Rich Thorne

Rich Thorne was born in New York City and moved to Los Angeles at age ten. Upon graduation with a degree from the Film School at Cal State Northridge, Rich Thorne began his film career as an editor and compositor for The Post Group, working with Ampex Corp, Quantel Corp and Abekas Video Systems to design and build the early predecessors to today's CG compositing and graphics systems. With CG, compositing, and paint system technologies, Thorne designed systems and techniques that allowed television shows like Star Trek: The Next Generation, Max Headroom and Pee-wee's Playhouse to be shot on film and with visual effects composited on video. This made it possible to bring high-end visual effects to the television industry at a significantly lower cost with faster turn-around than traditional optical visual effects techniques. Star Trek veterans Peter Lauritsen, Dan Curry, Rob Legato and Fred Chandler approached Thorne and The Post Group in 1984 to attempt to recreate select VFX shots fro