About - Aaron Dabelow

The Who

I build the systems behind creative work - and and then get people use it.

I have spent twenty years in the commercial VFX and animation world, doing most of the jobs at least once. Running teams, pipelines, production, render farms, color science, and lately the AI tools creeping into all of it.

The Work

I spent 20 years at MAKE, and animation and VFX studio in Minneapolis, and I've done a bit of every job along the way because the studio didn't do titles and I was usually the person standing closest to the problem. What I actually care about is how the pieces fit together: that a tooling gap shows up weeks later as an artist quietly hating their job. So I build for the long version - code someone can read in ten years, few dependencies, everything written down, because the alternative is it all lives in my head, and that's a terrible place to keep a studio.

The Rest of it

Aaron Dabelow Away from the keyboard I run a long-running tabletop campaign as the DM, which is really just production scheduling with dice. I do my best for my two dogs and family, and I keep Japanese maples as bonsai, with a success rate that's improving but would not survive an audit. I peaked at Diamond in StarCraft II and have made peace with that probably being the ceiling. I cook a serious weekend breakfast, and if not carefull, I can lose entire evenings to Factorio, which is - again - just pipeline optimization with a with faster feedback.

Select Awards

Gold ADDY - The Show (Ad Fed Minnesota), Animation/SFX/Motion Graphics - Producer

Silver ADDY - (CGI) - The Show MN 2025 - "Second Catch" - Producer

Best Professional - MET 2020 - "Xbox Controllers" - Technical Director / Lead Artist

Best Professional - MET 2015 / 2017 - "Mechsplorers" - Technical Director / Lead Artist

Official Selection - SIGGRAPH 2008 - "Now Look What You Did" - Artist

Best Independent - MET 2007 / Blockhead Film Festival - "Drown" - Director

Get in touch

Happy to talk - production tech, creative tooling, hard problems. My full work history lives on LinkedIn, the channels below all reach me.

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