Looking To The Future: A Q&A With Tim McLaughlin, Dean Of The College Of Performance, Visualization And Fine Arts
Innovation has been a consistent theme throughout Tim McLaughlin’s career, both in higher education and the visual effects industry.
The Longview native’s degrees at Texas A&M University helped to take him to Industrial Light & Magic, where he played a major role in how digital creatures look and move in films including “Star Wars: Episode I — The Phantom Menace,” “Mars Attacks!” and “Jumanji,” along with a protoype project for “Avatar.”
Returning to his alma mater in 2007, McLaughlin helped the budding Visualization program grow from a lab into a department with multiple degree offerings. The program now ranks among the nation’s best in animation; augmented and virtual reality; game design; and visual effects.
In 2022, McLaughlin was tabbed to take on an ambitious new adventure: leading the creation of the College of Performance, Visualization and Fine Arts, and bringing Visualization together with Dance Science and Performance and Visual Studies. Its degree offerings have since expanded to include undergraduate fine arts degrees in Theatre and in Music Performance; a graduate fine arts degree in Dance; and a Ph.D. in Visual Computing and Interactive Media.
The college also includes the emerging Virtual Production Institute, which integrates real-world scenarios and extended-reality technology through virtual environments displayed on large LED walls, both on main campus and at Texas A&M-Fort Worth.
As dean, McLaughlin is working to fuel the growth of the new college, which is bringing a stronger focus on the arts at Texas A&M. With an emphasis on the intersection of art and technology, the college connects visual arts, performing arts, visual computing and humanities.
“We are relatively unique in that we have a comprehensive group for disciplines under one roof,” McLaughlin said. “We have historians, theorists, critical thinkers. We have performers in music and dance and theatre. We have visual artists, designers, choreographers, composers. We have technologists and engineers creating tools and doing user-interaction research and visual computing research.
“Having us all in one college means that as ideas, concepts, problems come forward to be explored, we can pull the team together and say, ‘Let’s look at this from different angles.’ We need those viewpoints to achieve the best solutions. In most other academic institutions, the artists, engineers and humanists would be in separate academic colleges and departments. We’re here together every day.”
Q: Art is naturally something that plays a role in our youth. How did it emerge as something that meant more for you?
I always liked to draw. I remember sometime around the age of 8, asking my parents what someone who likes to draw can do for a living. My dad was a policeman and my mom was a schoolteacher, so their answer was very practical: You can be an architect.
I had no real concept of what that was. I had seen “The Brady Bunch” and Mr. Brady was an architect. That was as much as I knew about it.
I kept taking art classes at Longview Pine Tree High School. I went to Kilgore College, the community college in my area, and was an art major there. I learned the fundamentals in art and design there, and it built my confidence in terms of how to draw and think about design.
There were other ways to explore drawing. I was a courtroom sketch artist for the local TV station in a high-profile murder trial. People with the city of Kilgore commissioned me to do a number of drawings of historic downtown buildings and other projects.
What brought you to Texas A&M?
I had taken a look at the Environmental Design program in the College of Architecture, and met with Professor Rodney Hill, the adviser. His approach was that architecture was one of the outcomes, but it was a degree designed to encourage creative thinking. It was open in terms of how an art-and-design approach could be taken within it. That was appealing.
The environment was one where you spent all hours in studio, and it was hard. There was a lot of stress in hitting deadlines. But it was also a collegial environment. It pushed everyone to be better. Everyone could see who was doing great work. And if you weren’t, you recognized, “I’m struggling. What can I do?” That academic environment molded my thinking, and I enjoyed that part of my undergrad.
You earned your degree in 1990, then worked in architecture in Dallas for a year before returning for grad school at the new Viz Lab. Why was getting your master’s in Visualization Sciences important to you?
Both my parents went on to get advance degrees — my mother with her medical degree and my father went on and got his juris doctor degree. I felt like that was what I was supposed to do.
The Viz Lab was just forming as I was leaving with my undergrad. It was bright and shiny and interesting. I was thinking I would do visualizations and 3D graphics for architecture, and entered the program in the fall of ’91.
There was a big learning curve. But it was very much like my undergrad in that we were all in there together. I was watching what everyone was doing, just amazed at what could be done on the computer. I started thinking about visual stories, animations that I wanted to try. It took a while to understand how to make things move, how to transform motion in space and time to actually communicate.
The faculty were photographers and videographers and animators and computer scientists. Susan Van Baerle was a character animator. She talked about principles of animation: squash and stretch and timing and silhouette. So my work in their classes gravitated in that direction.
