LogInAli Yassin shared their path toward becoming a lighting artist, talked about working in AAA production, and showed the process of lighting a scene.
Introduction
My name is Ali Yassin and I’m currently in my third year of working at Infinity Ward as a Lighting Artist. I have worked on single-player and multiplayer environments in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II (2022) as well as Call of Duty: Warzone 2.0. In this interview, I’ll describe the path I took to get here and share some insights that helped my artistic growth. I am also excited about this opportunity to share with you some helpful resources that I created during my time as an instructor.
I was born and raised in Cairo, Egypt. Growing up, no other hobby absorbed my attention as much as playing video games. Most of my favorite childhood memories start with me and my cousins going through a rotation of PlayStation 1 classics. In my high school years, my interest grew beyond playing games to appreciating their technical and artistic elements. I tracked down several “making of” videos for games and animated films and learned about Autodesk Maya as the primary 3D production tool. There began my education about 3D art.
In 2012, I moved to Berkeley, California, to pursue an undergraduate education at UC Berkeley as a Psychology major. Thinking that 3D art would remain a hobby, I enrolled in a student-led course that served as an introduction to animation (UCBUGG: UC Berkeley Undergraduate Graphics Group. This course exposed me to every part of the 3D art pipeline and concluded with a final project: an animated short film. I found the production process to be hugely enjoyable. From collaborating with my teammates on story ideas all the way to managing our renders, I found every step to be fulfilling, challenging, and fun. By the end of the experience, I searched for any courses that could provide a similar environment. Thankfully, I found the class Advanced Digital Animation (CNM190), which blossomed into a hugely positive force in my life for many years afterward.
In CNM190, I became a Project Manager/Producer on a short film titled Bandits!, a one-minute-long animated comedy about 3 raccoons executing a heist against a housecat. Our main inspiration was Tom and Jerry meets Ocean’s Eleven.
I had the privilege of leading a team of 11 amazing students of varying majors throughout this two-semester course in 2014-2015. Most of us started with very little experience in 3D but by the end were comfortable quickly reacting to problems across the pipeline. In addition to managing the project, I contributed to environment modeling, lighting, and rendering. I had so much fun, I was constantly learning. I had never engaged this deeply with a project. Being surrounded by enthusiastic, passionate, and skilled teammates while figuring out the many technical and narrative challenges we encountered in this film solidified a growing feeling I had been experiencing during that time: I must make this my main vocation. Production life simply brought out the best in me and I wanted to do more of it.
I switched roles following the completion of Bandits! and rejoined UCBUGG as an instructor, and later CNM190 as a Teacher’s Assistant to Professor Dan Garcia. I cherished sharing my experience and knowledge with students as they navigated their own production journeys. I provided lectures and guidance on various parts of the pipeline and coordinated weekly guest lectures and critiques from industry artists, engineers, and producers. I equipped the next generation of students with better tools and preparation. As an artist and a teacher, I supported and evolved the 3D art community at UC Berkeley.
Choosing Lighting as My Focus
I discovered I wanted to specialize in lighting after reading “Lighting for Animation: The Art of Visual Storytelling”. Written by former Blue Sky lighting artists, Michael Tanzillo and Jasmine Katatikarn, this book filled the gaps in my self-taught understanding of lighting. I tore through this book. Every chapter presented clear principles and provided plenty of examples. Absorbing those fundamentals meant that I could understand lighting regardless of tool, program, plug-in, or even medium. For example, I had an eye for what I considered to be beautiful lighting, but I would sometimes struggle to identify the individual components that reliably resulted in beautiful lighting, leading to inconsistent lighting quality in my work. Sometimes I would get a good result through experimentation, and at other times I would be lost, unable to create a compelling lighting setup no matter what I tried.
Learning fundamentals and principles from this book helped me overcome this completely. I learned that regardless of the elements of the scene, there are always essential lighting tasks: establishing visual shaping, setting the mood, and directing the eye. These formed a “true north” for me that I could follow, and thanks to this knowledge, I could approach the lighting process methodically. Excited to apply my newly gained insight, I wanted to revisit an older project and relight it for practice.
