John Grower

John Howard Grower , is a visual effects artist and has been the head of the special effects company Santa Barbara Studios (SBS), which he founded in 1990 and operated until 2002, and has worked, while operating his company, on several Star Trek productions, which included the television series , , as well as the , , and . Long before becoming CEO of SBS, he did, in an otherwise unspecified role, made an early uncredited contribution to the Star Trek franchise, while working in the employ of Robert Abel & Associates (RA&A) on , or as he has put it, "I started in the late '70s in Hollywood and even worked a few months on the first Star Trek." ()
John Grower has been interviewed on several occasions for various magazines regarding his, and his company's work on Insurrection. These interviews were published in, among others, Star Trek: Insurrection - Official Movie Souvenir Magazine, American Cinematographer, and Cinefex.
Grower received an Emmy Award nomination for his work on Star Trek: Voyager in the category Outstanding Individual Achievement in Graphic Design and Title Sequences in , shared with Dan Curry, Erik Tiemens, and Eric Guaglione.
==Career outside Star Trek==
Starting out his motion picture industry career at RA&A, John Grower has, beside his work on The Motion Picture, worked as visual effects coordinator on (1982), Prior to forming SBS, he served as director of production at the computer software company, Wavefront Technologies, which later merged with Alias Research to form Alias|Wavefront. It was their CGI software package, "Maya", that became the package of choice for SBS. 
While operating his company, John Grower has outside Star Trek, worked as visual effects supervisor on productions such as the short documentary Cosmic Voyage (1996, along with Eric Guaglione, Kathi Samec, and Mark Wendell), (1997), and (2000), while he has, on personal title after the closure of SBS, worked as digital effects artist on (2002) and (2004).
More recently he worked as visual effects supervisor for Cinesoup on (2006), (2008), (2008), (2009), Something Borrowed (2011), and (2009).
== Star Trek interviews ==
* "Stellar Phenomena", Eric Frederickson, Star Trek: Insurrection - Official Movie Souvenir Magazine, 11 December 1998
* "Effecting an Insurrection", Ron Magid, American Cinematographer, January 1999, pp. 40-46
* "Visual FX", Larry Nemecek, , February/March 1999, pp. 52-59
* "Lost in the Briar Patch", Kevin H. Martin, Cinefex, issue 77, April 1999, pp. 68-95
== External link ==
* 
Grower, John
Grower, John