Lok Hwa

Lok Hwa

Lighting Artist/TD with strong technical background

Lighting Artist / Technical Director / 14 yrs

Los Angeles, CA

Hire Me

Lighting artist for marketing

Penguins of Madagascar (2014)

Kung Fu Panda 2 (2011)

Kung Fu Panda Holiday (2010)

Shrek Forever After (2010)

Turbo (2009)

Lighting Artist

Monsters vs. Aliens (2009)

Kung Fu Panda (2008)

Layout TD

Over The Hedge (2006)
Demo Reel 2015
Experience in lead lighting/lighting for feature animation working on visual development/shader development, rig and template creation for lighting/compositing, and pipeline tools. Also experience with layout/previz and editorial pipeline workflows.
Work History

  • technical director

    DreamWorks Animation

    September 2015 - Present

  • layout TD

    DreamWorks Animation

    July 2015 - Present

  • 3D pipeline developer (freelance)

    Saatchi & Saatchi

    March 2015 - September 2015

    Pipeline developer working in a team to develop in-house tools and scripts using Python, PySide, QT and JavaScript in Maya, Nuke, Shotgun and Photoshop. Developer environment using PyCharm/GIT extensions/GITLab/Upsource

  • Lighting artist

    DreamWorks Animation

    September 2014 - October 2014

    Penguins marketing work: Cuba online spot, Pitbull music video, Chinese Yili banana milk, Ellen show Penguins shake

  • Lead lighting artist

    DreamWorks Animation

    June 2010 - May 2013

    Turbo:
    • First lead lighter to work on look development before production. Worked closely with CG sup, surfacing lead, and VFX sup on achieving the desired look in CG.
    • Feedback from art director, VFX sup, production designer, previz artist, director, and cinematographer Wally Pfister.
    • Sequence lighting and rig development for sets and characters based on key art and live-action reference material
    • Part of the R&D feedback cycle for studio switch to using MSL shading language.
    • Template development for dependency graphs and Nuke composites.
    • Lig

  • Lighting Artist

    DreamWorks Animation

    March 2009 - June 2010

    Monsters vs. Aliens
    Shrek 4

  • Lighting Technical Director

    DreamWorks Animation

    October 2006 - March 2009

    Monsters vs. Aliens
    • Responsible for both technical direction under a team of lighters as well as doing production lighting work. Software development for tools in Python.

    Kung Fu Panda:
    • Large system software design and development in perl/tk for production tool to propagate sequence lighting rigs and templates into shots. Involved in design/prototyping/feedback/coding/deployment/presenting/testing/maintenance and became a pipeline tool.
    • Worked closely with R&D on the development of the mini-farm - a cluster of farm machines used for interactive

  • Layout Technical Director

    DreamWorks Animation

    October 2004 - 2006

    • Pipeline development for the layout department in its transition to using new software from the
    PDI branch and educated/supported artists.

    • Developed UI tools for the artists in the layout department to assist in camera, previz, editorial
    workflows and automatic publishing, shot and scene manipulation including animation in multiple
    scripting languages.

  • Research Assistant

    Institute for Data Analysis and Visualization

    2003 - 2004

    Researcher with Ken Joy and Mark Duchaineau for Adaptive 4-8 texture hierarchies. Visualization of out-of-core large terrain data sets for interactive fly-throughs. Extensive programming in C++/openGL/nvidia and ATI graphics API

  • Teaching Assistant

    UC Davis

    2002 - 2003

    Taught the discussion section for ECS30 - Programming course for undergraduates learning C language

  • Web Designer

    Campus Circle INC.

    2000 - 2000

    Web design, search integration, database integration, site layout

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Education

  • UCLA Extension

    2011 - 2014

  • University of California, Davis

    2002 - 2004

  • University of California, Davis

    1998 - 2002