Afonso Salcedo

Summary

I’ve spent my career making things or people look their best. A magical snowman, talking toys, robots in space, or even someone needing a LinkedIn headshot. After working on some film projects like Moana 2, Encanto, Frozen 2, Ratatouille, Up, Wall-E, and Toy Story 3 at studios you might’ve heard of (Disney, Pixar, and DreamWorks) I decided to apply my skills to make real people look as good as animated ones. These days, I love spending my time working in portrait and documentary photography. I really enjoy the opportunity to collaborate and work with individuals to create something authentically theirs. I find a ton of joy in the humanity and intentionality that photography embodies. Whenever I have a break between film projects, I spend the majority of my time with a camera. When not behind the camera, I continue freelancing as a lighting/compositing artist since old habits die hard. Last year I worked on Moana 2 at Disney, for example, and I am currently collaborating with a small team at Paramount working on something cool. I’m also exploring interactive and immersive storytelling, recently diving into Unreal Engine and Unity. And as that wasn’t enough, these past few months I learned Next.js, Vercel, and SwiftUI and created a fully-feature Web App to track real-time economic data in the US (https://butmyeggs.com), and also developed my first native iOS app for film nerds like me who love the Oscars. My not-so-secret superpowers include: • Portrait Photography: Making you look like the pro you are. • Cinematic Lighting: For animated princesses or your next headshot. • World Building: Because reality isn’t always enough. • Creative Direction: Leading teams while pretending to be a grown-up. • Workflow Optimization: Making processes run themselves. • Surviving Burning Man Art Installations Without Losing My Sense of Humor. Software Skills (if it’s intimidating, I’ve probably mastered it): • Maya, Nuke, Unreal Engine, Unity, Adobe Suite, Houdini Other Skills: • Color Theory: But I do love black and white too. • Cinematography: Lighting, you know? • Project Management and Creative Leadership: Spreadsheets, yay! • Programming (Python, SwiftUI): Mostly for fun. If you’re still reading (woah!), check out my work at https://afonso.me/ and subscribe to my musings at https://fonzieland.substack.com. Let’s create something amazing, or at least have a good laugh trying.