Using Maya and Renderman, I revisited Bandits! and gave it a completely new lighting setup. This time around, I was more deliberate with my choices. I chose a high level of contrast and picked nighttime instead of daytime for a better match to the mood of the narrative. I set up a warm and cool color scheme. Applying the lighting fundamental of “Hero Colors” (the concept of using light colors that match the subject to create visual harmony between materials and lights), I used colder light temperatures on the raccoon characters to bring out their gray-blue colors while reserving a warm light temperature for the yellow pattern of the cat. For every wall, object, and character, I set up lighting gradients to maximize Visual Shaping, which created depth and enhanced appeal. I deliberately placed subtle lights behind characters to pronounce their silhouettes. Seeing the huge improvement in results, I wondered: if after reading an introductory book I am able to achieve such a large degree of improvement, then what could I accomplish if I pursued advanced, specialized education in this craft?
The nighttime version of Bandits! can be viewed here with a full lighting breakdown available here.
In the fall of 2017, I enrolled in a 3-year MFA at the Academy of Art University in the School of Animation & Visual Effects as a Texturing/Lighting major. I savored the courses that helped me specialize further in materials and lighting and I reveled in the courses that introduced me to completely new techniques (i.e., Matchmove and 360 video compositing). I approached every class assignment as if it were a portfolio piece, investing all my energy into sharpening techniques and delivering high-quality results. I also joined as many side projects as I could, the most notable of which was Monsters in the Dark. Directed by Apollonia Vick, this short film combines 2D and 3D animation. I took on a huge range of responsibilities for the project: setting up shaders using V-Ray, lighting, rendering, and compositing 70 of the 75 shots of the film. I found a unique but fulfilling challenge in the task of merging 2D and 3D elements. This was my largest and most successful project. Monsters in the Dark was an official selection at 17 film festivals and was awarded Best 3D Animated Film at the Academy of Art’s 2019 Spring Awards show.
In the final year of my MFA program, I worked on my thesis film, True Nowhere. My goal with this project was to create a mood piece where the storytelling was primarily conveyed through lighting – I wanted the sudden shift that occurs in the film to be emphasized and communicated by dissolving from one lighting setup to another. This also involved doing a significant amount of modeling and texturing to support the narrative, along with camera and character animation. I found the final rhythm of the film after discovering the song Golden Hours by Brian Eno and decided to alter it for the project to enhance the mood and storytelling.
Narratively, the seed of the idea for True Nowhere came to me after I reflected on my own tendency to work too much. I imagined a workaholic character visiting an old workplace and reminiscing about the many years of long days and nights spent working. I wanted to take a position on this notion by showing how this type of workaholism can result in the decay of many dimensions of one’s life and represent this through the decay in the environment and the dramatic shift in lighting. In a way, I wanted to make a mood piece about the type of person I don’t want to become.
Following the completion of my thesis, I graduated from AAU in the spring of 2020, which wasn’t the best time to graduate: the pandemic had begun a few months prior, and suddenly, internships and job opportunities disappeared. However, before seeking to enter the industry as an artist, I craved a return to teaching with all the knowledge and practice I had gained during my MFA. In the fall of 2020, I returned as a teaching assistant to CNM190 at UC Berkeley, this time teaching online through Zoom due to the pandemic.
While this was initially challenging, I was constantly inspired by how flexible and adaptive my students were and how well the course went. Despite the online-only environment, the students delivered some of the best productions in the history of the course: Mirage and Noodles. I gave frequent lectures on various parts of the pipeline, sharing my experiences from being a student who was in their place and the many lessons I had absorbed from my time during my MFA. I cherished sharing these insights and the students inspired me with how enthusiastically they absorbed my lectures. The online format encouraged me to create multiple video lectures and demos for them, a few of which I would like to share with 80 Level.
