This all started due to my fascination with the small box like machines we all know as computers today. Born and brought up in a small town in India known as Lucknow, I got my first computer at the age of nine. Back then Internet was mostly unheard of in India and I remember my Dad describing it to me as a tool which will “allow us to travel all over the world just by sitting in our chairs”. Though we still have to see if this statement ever comes true, I was certainly intrigued and so I started off.
Hmmm.. so what should I do on this machine? Thinking for about a year on this very question and a lot of fiddling around, I came up with a website of my own at the age of eleven. Not surprisingly it was about aliens and all the cool science stuff (you can see where my love for sci-fi movies comes from).
Back when I was small, I always wanted to be a scientist, much akin to Dexter from Cartoon Network. But then this brought me to a very different point in my career. I became a web developer. After finishing a two year intensive program in web development I got picked up for a part time position at a studio in the age of thirteen. Fighting off monsters in school and sitting with geeky guys writing computer codes for the next four years I decided to step into the third dimension.
My boss gave me a copy of 3D Studio Max 4 and told me to make a walk through for a client. Since none of us knew how it worked the help file became my best friend. After countless hours of reading and sweating in the Indian summers polygons started turning into cubes and cubes became walls, then we threw in a camera and voila! We had a somewhat shitty walkthrough. Gladly the client liked it and I ended up being stuck in the third dimension. Then the craze about visual effects started and Lord of the Rings came out. Watching all the beautiful visual effects my heart melted again and I wanted to do effects for films rather than building web pages.
School was almost over by then and I embarked on a new journey to pursue my dream in 3D. I decided to move to New Delhi where I did my graduation in 3D animation and multimedia at the Birla Institute of Technology, which was the only place in the country offering a graduate degree in animation at that time. And once that was over I bid adieu to my new found friends, most of them who are not doing anything related to 3D now, and took a 21 hour flight to Vancouver where I finished my specialization in Visual Effects at Vancouver Film School.
So after setting out to becoming a scientist I have finally made it to being a visual effects artist. I think Mr. Fuller was right after all.
I am currently a Senior Lighting Artist and have just finished working on the amazing Lego Movie at Animal Logic in Sydney. Previously, I have been involved in a large amount of diverse projects and have had the opportunity to try different roles in this field. From pre-viz artist, to modeler, to rigger, to fx artist, to a compositor and last but not least as a lighting TD.