David Altenau: the power of pixels
Purdue engineers are famous for launching into space — but only one Boilermaker has built spaceships for Captain Marvel!
David Altenau (BSME 1988) is the founder and chairman of the Pitch Black Company, a visual effects powerhouse whose empire stretches from Star Wars to Barbie to Indiana Jones.
David grew up in Cincinnati, Ohio, and like many Midwesterners who excel in math and science, had eyes on Purdue. “My oldest brother went to Purdue, majoring in industrial management,” remembers David. “So I was very familiar with the campus. When I enrolled, I started in industrial engineering, but eventually switched to mechanical engineering.”
While at Purdue, he dabbled in robotics and mechanical systems, but was really drawn to computers. “We had to build a PC, which I think ran on CP/M 80,” he said. “I also had a class in vibration dynamics, where we built a model of a four-story building and used sensors to monitor the resonant frequencies. Those control systems foreshadowed how I eventually used computer-generated imagery to create fully digital versions of movement.”
Having done a co-op at General Motors, David was convinced that his future lay in designing industrial processes for a major manufacturer. His two main job offers upon graduation came from aerospace manufacturer General Dynamics, and potato chip maker Frito-Lay. “I came real close to making potato chips the rest of my life,” laughs David. “It was actually fascinating to see potatoes go in one end of the factory and chips come out of the other, without ever being touched by human hands. I figured as a process engineer, I’d be well-equipped to make potato chips or fighter jets!”
He ended up doing neither. In 1989, he joined a California-based company specializing in forensic engineering. “Attorneys hired this company when they needed engineers to reconstruct the scene of an accident,” said David. “When they testified in a courtroom, they often used computer animations to visualize their testimony. I joined as an entry-level engineer, and began learning computer animation.”
While computer animation tools in the late 1980s were nowhere near the complexity of today’s systems, the seeds were definitely planted. “So many visual effects artists in Hollywood got their start in the Bay Area, because that’s where all the software was developed,” said David. “In movies, everything has to look good. But in forensics, everything has to have a factual basis, since we were recreating a scene for legal purposes. It was a great hybrid of engineering and animation.”
David eventually moved to Chicago, where he focused less on forensics more on computer graphics. As a visual effects artist, he helped to produce 3D animations for TV commercials. He also developed particle simulators — software code that enabled complex computer animations of organic objects like water and fire. When his company went under, he had a choice: stay in the Midwest and keep making commercials, or try to make it in Hollywood. “By the mid 90s, there were so many opportunities in the computer graphics industry,” he said. “I moved to LA, and the rest is history.”

Silver Screen
David’s first big opportunity came at Warner Digital (a division of Warner Brothers), with the Arnold Schwarzenegger action film Eraser. “Arnold had this really cool rail gun, which shot out blue streaks,” David remembers. “That’s exactly the kind of thing I did, creating those particle effects. By a total coincidence, I also worked on Arnold’s next film, Batman & Robin, where his character Mr. Freeze also had a unique gun that shot freeze rays. It was a very complex particle-driven fluid system with many layers. I worked on that film for more than a year, and wrote all kinds of software that simulated movement within different coordinate systems. It’s probably the most technical thing I worked on in my Hollywood career.”

He also quickly learned the realities of Hollywood when Warner Digital shut down in 1997. “My first four companies all went out of business,” laughs David, “so that’s one way to move your career along!”
He landed at Pacific Title/Mirage Studios, working as digital effects supervisor on the HBO miniseries From The Earth to the Moon, which featured a unique Boilermaker connection. “When you see Neil Armstrong and Gene Cernan flying to the Moon, that’s our computer graphics,” David said of the famous Purdue grads. “We did 13 episodes, and my team was nominated for an Emmy for that work.”
He then moved on to Cinesite, a division of Kodak, where he was the digital supervisor on the first two X-Men films. His engineering experience came in handy working on Thirteen Days, a Kevin Costner film about the 1962 Cuban Missile Crisis. “That was my favorite movie I ever worked on,” David said. “There’s a sequence where the U-2 spy plane is shot down. We used a combination of computer graphics, along with filming an actual 12-foot model plane. I had fun geeking out about the math of what the Earth would look like at 60,000 feet, so we didn’t have to render more than is necessary.”
Off the Box
After Cinesite went out of business, David became an independent visual effects supervisor. “In my business, we call that being ‘off the box,’” David explains. “The folks sitting at computers doing the work are ‘on the box,’ and then there’s a supervisor ‘off the box’ who coordinates and directs tens, or sometimes hundreds, of artists.”
He turned his focus to television, serving as visual effects supervisor for the CBS military series The Unit. “In feature films, effects teams typically form around one project and then they’re done,” David said. “I wanted a company where we could just keep rolling from one TV show to the next.”
That company was FuseFX, which David founded in 2008. From a team of ten, it soon grew to 40, and then hundreds of people — split between New York, LA, and Vancouver. Their first big hit was the ABC series Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. “That was Marvel’s first television show,” David said. “We did all sorts of animations for them: spacecraft, weapons, cars. They had this giant cargo plane called ‘The Bus,’ which we animated to take off vertically.”

FuseFX truly found their niche with “prestige television” — television shows raising their aesthetic to match what appeared in movie theaters, which required an increasing amount of visual effects. David had worked on series like this for HBO, such as Carnivále and Deadwood. Soon, his company were tackling dozens of episodic shows for networks and streaming services.
This culminated with an Emmy win in 2015 for their work on the FX serial American Horror Story: Freak Show. “We had an actress playing Siamese twins,” said David. “We would shoot each scene twice, which her playing both heads. Then we would ‘stitch’ them together with digital skin. There were times when we were like, ‘we’re not sure we can do this.’ But we kept working at it, and kept trying different techniques until we got it done.”

A New Pipeline
“I came to Hollywood as an engineer,” David said. “I became an artist, but I always drew from my engineering background. The visual effects pipeline is just like that Frito-Lay factory: raw materials come in one end, a finished product comes out the other, and it’s important to engineer your throughput to be as efficient as possible. We’re just making pixels instead of potato chips!”
David also had eyes on the pipeline of his business. He saw that diversification was the best hedge against the volatility of the entertainment industry. So in 2018, he sold most of FuseFX, and transitioned into a new role overseeing a series of mergers and acquisitions, acquiring visual effects companies in Australia, India, Canada, Colombia, and Spain. In 2022 the global conglomerate rebranded as the Pitch Black Company, with David serving as chairman.
“We’re now in six countries, and have about 1,500 employees total,” said David. “We’ve built a very deep bench, and our clients love what we can deliver for them.”
And it shows. Pitch Black’s filmography over the last few years is a who’s-who of the finest films and TV shows in the business: Barbie, Captain Marvel, Deadpool & Wolverine, Indiana Jones and the Dial of Destiny, Loki, Star Wars: Andor, Stranger Things, The Boys, The Umbrella Academy, Yellowjackets, and many many more.

“One of the things I love about the business is that it’s a complete balance between right brain and left brain,” David said. “It’s very technical, and you’re using some of the most complex software in the world. But at the same time, you need to know what a good picture looks like: composition, integration, lighting photography.”
And that balance began in West Lafayette. “Believe it or not, everything I’ve ever done relates back to the engineering principles I first learned at Purdue,” he said. “Restate the problem, break it down into its components, list your assumptions, and then solve the problem. Breaking down problems like this became a fundamental part of the way I think, whether it’s creating visual effects or running a company. Applying that to the broader aspects of our business has been really gratifying for me.”

Writer: Jared Pike, jaredpike@purdue.edu, 765-496-0374