Allan McKay (born May 1, 1982) is a Los-Angeles based visual effects supervisor and technical director. He is responsible for visual effects sequences in projects including Transformers: Dark of the Moon, Blade, The Last Airbender, Star Trek: Into Darkness, Flight, The Equalizer, and other films. He has also worked on several video games including Halo, Destiny, Call of Duty, Bioshock, Prototype, Half-Life, Team Fortress 2, and others. His studio CatastrophicFX is located in Los Angeles. Early life McKay began sculpting and drawing while young. He sold his artwork to friends so he could buy a second hand IBM 286 computer when he was 11 years old. He started using Deluxe Paint Animation and Animator Pro, populating entire games with his own characters. He developed an interest in filmmaking when he got exposure to POVray, Vista Pro and the 3D Studio R3 for DOS. He got his first big break working for Team Fortress Software working on Team Fortress 2. At the age of 18, he moved to Sydney to work for Ambience Entertainment. At 17, McKay started teaching advanced courses on game development and 3D animation at QANTM College, as well as evening classes on visual effects. During his time there, he became involved in building the curriculum for Queensland College of Art's Bachelor of Interactive Entertainment, the first university-level curriculum aimed for video games development. In 2005, he launched his own studio, Catastrophic FX. Within this company, he worked on dozens of game cinematics, TVCs and films. Career In 2009, McKay worked on an Australian-American science fiction horror film Daybreakers, as a senior technical director. Working on the film Priest, in 2011, McKay had to come up with a pipeline for doing a massive sequence of realistic explosions, at a time when that was not common. Michael Bay's Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011) brought on a challenge of building tools that would construct max files from scratch and FumeFX simulations from that. He used a combination of FumeFX and Karatoa, along with Max's built-in particle system Particle Flow. In 2012, McKay worked on Flight, directed by Robert Zemeckis, in which he created a giant plane crash which contained over 2,500 frames. In 2013, he worked on Metallica: Through the Never, as well as J.J. Abrams' Star Trek Into Darkness. He was an FX Animation and Simulation Lead on The Equalizer (2014), directed by Antoine Fuqua. Video Games At