From Prototype to Conference: Winbush’s Journey in Motion Graphics

Jonathan Winbush watched a line wrap around the Dell booth on the first day of SIGGRAPH. Everyone was waiting for their chance to pick up a WonderFitter M17 Light Gun to shoot at Winbush’s latest video game. Most people know Winbush for Unreal Engine, but Unreal was too heavy for this project. He opted to build a lightweight HTML5 engine and used ComfyUI to animate his artwork.

The project started at Dave & Buster's where Winbush and his family shared a love for the classic light gun arcade games. It struck him that no one makes light gun console games that can be played on modern systems. He chipped away at it in his spare time and put in real hours when Dell asked him to bring it to their booth at SIGGRAPH.

Twenty years of title sequences

Winbush has been a professional motion graphics artist for 20 years. He started in the industry animating titles and creating type designs that run over films and TV shows. Toy Story came out when he was an early teenager and stoked his curiosity about animation. When the Matrix hit, he was in high school and couldn’t ignore his interest any longer. "I was like, how do I get into stuff like that?" He says. That led him to the Art Institute of Pittsburgh and a bachelor's in VFX and motion graphics.

In 2006, he landed a six-month internship with an A-list comedian’s studio that became four years taking leading motion graphic artist works on every film they made. He worked on VFX, title sequences, and every DVD and Blu-ray menu for several films.

He freelanced around Hollywood for a couple of years before a major studio hired him to build out its in-house motion graphics team. His credits there include popular TV shows and digital signage for Comic-Con booths. His biggest job was a Times Square takeover, complete with green-screen footage of a daytime talk show host, composited and color-graded until it sprawled across the enormous billboards.

When the Oculus developer kits came out, he posted rough VR experiments online. The stuff he put out was rough, but people appreciated seeing the process of an artist working with emerging tech. A rapper from a popular trio saw them and hired him, resulting in the first hip-hop VR music video. Someone at Adobe saw his work and asked him to speak at Adobe MAX in San Diego in 2015. That set Winbush on the conference circuit for the past decade, where he spoke and showcased his work at events including NAB, SIGGRAPH, Adobe MAX, and GDC.

Generating with the internet off

Winbush has had untold numbers of workflows over the years including utilizing render farms and compute on the cloud. These days he’s exploring local AI design and development on his Dell Pro Max Tower T2 with an NVIDIA RTX PRO 6000 Blackwell. The workstation empowers him to use open source models on a locally hosted ComfyUI platform. He can set a start frame and an end frame, and the model creates every frame in between. Generations that would have taken two to five minutes on his previous rig now finish in about 30 seconds. "The Blackwell card is just ripping through them," he says.

In his line of work, a powerful workstation is almost a necessity. Large clients with IP at stake require work to remain offline. "I want to run everything on my T2. I don't want to go to the cloud," he says.

Pixel x Pixel, Tokyo

These days, Winbush is most excited about Pixel x Pixel, the Tokyo-centered conference he co-founded with Ryuta Hoshi and Tad Hoshiko and EJ and Chris Schmidt, fellow Dell ambassadors. It grew out of a 2023 world tour that Winbush, EJ, and Chris were in. They travelled across three continents but couldn’t make Japan. Their fans kept asking when the tour would come to Tokyo, so last year Winbush and his Pixel x Pixel co-founders did Tokyo alone and sold out. This year they are selling about 800 tickets and have nearly sold out again.

Posting prototypes got Winbush to his first Adobe MAX. Pixel x Pixel is that stage for other people. "A lot of artists don't get the opportunity to really show off what they do," he says. Pixel x Pixel brings VFX and motion graphics artists from around the world. Presenters are invited to demonstrate a recent project, research or industry developments. Pixel x Pixel is October 17, learn more at PixelPixel and find Winbush at Winbush Immersive.

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