October 2006

ALUMNI NEWS

Visual Effects Artist Wins Big with African Lions, Hyenas, and Wild Dogs

Nick Jernigan, SOC/BA ’04, recently joined an elite club whose members include only a handful of fellow AU alumni: He won an Emmy Award from the National Academy of Television Arts & Sciences. The former Visual Media major was one of five members of a National Geographic team to walk away from a festive evening in the heart of New York City with a shiny gold statue for his work on a program called Predators at War.

“It was really cool to be there,” says Jernigan. “They put on a really nice ceremony. All the big names in news were there and 60 Minutes’ Ed Bradley gave us the award.”

Predators at War, a documentary about a drought-ravaged game reserve in South Africa, was one of three National Geographic programs nominated. So when the world-renowned company was announced as a winner, Jernigan remembers waiting a few beats to hear more details about which show had won.

“We won for the one we really wanted,” he says of Predators at War.“My boss knocked his chair back, then there were lots of hugs and handshakes. We had two tables there. My parents and family were there, too,” notes Jernigan, whose father, Dr. Robert Jernigan, teaches at CAS.

Jernigan’s job as visual effects artist on Predators at War entailed using high-tech computer graphics to show, well, the wild in African wildlife. For example, “They would go out and shoot a lion roaring and they would want to depict the lion’s roar in the air as heat waves, as if you’d see the distortion in the air,” he explains.

“There were a bunch of maps, too, with a hyena clan and a pride of lions and a pack of wild dogs in the battlefield where conflicts occur… so [I’d show] a bunch of satellite views of infrared lions approaching the hyenas.”

Many of Jernigan’s graphics are not for the faint of heart: He helped create images revealing how animals would look with their skins peeled off, to show their muscle makeup; and the roughness of lions’ sandpaper-like tongues, able to lick flesh from bone. Then again, he also helped bring to life the excellent eyesight of lions, able to see by starlight.

Jernigan says he worked many 10- and 12-hour days on the Emmy-winning documentary, and several other interesting productions since, but he loves the job. “It’s so fun and creative. I really enjoy creating something from scratch and expanding it... You learn so much when you work on different shows. Right now I’m working on a show about a hydroelectric dam in Iceland. We just did a show on the Panama Canal; and I was involved in the Gospel of Judas show earlier this year."

Despite the fascinating worldwide locations of the projects he’s worked on thus far, Jernigan hasn’t had the pleasure of traveling anywhere exotic as part of the job yet. He stays put at his computer, he says.

Jernigan notes he didn’t know he wanted to do visual effects when he started at AU. He had taken three years of photography in high school and thought he wanted to edit or direct films. Then, he got an internship at National Geographic for credit his first semester senior year. “They had enough work that they hired me part-time during my second senior semester, then they hired me full time after that. I graduated on Sunday and started on Monday,” he says.

It was Jernigan's boss, Ricardo Andrade, who got him more involved in visual effects. "He’s really more of a best friend than a boss," notes Jernigan.

-Melissa Reichley

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