Kat Mann

Head of Production

Kat Mann is Head of Production & Executive Producer at Milk, an Academy, Emmy and BAFTA award-winning visual effects company.

Kat is an experienced VFX producer who has worked on a range of feature film, TV and commercial projects all over the world during her 16-year career; with extensive experience managing VFX production.

Kat oversees all aspects of Milk’s production at its London studios. Milk’s roster of feature film and high-end TV projects currently includes feature film Four Kids And It and completed work earlier this year as lead VFX vendor on both Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s six-part TV adaptation of Good Omens for Amazon/BBC and YouTube’s sci-fi series Origin.

Kat joined the Milk team in June 2018 from ILM London, where she was VFX Producer on Jurassic World: Fallen Kingdom. Prior to this Kat held senior production roles at MPC, Image Engine, The Third Floor and Weta Digital.

Kat began her VFX career at Weta Digital in Wellington, New Zealand on the Lord Of The Ringsfilms, following a start in the film industry as an editorial assistant and animation cell painter.

Benoit Leveau

Head of Pipeline & Systems

Benoit Leveau is Head of Pipeline and Systems at Academy and BAFTA award-winning VFX studio Milk. Benoit joined Milk in August 2013 and oversees and all technical aspects of Milk’s studio facilities and pipeline. Milk creates visual effects for both high end TV and feature films such as Adrift; Annihilation; Kingsman: The Golden Circle; Altered Carbon (Netflix); Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them (Warner Bros.) and Origin (YouTube Premium) and Sherlock (BBC/Hartswood).

Benoit was instrumental in creating a groundbreaking Cloud rendering solution to process almost 80 million frames in just 10 weeks. This enabled Milk to create large-scale CG dinosaurs and their environment for UK special venue theatrical project ‘Dinosaurs In the Wild’. Since then he has overseen the upgrade of Milk’s pipeline to a completely cloud-based rendering solution, which was used extensively on feature film Adrift; YouTube’s new sci-fi thriller Origin and Amazon/BBC’s adaptation of Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s much anticipated Good Omens.

Benoit’s work was recognised at Autodesk’s Shotgun Pipeline Awards, held at Siggraph in 2015 for the creation of a ‘Smart publishing tool’ for Shotgun.

Before joining Milk, Benoit was 3D Pipeline Lead Developer at Prime Focus for three years. He worked on the launch of Prime Focus Film London, helping to design and build the VFX pipeline from scratch as well as the 3D tools and libraries required by productions including Dredd 3D, Mirror, Mirror, Total Recall, The Great Gatsby, andWhite House Down. During his time at Prime Focus Benoit also set up the company’s VFX pipelines, in both Vancouver, Canada and Mumbai, India.

Prior to this Benoit spent a year as Software Engineer at MPC, London where he coordinated the migration of the entire MPC software stack (300+ projects) to a new linux architecture/Maya version/Python version.Following an internship at Sony’s R&D facility in Tokyo, Benoit began his visual effects career as a C++ Developerat Paris-based software company e-on software, where he spent five years overseeing their Vue xStream product – an integration plugin for 3ds Max, Cinema4D, LightWave, Maya and XSI.

Benoit hails from the Champagne region of France and is a graduate of Télécom ParisTech, one of France’s leading engineering schools, where he specialised in Image Synthesis, Digital Television and Image Processing.

David Cook

Finance Director

David Cook (ACCA) is the Financial Director at multi award-winning, independent visual effects studio Milk. David oversees Milk’s financial affairs working closely with Will Cohen Milk’s CEO. His background in forecasting, analysis and system implementation within the media sector brings the experience required for Milk’s continued growth as the studio enters its seventh year in business.

David joined the Milk team in 2017 from London based accounting and business advisory company Thomas St John where he was senior reporting manager working with UK and international clients from across the music and media industry.

Prior to this, David spent seven years with Viacom International Media Networks in both the UK and Sydney, Australia, progressing through a variety of finance roles to UK Financial Controller for MTV, Comedy Central and Nickelodeon.

David holds a first class BSc in Accountancy with Finance and hails from Glasgow.

Clare Norman

Business Development Director

Clare Norman is Business Development Director at Academy and BAFTA award-winning independent VFX company Milk.

