The Portfolio of Michael Talarico
I have been in the business of making captivating and appealing images for Film, Televison, and Interactive Entertainment for more than 25 years now in a variety of capacities. They have all been highly colaborative undertakings and the teams of people involved have been both large and small but always in an environment of enthusiasm and creativity with a shared desire to make the best visuals imaginable. The work has been diverse and fascinating, we have created worlds that have ranged from the fantastic to the realistic, from deep in outerspace to deep in the Earth's oceans and many places in between. Some of these projects have been fortunate enough to have won Academy Awards, others have won Televison Emmys or Video Game awards. Some of these undertakings have been with me as an artist or technician, and others have been under my supervision, and some of them have been just me making images on my own. I like working in all of these capacites.
Welcome to my site, I hope you like what you see.
-Mike

Lego Universe PC MMO

As the Visual Effects Lead Artist for Lego Universe I worked closely with the Art Director to bring his vision of this groundbreaking MMO forward.  The visual effects for Lego Universe tried to maintain a certain graphic quality to them yet still maintain a realistic kind of movement.  Thus, even though the texture work that was done for “fire” might not look exactly like fire, because it moved in a realitic fashion then we could get away with strong graphic representations of “fire” and it made for very storng visuals.  

Additional to these duties, as the Lead it was my responsibility to oversee the creation of the entire VFX pipeline.  I worked with the game engineers to make tools that will allow artists to make visual effects that are both attractive and can be iterated upon quickly.  The images below represent the thousands of visual effects that I and my team of artists made.


The Spinjitzu Cast VFX in the Crux Prime Level
Racing on the Gnarled Forest Race Track
Nimbus Plaza Infected by the Maelstom
Crowd Particle Minifigs in the Nimbus Station Racing Level
The Winter Race Track
The Dragon Boss Fight in The Forbidden Valley Level
The Maelstrom Facility in The Forbidden Valley, VFX by Drew Goheen
The Fire Spinjitzu cast in The Ninjago Level
The Barron VFX by Cassie Brubaker
Interior of the Spaceship
Battling the Ronins in The Forbidden Valley Level, VFX of the Ronins by Angelo Vildesol
The Imagination Beam in Nexus Tower
The Spider’s Lair in Avant Gardens
The Concert Area in Nimbus Plaza