Inside Movie Animation With Sakshi Verma Of Dreamworks

Sakshi Verma, a girl from Faridabad who works at DreamWorks Animation as Senior Technical Director and Lighting Specialist, is now working on projects like 'The Bad Guys' and 'Puss In Boots 2'.

She talks about the techniques involved in creating these animated movies and how challenging the job is.

Sakshi also led the development of highly configurable software for artists to render scenes, and manage multi-shot workflows that allowed the artists to light and render scenes very efficiently.

She shares: "As a Technical Director, one of the best things about the job is to witness every department coming together to bring a story to life and make the audience feel the emotion storytellers are trying to convey."

Sakshi has worked on various Hollywood animated projects like 'Trolls', 'Kung Fu Panda 3', 'The Boss Baby', 'Madagascar 3: Europe's Most Wanted', 'The Croods: A New Age' and many more.

She found 'The Croods: A New Age' as one of the most challenging projects as Sakshi explains: "It was super fun and challenging project with complex scenes. My work on the global pipeline for the lighting department helped utilize the new 3D computer graphics and image denoising tools that are used to remove the additive noise while retaining as much as possible the important signal features."

Sakshi added that to prepare for a technical job at an animation studio like DreamWorks, Pixar, or Walt Disney, "strong technical fundamentals" with a background in "computer graphics" are a must.

She has been doing this job for almost a decade now, and adds: "The diversity of projects during my time at DreamWorks and the advancement of production technology over these years have played a big role in keeping up my enthusiasm and excitement."

"From making a Panda's dream of becoming a kung fu master come true, to sending a baby on a secret spy mission, to showcasing the emotional Viking-dragon relationship, every movie I have worked on has taught me a bit more about how to bring these characters to life. That coupled with opportunities to work on the new technology in every film with an amazingly talented crew makes it a real joy to work every day. And 11 years later I still feel excited about my work," concludes Sakshi.