QA Technical Artist, then Software Engineer, 2019 to 2021.
I’d already worked on both Lazer Team films from the vendor side at two different studios, MoontowerVFX and Mighty Coconut, before I ever worked here. This industry is smaller than it looks.
I started on render farm infrastructure and on regression testing the pipeline tools, which turns out to be a fast way to learn a pipeline. You find out where it breaks before you find out what it does.
In May 2020 I started a pilot pipeline on Shotgun Toolkit and did the bulk of the work on it. Premiere Pro had no Toolkit engine at the time, not from Shotgun and not from anyone else, so I built one off the After Effects engine and got it running.
The rest was tooling the artists would actually touch. A framework wrapping ffmpeg, so everything in the pipeline encoded video the same way and the encoders, filters, presets, and text overlays lived in one place instead of copied across six scripts. A Maya playblast tool rebuilt as a Toolkit app, so it published straight to Shotgun instead of an artist uploading by hand. A publish-to-render hook in Nuke that sent the job to the farm. The Unreal animation ingest tool moved into the Toolkit Loader so it stopped being a separate thing to remember.
The pilot never reached production. Would’ve been cool. Life is like that sometimes.