After leaving Uni, I came back to live in Glasgow, and the first place I applied to was Axis Animation, who do amazing work on game trailers and cinematics. By a fantastic twist of fate and sheer luck, they were also looking for lighters for a huge project, and I started working there just a few weeks out of Uni. 

Turns out the project was for the game cinematics for Halo 4: Spartan Ops, an episodic batch of DLC, with almost an hour of CG cinematics. This is a huge production by anyone's standards, and quite an achievement in the end, considering how consistently high the quality was throughout so much content. 

I was hired as a lighting artist, but each lighter also did their own compositing, so it was a bit of both. Their pipeline is Houdini and Fusion based, so it was a bit of a learning curve to get my head around Fusion (coming from Nuke) at the same time as trying to work out the Axis custom tools. I did a variety of different shots, but the main scenes were centred around the alien invasion at the end of Episode 7 (shown above), and the Pelican ship escape as the planet explodes in Episode 10.  

I would have loved to come back to Axis, but by the time they had enough work in, I was living in London. However, I enjoyed my time there and learned a lot.