Christopher Anthony(II)

Christopher is a writer, director, visual effects supervisor, stunt rigger/designer and professional mixed-martial artist. He is a fourth generation Nigerian-Lebanese. His mother was born in Beirut, his father in Port Harcourt, Nigeria. His paternal grandparents owned a cinema in Port Harcourt and survived the Biafran War. His brother and sister, grandparents and great grandparents were born and lived in Nigeria. He himself was born on October 1st, on his sister's 5th birthday and both share that date with Nigerian Independence Day. However, he is the only British-born member of his family. He grew up in Bournemouth and moved to London on his 19th birthday to study Mechanical Engineering at the acclaimed institute, Imperial College.

His mother worked at the Bournemouth Art Institute (later, the Art University) and at Bournemouth University where he would spend many Summers in the library reading books on art and animation or hassling the animation students. His father lived in Nigeria and distributed films there during the early days of Nollywood. He was surrounded by films and given unrestricted access to them. On long holidays in Kano, Nigeria as a child he would often stay in to watch films all day, too young to go out with his siblings. He first watched Full Metal Jacket aged 6 and many other classics that would give him a thorough but obscure film education.

Aged 10 he was taken to visit Jim Henson's Creature Shop some few months after Jim passed away. His love of puppetry and animatronics soon became a desire to work in CGI upon the released of Jurassic Park. It was simply more accessible for a 13 year old to learn. He taught himself animation and interned for The Jim Henson Company at 15. His first official job in London was for Hensons. Over the years he worked on a number of pioneering projects, developing the tools and pipelines that made London a world leader in VFX. The key turning point being Prisoner of Azkaban. He went on to develop perhaps the original atomisation effect seen in many films. This was originally for X-Men 3, later used to kill Voldemort and later copied many times over. In 2008 he moved to San Fransisco to work at Lucasfilm on Indiana Jones and became a BAFTA member soon after. After having a number of projects being nominated for BAFTAs and Oscars, finally as a senior technical director on the show, Jungle Book won both a vfx Oscar and BAFTA. Over the years he has directed various shorts and music videos for artists such as KT Tunstall and Younger Brother and moved into pre-visualisation to further hone his directorial and cinematography skills.

He began working closely with a long standing stunt crew and worked to develop a new system bringing stunts, camera, art department, vfx and virtual production under one roof. A system that has been successfully rolled out on a number of major motion pictures since. He continues to work on the design of key and complicated scenes in film and continues to pursue his directing and writing career. Outside of film he enjoys weightlifting, boxing, muay thai, wrestling, Mixed Martial Arts and Brazilian jiu-jitsu under Roger Gracie. He retired from professional MMA in 2010.