Mortal Combat

Love and MonstersDora and the Lost City of GoldI had the pleasure of leading the lighting teams using the skills I learnt during my career as a lighter. As challenging as it's been working on a brand new pipeline, it's also been incredibly satisfying. Some of the biggest challenges were completing shows on a reasonably small render farm, that was also competing with bigger shows on at the same time. We've had to keep the resources to an absolute minimum, while creating some really beautiful work. The teams have consisted of quite a number of junior lighters. Getting them up to speed via docs and trying to harness their skills and strengths has been a great learning experience. We've been running Katana and are finally up to the stage where we can run sequence based rendering. To say we've come a long way would be a huge understatement. We've had to figure out how to shade & render many different fx sims, how to manage departments updating via usd without the help of shotgun, and we've had to figure out how to run a show during the pandemic while navigating working from home. It pulled the team closer together and I feel very lucky to have been able to work with the people on my teams. I regard them as close friends via the experience of working with them at Mill Film.

Weta Digital Wellington, NZ. • January 2006–18 I worked as a Lighting Technical Director. Over the years I have had to keep up to speed with the constantly changing technology of the Weta Digital pipeline, from using PR Man through to Manuka, XPalette, and Katana. I've learnt lighting techniques to match cg characters and environments to plates. I have been lucky enough to work with some of the best people in the industry, especially when it comes to character lighting and I have learnt techniques as to how to beauty light them for Academy Award winning cinematography. We had many inhouse meetings on how to achieve the best look for film, how to create good composition via Rembrandt beauty lighting, lighting for the eyes, telling the story with light and how to make frames scintillate via source lights and silhouettes. The biggest challenge has been rendering the frames out at the highest possible quality, in stereo whilst only using the minimal amount of data possible on the render farm during high pressure deadlines and deliveries.