Meet the Governors: Derek Spears

Name: Derek Spears

Peer Group: Special Visual Effects

New or Returning Governor? New

Describe your day job: I work as a facility-side Visual Effects Supervisor at Pixomondo.

Credits of which you're most proud: Game of Thrones - A wonderful chance to have a large sandbox with time and resources to make some big, impactful images

Black Sails - An amazing show with great Writing, Performance, Art Direction and Visual Effects. It was a wonderful experience to work on such an Art-driven show

The Watchmen - Although we only contributed a small part of the vast canvas the show played on, it is one of those projects that you can be grateful you just got to be a part of it.

Westworld - Visual Effects, albeit important, took a back seat to the story. I enjoyed watching the episode as much as working on it.

Why did you want to be a Television Academy governor? I was invited to be a part of the PGEC where I got a front room seat to the Emmy vetting process. I came to want to be a Governor in order to partner with my co-Governor Erik Henry on streamlining our rules.

What do you hope to accomplish as a governor? In addition to making our Emmy process more streamlined for our members, I also want to see how we can involve more of our international members.

Visual Effects in Streaming in Television is broadly contributed to by people representing a wide range of nationalities in different locales, I’d like to see what we can do to engage all of our members more directly and involve those who aren’t local.

Why is the Academy important to the industry? Television and media in general is a quickly changing landscape. I believe the Academy is central to recognizing that work as it evolves and helping educate and involve future generations.

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