Written by Samantha Alvarez.
The wonderful delicious world of Ginger and the Vegesaurs is brought to colour through the lighting and dressing done at Cheeky Little. Part of what the Unreal Engine (UE) team here at Cheeky Little do is turn the grey animation we receive into colour, by adding lights, colour grading, and luscious vegetation to make our show the prettiest it can be.
Unreal Engine is a game engine and has recently been rising in popularity in the Animation industry. It is a real time 3D creation tool which is significantly different to other industry standard applications such as Maya. Real time means what you see in the viewport is what you will get in the final render and all updates are visible instantly.
Lighting and dressing is an essential part of the animation process. It adds visual appeal and helps bring the character’s acting closer to audiences. It’s one of the main drivers for delivering the emotional beats of a story.
Being a lighting artist on this show gives me great pleasure to let loose my creativity, experiment with lights, and explore different ways of visual storytelling.
I have the most fun when I’m given the task to light sunsets and add in those magical god rays. Of course, there are also some challenges with lighting such as keeping it consistent across multiple shots and characters, and ensuring that hook ups are working smoothly so as to not distract the audience from the story.
Dressing is another part of my job which I love just as much as lighting. Our 3D environments are always evolving as more creative and fun stories are being written for each new series. So almost every episode gets its own treatment. Having a background in illustration gives me confidence in dressing up an environment and using my composition skills to make the environment feel natural and non intrusive. I get to arrange foliage so that it draws the audience’s eyes to the subject and to give the environment a full and luscious feeling. I get to add little details that make it feel real like adding some leaves on the ground that might have fallen from a nearby tree, or a cluster of smaller stones near some bigger ones that suggest erosion.
Unreal is such a great platform to pick up many skills. I’ve been able to create tools and effects that improve efficiency in the lighting and dressing process. They’re technical challenges that I enjoy solving. One such example is animating the lights on the Pineapplesaurus’ scales. Typically an artist would need to animate each of the scales one by one. I was able to group the scales so that an artist would only need to work with groups rather than each individual scale, cutting the light animation process in half.
Sometimes doing this job doesn’t feel like work, Unreal is my playground and I get to play with colour, lights, and tools that feed my creative and technical brain. Ginger and the Vegesaurs is such a vibrant world so I think I’m in the perfect place.