Clare was promoted to the role in June 2018, having been Milk’s Head of Production for three years – overseeing all aspects of Milk’s production for the company’s London and Cardiff studios, with a range of feature film and high-end TV projects including Alex Garland’s Annihilation; Balthasar Kormakur’s Adrift; Kingsman: The Golden Circle; Fantastic Beasts And Where To Find Them (Warner Bros.); Ben Wheatley’s High-Rise and Free Fire; Sherlock (BBC/Hartswood); Channel 4/Amazon/Sony’s Phillip K. Dick’s Electric Dreams; Altered Carbon (Skydance/Netflix) and The Alienist (TNT/Paramount).

Clare is a veteran London-based VFX producer who has worked on a wide range of feature film and high-end TV projects over her twenty year career; with extensive experience managing VFX production both on set and in the VFX studio.

Clare joined the Milk team in 2015 from Vine FX where she was VFX Producer and Head of Production, overseeing the production team and designing pipeline and production tools and forging relationships with new clients. Clare’s credits at Vine FX include BAFTA-nominated work on Atlantis series one and two (BBC). Prior to this, Clare was a VFX Producer at Blue Bolt where she ensured the smooth running of numerous feature film projects including Snow White and the Huntsman (Universal); Skyfall (MGM); Cloud Atlas; Long Walk to Freedom and Belle as well as BBC TV series Peaky Blinders (series one) and Great Expectations (BBC) which received a BAFTA Craft nomination for special and visual effects.

Clare began her career at Cinesite where she progressed to VFX Producer, eventually becoming a member of Cinesite’s management team. Clare was VFX Producer on three of the Harry Potter films as well as Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (Disney/Bruckheimer); X-Men: The Last Stand (Fox); Batman: The Dark Knight (Warner Bros.) and Bedtime Stories (Disney). Clare’s additional credits at Cinesite include Pirates Of The Caribbean: On Stranger Tides (Disney); Band Of Brothers (HBO) and The World Is Not Enough (Eon/MGM).

###

Çiğdem Worthington

HR & Business Affairs Director

Cigdem Worthington is HR & Business Affairs Director at Milk, an independent Academy, BAFTA and Emmy award-winning visual effects company. Milk creates innovative and complex sequences for the high-end TV and feature film markets with credits including Baltasar Kormakur’s Adrift; Altered Carbon(Netflix); Philip K Dick’s Electric Dreams; The Alienist and Neil Gaiman and Terry Pratchett’s Good Omens (Amazon/BBC).

Cigdem combines her role at Milk, in which she oversees the human resources and business affairs of Milk’s Fitzrovia based studio, with a career as a successful freelance writer. Just before joining Milk, Cigdem’s very popular blog ‘Kitty Tells It As It Is’ was optioned and is being produced as a film.

Before her most recent prolific writing stint, Cigdem was Business Affairs Manager at Rainmaker/CIS UK for three years, where she worked on visual effects projects for feature films including Slumdog Millionaire, Golden Compass, Inkheart, 28 Weeks Laterand The Da Vinci Code.

Cigdem began her career at Working Title Films as Business Affairs Executive where she worked for seven years, providing legal services for a variety of feature films including Notting Hill, Billy Elliot, Elizabeth and Captain Corelli’s Mandolin.

Jenny Burbage

PR & Marketing

Jenny has been working with Milk since its inception in 2013 to handle its launch publicity and is responsible for the studio’s PR and Marketing.

Drop her a line if you’d like a chat with Will Cohen and the team about what Milk is up to and the fabulous projects we’ve been involved with. Or if you have a project, festival or an industry event you’d like to tell us about or get us involved with.

Jenny has over eighteen years experience driving communications for broadcast, post production and entertainment media brands and content creators across Europe and internationally. She has provided communications consultancy to brands such as The Walt Disney Company, Viacom International Media Networks, Nickelodeon Consumer Products, youth consumer products brand The Extreme Sports Company, the MOJO music awards and Norwegian children’s entertainment brand City of Friends. Jenny lead the corporate communications team at Disney owned pan-European TV network Jetix Europe for five years.

Jenny began her PR career at the Jim Henson Company where she eventually headed up the UK PR team, with responsibility for special effects studio Jim Henson’s Creature Shop and brands such as pre-school hit Bear in the Big Blue House and The Muppets.