KANG Jong-ik, born in 1969, is one of the most famous VFX supervisors in the history of contemporary Korean cinema. Starting his career in a commercials production company, he joined in 1995 the visual effects company L.I.M. where he took part in <A Petal> (1996), <Beat> (1997), and <No. 3> (1997). After the bankruptcy of L.I.M. in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis, KANG didn’t want to give up his career. In 1998, he convinced the producers of &...More

KANG Jong-ik, born in 1969, is one of the most famous VFX supervisors in the history of contemporary Korean cinema. Starting his career in a commercials production company, he joined in 1995 the visual effects company L.I.M. where he took part in <A Petal> (1996), <Beat> (1997), and <No. 3> (1997). After the bankruptcy of L.I.M. in the aftermath of the Asian financial crisis, KANG didn’t want to give up his career. In 1998, he convinced the producers of <The Soul Guardians> (1998), a project that had previously been entrusted to L.I.M., that he could take over, and founded his own CG company Insight Visual with the down payment. With four other CG artists, they worked day and night for three months. In the end, <The Soul Guardians> (1998) marked a breakthrough in VFX for Korean films. Many people couldn’t believe it was made in Korea; the fire scene in a drain was unprecedented in the industry and earned him a (collective) Blue Dragon Award for Technical Achievement. Thereafter, KANG started receiving a lot of projects. He took on new challenges with films of the early 2000s, including <Friend> (2001), <Champion> (2001) and <Memories of Murder> (2003). The two Korean War films by Director KANG Je-kyu, <TaeGukGi: Brotherhood> (2004) and <My Way> (2011), were other remarkable achievements from the company as it featured many explosions that KANG wanted to be as extraordinary as those in Hollywood war films like <Pearl Harbor>. In KWAK Kyung-taek’s ocean action drama <Typhoon> (2005), KANG had to generate destructive sea waves while there were no proper way to create them. The Seoul Station scene in <Modern Boy> (2008) was also memorable, as the building erected during the Japanese colonization was almost entirely recreated digitally. In 2010, his company merged with DTI Pictures and EON Digital Films to set up a large scale VFX post-house, Digital IDEA. In 2012, KANG joined Director KIM Yong-hwa at Dexter Studios and worked on the 3D sport film <Mr. Go> (2013) which featured a gorilla as a CG character. Based on the digital technology and skills he accumulated in the creature film, KANG made another breakthrough with the summer hit swashbuckler <The Pirates> (2014), for which he won the Technical Achievement Award at the Blue Dragon Awards.Less