“Jurassic Park” in summer 1993 was a game-changer, not just for visual effects in movies but also for how people saw career opportunities. How did that impact you?
Just like everybody else, I was blown away by it. I remember thinking: “Wow.” “Imagine.” “That’s crazy.” And then I wanted to try to figure out how it was done. We saw that it was done on the same software and hardware that we used. It inspired us.
As I was moving toward graduating, I made a list of places I’d like to work. At the top of the list was Industrial Light & Magic, because they had done “Jurassic Park,” “Terminator 2,” “The Abyss.” I took part in the recruiting event during the SIGGRAPH conference in 1994, and I did lots of interviews there. Through Susan Van Baerle’s connection, I got an interview with ILM.
The roles weren’t as well-defined as they are now. Their approach was, “We’re not sure what you’ll do, but we know you have the right skills that we’re looking for.” What I wound up getting was called an enveloper. That meant defining the way skin moves on digital creatures. That technology came directly out of “Jurassic Park.”
What was your first big movie project at Industrial Light & Magic?
That was “Jumanji.” The project had been on the shelf for a while because they knew it would be expensive to make with animatronics and robotics. When “Jurassic Park” hit, the producers realized they could use computer graphics to get the project done. That’s where I came in.
“Jumanji” was hard, but also just a great fit. Each morning began with “dailies,” a look at the work you did the day before, with the team and the supervisors. So you’re getting very specific feedback constantly. I had good stuff and I had embarrassing stuff. I walked in without much background in film, visual effects or animation beyond what I did in school, so there was some real fumbling around. It was uncomfortable.
How did you get past that?
Picking up the film language was a process of listening and understanding. But understanding the computer graphics language and how to make things move was something I did have. I would work on the zebra in “Jumanji,” and try to figure out how to make the shoulder, the hips, the hindquarters and forequarters move naturalistically. I looked at video references of horses and zebras, and then went back and forth between the live reference and what was happening in the animation.
I could understand how to move the tools around quickly and how to make adjustments. And then how to make things articulate well and figuring out how to write code to make something happen more easily than doing it by hand.
I really liked that kind of work. The Viz Lab prepared me well for it.
Few things were bigger in the late 1990s than the return of “Star Wars.” You had a big role on “Episode I — The Phantom Menace” including working on a famous character. What was it like to be a part of that?
When word came around that George Lucas was starting to work on another “Star Wars” film, everybody got excited. George had seen “Jurassic Park.” He and Steven Spielberg were close. He recognized the technology had reached the point where he felt like he could tell the stories the way he wanted to tell them. So he was ready to do that again.
We knew that Jar Jar Binks would be a big part of the film. What I was brought on to do was help figure out the deformation and the simulations for Jar Jar. At that time, we didn’t know if Jar Jar would mainly be actor Ahmed Best in prosthetics with a bit of digital, or mainly digital with a bit of prosthetics. It turned out there are very few shots where it’s the physical prosthetics. The rest is digital, inspired by Ahmed Best’s performance.
I think there ended up being 65 creatures in the film, and the team I supervised was responsible for making sure they worked well for the animators and lighters.
In addition to my team, there were other leads for aspects of creating the creatures: James Tooley led rigging, Jean Bolte on texturing and Geoff Campbell on modeling. Digital creatures played such a key role in the film. It was challenging, but fun.
“Episode I” was an enormous movie, but Jar Jar was a much-maligned character. How did you react to that after putting in all that work?
Many of my peers and I were in the group that was first enthralled with “Star Wars.” It hit us as 10-, 11- and 12-year-olds as this hugely important thing.
With “Episode I,” George made something for the new 10-, 11- and 12-year-olds. And we wanted it to be made for us, as adults. So the Jar Jar character was very similar in my world to the Jawas and the Ewoks from the original films. Those parts were kind of funny and throw-offs, but it became a bigger part of this film. We were wanting the nitty gritty stuff, but that’s not where George’s storytelling was.
It was brilliant from a business point of view. He captured a whole new generation. It may have irritated us that he didn’t make the film for us. But he didn’t lose us.
Certainly, when Jar Jar was criticized, what we did was retreat to the technical achievement and say, “They’re criticizing the character. They’re not criticizing the computer graphics. That’s a win.”
You returned to Texas A&M in 2007 to lead Visualization as it grew into a department within the College of Architecture. It soon added a bachelor of science degree and a master of fine arts degree. How was that transition for you as the first department head?
I came in with a different career path. I’m here to be an administrator. I’m here to unify the vision of the department and figure out where we need to go. It really felt collaborative. Faculty had their areas of specialty that were strengths, and my job was to bring as many of those under one umbrella as I could. We wanted to have balance between being an academic-aligned program and an industry-aligned program.