First, early in the course, I wanted to inspire my students to keep their stories as personal as possible. I firmly believe that the path to universality is specificity. This can seem counterintuitive to many as these seem like potentially opposing ideas. I created a video lecture titled “Personal Filmmaking” to showcase some of my favorite examples of directors and musicians creating personal work, and to examine the effect of that work on both the creators and the audience.
Second, I wanted to give students a tour of various stages of filmmaking, with the following perspective: every stage is a toolbox that can be used to sharpen storytelling.
Finally, the one that I am most excited to share is a two-hour lighting walkthrough where I demonstrate the process of lighting a scene in Maya and Renderman from start to finish. This is the exact type of tutorial that I always wanted to have as a student and could never really find. This is a narrated demo, where I explain all my decision-making as I’m lighting the scene, which I hope helps those that are interested in lighting and are looking for a fully explained walkthrough where every step is shown.
Working In AAA Production as a Lighting Artist
My experience as a lighting artist on a AAA production has been quite positive so far. I get to work with teams of various sizes across different disciplines, usually large enough to allow for a high degree of specialization for each artist. A large component of my job involves collaborating and coordinating with environment, materials, and VFX artists in order for all of us to ensure that our efforts are pointed in the same artistic direction. My responsibilities involve setting up lighting that is photographically plausible without compromising the priorities of other departments.
Here's a hypothetical example to demonstrate a common AAA lighting compromise: a sunny day lighting setup for a multiplayer game. Let’s assume you are calibrating lighting in an interior that has a window. If you were to set up exposure for the interior brightness, the windows should appear blown out (almost completely white). If you were in an exterior environment and setting up exposure based on sunlight, the interiors would appear almost completely black through the windows. This mimics a real-life phenomenon related to the limited dynamic range of cameras. Emulating this phenomenon would help deliver the photoreal visual style, however, there are gameplay considerations: how will players on either side be able to see each other? This is where it becomes essential for lighting artists on AAA productions to not only have a command of the ideal photographic setup but to also have enough artistic discipline to dial it back if it impedes gameplay visibility.
Additionally, there are typical responsibilities that inform a large part of my work in a AAA environment. For example, Call of Duty is a 60 FPS game and therefore, maintaining efficient lighting setups while achieving a great visual quality is absolutely necessary. Whether the work is in single-player or multiplayer modes, there’s always a narrative that needs to be respected and accentuated by lighting. Sticking to deadlines is critically important, especially considering the interdependencies between production departments.
Advice for Those Seeking to Break into the AAA Industry
My advice to those seeking to enter the AAA industry as a lighting artist is to start with an education in photography principles. Primarily, ensure that you learn as much as you can about exposure, values, and color theory. This will set you up for a great understanding of PBR (physically based rendering) pipelines, which are now considered standard even in many productions that have a stylized look. If you can learn the principles and PBR workflows, you will be in sync with the direction that lighting and rendering technology is moving toward.
I would also recommend seeking resources such as the “Lighting for Animation” book mentioned above. I personally found it significantly helpful to go through such a resource in order to analyze what constituted “beautiful” lighting to me. This is where developing and sharpening your artistic eye is critical. The photography principles and fundamentals are great, but without a sense of what makes for beautiful lighting (and equally importantly, what does NOT make for beautiful lighting), applying those principles would be incomplete.
Screenshot from a collaborative portfolio piece I worked on with Leonardo Quert.
Once you have a grasp on exposure, values, color theory, and fundamentals of lighting, I would highly recommend applying what you learned in a freely available package like Unreal Engine. There are now plenty of free environments available in the Unreal Marketplace that you can use for training. Practicing the concepts you learn will help you quickly internalize them. For example, study the Ansel Adams zone system and then attempt to apply it to different environments – you’ll be surprised how quickly you start to develop an eye for good contrast.
As you keep learning and practicing the fundamentals, start to include references from movies, television shows, and photography in your process and attempt to replicate them. When you complete your lighting pass, revisit the reference and ask yourself if your lighting pass evokes the same mood. Whether it succeeds at doing so or not, if you deliberately analyze the reasons for either outcome, I guarantee that you will learn a lot about lighting and improve very quickly.
