Breakdown: Creating the Disco Light Effect for Lilo & Stitch
Jonathan Wai talked about the pipeline to create the disco light effect for the Lilo & Stitch live-action film, explaining how he used Nuke to create the light texture, and detailing how he animated the ball to make it look like it was spinning.
Introduction
Hi, I'm Jonathan Wai, a Senior Lighting Technical Director at Industrial Light & Magic in Vancouver. I've worked in visual effects for about 14 years, on projects like The Mandalorian, Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, and Transformers One. My work usually sits at the intersection of storytelling, look development, and problem-solving, translating creative ideas into solutions that can hold up in production and be reused across a team.
When I was assigned a sequence on Lilo & Stitch involving a disco light effect, I realized there wasn't a clear existing approach that matched what we needed. That's part of the fun and frustration of lighting work. Sometimes you have to invent the method from the ground up. To address this, I developed a custom setup designed for production use, which was later adapted for reuse across multiple shots in the sequence.
Finding Reference
Like most lighting work, it started with a reference. I spent some time studying real disco lighting. How the patterns move, how quickly they flicker, and how chaotic the colors feel. Disco lights have a very specific rhythm: energetic but still somewhat random. Once I found a clip that captured the feeling we wanted, I used it as the visual target while building the setup.
Building the Light Texture in Nuke
To recreate that shifting pattern, I built an animated light texture in Nuke. The idea was to drive the lighting with something that constantly evolves rather than looping too obviously. To achieve this look, I used effects like Glint, Distortion, and chromatic aberration driven by a noise pattern.
After a few tests adjusting the scale, timing, and motion of the pattern, I exported the sequence so it could be used directly inside Katana. At this stage, the goal wasn't perfection. It was creating something organic enough that, once projected through lights, it would feel lively rather than mechanical.
Setting Up the Disco Ball Lighting
Since the source of the effect is a disco ball, I built the lighting by parenting several Rect Lights to the ball itself rather than relying on a single point light. Rect Lights gave much better control over direction, softness, and shadow behavior. Each light used its own cookie texture, with a few variations of the Nuke pattern applied across the setup.
All the lights referenced a different animated texture sequence, which kept the movement consistent while still allowing subtle variation between lights. One small tip here: after linking everything, it's worth double-checking that each cookie stays properly aligned with its light. It's an easy thing to overlook.
Animation and Reusability
To simulate the disco ball spinning, for production use, I extended the animation to around 300–400 frames and offset the light texture timing so the pattern wouldn't repeat across shots when the setup was passed to other artists. Getting the right balance took a few test renders, adjusting rotation speed, intensity, and spacing until the light felt energetic without becoming distracting.
This approach helped maintain consistency across the sequence while reducing the need for shot-by-shot relighting. Animation and Reusability to simulate the disco ball spinning, for production use, I extended the animation to around 300–400 frames and offset the light texture timing so the pattern wouldn't repeat across shots when the setup was passed to other artists.
Getting the right balance took a few test renders, adjusting rotation speed, intensity, and spacing until the light felt energetic without becoming distracting. This approach helped maintain consistency across the sequence while reducing the need for shot-by-shot relighting.
Final Touches in Nuke
After rendering, I brought the passes back into Nuke for final compositing. Small details like glow, subtle chromatic aberration, and gentle color variation helped the lights blend naturally into the scene. These small adjustments pushed the look closer to the real-world reference and gave the sequence a bit more atmosphere.
Closing Thoughts
This was one of those shots where there wasn't an existing solution to rely on, so the workflow had to be built from scratch. In production, that's often part of the job, finding a balance between creative intent and something that can scale across a team. A shot like this reminds me why I love lighting work, it's creative decisions backed by technical precision.
And sometimes the tools you build for one sequence often end up being reused in ways that benefit the team beyond the original shot. When something doesn't exist online, figure it out, document it, and share it, because chances are the next artist is Googling the same thing you did.
