Happy Feet

I was the Lighting Supervisor on Happy Feet, Animal Logic’s first animated feature. I worked with George Miller and the wider production team to develop the visual approach for an enormously ambitious film - and it was an incredible opportunity to help define how a new Australian animation studio could make a feature sing.

We combined stylised character performance with Antarctic landscapes, underwater chases, snow, crowds, and constantly changing skies. The team developed a mix of proprietary software and production techniques to achieve fluffy penguin fur, snow kicks, water, and the art-directed reality of a huge penguin population - every penguin needed a personality.

For me, lighting on an animated feature is where storytelling and systems thinking meet. I had to shape mood, guide attention, and support performance while keeping the look consistent across thousands of shots. When it worked, the technical machinery disappeared and the characters took over.