Council Biography

The Secret Lab
Senior Visual Effects Supervisor

Hoyt Yeatman is the dynamic force behind The Secret Lab's innovative visual effects. He has contributed to the conception, design, supervision and production of special effects for more than 100 motion picture, television and commercial projects. He was also one of the original founders of Dream Quest Images, an Academy Award-winning visual effects company.

Yeatman's conceptual and innovative approach to special visual effects embodies his commitment to high quality creative, technical and visual performance. He has always been drawn to the visually artistic and the technically complex and the challenge in blending these two worlds seamlessly.

His dramatic use of miniature and underwater bluescreen photography in the 1989 film The Abyss won Yeatman an Oscar for Best Achievement in Visual Effects. Most recently, Yeatman was visual effects supervisor on Mission to Mars. He was also visual effects supervisor on Academy Award-nominated Mighty Joe Young, as well as feature films The Rock and Crimson Tide. In March 2000, Yeatman and the Eastman Kodak Company were honored with a Scientific and Technical Achievement Certificate from the Academy for their joint development of a new visual effects film stock, SFX 200T. Additionally, he has directed special attraction films for Warner Bros. Recreation, Sony Wonder, Imax Corp. and Samsung.

Yeatman attended UCLA where he studied animation and film. After receiving his Bachelor of Arts in 1977, Yeatman joined the effects crew of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, an experience which springboarded him into work on the animation and special effects for NBC's Laugh-In specials, Buck Rogers and Battlestar Galactica. Following this, Yeatman was recruited by the production team of Paramount Pictures for Star Trek: The Motion Picture, the first of a series of highly successful films based on Gene Roddenberry's television series phenomenon Star Trek.

It was on this film that he and the co-founders of Dream Quest first met and planned the creation of their own visual effects company in 1979. Dream Quest Images was acquired by The Walt Disney Company in 1996 and became The Secret Lab, the digital production studio of Walt Disney Feature Animation, in 1999.

Yeatman has been invited to be a guest speaker at seminars and conferences throughout the country, as well as in Canada, England, Japan, Italy and Monte Carlo. He states that one of the pleasures of his work is to combine the challenge of creating seamless visual images with the pure enjoyment of finding the solution for complex film visuals.

"My one real love will always be film," Yeatman says. "I truly enjoy my work - it presents physical, emotional and intellectual challenges in a most unique and ever fascinating way."