My Process When Lighting a Scene
My process starts with analyzing the narrative of the level/map/shot I have been assigned. At this early stage, I want to hear as much as possible from the art or narrative directors: what do they hope to accomplish with the piece? What primary mood and tone should be communicated? It is critical for me to understand this first so that when I begin searching for references, I am sorting by images that evoke in me the same mood that is intended by the director(s). Ideally, I’d find 3-4 images that become my key references. I find that having too many references can be distracting and may dilute my idea of the intended look of the lighting.
Once the reference stage is complete, I search for sky HDR images, looking for the ideal ambient brightness and sunlight-to-skylight intensity ratio. For example, a clear daytime sky will have a significant difference between sun and sky intensities while an overcast, cloudy sky will have an almost uniform level of brightness between the intensity of the sun and the sky.
Then, determining the light direction, contrast amount, and dominant color scheme are the next steps. I take my time experimenting with different directions for the dominant light source in order to avoid flatness as much as I can. If the dominant light angle flattens the environment, there is little that can be done afterward to resurrect visual shaping. Once I’ve found a good angle, I start to alter the sun and sky temperatures to provide the color scheme that I want, while maintaining an ideal balance between the exposure of each. Afterward, it’s time to add artificial light sources if necessary or to bolster the natural lighting setup by adding fake “bounce” lights if needed to boost the visibility of areas with natural lighting. Once those large decisions are settled, the remainder of the lighting process will depend on the needs of the scene, environment, or shot.
Main Challenges When Lighting
One of the challenges I’ve frequently run into is striking a balance between the needs of multiple departments, some of which can have conflicting priorities. For example, dark materials can significantly reduce the visible brightness of an area due to reduced light bounce. So, if a concept artist designs an area to use strictly natural lighting, and then an environment artist implements dark materials in that area, the lighting artist would need to navigate a tricky compromise. The lighting would need to be bright enough to work against the dark materials while still seeming motivated by purely natural lighting, all while ensuring ideal visibility. Simply doing the “photographically accurate” approach here would result in a flat, unappealing environment that’s also too dark for visibility. Ensuring that lighting harmonizes with other departments can be a challenge in situations like this when some decisions are made earlier in production that restrict the freedom that lighting has. I’ve however also found this to be a fun element of being a lighting artist: there are always problems to solve.
The other common challenge I run into sometimes is not finding an ideal reference. This would usually prompt me to do some photo editing, where I take a less-than-ideal reference and slightly shift color temperatures or contrast levels until I hone in on the desired mood for the lighting. It’s only natural to not be able to find a perfect reference for every situation or camera angle, but the work must still be done to ensure that the results match the intended mood.
In terms of beginner mistakes, there are a few that I would advise against above others: avoid adding too many lights too quickly and try to focus on the relationship between the key and the fill light. It’s okay that not every area of the frame is bright, in fact, the strategic placement of shadows is just as important as the deliberate sculpting of light. Additionally, avoid assigning arbitrary values to lights, especially the sun and sky ones – always ensure you are working with physically plausible values whenever you can. Ideally, you should be able to know the Exposure Value (EV) or f-stop, shutter speed, and ISO of your setup. This will help orient your process around photography fundamentals.
Finally, ensure that lighting serves to also direct the eye. Look at your scene in black and white, what do you see? It is easy for beginners to light the whole scene to be relatively the same in intensity, which loses a lot of the power of good lighting. Lighting should emphasize focal points, and deemphasize areas that are uninteresting or nonessential. If you can avoid some common mistakes like this, you can be sure that your work is well on its way to the right path!
Thank you for taking the time to read this interview! Please feel free to check out the free resources I’ve linked above, including the lighting walkthrough I created during my time as an instructor a couple of years ago. If you have any questions related to my answers above, please use the contact form on my website and I would be happy to get back to you. Thanks!