I became staff at MPC a few weeks ago! I'm very lucky to have had the opportunity to work on a full CG christmas advertisement, lighting stuff explode, and a live action/ CG game cinematic trailer so far. Working in VFX makes me realize how much I don't know about lighting! (and CG in general!) I've gotten the chance to hang out with people who went to SVA and SCAD and have helped me gain a different perspective about being a CG artist.
Being a lighter/generalist at MPC NYC is a very interesting and fun job! I get to be part painter, compositor, and technical problem solver. In my early days trying to do lighting in college, I thought that lighting to make a pretty picture would begin at Lighting and end at Rendering. Now,my process to making a render is to make materials in CG react to light in a convincing manner, light it, render out passes, and push it further in compositing. Then it is a back and forth trying to balance out each phase to achieve the final polished result. Many times there are headaches trying figure out issues in rendering, especially since we are using Mental Ray ( At school we used Renderman for Maya).
Working in commercials is very high stress and lots of overtime. Luckily its paid and time flies by very quickly! The deadlines are very fast and you could be working on multiple projects at the same time. You really have to pick and chose what parts to make really nice and what parts to spend less time on. The cool part is that its like a new learning experience every other day for me. Coming from doing just full CG work, I now have the opportunity to learn VFX skills as well. Freelancers are always coming and going and you have the opportunity to meet a lot of interesting and unique artists. Getting a chance to go out to lunch and hear their stories is such an interesting experience. The opportunity to work on many different types of projects is very rewarding.
Also recently, our film got accepted into Siggraph Asia! Also we were also finalists in the Adobe Achievement Awards!
