Aurore de Blois

1969 was a definitive year for Aurore de Blois. Witnessing Neil Armstrong's first steps on the Moon on live television had an impact upon her that her unsuspecting parents could not have foreseen. But it was when Star Trek began syndication and her ever growing love for the films of George Pal and Ray Harryhausen along with the classics of science fiction, that her parents realized she was now out of control: building model spaceships out of cereal boxes, empty paper roll tubes and playing 'spaceman' wasn't what her sisters were doing, after-all. Blowing up model airplanes with home-made gunpowder, (something she learned from Star Trek) suspended by string in the backyard while filming with a super-8 camera didn't add to her parent's hopes of her being a normal teenage daughter- Aurore grew up to be quite the Tomboy. Growing up in a small rural town in Western Canada, however, her aspirations were seen as being somewhat unrealistic. It was years later when she left home after college to live in Vancouver when everything changed for her. Meeting people who actually worked in film and television, she quickly realized that working in the movies and creating effects was a perfectly obtainable goal, and in time she was working in the local VFX scene. In 2003, through her lifelong love of Star Trek, multiple award winning VFX artist Doug Drexler discovered her - by this time self-taught in digital compositing, matchmoving and 3D modeling. In 2005, she became one of the founding members of the newly formed Battlestar Galactica in-house VFX Dept. Led by award winning VFX Supervisor Gary Hutzel, Aurore spent the next 3-1/2 years as Senior Compositor, working alongside her heroes of Star Trek VFX. Aurore received her first Emmy Award in 2008 for outstanding special visual effects for a series, the Season Four Battlestar Galactica episode 'He That Believeth in Me', and shares in the series Peabody award win from 2005. During her time with the BSGVFX team, Aurore contributed significantly to Battlestar Galactica's numerous additional awards including three additional Emmy Awards (for which she received a certificate for the 2007 win); as well as two additional Emmy nominations and three additional VES nominations. Aurore relocated to Los Angeles in 2009 on an O-1 Visa, working on such films as Avatar and Clash of the Titans. In 2011 she moved overseas to London, UK on a Tier1 Exceptional Talent Visa, where she worked on many major motion pictures including: Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part II, John Carter, Prometheus, Great Gatsby, Iron Man 3, 300 Rise of an Empire, Godzilla, Thor The Dark World, Jupiter Ascending, Hercules and Avengers Age of Ultron. She returned to Canada in 2015 for the role of VFX Compositing Supervisor on Ben Hur's chariot race sequence and is presently VFX Compositing Supervisor on Guillermo del Toro's The Shape of Water. With a successful seventeen year career in VFX, she has received major awards, has been published internationally seven times and enjoys an intercontinental reputation for the quality of her work - a far journey for a little girl with big dreams from a small rural town in Western Canada who overcame discouragement of her aspirations. Through her involvement with Battlestar Galactica, Aurore has become friends with mission scientists at NASA/JPL. Her lifelong love for the planet Mars was rewarded in 2013 with a birthday present from one of the MER and MSL mission scientists. On June 19, 2013, MER2 Rover Opportunity was given a waypoint bearing her name on Sol 3342 near a feature called Nobby's Head at Endeavour crater. "Aurore de Blois' expertise in award-winning visual artistry only skims the surface of her deep connection to space exploration. With her recent script, A T S F, her uncanny understanding of conquering space travel as told from a unique historical timeline is brilliantly immersive from end to end. Ms. de Blois' use of actual events during the space program's formative years intertwined with a timeless tale of perseverance and triumph delivers a compelling interpretation as the story unfolds." -Joanne Dicaire