Back in 2007 I started my journey as a lighting and texture artist working on VeggieTales, growing up with Silly Songs with Larry, of course I couldn't turn this opportunity down! On top of lighting my assigned shots, I also textured and shaded props, costumes and sets such as buildings for villages, all keeping to the cartoon style VeggieTales is known for. For a list of episodes I worked on, feel free to check them out here.
Moving away from cartoons, in May 2012 I worked for Weta Digital on various shows including "The Hobbit - An Unexpected Journey", "The Hobbit - The Desolation of Smaug", "The Hobbit - The Battle of the Five Armies", "Iron Man 3", "Dawn of the Planet of the Apes". This involved providing technical support to the Lighting Department, testing, debugging and lighting shots with light rigs and from scratch, rendering all the needed passes as well as assisting with look development.
After Weta, I worked at Illoura in Melbourne on Ted 2, then jumped back to Wellington to work at Park Road Post, where I learned more about post production in Nuke. Here I enhanced plate lighting, de-aged characters, added muzzle flash, blood splatter, all the fun stuff that Fargo season 3 required.
In October 2015, my husband and I made the decision to move to Vancouver Canada, as I wanted to seek out new opportunities and wanted to grow my knowledge and skills of software and pipelines in a new environment. There I started working for Digital Domain as a lighting artist, and worked on a list of films including "Deadpool", "Beauty and the Beast", "Spider-Man: Homecoming", "Avengers: Infinity War", "Thor: Ragnarok" (city and ship renders). Cinefex magazine featured my shot of Thanos on their magazine cover. Working closely with other departments, especially the compositing team who are all under pressure of deadlines and client notes, has given me great understanding of the work flow within the pipe line, the huge importance of communication and an eye for detail.
Wanting to broaden my knowledge and take on a more creative task in the field of Lighting, I decided to work for Sony Imageworks on “Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse” This was the first time I've worked on a full Animation Feature since working on VeggieTales. While adapting to Sony’s Katana, I had to change my view on lighting from physically accurate to a more general painting with light and color creative approach.
Matching to colour keys or concept art in 3d is something I loved doing, especially as we had to take something in 3d and make it look like a 2d comic book. I also learnt how to composite my own shots and put them together for stereo. For Spider-Verse, this was especially challenging as we had to bring in a lot of treatment such as hatching and dots you would normally see in print.
Returning to Digital Domain in 2018, I continued to work on Marvel vfx shows and even had a fun game cinematic for “Apex Legends- North Star”. The cinematic was a styalized piece we rendered with toon shaders and collaborated with Electronic Arts, we needed to match their look with Maya Vray. I truly appreciate the small team we had bringing this project to life, collaborating and coming up with new ideas as it was outside of Digital Domain's usual pipeline, so we had to adapt and find solutions together. The project "Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore" introduced me to Houdini, due to Covid and only 80 people being allowed on set, we were tasked with rendering the crowds that would normally have been there, along with set extensions. There was a lot of interactive lighting from various elements, so I had to learn how to optimize shots to get them through the farm on time.
2022 I moved on to a small studio called Barnstorm VFX, where I was hired as a Senior Lighting Artist. I was the sole lighting artist working working on "One Piece", where I was responsible for setting up lights for large and small ships, their lanterns and window lights. This is where I began using Arnold render engine and working with a studio that is still developing it's pipeline. The studio moved the pipeline over to Houdini, where I worked on "Echo" and "Deadpool and Wolverine" in the Houdini Arnold Pipeline, working closely with the FX artists for car glass shattering and rain/water on road fx. Quite often we weren’t supplied with a plate to fill in the blue screen, in the example below I threw in a car asset, animated it with lights and tweaked the glass and water lookdev. Optimization was key here for getting renders out on time with refractions and specular highlights without any noise.
Before I started my career, I studied at Lifeway College graduating with my Diploma in Advanced 3d Animation.
I continue to pursue my creative interests outside of work, film medium format photography (Mamiya RB67 pro-s) , digital photography, Unreal Engine, 100 days of Python. When I’m not at the computer I’m hiking, skiing or working on one of my many garden projects.