I began on Shrek Forever After on October of 2008 as a Lighting Technical Assistant (or TA). I was hired as for this production directly out of graduate school. The TA position was very new at the studio and I was the first hired to work on Shrek. Much of my initial time was spent working with the CG Supervisors to determine what the role entailed.

An initial task given to me was Asset Validation. This involved testing all environment assets under three different lighting scenarios and rendering them out as a turntable. This was originally done by hand but when faced with over 1000 assets to handle I began working on a more automated method. After a few weeks of development I was able to create a python script that would set up all the lighting rigs and render nodes needed to do this for all assets installed in the shot. This cut the time needed to do asset validation to almost nothing. Originally it took nearly 30 minutes per asset to setup. With the script it took a few minutes to do over 50 assets at a time.

I wrote many more python scripts and plug-ins for the proprietary lighting package on Shrek 4. These included a distance calculator that would calculate the distance from the camera to a character's head and export the information to a curve used by the depth of field; and a candle plug-in that would create instanced lights that were bound to a flicker function with an easy to control falloff, which was useful in some castle scenes where there were hundreds of practical light candles.

I had many other responsibilities while on the show. These ranged from the creation of DI mattes, the installation of lighting rigs, troubleshooting issues for lighters, helping with getting final clean renders as well as lighting some production shots and consumer product images. These can be seen in the above poster of Fiona and the video below *Note: Only responsible for Rumpelstiltskin lighting in the section of the "Deal of a Lifetime"