LUKA ZABRET IS A CG DIRECTOR, ART DIRECTOR & SUPERVISOR, LIVING IN AMSTERDAM. He also does Houdini, but he's learned not to lead with that at parties. Mostly, he works with people: directors with a half-formed idea, agencies with a deadline that has technically already happened, and producers who would just like someone to tell them it's going to be fine. It usually is.

Before any of that, there was art school. Luka has a master's degree in painting, and spent those years reading art theory and philosophy, taking photographs, and painting pictures that nobody bought. None of it was wasted. It just took him a while to find out what it was for.

Two of the three following statements about Luka are true…

1. Luka spent most of his final year at art school painting the same chair. He still thinks about that chair.

2. Luka's first question on any job is "what should this feel like?" and his second is "when is it due?" He has learned to ask them in that order. Mostly.

3. Luka has read considerably more philosophy than is strictly needed to make a beauty commercial, and he promises not to bring it up in the meeting.*

These days he sits somewhere between the brief and the render: finding the look, art directing the frames, looking after the CG team, and now and then quietly fixing a simulation himself when nobody is watching. He has made work for Netflix & Stella Artois, No7, Bitvavo, Greenpeace and Ray-Ban x Meta, with good people at Heckler, Nervous FX, Choann Studio, Octagon and Gut Amsterdam. He's rarely the loudest person on the call. He's usually the one who sends a single frame afterwards that makes the call make sense.

*All three statements are true. He's still thinking about the chair.