Duncan Brinsmead

Duncan Brinsmead has achieved great success as a musician and as a computer animator.

He is the  son of Dr. Alan and Aveleigh Brinsmead, and grandson of Percy and Fern Brinsmead. He was born in Edmonton, Alberta and is married to Anne-Marie. They have a son, Alan and live in Toronto, Ontario.

Duncan is a Principal Scientist and computer graphics software programmer and engineer in Research and Development at Alias Wavefront Inc.  In 2003 he won an Oscar an Academy Award for Technical Achievement for 3D Animation, Modeling and Rendering Production. He has been a pioneer in cutting edge CG (computer graphics) features for Alias' Maya computer graphic software product.  This is used by animation production houses worldwide for creating computer graphic effects in most major Hollywood movies, including The Perfect Storm, Spiderman, and Toy Story, to name a few.

Duncan attended University of Toronto, Faculty of Music from 1977-1980 as a French Horn performance major. He graduated with a Bachelors in French Horn Music Performance from the world renown, full-scholarship conservatory, Curtis Institute of Music, in Philadelphia in 1983. He received his Masters in Music Performance (French Horn) from Juilliard School of Music in New York City in 1984.

He married Anne-Marie Soucy in 1983. Anne-Marie is Associate Program Director of Arts at the Chang School of Continuing Education at Ryerson University. She has nearly two decades of experience coordinating bilingual certificate programs for internationally educated professionals. She has also been teaching at the university level for nearly 3 decades, and at Ryerson for the last 2 of those decades.

Their son Alan was born in 1987. He attended Trinity College School and enjoys filmmaking, computers and the media arts. 

In addition to being self-taught in many computer languages and in 3-D computer graphics animation, Duncan worked in the mid-1980s for Judson Rosebush Co., a production house in NYC and is an award recipient for his animation, "Fractal Fantasy", presented during the Animation Showcase at the 1988 international computer graphics conference SIGGRAPH in Los Angeles.

Duncan is a veteran animator (he worked on Science animations for educational programming at TVO in the late 1980s) and a classical pianist who is one of the musicians on the cutting edge of innovation in the world of digital musicianship, conducting with the aid of synthesizers, sound libraries and computers, his own interpretations of Brahms, Mozart, and Mahler symphonies that sound similar to Leonard Bernstein's performances with the Vienna or New York Philharmonic Orchestras.

If you would like to hear one of Duncan's symphony performances, check out his blog or email him at duncan.brinsmead@autodesk.com. He would love to own a Brinsmead piano someday!