Kai Chang Email & Phone Number

Emeryville, Ca, Us

Berkeley, Ca

Pipeline development and support in a small shop handling VFX for a wide range of projects ranging from feature film to episodic to special venue. General development and support tasks for tools in Maya and Nuke. Built fur workflow for Yeti, handled a lot of show setup tasks, most critically color setups in OCIO, becoming the key color specialist at Tippett.

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Lighting work with occasional asset look adjustments for Hobbs & Shaw. Worked mainly in Clarisse and Nuke. Included lighting on FX elements like smoke and particles like rocks, debris, gravel.

Mostly lighting in Katana using Arnold and Pixar Renderman and in-house software package 'Zeno', with occasional work in fire/smoke and water drip/mist simulations also in Zeno. Regular participation in technical teams creating or maintaining pipeline-level or package-specific (Maya, Zeno, Katana, Houdini, Nuke) tools, generally coding in Python, often with GUI packages like Qt and FLTK. Also work with the Shotgun database API, developing for it and investigating its viability for somewhat unconventional applications.

Scripts and Tools writing. Majority of code in Python with various GUI packages, most recently PyQt, but also GTK, FLTK, and wxPython. Tool written were generally run via command-line, but also did tools work for Katana, Maya, Zeno, and occasionally Nuke and Shake. Some work in Maya using MEL and Python as well.Areas of development included automation of media creation, tools to assist with dailies, adding features to simulation software to allow it to run on our render farm, asset/animation check-in.Assistant TDs also pick up some shot production tasks as well to build up shot experience. I've done lighting for Transformers (2007) and The Last Airbender (2010). I even assisted with some animation for the Star Tours update we did in 2010, cleaning up matchmoves and doing some light ship animation.

Supported the Digital Matte Dept. Started as a Macintosh/Unix environment using primarily Electric Image, Form-Z, and After Effects to a Windows/Unix environment primarily in 3dsmax, Maya, and After Effects. Later on some artists used XSI and Vue. Supported desktop, render farms, and even some file server and web server machines on Macintosh and PC. Farm software included Autodesk's Backburner and a third-party system known as Smedge. On the Macintosh side we had internal software that scheduled/allocated render farm jobs.

Berkeley, Ca

Technical support work at Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley, which included its Statewide Database project which handles voter information often used during redistricting.General support ranging from systems administration to web site maintenance on Unix. Some desktop IT support on office systems on Windows. Also some database work with GIS databases used for redistricting.

Setup and troubleshooting of artist and administrative Macintosh hardware and software at ILM. Includes Machine builds, setup/troubleshooting of CG Software and conventional office software, backups, etc. Mostly Mac OS 9, but beginning to pick up Mac OS X at the time. I actually also had extensive Unix and Windows experience, which was a plus in many situations.

Rotten Tomatoes was actually an internal project at web design firm Design Reactor, where I started work. As the site grew popular, the entire company shifted focus to that.Web development for RT website primarily in PHP interfacing with a MySQL DB. Included some Perl work. Built tools to help production staff input data and create pages and various features on the site and transition the site to run from a database instead of a bunch of HTML pages. Being a small startup company, we were all involved in discussions on product development and general conversations about the movie industry. I wrote reviews a few times myself.

Bachelor Of Arts, Psychology

Activities and Societies: Oakes College, worked at ICL.

Bachelor Of Science (Incomplete), Mechanical Engineering

Incomplete. Interrupted by father's death, then work in the dot-com startups of the late 1990s!

Education record

Coursework for modeling, animation, rendering, and compositing in After Effects and Maya.

Art - Painting

Formal training in acrylic painting.