Stefan Grambart (Moderator)

Stefan is an award-winning creative thinker who has built a career on creating visual storytelling and interactive narrative experiences. With twenty years of combined experience across film & television animation, computer gaming, and digital media, Stefan has worked on numerous award-winning entertainment projects and properties.

Martin Bradstreet – “Chiaro and the Elixir of Life”

Martin Bradstreet grew up in a small country town in Western Australia, where he’d wake up at 4 am before school to play Starcraft against American players, unsatisfied with the local competition. After making some noise at the World Cyber Games playing Warcraft 3, he noticed many top players had moved on to playing Internet Poker. A few years later, he had dropped out of a Computer Science degree, and was playing the highest-stakes poker games in the world. This gave him the opportunity to pursue his passion for art — and eventually dive headfirst into the paradigm-shifting world of VR game development. In 2016, Martin co-founded Martov Co. with Jay Rosenkrantz, with the goal of making Chiaro and the Elixir of life a reality.

Blair Renaud – “Technolust”| IRIS VR

Blair Renaud is everywhere in VR. Founding three successful VR start-ups, including IRIS VR (a VR game studio); Quantum Capture (creating photo-realistic digital humans); and Occupied VR, one of Canada’s leading VR client service companies. He is currently is working on the sequel to the critically acclaimed VR cyberpunk adventure, Technolust.

Paloma Dawkins – Creator “Museum of Symmetry” | NFB

Montreal-based Paloma Dawkins is a cartoonist and self-taught animator turned virtual reality and videogame artist. Known for her fantastical landscapes inhabited by strange and lovable characters, Paloma strives to create games that are surreal and beautiful. Her past work includes the technicolor rainbow graphic novel Summerland, the minimalist and meditative rhythm game ALEA, and the psychedelic explore game Gardenarium.

She first came to work with the National Film Board of Canada through its Hothouse animation mentorship program, which resulted in Scientifiq Piqniq, an animated adventure through the cosmic unveiling of the beautiful and strange macro/micro structures that unite us with the Universe.

Paloma’s most recent NFB project, Museum of Symmetry, is an “other-dimension” VR adventure game that disrupts conventional game storytelling to take players on an absurdist romp through the highest clouds to the ocean deep.

Lee Vermeulen – Creator “ModBox” | Alientrap

Dustin Freeman – Creator “Sparasso” | Escape Character

Dustin is a veteran of building interactive experiences on new platforms. After running an improv theatre company, he did a PhD in Computer Science and Theatre, interning at Microsoft Research on realtime scanning technology for the Kinect. While working for a couple years in Silicon Valley on game design for AR and VR, he kept doing digital theatre projects on the side. He founded Escape Character to build platform and content to connect performers to players.