Awards —
Emmy: News & Documentary
Webby: Film & Video
Tribeca Storyscapes Award
Tribeca Immersive Narrative Award
Exhibitions —
Museum of Modern Art New York
The Barbican
Sundance Film Festival
Tokyo Photographic Art Museum
Artist Residencies —
Eyebeam
Microsoft Research
Yamaguchi Center for Arts & Media
CMU STUDIO for Creative Inquiry
James George is an Emmy-award winning artist, entrepreneur and computer scientist. He is CEO and Co-Founder of Scatter, a creative technology company that develops the original volumetric video capture software Depthkit.
James is a pioneer in volumetric video experience creation and software tool development.
Scatter’s product Depthkit is the most widely used tool for creating volumetric video human holograms. First launched as an open source beta in 2011, Depthkit has enabled tens of thousand users to create volumetric video. Today, Depthkit serves a vibrant community of global enterprises and creative artists alike. James is the primary inventor on Scatter’s patents granted by the USPTO that represent Depthkit’s foundational intellectual property for volumetric video technology.
He served as Executive Producer for Scatter’s virtual reality title Zero Days VR which won the first News & Documentary Emmy awarded to a 6DOF Virtual Reality experience. He was nominated for a second Emmy in 2022 for The Changing Same VR, for which he also acted as Executive Producer.
Prior to founding Scatter, James was the first Artist-in-Residence at Microsoft Research in Redmond. He co-directed CLOUDS, the first virtual reality documentary to utilize volumetric video for human holograms. CLOUDS premiered at Sundance New Frontier in 2014; won the Tribeca Storyscapes Award for Transmedia that year; then toured globally before its exhibition at the New York Museum of Modern Art in 2016.
James coined the term ‘Volumetric Filmmaking’ in his 2016 essay A New Dimension in Filmmaking to distinguish the creative artform from the underlying volumetric video technology. Volumetric filmmaking has been recognized as an important emerging medium by the world’s most influential film festivals, arts organization and largest technology and media companies including Microsoft, Google, Meta, Intel, WarnerMedia and Verizon.
Immersive Media Credits
CLOUDS, Co-Director
Sundance New Frontier 2014, Tribeca Storyscapes Award for Transmedia 2014
Zero Days VR, Executive Producer and Technical Advisor
Emmy News & Documentary: Original Approaches 2017, Sundance New Frontier 2017
Blackout, Executive Producer and Technical Director
Tribeca Storyscapes 2017
The Changing Same, Executive Producer and Technical Advisor
Emmy-nominated News & Documentary: Oustanding Innovation 2021. Sundance New Frontier 2021, Tribeca Festival: Best immersive Narrative 2021.
Selected Press & Interviews
James George on Creative New York - Museum of Modern Art
Virtual Reality: The Wearable Movie - New Yorker Radio Hour, WNYC
Tech As Art: Case Study - National Endowment for the Arts
When Virtual Reality Competes with Reality - BBC Click
James George Interview - XR Must
Inventing Volumetric Filmmaking - Shaping Business Minds Through Art Podcast, The Artian
Democratizing Volumetric Capture with Scatter’s Depthkit: The History, Evolution, & Future of Accessible Volumetric Filmmaking - Voices of VR
Stuxnet Documentary ‘Zero Days VR’ Wins an Emmy - Road to VR
Cracking the Narrative Code of VR with the Interactive Documentary Genre - Voices of VR
The Groundbreaking Volumetric Filmmaking of Scatter - Filmmaker Magazine
Computational Photography Is Ready For Its Close-Up - PC Magazine
A Rikers Island Doctor Debuts At Tribeca Film Festival, With Help From This Artist-Led VR Company - Forbes
What Only Artists Can Teach Us About Technology, Data, and Surveillance - The Stranger
Is It Art? Artists Are Turning Their Work into Startups - Vice
Inside Microsoft Research’s First Artist-in-Residence Program - Fast Company
The Art of Creative Coding - PBS Off Book
At Eyebeam, making art from the technology that tracks our every move - The Verge
Selected Writing & Lectures
Expressing Our True Likeness in the Metaverse with Volumetric Video - Medium, Essay
Brief History of Volumetric Filmmaking - Medium, Essay
A New Dimension in Filmmaking - Medium, Essay
Volumetric Filmmaking: Democratizing A New Medium - FirstMark's Hardwired, Lecture
Imaging the Future - Eyeo Festival, Lecture
CLOUDS Director’s Tour - Eyeo Festival, Lecture