Cosku Turhan is a filmmaker/visual effects supervisor with over twelve years of experience in the Hollywood film industry. Born in Ankara, Turkey, his talent for visual arts can be traced back to the drawings and animations he did of Disney characters when he was eight years old. Building up on his skills, he graduated from an International Baccalaureate program having concentrated on classical painting and music. After his painting mentor Marek Brozozovski convinced him that he would get a formidable education there, he decided to study graphic design at Bilkent University. Here he studied both basic design and jazz composition as a minor. Upon graduating with honors, he concluded that his passion is in moving images and Hollywood. This quest landed him in Los Angeles to study film and digital arts at the University of Southern California - the Harvard of film schools. Here he got to study under industry giants like Robert Zemeckis, Tom Sito, and Paul deMeyer. During his master's studies he produced two thesis films, one of which (“The Bioturk”) got him international accolade by being shown at more than 20 festivals worldwide. 

 

Towards the end of his studies Cosku had a chance to work with John H. Williams - producer of the Shrek trilogy - at his animation studio, where he learned about project development and concept creation. He then got offered a job at Sony Pictures Imageworks as an associate technical director. He quickly became a lighter and then a lead look development artist having worked on movies like “The Beowulf”, “Alice in Wonderland” and “The Wizard Of Oz”. He is a three time VES awards (Visual Effects Society Awards)  nominee for the work he did for “Alice: Through the Looking Glass”, “The Amazing Spiderman” and “Eagle Eye”. After his successful run as a look development lead, he worked as an FX development lead for “never seen before effects” on movies such as  “The Amazing Spiderman II”, “Alice in Wonderland, Through the Looking Glass”.  His last project at Sony Imageworks was the Oscar winning "Spider-man, Into the Spiderverse". On this project he helped develop the compositing and rendering pipelines that formed the look and feel of  the comic book style of the movie. 

After winning the grand prize on the “Rendering the Metaverse” VR competition held by Otoy with his VR startup group he decided to go into VR. He started as a Rendering/Lighting and FX Supervisor at Magnopus in 2016. Here he was a part of Emmy nominated VR projects such as Blade Runner 2046: Memory Lab, Coco VR. He also helped develop Magnopus’ ground breaking virtual production toolset. Also leading the FX department at Magnopus, Turhan was involved with numerous R&D projects developing new techniques and creating stunning visuals to allow photoreal quality imagery in real-time engines using tools such as Houdini, Unity VFX Graph and Unreal Niagra. As his real-time and CG skills were blending rapidly, he got called to lead and supervise the visual look of Vaulted Halls Entombed which is an episode in the critically acclaimed animated Netflix series Love, Death and Robots. Being one of the first high-profile CG projects to be realised and rendered in Unreal Engine, Turhan supervised the lighting and the look of this groundbreaking project.