Laura Coover

Filmmaker & Director of Marketing at Orbital Studios 

Laura Coover

Filmmaker & Director of Marketing at Orbital Studios

Laura Coover is a filmmaker leading R&D at Orbital Studios, where she pilots and champions emerging production tools, including 3D Gaussian splatting and AI-accelerated previsualization, work she presented at Cannes Next 2026. Her focus is on putting tools once reserved for studio budgets into the hands of artists at every scale of production. An award-winning director, producer, and actor, Coover produced and directed the SoCal Fire Fund PSA with the Entertainment Industry Foundation, starring Academy Award winner Jamie Ray Newman. It aired nationally on more than $9M in donated ad placement and won a Gold Anthem Award. She produced and starred in the short film As Easy as Closing Your Eyes, winner of Festival Treasure at the Catalina Film Festival, where she also received an Award of Excellence for her performance. Her screen credits include Agent Carter, Castle, NCIS: LA, and the Sundance feature Another Happy Day. Her stage credits include work at Goodman Theatre, Writers' Theatre, Court Theatre, and American Blues Theatre. She is currently developing Luke, her first feature as director. The screenplay was a Finalist at the Dallas International Film Festival and was selected for the Stowe Story Labs Producers Lab.

Session Details

Panel Discussion | Expert StageThe New VFX: From Artists to Pipelines to Business14:30 - 15:15 Expert StageVFX is changing fast and has been under pressure for years, not only because of AI and the expectations around it. Global experts with decades of experience in virtual production, animation, photogrammetry and Gaussian splatting discuss where it goes next.

Hands-On Session | SEP 30 | Virtual Production StageSplatsMaxxing11:00 - 13:00 Virtual Production StageGaussian splatting is one of the most significant recent breakthroughs in real-time 3D capture. This session covers the R&D behind a production-grade splatting pipeline for virtual production, from capture and reconstruction through to deployment on an LED volume.