Jonathan Strellman

CG Lighting Artist

I'm not your average lighter

After a decade of running on-set lighting departments, I see light differently.

When I shift an edge light for a closeup or raise the key to shadow the jaw five percent more, I'm drawing from telling hundreds of stories and illuminating the contours of hundreds of real-world faces. I'm comfortable obsessing in the minutiae reserved for "dots and fingers" as well as choosing the three quickest changes that will have the biggest impact before the camera starts to roll.

I believe animation and live-action have many wonderful ideas to gain from each other, and I'm delighted, as a lover of light, to bridge the intersection between these two worlds.

I thoroughly appreciate the power of pressing "W" to move a light.

With a good crew, it's all smiles—even on long days.

Controlling lights from an iPad for a soon-to-be-released Paramount + show.

I'll do what it takes to put lights in the perfect spot.

Looking for VFX and Compositing?

Alongside my lighting background, I have a strong history of VFX work ranging from cleanup and keying to full CG integration and advanced compositing.

You can check out my VFX and Compositing reel HERE.

Lighting Challenges

Here are a few interesting lighting and compositing scenarios from this last year.

Sandswept - The Unholy Necessity

Set within a nuclear reactor, this dark scene needed extra care to light. When the on-set lighting didn't have the perfect shape for the story, a mix of adjusting the CG light and adding a hat shadow in Nuke required a particularly delicate dance between live-action and 3d. Add that to a long push-in camera move and it became a shot I'm proud of pulling off.

Apocalyptic Noise Managment

On this personal project, I challenged myself to light a large apocalyptic interior scene with strong sunlight, volumetrics, and minimal fill—in short, a recipe for noise. I made the render clean through a combination of selective transmission on the windows, recreating the bounced light, compositing the volumetrics in Nuke, select instances of light baking, and a lot of good, old-fashioned fine-tuning render settings.

Lighting Resources

CG Project Hierarchy Creator

While not lighting-specific, it sure is helpful to have the 20+ folders for a full CG project (from refs and scripts, to comps and renders) all created and named with the click of a button.

It's graphically pretty simple, but if you run Python it'll save you some time! There are optional checkboxes for common subfolders, and a designation for multiple shots vs a single shot so as not to overclutter a simple project.

DMX Patch List Generator

A little Javascript app I made to order and generate a visual patch list for programs—like the current version of Luminair—that don't offer such a feature.

It supports drag-and-drop reordering and deletion of units and can recalculate optimized addresses downstream.

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