The Faces of Target3D Series: Meet Harry

Perhaps not unusually for a child of school-age, Harry aspired to be a professional footballer. Fast forward a decade or so and he’s a Virtual Production TD. Was his journey here strategic or a happy accident?

Despite his teenage football aspirations, and playing hockey for the East of England youth squad, Harry’s sporting career didn’t come to fruition.

After starting a degree in Robotic Engineering, Harry soon realised the course wasn’t for him, although he did identify that he enjoyed the coding aspects. When he found a BA in Games Software Engineering at Bournemouth University he thought it would be a fun way to develop his coding skills with a view to working in the booming games industry.

Harry’s knowledge of mocap at the time was limited to behind-the-scenes footage of Avatar and Star Wars, so the first ‘happy accident’ happened when he was introduced to Target3D co-founder Allan around the time he was seeking an internship in 2019.

Working with the Target3D team in their Hoxton studio, as a Mocap Intern Harry got to help out on shoots as well as with testing and developing. Whilst his degree in Software Engineering focused heavily on coding, the internship gave him experience of the other side of things; the production and the animation. He tells us that he “really appreciated working for a smaller tech company, which gave him the freedom to experiment and think outside the box”.

The feeling was mutual and when Covid smashed his summer plans, his internship extended through to a year - the second happy accident. In this time Harry worked on some pretty cool mocap projects including with the singer Jehnnie Beth and on The Hundred Cricket experience app with Sky Sports.

Imagine the excitement (from our side at least) when, a week after finishing his degree, Harry came on board as a full-time Solutions Architect. Leading our Tech Eval project, he was responsible for testing new kit then producing guides for the team to help with set-up, knowledge sharing and sales. A big change from his first jobs including a stint in a fish & chip shop and a holiday job trimming Christmas trees!

Looking forward to a future more involved with film production rather than gaming, Harry has recently gained a promotion to Virtual Production TD based in our Virtual Production Test Stage in Guildford and is now working with film cameras as well as motion tracking cameras.

“It’s cool to be on the cutting edge of this stuff,” he explains. “As Virtual Production is still so new, there are no real set rules yet. Everyone is forging their own path and discovering that there’s loads of different ways that you can go about stuff which feels exciting.”

Being from a software background, Harry acknowledges there are challenges as he gets to grips with his new role; “Understanding how everything fits together - jamming all of the different technologies into one workflow when they haven’t necessarily been used in that way before - it’s a learning curve as I get my head around the hardware.”

“But I just want to keep creating content, creating cool videos and producing stuff that we’re proud of and happy to shout about.”

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