CG Pro Community 

A letter from the founder

When I was in my freshman year of high school, I went through a bit of a rough patch after being fired from my first job at fifteen.  My mother arranged an internship for me at the local public access channel.  The self-esteem boost of working at the station for four years helped steer me to major in film in college and then get a great job doing visual effects at the University of California, Santa Cruz.

As my career bloomed, with key roles on major motion pictures, I have repeatedly found myself being one of the only women in the studio working as an artist.  Fortunately, I was blessed with having some great mentors supporting and teaching me through my career.  However, there was then and still is an obvious gap in the availability of educational opportunities, post-grad mentorship, and race/gender participation in the production and post production industries.  

The world of filmmaking and visual effects is changing rapidly due to advances in software, hardware, and cloud computing technologies,  These new elements open an amazing opportunity to work on addressing the inequalities, and striving to bring a diversity of viewpoints, cultures, and perspectives to our education system, AI models, jobs, and potentially to our very existence.  

CG Empowers, a non-profit organization, was born out of my and my colleagues’ aspiration to broaden the mix of students taking courses at CG Pro, an Unreal Authorized Training Center, that would subsequently bring more diversity to the industries we are serving.  In furtherance of this aim, we are now seeking funding to build focused training and scholarship programs to meet this need.  We welcome your support in this important endeavor.  

Jackie Cooper

Co-Founder of CG Pro