Bill Westenhofer

Bill Westenhofer is an American visual effects supervisor. He worked for Rhythm and Hues Studios until its closure in 2013.  His hometown is Brookfield, Connecticut, where he graduated from Brookfield High School in 1986. He then earned a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science and Engineering from Bucknell University in 1990.  Westenhofer also received his master's degree at the George Washington University School of Engineering and Applied Science in 1995, where he studied the use of dynamics in physically based animation.  In 1994, he joined Rhythm & Hues as a technical director, and Westenhofer's lighting and effects animation work was featured in Batman Forever and numerous commercials. He was promoted to CG supervisor for Speed 2: Cruise Control and continued in that role for Spawn, Mouse Hunt, Kazaam, and Waterworld. His other VFX supervisor credits include Elf, The Rundown, Stuart Little 2, Men in Black II, Cats & Dogs, Along Came a Spider, Frequency, Stuart Little, and Babe: Pig in the City.  In 2005, Westenhofer supervised a team of 400 digital artists on The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe, which was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Visual Effects. Later, he would win both the BAFTA and the Academy Award for the 2007 release The Golden Compass and 2012's Life of Pi in 2013. Westenhofer also worked as a VFX supervisor for Wonder Woman and Black Adam.  His latest work is on Marvel Studios' Captain America: Brave New World.

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Data are -- hey, it's a plural -- subject to the limitations of their sources. (For example, TMDB search results currently max out at 20.) I am limiting myself to free data sources for now. (No, a "free trial" is not free.)

While much of the above data are retrieved directly from outside APIs and other such sources, data from American Film Institute (AFI) and British Film Institute (BFI) were manually entered the old fashioned way into a MySQL database. Re BFI I took the following liberties:

  • I added "runners up" to Top 10 lists, treating them as ties where applicable and numbering them accordingly at the bottom of each list.
  • Regarding those polls wherein "franchise" movies were submitted as one project until BFI's policy changed to regard them separately, I treated them as ties and renumbered the affected lists accordingly (e.g. the Godfather films).

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Filtering is applied here to film projects flagged as "adult" by TheMovieDB. Pending "popular demand" I am contemplating a login and profile system with preferences (such as whether to allow adult images to appear) and permissions (such as data entry).

Whereas the overall purpose of this website is to serve as a personal demo/portfolio/workshop of web and data skills, this Movies section is not meant to compete with or substitute for far more definitive movie websites.

Whether or not he still clings to an award which he won in 1986 as a film critic for his college's newspaper, Jeffrey Hartmann is not responsible for the texts of overviews and biographies supplied by external data sources.