgi, real and virtual sets. These ranged
from the "Mulino Bianco" commercials with idyllic countryside views
transported into major Italian cities, to "Zebra Zulu" for the Italian
newspaper "Il Corriere Della Sera", to Italy's first HIV awareness
commercial - designed by the renowned and pioneering advertising guru
Armando Testa himself, with a purple line drawn around "infected" HIV
individuals, intended to shock the public into understanding that HIV
could affect anybody. From "Birra Moretti" to "Pasta Agnesi", David
developed his skills through experience and innovation, satisfying and
often stimulating the wish lists that the advertising community
continually presented him with.
He honed the skills the film industry
would later seek from him - solutions that could get production value
and creative ideas on the screen with ever lower aggregate budgets. To
that end he has specialized in offering combinations of digital, real
and virtual sets, together with set-extensions and matte paintings for
feature films, helping creatives and producers in achieving their often
challenging goals. This has led to David working with many renowned
Film Directors.
A convinced embracer of traditional
techniques ever more integrated with digital techniques, David has
often consulted in team work with film production designers and
creatives. He has offered his services as Visual Effects Supervisor on
a large number of major films, following a career during which he also founded and
managed successfully many of the principal Italian post production facilities. A
pioneer in digital intermediate film techniques, David has been
involved with early d-cinema trials, innovative digital film
restoration techniques, d-cinema mastering, digital and stereo 3d
film shooting and post production, and advanced digital lab techniques.
A long believer in divulging knowledge and know-how to his colleagues,
David helped Felice Laudadio (president of Cinecittà Holding until
2003, past director of the Venice Film Festival, and now Artistic
Director of Bari's Film Festival BiFest) to create various
conferences, workshops, test sessions, and open days aimed at
professionals in the Italian film industry. David related his
experiences and helped de-mystify the various digital processes to the
often very attentive and packed audiences in the "Martedi del Digitale"
(digital Tuesdays) conferences that became well known in the local industry
in their day.
David is a member of the "Accademia del Cinema Italiano" for the David di Donatello awards.
He has specified, supervised, trained others, and helped perfect the
technicalities, work-flow, and creative aspects for the Digital
Intermediate (DI) mastering processes in general.
In the last decade David has actively pursued a career in supervising native 3d during shooting and has learned how to use the relative post production equipment.
