From Oscars to Emmys: Georgia Tech Alumni Transform Entertainment
By: Daniel P. Smith | Categories: Alumni Achievements
Alex Powell, CS 04, MS CS 05, and Bridgette Powell, CS 10
By the early 2000s, animation had come a long way from the days of Felix the Cat and Walt Disney. Computer-rendered images replaced hand-drawn characters. And the animation process, once the sole domain of creatives, became increasingly technical, even mathematical. While stirring more dynamic visuals, the shift created long, laborious projects and ignited industry-wide hunger for a more natural creative process for animation.DreamWorks Animation, the Universal Pictures–owned studio behind celebrated hits like Shrek and Madagascar, tapped Alex Powell to spearhead a fix.
Over five years, Powell led a team of 50 DreamWorks engineers, including his now-wife and fellow Yellow Jacket, Bridgette (Wiley) Powell, in creating the Premo character animation system. Stripping away the spreadsheets and recalculations, Powell and his team created a faster system that allows animators more time to refine their animations, iterate, and produce lively, high-quality results.
“Premo is primarily centered around this idea that if we can make everything interactive about animation, like interacting directly with the characters, you can judge a performance immediately and make tweaks,” Alex says.
While the Powells were not direct collaborators with each other on the project—Alex focused mainly on the front-end animation experience, while Bridgette served on the project’s optimization team—they often found themselves discussing Premo long after leaving the office for the day.
“It was living and breathing work, but that’s because it was such a fun project and such a massive endeavor,” Alex says.
Powered by collaboration, collective passion, and urgency—“There was no contingency plan,” Alex confesses—Premo enhanced the 2014 release of How to Train Your Dragon 2. At a special pre-release screening of the film in downtown Los Angeles, Bridgette marveled at the finished product. Premo unlocked a level of scale and complexity intensifying the action and propelling the film’s story.
“Seeing what the artists were able to do, from the scale of the dragons and size of the sets to manipulating dragons flying across the screen, was pretty phenomenal,” Bridgette says.
Over subsequent years, the proprietary technology has bolstered additional DreamWorks titles, including additions to franchises such as Shrek, Trolls, Kung Fu Panda, and The Wild Robot. Premo also garnered widespread industry attention and praise. In 2018, in fact, Alex earned an Academy Award for Scientific and Technical Achievement; the Oscar celebrates his contributions to the engineering and design of the groundbreaking animation system.
Even though the Powells have since left Hollywood, swapping L.A.’s entertainment scene for Silicon Valley tech jobs, the joy of unlocking creativity for animators and empowering them to elevate their work remains a shared professional triumph.
“We had this ability to go in and write something bespoke for a select group of artists, which became deeply personal and incredibly meaningful,” Alex says.
Omer Inan, Regents’ Entrepreneur and Linda J. and Mark C. Smith Chaired Professor in the School of Electrical and Computer Engineering
When the message from a generic AMPAS email address came his way in 2021, Omer Inan initially considered it junk. But AMPAS sounded vaguely familiar, so Inan opened the email and … “Immediate disbelief,” he recalls of reading the word congratulations alongside the iconic image of the Oscar statuette.
AMPAS—the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences—awarded an Academy Award to Inan and his former colleague, Countryman Associates President Chris Countryman. The honor for Technical Achievement hailed the duo’s work on sub-miniature lavalier microphones used in film and television, including the B2D, the world’s smallest directional lavalier. Over a six-year career with Countryman, Inan helped solidify the family-owned company’s foothold in the entertainment industry with various audio innovations designed to deliver crisp, clear sound for film, television, and stage actors, musicians, broadcast news anchors, and mic’d-up professional athletes. “Seeing our products used in these highly demanding environments has always been a thrill,” says Inan, who has folded his experience in the audio world into a prolific research and entrepreneurial career at Tech, creating wearable sensors for health.
Emmy Winner: Paul Goggin, Phys 91
Paul Goggin says most of his Tech buddies would have pegged him to become a college professor. Inquisitive and studious, Goggin majored in physics, intimidated by neither complexity nor theory.
But Goggin, who devoured science fiction and history books and minored in philosophy as well as science and literature, aimed to be more da Vinci than Einstein.
That personal mission shines in the present.
In 2018, Goggin co-founded The ABLE Channel to bring accessible, engaging, and accurate health information to the masses. He describes the pioneering streaming service as “Netflix meets healthcare”—a novel blend of consumer-facing content with a distribution focus on hospitals and insurance companies.
Leading ABLE has allowed Goggin to craft compelling stories reaching the mind and the soul. ABLE earned an Emmy nomination in 2023 for Together We Are Able, a 42-minute television special featuring stories of individuals with disabilities thriving in careers and redefining perceptions and expectations. And last year, Goggin and the ABLE team earned an Emmy win in the Societal Concerns—Long Form Content category, with Surviving Suicide: Stories of Help and Hope. The six-part series offers intimate stories of individuals affected by suicide, sharing powerful personal accounts of survivors—a single mother living out of her car, a teen who attempted suicide three times, and a military veteran stationed near the Pentagon on 9/11 among them—and those who have lost loved ones to suicide.
