Headspace

Make It or Break It

My mission was to make the film look as good as possible for as cheap as possible. We pushed for thorough concepting and previs on every major sequence so no work got thrown away. While managing the team and leading the visual look, I kept optimising renders and workflows with Python tools, Houdini HDAs, and OpenCue distributed rendering, taking on far more than a typical supervisor role because this film was our make-it-or-break-it moment.

CG Supervision & Lighting

Supervised all CG departments except animation, ran dailies and weeklies, and personally lit around 80% of the film. Established the master look development (Redshift, later Arnold), surfaced multiple characters, sets, and assets, and standardised AOVs and render layers across the production.

Rendering & Pipeline

Built the production pipeline from the ground up in Python, Houdini, Maya, Bash, and OpenCue, with a Houdini SOPs + Arnold render pipeline developed alongside the Pipeline TD. Wrote caching and artist tools as HDAs and Hython scripts, and wrangled most of the film myself across 100 render nodes. Some passes rendered in Cycles or Karma; lentil lens simulation implemented with Zeno Pelgrims.

Compositing & Finishing

All compositing in Nuke, with multiple passes and shot finaling done myself across the film. Handled camera and layout, focus pulling for most shots, and 3D clouds for most day exteriors, built in three days. Also produced all marketing collateral and 3D branding lookdev.

Tools & FX

Developed HDAs for the Maya-to-Houdini Alembic pipeline, Arnold instancing, a procedural tree animator, an asteroid field generator, dynamic lighting for the brain sequences, and set rigs with adjustable, story-driven parameters. Also delivered pyro and Vellum shots under tight deadlines.

If you want to see more of my work on Headspace, just watch the film. I had my hand on every single shot in some way.