Lighting Club #06 – Pro Tips

Hullo everybody

New lighting club and this month it will be a bit different – routine could be boring I know right – cause we had a great opportunity ! We talked with different lighting TD, lead lighting, lighting supervisors, CG supervisors, managers and more, from vfx and animation studios in the world. We wanted to ask them only one question : “ Talking about your carrier, If you could give one advice/tips about lighting/lookdev/human aspect, in one sentence, what would it be ? ”.

For this, we tried to have the larger panel of people : new in this industry or with a lot of responsibilities, in feature animation or in vfx, manager or artists, women or men, young or less young, lighting or lookdev side, big or less big studios, worldwide… And you are probably lucky enough to know some of them !

It is just wonderful to had this chance to talk to them about lighting.  And here we are with their answers, we hope that could inspire you or at least help you !

“ Keep it simple ! ”

Christophe Brejon de Lavergnée – Senior Lighting Artist at Illumination Mac Guff – Paris/France

“ Never forget to work your lookdev from distance and not only close ups, as it’s more likely you will render your asset from far away. ”

Claire Michaud – Lighting Supervisor at Framestore – London/UK

“ Reinforce your graphic culture by taking an interest in the great artistic movements of painting such as impressionist, classicism, romanticism, orientalism… to mention only those. ”

Damien Pierlot – Mid Lighting TD at ILM – London/UK

“ A moment I really like in lighting, is when you try weird things by playing with lights and gobos within the interactive render. And sometimes, you can find some really cool accidents that you couldn’t really imagine in advance. ”

Benoit Lecailtel – Mid Lighting TD at MPC – London/UK

“ Starting to build your network from the first projects is essential because the wider and richer it is, greater the opportunities will be. ”

Simon Loisel – Senior Lighting TD at Method Studio – Montreal/Canada

“ If you enjoy spending time working at your desk, don’t become a supervisor. ”

Britton Plewes – CG Supervisor at Framestore – Montréal/Canada

“ Try and keep your ego out of your work: it is important to be dedicated and give your best, of course, but keeping a certain emotional distance will help you handle retakes and notes more easily.
When lighting, I usually try and stick to practical lighting : for an outdoor scene, I’ll use a simple sun/sky system (sometimes an HDRI if needed) – for indoors lighting, I’ll start with whatever light sources are in the room, and will only add stage lights if I can’t get away with what I have. ”

Mickaël Riciotti – Senior CG Generalist at ILM – Vancouver/Canada

“ Learn from your mistakes, it’s okay nobody is perfect and it’s always good to push yourself more every day.

Learn about the people surrounding  you, every people you worked with have their own point of view,  understanding that is already a huge step aside.

Try to optimize. We have more shots every day and we are in constant need of artist. The only way to get through is to set-up and optimize the show as much as possible  so you can run it smoothly when the time is done. ”

Alexandre Corbé – Lead Lighting at Framestore – Montréal/Canada

“ Read and share Lighting Club articles to your friends. ”

Wesmo – Lighting Club creator

Such good advices ! We really wanted to thank all the people who participated to this participative pro tips article, we get so many answers we are glad of it. Welcome to the Lighting Club to them !

We hope you enjoyed. We promise you awesome stuffs soon in the next Lighting Club articles, keep posted 🙂

WesmO.

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