About / Elliot McKenzie
More than 10 years in professional production, including five years leading teams and departments.
Artist / Designer / Technical Director
I am Elliot McKenzie, working as Zura. I am a motion designer and VFX artist with more than 10 years of professional industry experience, including five years leading teams and departments.
My practice sits where image-making meets technical problem-solving. I can shape the frame, build the simulation, composite the result and engineer the pipeline around it, with expert-level practice across 2D motion, 3D, VFX and AI production.
Houdini, Blender and ComfyUI are central to how I work. I am especially drawn to procedural, node-based systems that solve complex production problems once and keep making the whole team faster.
Background / Practice
The beginning
I began creating long before it became a profession. Photoshop CS3 was my first serious creative tool, and the instinct to experiment, learn and push beyond a program's intended use has stayed with me ever since.
Motion
Editing gameplay, custom camera angles and music introduced me to rhythm, cinematic movement and the emotional weight of a cut. It was also where motion design, filmmaking and technical invention first became one practice for me.
Tools
I coded modifications, injections and visual tweaks that added keyframed camera moves and deeper image control to games never built for filmmaking. That work became a significant part of the Call of Duty editing scene, remains credited and used today, and helped inspire later generations of custom movie-making tools.
Leadership
As a teenager I led Mount Arcadia, a team of talented editors. It was an early education in creative direction, standards, feedback and helping ambitious people do their best work, all of which still shapes how I lead today.
Now
Today I work deeply in Houdini and ComfyUI, designing node-based production systems and tackling advanced physics simulations, including custom solvers and communication across solvers. I approach each challenge with the future in mind, building a reusable answer instead of a one-off fix.
Expert in 2D motion, 3D, VFX and AI production pipelines.
ComfyUIDesign, animation, compositing, typography and edit rhythm.
Modelling, lighting, look development, procedural systems and rendering.
Simulation, integration, effects development and final compositing.
ComfyUI workflows, automation and custom production pipelines.
Approach