Aaron Dabelow

I build the systems behind creative work - and I think in systems even when I probably shouldn't.

Twenty years at one studio, doing most of the jobs at least once. Pipelines, render farms, color science, teams, and lately the AI tools creeping into all of it.

The work

These days I run the technical and production side of a VFX and animation studio - the pipeline, the render farm, the teams, and lately the AI tools creeping into all of it. I got here by starting as an intern twenty years ago and never quite leaving, doing 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

Away from the keyboard I run a long-running tabletop campaign as the DM, which is really just production scheduling with dragons. I keep Japanese maples and 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 being the ceiling. I cook a serious weekend breakfast, and I lose entire evenings to Factorio, which is - again - just pipeline optimization with a worse opinion of my time.

Get in touch

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