About Me
Lighting Supervisor and Technical Director with over 10 years of experience designing and deploying scalable animation pipelines for world-class studios. Known for a creative problem-solving approach and rapid adaptability, I thrive on deconstructing complex problems and engineering the tools necessary to overcome them. I bridge the gap between creative goals and technical execution, developing robust Python frameworks and tools that empower hundreds of artists globally.
Experience
DreamWorks Animation
Lighting & Compositing Department Supervisor
Nov 2017 - Current
✅ Responsibilities
- Overseeing technical architecture, pipeline strategy, and quality standards for Lighting & Comp on all DreamWorks TV productions.
- Engineering robust object-oriented Python libraries which supercharge our development iteration speeds.
- Designing and developing Python-based software and tools deployed to hundreds of artists globally, utilizing PyQt, USD, ShotGrid, etc.
- Utilizing my deep knowledge of DCCs such as Maya, Houdini, Nuke, Unreal Engine, etc to realize new and creative workflows.
- Bridging communication between internal teams and vendors to align technical solutions with creative goals and ensure efficient production workflows.
- Managing an in-house team of lighting artists and TDs on day-to-day tasks and long-term R&D projects.
📈 Key Projects
- Developed a USD backed, sequence based lighting and rendering pipeline in a game engine for episodic production.
- Aligned multiple departments codebases to use our core libraries, greatly cutting down on similar and duplicate code.
- Transitioned the studio from a legacy color pipeline to ACES with OCIO along with P3 and HDR.
- Brought hundreds of thousands of lines of legacy code up to modern development standards including PEP8, logging, Python 3 compatibility, unit testing, etc.
🏆 Awards
- Advancing the DWATV Animation Pipeline award for my creation of the Lighting Handoff Tool which automated all steps in between Animation and Lighting.
- DreamWorks TechCon Team Initiative Award for my work on the DreamWorks TV Game Engine Pipeline.
Doodle Picture Studio
Lighting Technical Artist
Aug 2015 - Aug 2017
- Lighting, rendering, and compositing for various LEGO projects including story animations, product features, and key visuals.
- Look development, sequence lighting, and shot lighting with Maya, Redshift, and Fusion.
- Designed creative solutions for problems that arose in production such as memory limitations, volumetric rendering issues, etc.
Education
Cogswell College
BA Digital Arts and Animation
2011 - 2015
- Worked on student film projects including Trouble Brewing.
- Lead a team of artists on MediaWorks projects where we pitched and delivered short video projects for real world clients.
