Spaceman

"Everything is permanent, yet nothing ever is... that is the truth of the Universe." - Hanus

MPC Film / Netflix

Half a year into his solo mission on the edge of the solar system, an astronaut concerned with the state of his life back on Earth is helped by an ancient creature he discovers in the bowels of his ship.

View on IMDb ↗

Role

Lighting & Compositing

—

Project Details

Spaceman is a science fiction film produced for Netflix, starring Adam Sandler. As a Lighting Artist at MPC Film, I was responsible for lighting characters, FX, and environments, across a variety of different shots. After ensuring that the lighting was finalized, I would produce initial comps, optimize, and troubleshoot.

My work primarily consisted of three types of shots. The first were tight interiors, which involved a large alien spider named Hanus, set extensions, various CG props, and digital doubles of Adam Sandler’s character, Jakub. The second type of shots were wide, full CG exteriors, in which I lit and rendered the film’s spaceship, large cloud volumes and particle FX, as well as Hanus and Sandler's digidoubles. The third and final type of shots that I spent most of my time on were outdoor close ups of Jakub, for which we required CG astronaut helmets, and for which I developed an HDR texture which would reflect the outdoor space environment.

Lighting principles were important to keep in mind throughout the project to achieve realism, but our team also capitalized on opportunities to accentuate moods that would emphasize the film’s themes of isolation, loneliness, existentialism, and hope. All lighting was done in Katana, we used Renderman as our render engine, and our compositing was completed in Nuke.