Saravanan Govindaraj: senior lighting & compositing artist interview

Hi everyone, my name is Saravanan, and I’m a senior lighting and compositing artist who loves cartoons and animated films, ever since childhood. I do lighting for a 3D scene to convey the story, mood, emotions, and so on. I do shading, lighting, rendering, and compositing as a profession. Modeling and texturing are my spare time works. My home country is India and I’m doing my job here in Malaysia.

It was an amazing experience. I was inspired by the blue umbrella animation short from pixar. The mood and the colorscripts of that reference was just awesome. The workflow for that artwork was quite interesting and a little complicated for me. I used ACEScg colorspace and it took some time to understand the workflow.

The idea of the artwork was to choose one simple snapshot, but I faced problems while set dressing the shot. It wasn’t just the shot of the asset. I got those assets from various sources and I set dressed it myself to make a scene. Many times I was disappointed when I saw the imperfect composition. It took a lot of time to make it good. I learned the ACES CG workflow through this. I learned the importance of colors, contrast, and composition to impress the audience.

I prefer Maya for most of my artworks. Recently I’ve started learning Katana, which has become the industry’s most used tool, and I like learning new tech and skills. I made the perfect artwork by using Arnold renderer which more and more professional and live action industries are using widely. Another recent addition is Redshift, which I started learning a month ago. I completed my Hope artwork by using Redshift.

I used to do my personal works frequently. Whenever I start, I begin with the simple tasks. But once it reaches a point, I try to do more and more to polish it. This is how i keep my work simple, also to be added as my portfolio. Generally, my portfolio contains the best of all my works. So I always push myself every time to do a better work, so that it will also be part of my portfolio. Just grab an idea and work out the details!

So far I have been a member of the Acadamy of Animated Arts group. I really love that group. I want to thank them. I learned a lot through them and group members. I practice most of the time with their amazing assets. My favourite hastags are lighting, shading, compositing, and concept art.

I want to keep learning and studying the new artistc opportunites and experiments to get a good result. I want to achieve something bigger in this animated world. I just want to reach the position where I can show to everyone how I see art.

Jeremy Vickery. I love his color scripts, ideas, execution in lighting. I am just addicted to his works. So far, he is my first inspiration when I start my animation studies.

I have a list of plans to improve my skills and workflow. So I plan to focus on steps individually. My next big goal is to learn Katana and do some nice artwork or animated shot. I’m still doing a concept for that artwork. Hope i show it soon!