Aaron Dabelow

The Who

I build the systems behind creative work - 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, an 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

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 careful, I can lose entire evenings to Factorio, which is - again - just pipeline optimization with faster feedback.

Select Awards Check out the list of awards my projects have collected over the years. View on LinkedIn →

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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