Michael Heagle is a filmmaker and educator whose former students are working throughout the visual effects, animation, and motion graphics fields, and include artists and supervisors at such name-brand facilities as Industrial Light and Magic, Double Negative, MPC, Weta Digital, and Marvel.
Michael has been making movies since the fifth grade, starting with Super8 (processed at Kmart and projected on a bedsheet) and running the gamut from 16mm to S-VHS to DV to HD. In 1999 he directed his first feature, a shot-on-film, direct to video comedy that was released by Troma Entertainment. He has since written and directed Transylvania Television, a nine-episode adult puppet comedy series for regional broadcast and streaming, and has worked in various post-production capacities on music videos, Blu-Ray special features, and feature documentaries. In 2017 he served as animatics editor on the Daytime Emmy-winning animated series Danger & Eggs for Amazon Studios. He is the author of two books on 80’s movie fandom, “Synthesizers and Saxophones: Montage Pop and Musical Movies of the 1980s” and “Class of 1988 – Fright Film Annual.”
Michael has been in higher education since 2000 and serves as Director for the Animation & Digital Media Program at the University of Wisconsin, Stout. He holds an MFA in Animation and Visual Effects from Academy of Art University, and a BFA in Film from the University of Wisconsin, Milwaukee.