I started on Puss in Boots as a Lighting TA in July of 2010. This was during pre-production in lighting. I worked closely with our lead lighters and supervisors during this time to develop the rig structure and setups. During this period I also worked to develop a view templates for our proprietary lighting package, Light. I maintained this throughout the production and updated it when new needs arose.

As a veteran TA and the first one on the show I was given the task of bringing the new TAs up to speed on the show. There were also several new TAs hired to work on Puss in Boots who I served as a mentor for. This included working with training to get them up to speed, helping them with the initial workload and being there for any questions that might arise during thier time on the show.

Puss in Boots was the first show at the studio to use Nuke. Because of this we had no method for delivering DI mattes, I worked with our supervising TDs and developed a method for creating these mattes. This was used for the remainder of the show but was eventually augmented when the studio hired compositing supervisors. I also developed some Nuke gizmos early on to simulate nodes we had in our previous compositing software. These helped make the transition easier for lighter's who were unfamiliar with Nuke.

One of the biggest challenges my team met on the show was the Giant's Beanstalk. The biggest challenge was getting translucency to work. We had recently started using point based translucency and were running into issues due to the size of the beanstalk. After many iteration I was able to find the proper settings to get the right look while preventing memory limit issues. This was a challenge primarily because the adoption of point based translucecny was so new the ability to augment setting as well as general knowledge was quite limited. Once this was solved we were able to complete the sequence without much issue.

During the show, I was promoted to the position of lighter. I still helped with many TA tasks and assisted the remaining TAs with questions but my primary focus was production lighting. My production lighting included work in Hotel Room, The Storeroom, The Planting Site, Outside the Giant's Castle and The Moat. Some of these were completed while I was still a TA. My work can be seen below.