The Magician's Elephant
Animal Logic, Sydney | Lighting Lead
For the second half of the Covid lockdown I re-joined Animal Logic as a lead lighter for their first feature animation project with Netflix Animation. With Greg Jowle as the VFX supervisor and Herbert Heinsche as the Lighting Supervisor we were in superb hands to see the clients vision fully realised. Set in a fictitious post war time before the advent of electricity and with a mediterranian-esque village as the backdrop, we were mandated to create a soft painterly stylised look inspired somewhat by the artist Rebecca Dautremer. For the lighting department this meant refraining from having any obvious key light source or indicative shadowing, while still always maintaining volume and visual contrast for where the eye needs to go. So instead of relying on luminance based contrast, we ended up employing a lot of subtle hue based contrast in the lighting to achieve these results.
I had an awesome team of artists, 15 in total with some rotating out and some many time zones away, that worked on 13 sequences covering 586 shots. As I just come off a long stint with Katana and Arnold at Luma, I initially relied on senior lighters to cover the more advanced technical aspects of Filament and Glimpse (which had evolved quite a bit since i last used it) while I got re-familiarised. Besides doing shot delegation and tracking, I primarily gave lighting feedback through RV painting sessions, dispensed workflow feedback and investigated problematic shots and submitted tickets where necessary. I also took on the integration of the bg matte painting assets into our standardised Nuke template which were very visible on our sequences when Peter is flying above the city, in addition to integrating the post treatment on the overcast 'boba' clouds which are present throughout the film. I also took over shots from a few artists who departed the show, as well as more complicated or bespoke shots that needed a lot of comp trickery to get across the line.
The biggest general challenge by far was tuning shots for the goldilock zone of soft, flat painterly lighting that still retains enough directionality to provide dimensional interest but doesn't feel totally '3D'. To achieve this one needs way more than a skydome, so we had a plethora of generalised and customised lights at our disposal that were fine tuned in Nuke to achieve this look. Ironically we were fighting the beautiful innate light transport qualities of Glimpse, overriding anything that became too dark, too bright, too speccy etc, with other lights and passes that helped even it all out in comp. As each shot angle became a somewhat bespoke exercise we had to be vigilant about maintaining continuity across sequences, especially from different angles (I'm looking at your hair and jacket Peter!). In the end however we achieved what we set out to do as it largely came out gorgeous, and I am grateful to have been a part of the journey.
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