DNEG · Shotgun pipeline development
DNEG feature films
From April to December 2015, I was Technical Lead at DNEG (formerly Double Negative), the London visual effects studio. I led development of its Shotgun asset management system, automated pipeline work in Python, fixed production issues, made a large back catalogue of scripts modular, and worked with production staff to fix slow areas of the pipeline with training or new tools.
- Studio
- DNEG
- Role
- Shotgun pipeline development
- Year
- 2015
- Tech
- Shotgun, Python
The challenge
I joined DNEG (formerly Double Negative) as Technical Lead from April to December 2015. DNEG is a London visual effects and animation studio, and during my time there it was working on films including Ant-Man, Mission: Impossible Rogue Nation, Batman v Superman, Miss Peregrine's Home for Peculiar Children, The Huntsman: Winter's War and Geostorm.
My work was on the pipeline, not on the effects you see on screen. The studio's asset management system was built on Shotgun, a review and production tracking toolset for VFX, animation and games teams. It had to meet the technical needs of studios in London, Mumbai, Singapore and Vancouver, which sometimes meant working around very different sleep schedules.
What I did
I led development of the Shotgun asset management system across those sites.
- Pipeline automation in Python, as part of my day-to-day work.
- Bug fixing for issues that came up during productions.
- Working through a large back catalogue of scripts to stress test them and make the functionality modular, which took most of my development time.
- Working with production staff, about half my time, to find the slow areas of the pipeline and fix them with training or new tools.
The outcome
I delivered Python automation, fixes and modularised scripts for the asset management system, plus training and tools for the slow areas production staff and I identified. The posters shown here are films the studio was making while I worked there; my contribution to them was through the pipeline, not the visual effects themselves.