The biggest strength of Visualization is that it walks this middle road between the arts and science. We really worked on building up the humanities, the understanding of the critical theory and the history of what we’re doing. That skill in our students made them really sought after in industry. Their success at high-profile projects in industry led to greater exposure for the department. It was clear something great was happening at Texas A&M.
Creating a new college with an arts-and-technology focus was first discussed in early 2022 by then-President M. Katherine Banks as part of the Path Forward initiative. By August, this new college was up and running. What was that experience like, and why was a focus on the arts important for the university?
Texas A&M has a long history of traditional strengths: engineering; agriculture; building into the sciences including veterinary medicine; building up Mays Business School. We were thinking about how the university serves the state better, and how the university increases its capacity to meet student need and workforce demand, and the needs of industry in terms of research and problem-solving. That continued on with the addition of the College of Medicine, the Health Science Center, the School of Law.
Then, relative to our peers who are great public universities across the country, there’s this missing piece at A&M. That was in the visual and performing arts. I think this college provides that leg that will strengthen the overall competitiveness and accomplishments of the university.
Every group coming into the new college was excited about what could be gained, but anxious about what might be lost. There were so many questions. What helped was Dr. Banks waved the flag of this new college nearly every time she gave a public address to what her vision was. It gave necessary fuel to the energy required to do the work. She said this is important. And it helped us to hear that. When President Welsh took over, he reaffirmed the university’s commitment and worked with us to clearly define our future.
As we’ve expanded our programs, we have chosen purposely to not go into competition for resources with others at the university or at other institutions in the state that are already doing things really well. Each of our degrees is an approach to the arts with an additional twist that fills a need in the economic growth and the educational opportunity for our students.
Take theatre, for example. We have a B.F.A. in Theatre, but our focus is on devised theatre, which is very applicable to developing the skills required for collaborative work and problem-solving. In our B.F.A. in Music Performance, the foundation is the practice of an instrument. But it is practiced in a way that provides time in the curriculum for the addition of development of other skills. That could be composing for interactive media. It could be music and business. We have a B.F.A. because it doesn’t exist elsewhere in the state.
As part of the college, the Virtual Production Institute was approved in 2024 and funded by the 88th Texas Legislature for faculty, staff and equipment. With four stages planned on main campus and at the Texas A&M-Fort Worth campus — three of which are up and running — this is a big step for the college. How did those early conversations go?
I had been investigating the use of real-time graphics, the advancements in virtual production and what that could mean for the university. I was trying to get a virtual production stage built at RELLIS that would be accessible for film production in the state. It caught some people’s attention, but it had a pretty high price tag.
When the college started, Dr. Banks asked me to write a proposal for a virtual reality institute, describing uses of immersion across segments of our economy. I said, “What if we talk about expanding that tool set and we call it virtual production instead, and address how immersion and virtual, augmented and extended reality can all play into this.” Not only could it meet the goals she had in mind, but we could expand it into other areas that are emerging.
There was great support for this from the university and industry, including Paul Jensen, former director of the Texas Media Production Alliance, who was critical in helping to get industry support. The Legislature came through with funding, and it’s been transformative.
We are focused on workforce development that includes media and entertainment but goes into other industries as well, like health care, digital twins, aerospace and the military. And the development of it spurs lots of discussion. What I love about what we’re doing in the college and with the Virtual Production Institute is saying, “We know some things we are going to do, and there’s a ton of things we don’t know about yet, but we want to explore them.”
As these facilities are coming together and as the people are being hired, lots of conversations are taking place: “What if we did this?” “Have you thought about applying it this way?” That’s what I love. It’s like fertilizer for creative ideas.
You’re three years into the College of Performance, Visualization and Fine Arts. How do you see it evolving in the future?
We have been in building mode — putting these academic programs in place, hiring faculty, hiring staff, figuring out facilities. When we get to a point about five years from now, we will be to the extension of our planning. And hopefully, with our building in place, that moment in the future is the payoff.
There will still be a ton of work to do. And not everything will look like what we planned. But that physical representation — that this is the College of Performance, Visualization and Fine Arts, and here are all the people, resources and facilities that enable it to happen — that’s what we can’t wait for. That will also be a real, visual symbol to the rest of the state that the future of the visual and performing arts experiences is being defined here at Texas A&M.
Top photo: Tim McLaughlin sits in front of an LED wall at the Virtual Production Institute stage at Red Productions in Fort Worth. Photo by Abbey Santoro/Texas A&M University Division of Marketing and Communications.
