Michael Siarkowski

AI Transformation (2023 — Present)

• Drove the studio’s pivot from traditional CG/VFX to AI-video production; own all AI strategy, tooling, and pipeline decisions across the company.
• Delivered two documentaries built on substantial AI-generated footage: one reached 100K+ views within its first week on YouTube; a second feature-length documentary is complete and in distribution talks.
• Replaced crew/location/wardrobe shoots with AI generation: shots that previously required a full production crew are now produced solo, in ~1 week.
• Designed and built mico, a desktop AI production app (Tauri + React, Claude/LLM + image-gen + video-gen APIs) integrating the entire pre-production pipeline into one tool; cut pre-production time by 50%+; adopted as the studio’s core AI workflow.
• Production-integrated AI stack since 2022: Stable Diffusion, GPT-SoVITS voice cloning, local LLMs via Ollama, frontier models (Claude, GPT), and video-generation models (Seedance et al.).

CG / VFX (2022 — Present)

• Built and owned the studio’s entire CG/VFX pipeline end-to-end as sole artist: modeling, look-dev, environments, rigging, animation, mocap, FX, rendering, compositing — UE5, Houdini, Nuke, Blender, ZBrush, Marvelous Designer.
• Promoted to department lead in 2025; hired and mentor a second VFX artist while directing all VFX- and AI-related work studio-wide.
• Shipped 80+ videos and 5 major productions across documentaries, commercials, and client media projects.

Studio Engineering

• Designed and built the studio’s livestream and broadcast stages end-to-end: cameras, lighting, audio, GPU/encoding workstations, and streaming infrastructure.

• Edited event and promotional videos for local clients through the COVID period.
• Designed and installed livestream room / studio setups for clients.