Olly Glenn

About

Hi, I'm Olly! I'm a technical director who's always looking for ways to combine my experience as a software engineer with my skills as an artist to solve problems and put out fires, no matter where they pop up in production.

On the software side, I've worked as a Unity developer and as a driver engineer, and on the artistic side, I recently finished solo-producing a mixed 2D/3D animated short called Whittled Down for my college thesis. I loved every aspect of the production process, but my favorite part was building out my own custom suite of tools to make the project possible. Whether I was building quality-of-life plugins to enhance my workflow as an artist, writing submission scripts for the render farm I jerry-rigged from some old laptops, or designing my own style of displacement map to achieve the film's unique 2D/3D look, I was always happiest when I could draw from both my artistic and my engineering experience to solve challenging problems.

As I often said to myself when production got tough: I wouldn't do this if I didn't love it, and if it was easy it wouldn't be fun!

To see a comprehensive list of all the tools I've built, including those relating to algorithms, pipeline, workflow, and game engines, check out my tools page. I also have a page for my lighting and compositing work, and the games I've developed.

Articles

When I finish a particularly complicated or interesting project, I like to write out articles to document my process and act as a sort of postmortem. If you're curious about how I approach production, these are a great place to start!

They're in the Room With You: The Immersive Audio of FEEDING_LOG_01172014 describes the way I synchronized real-time game events with prerecorded video in my game FEEDING_LOG_01172014.

Designing a Game With No Graphics: The Design Challenges of Follow My Voice discusses my approach to designing a first-person game where players navigate entirely based on sound.

Whittled Down: An Overwhelmingly Thorough Breakdown is a comprehensive summary of my short film Whittled Down's production. It dives deep into every step of the process, from my approach to storytelling to the technical challenges of mixing 2D and 3D animation.

Contact