Spellbound (Netflix)
Lighting Assistant on Skydance Animation's feature film for Netflix: scene preparation, renders and quality control of the render layers that later live in the comp.
Watch the Spellbound trailer on YouTube ↗
What was my role?
I joined Skydance Animation Madrid as a Lighting Assistant on Spellbound, the studio's animated feature released on Netflix. I supported the lighting team during the final stretch of production: preparing scenes, launching and wrangling renders, and doing quality control on the render layers before they moved downstream to compositing.
What I worked on
- Scene prep — getting lighting scenes ready for the artists: correct assets, caches and setups in place so shots could be lit without friction.
- Renders — submitting, monitoring and re-queuing renders across the farm, keeping shot delivery on schedule.
- Layer QC — checking AOVs and render passes for errors (missing passes, NaNs, artifacts) before they reached the comp department.
Why it mattered for my compositing career
Working on the lighting side taught me exactly what happens to a shot before it reaches Nuke: how passes are structured, what can go wrong in a render, and what a comp artist should expect from upstream. That knowledge is the foundation of how I build and debug comp setups today.