About the role
Company Overview
For more than 35 years, Bardel Entertainment has been growing and evolving, yet at our core, we remain grounded in the creative roots of the craft of animation. Our pursuit of fresh ideas, techniques, and technologies is driven by the belief that together, through creativity and collaboration, we can accomplish anything. The company offers an environment that empowers artists to experiment, learn, and contribute to exciting projects.
Role Summary
As a Lighting Artist, you will play an essential role in bringing our animated worlds to life. You will help shape the visual mood, atmosphere, and storytelling impact of a feature animation project by partnering closely with creative and technical teams and contributing to work that meets a high standard of artistic and production quality.
Responsibilities
- Create and refine lighting setups for characters, props, and environments in Blender, ensuring shots meet the project's artistic vision, visual style, and storytelling goals.
- Collaborate with other departments to optimize lighting and scenes for rendering, ensuring efficiency while maintaining visual quality and consistency across shots.
- Work closely with the CG Supervisor, Leads, and other departments to maintain continuity of lighting, shading, colour, and mood throughout the project.
- Identify and troubleshoot technical issues related to lighting, shading, and rendering in Blender, and implement creative solutions to overcome them.
- Work within established lighting templates, tools, and workflows, contributing to improvements where appropriate to enhance efficiency, consistency, and quality.
- Manage lighting and rendering tasks, including setting up appropriate render settings and passes, optimizing scenes, and ensuring efficient render times.
- Conduct rigorous quality-control checks to ensure that final shots meet the project's artistic and technical standards, with particular attention to the visual quality and consistency of the stylized look.
Requirements
- 3+ years of professional experience as a Lighting Artist in the animation or visual effects industry, with feature animation experience strongly preferred.
- Working proficiency in Blender, particularly lighting and rendering within a production environment, is an asset.
- Experience working with established lighting templates, production pipelines, and workflows; experience with Blender-based pipelines is an asset.
- Strong understanding of colour theory, composition, cinematography, and lighting principles, with the ability to apply them to stylized animation.
- Strong understanding of materials, shading, render settings, and the relationship between lighting and look development, preferably in Blender.
- Familiarity with compositing workflows and software such as Nuke or equivalent.
- Experience or interest in stylized animation.
- Availability to start as soon as possible for an 8-week engagement.
- A professional lighting reel demonstrating strong work in Blender is a bonus.
Compensation and Benefits
- Pay Range: $1,600 - 2,000 CAD per week.
- Final salary offer considers education, qualifications, certifications, experience, skills, geographical location, and business requirements.
- Flexible work environment.
- Extended health and wellness benefits from day one.
- RRSP matching program.