‘Richard is one of the most accomplished animators’

ANIMATOR Richard Baneham, who is originally from Tallaght, won a BAFTA for special visual effects on Sunday, alongside his colleagues for their work on box-office hit ‘Avatar: Way of the Water’.

The talented animator and his colleagues have also been nominated for an Oscar for their special effects work on the film, and the winner will be announced at a ceremony in Los Angeles next month.

Richard is a past pupil of Old Bawn Community School and went on to study animation in Ballyfermot College of Further Education before moving to Los Angeles in the 1990s.

Now aged 49, Richard has built an impressive list of credits for his animation work on a number of Hollywood films, including ‘The Lord of the Rings’ trilogy and ‘The Chronicles of Narnia’.

Richard Baneham with Jean Hughes holding the BAFTA in Dominics Centre on Wednesday

However, he has worked on the ‘Avatar’ franchise since its infancy, having teamed up with James Cameron in the mid-2000s with the aim of bringing his ‘Avatar’ project to the big screen.

In doing so, Richard, who was an animation supervisor for the first film, and a crew of animators created the totally digital world of Pandora and its blue inhabitants, known as N’avi.

The technology that the crew developed was ground-breaking in the visual effects industry and audiences lapped it up.

Theresa O’Brien with Richard and his BAFTA in Dominics

‘Avatar’ became the highest grossing film of all-time following its 2009 release, and Richard also won a BAFTA in 2010 and collected an Oscar in the same year for visual effects on the blockbuster film.

Commenting after Richard’s Oscar win in 2010, then-arts minister Martin Cullen said: “Richard is one of Ireland’s most accomplished animators and winning this much-coveted award is a great personal success, and a further recognition of the talent available in the Irish film industry either working at home or abroad.”