Last year, Brad Stilwell worked with Animal Logic in Australia on Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga’Hoole, directed by Zach Snyders (300). This May he leaves for England to work with Aardman Animation on Pirates!, directed by Pete Lord (Chicken Run). 

Brad was part of an animation team of 600 on Legend, compared to the team of nine he usually works with at Sunrise Productions on Jungle Beat, their award-winning children’s animation series.

He says, “On Legend of the Guardians, I learnt how to light. Before I went, we didn’t have a lighting department or a lighting phase. We modeled it and textured it, rendered it and sent it to compositing. The whole lighting process on Legend blew my mind. We had 80 lighters.”

Sunrise’s Phil Cunningham says Brad’s time away is always a “big loss” to the Jungle Beat team but adds, “What you gain back in the long run makes it worthwhile.“

For example, Sunrise has reinvented their lighting process since Brad’s return.

Technical director Rudi Durand says, “We used to do a global lighting rig, so it was quite quick, whereas you actually need to spend time and craft each shot. Firefly, one of our latest Jungle Beat episodes, was a big paradigm shift for us, where we went from an episodic lighting model to a shot by shot approach. It’s a big decision for a producer, but once you see the shot by shot lighting you don’t want to go back.”

Phil believes this sort of global cross-pollination is key, which is why on Jungle Beat they’ve worked remotely with international animator Eric Lessard (Shrek, Madagascar). “It helps us keep in touch with what’s going on in the rest of the world,” he says.

Brad agrees. “There was so much I was exposed to, from the tricks and shortcuts that make life so much easier to workflow and asset management. Even if I can’t do it myself, I can say: ‘Wouldn’t be great if we can move towards this?’”

Kevin Kriedemann