Hi Subhash! Can you tell us a bit about your background?
At the beginning of my career, I worked as a software developer then I thought about my actual passion, which is not really engineering. I always did the creative side of any event that happened at my college, so I knew myself to be more into the creative side.
After completing my engineering degree, I joined a software company. Then, accidentally, I found an advertisement for the Toonz animation six-month training program that propelled me toward my true passion. Ballistic Publishing and 3DM3 chose one of my digital creations in 2006, which gave me confidence in the creative sector.
After that, it was a long journey through 15 years of different roles in the visual effects, advertising, and animation industries. That enabled me to work as a VFX generalist for a while before opting to pursue a career in lighting and progressing through various roles. I was a lighting supervisor on a number of films, including White Tiger, 100, Ambulance, Sweet Girl, and Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery. Currently, I am part of Technicolor Studios as a VFX lighting trainer.
In addition, I’m highly inspired by paintings using both conventional and digital techniques. I am spending my days exploring and learning new tools and techniques that help me grow further.
What drew you to Lighting?
I was very interested in photography and cinematography, so I was given the opportunity to work on-set advertisements while working at Real Image Studios in Dubai. I was initially hired as a 3D generalist at that firm. After a while, I used to accompany the team to gather all lighting data, and while working on a shot, I could see how much attention they were paying to lighting, and I was a part of all production discussions, which gave me an idea of what lighting really required.
Because lighting is such an important aspect of the filmmaking process, this has the ability to tell the story of a shot without narration. I also feel much more confident when working on a lighting task because the on-set experience drives me. This helps me to visualize my output and judge the type, size, and exposure of the light being used for that specific shot.
Films like The Golden Compass were a great inspiration for me to step into lighting as well. I believe this is one of the best films in which the fur and lighting production quality were extremely great for its time.
How would you explain what Lighting in VFX is to someone who has never heard of it?
The most important role of lighting in films is communicating with the audience through the right mood and emotions. It is critical to convey the scene’s mood by describing how the characters should feel at that time. For example, bright and colorful lighting creates a cheerful mood, whereas dark and shadowy images invoke feelings of mystery.
So lighting is actually incredibly important in all aspects of film production and it has a strong sense of visual storytelling without saying any dialogue. If you could change the colors, position of the light, and sometimes even the absence of light, the audience would receive context clues about that particular scene. Because in every lighting condition, there is a boundary to define what they really want to tell us.
Lighting is heavily used in character development and can easily communicate various emotions with well-utilized brightness and shadows, making the audience care more intensely about the actors in that shot. And that’s the most obvious way to define the film genre. If the scene is well lit, perhaps it’s a comedy or a romance movie. On the other hand, genres like film noir have made excellent use of high light ratios, where your subject is placed in light and shadows will lead to different shades in the film. Any filmmaker will benefit from good composition and lighting.
Explain what you did for Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery?
I was the lighting supervisor in that movie. The movie was a challenge to work with, and there is a big glass onion structure with multiple conditions like night and day. The tricky part is that inside that onion there are a number of glass structures with light-casting properties. So, in a night scene, the transmission will be more complex to work with, and that is why the render time is drastically increased. And different lighting optimization techniques, scattering setups and ray count adjustments will help us cut down the render time to some extent.
And the team was given additional challenges, such as this glass structure being dispersed at night, which meant that the FX elements and interaction passes would be a little overloaded, so there were 23 shots in that sequence. We prepared a lighting config to set up all 23 shots and light rigs at once, managed by a single artist, and get it done in 3 days.
It was a wonderful experience for me to work with a small group of artists and very little production time.
Talk us through one or two of your favorite projects from Technicolor Group
My all-time favorite is The Jungle Book. There is an emotional attachment to this movie because this TV series of The Jungle Book really inspired me during my childhood. Because we didn’t have many options for cartoon series during my school days, I eagerly await Sunday’s telecast of Jungle Book on the DD national channel. And this TV series somehow inspired my drawing, because I always take time to draw Mowgli along with his friends in front of a moon. I can still say that this piques my interest in the animation side.
After a long wait, in 2016 The Jungle Book was released, and I was most excited to see that movie on its release day itself. I admired the technicality of the visual effects because the CG wolf and all other fur-based CG characters interacted so closely with the main character. Additionally, the rainy-day fur behavior really surprised me, so I spent some RND on myself to get an idea of how things will work in the fur system.
Managing a large number of CGI animals and their expression is greatly emphasized in the movie. MPC’s in-house tools, like animating muscular structure, deal with the character and push it to the photorealistic side. And the composition of each frame, along with the lighting, gives this film layering and depth in each character. I imagine this film is a reference for many new filmmakers.
What’s your favorite thing about being a part of The Academy?
I know the visual effects industry is evolving with different pipelines and toolsets every day. So, The Academy is the best option for seeing and learning about those changes.
We have fantastic, well-balanced sessions that will prepare the candidate for production. We interact with people from all over the world inside the team, as well as with our great industry veterans, whenever we need to. The team’s diversity allows us to meet people from different parts of the world with different cultures, which helps us adapt to team spirit and improve communication skills.
So, if you’re looking for a better career in visual effects, I’d recommend Technicolor Academy as your best choice.