“We had many people warn us not to do a series focused on suicide,” Goggin says. “It was too touchy. A third-rail topic.”
Nevertheless, Goggin and his colleagues pushed ahead, recognizing suicide’s long, expansive reach. Each year, he notes, the U.S. sees 40,000 to 50,000 suicides in addition to 1.5 million suicide attempts. Surviving Suicide became a means to discuss suicide in a meaningful way while offering hope and guidance. The National Alliance on Mental Illness called Surviving Suicide a program capable of saving lives. “We designed the series to engage and uplift,” Goggin says. “The Emmy is nice, but the real goal is helping people.”
In addition to crafting a second season of Surviving Suicide, Goggin, a former Alumni Association board member and former chair of the College of Sciences Advisory Board, currently has about 30 projects in development at ABLE, including a program on young adult mental health and a multi-part series on diabetes. “We want to be the place where people can get health information and inspiration,” he says.
Emmy Winner: Steven Little, Mgt 06
After years of the Susan Lucci treatment—regular Emmy nominations without wins—Steven Little and his Turner Sports peers finally broke through when March Madness Live claimed a Sports Emmy for Outstanding Trans-Media Sports Coverage in 2018. In winning the coveted prize, the Turner Sports team topped nominees such as HBO’s Hard Knocks and ESPN’s MegaCast of the 2018 College Football Playoff National Championship.
A senior product designer on the award-winning project, which provided streaming access to all 67 games from the 2017 NCAA Division I Men’s Basketball Championship, Little contributed to the app’s visual design and user experience. He continued working on March Madness Live—and earning additional Emmy nominations—for the next seven years, helping to incorporate additional features, including an in-app bracket pick ’em game. Little was named as one of the “40 Under 40” in the Alumni Association’s 2023 class. “March Madness Live lives for only three weeks each year, but it consistently delivers year after year for fans,” says Little, who left Warner Bros. Discovery, Turner’s parent company, last year and is now working to accelerate the growth of Section 103, a licensed collegiate apparel brand he launched in 2021.
Emmy Winner: Vivek Maddala, EE 95
After years scoring music for serious dramatic films and documentaries, Vivek Maddala jumped into the animation deep end in 2016. Hired to write the musical score for The Tom and Jerry Show reboot, Maddala made an immediate splash, earning four consecutive Emmys for Outstanding Music Direction and Composition (2018–2021) for his work on the animated cat-and-mouse show featuring wall-to-wall music steeped in European Romanticism and 20th-century jazz.
For Maddala, the music of Tom and Jerry introduces children to complex harmony, melody, and rhythm, constructs that are scarcely found in the music they typically hear.
“The show gives children more nutritional value in their musical diet, which can be incredibly powerful and educational,” says Maddala, who also contributed musical scores to a pair of Peabody Award–winning titles (American Revolutionary and the PBS documentary Asian Americans).Beyond his work in film and television, Maddala also produces records, composes scores for theatre and dance productions, and performs as a multi-instrumentalist in Los Angeles–area bands.
“I mix it up, which is a constant opportunity to grow and evolve as an artist,” says Maddala, a former member of GT Jazz Ensembles.
Jeff Albert, associate professor and interim chair in the School of Music
Truth be told, 10-year-old Jeff Albert wanted to play the trumpet. He only picked up the trombone to fill a need for his elementary school band director.
“It was a complete fluke, but it’s worked out well,” Albert says. “The trombone fits me.”
Over subsequent decades, Albert, who moved to Atlanta and joined the Georgia Tech faculty in 2023, has carved out a decorated career as a master of the brass instrument.
Raised in New Orleans’ rich musical scene, Albert wrote horn arrangements and performed for many years with The Meters, a legendary funk band honored with the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award in 2018. He released experimental jazz records on U.S. and European labels. He performed on a track with U2, recording in studio alongside rock icons Bono and Edge. He also wrote the horn parts and played trombone on Bobby Rush’s Porcupine Meat, which captured a 2017 Grammy for Best Traditional Blues Album.“The community aspect of music, interacting with people and connecting with them through music, has always energized me,” Albert says.
Emmy Winner: Osahon Tongo, Mgt 10
Osahon Tongo considers himself blessed. Why? He savors his work as a producer/director at NFL Media, the National Football League’s media arm that includes the NFL Network, NFL Films, and NFL.com. “I’m exhausted but very satisfied,” says Tongo, who’s based in Los Angeles.
A defensive end on Tech’s 2009 ACC Championship football team, Tongo now combines his passion for football and storytelling at NFL Media.
He has earned acclaim for his work on NFL 360 and an assortment of short- and medium-form documentaries showcasing individual lives and stories though a football lens.
In 2023, Tongo won a Sports Emmy for Outstanding Edited Special for The Indelible Legacy of Jimmy Raye. The 35-minute feature told the story of Raye’s journey from segregated Fayetteville, N.C., to national championship quarterback at Michigan State to the NFL, where Raye became a trailblazing coach and mentor. Tongo was also recognized by the Alumni Association as part of the “40 Under 40” 2024 class.
“The opportunity to touch the human spirit with my work is such a blessing and something that gives me great purpose,” Tongo says.
