Tim Best: A Pragmatist’s Guide to Cinematic Lighting

UT Department of Arts & Entertainment Technologies

Join us for our first Creatives on Campus event of 2024 with Tim Best from Pixar Animation Studios.

The Foundry (Located in the Fine Arts Library)

Creatives on Campus

A speaker series presented by the School of Design and Creative Technologies

<h3>A Pragmatist’s Guide to Cinematic Lighting for Animation</h3>In this one-hour talk, Tim Best will discuss his experience as a Lighting Artist and Supervisor at Pixar Animation Studios. Topics will include the day-to-day work of lighting artists, the structure and process of a lighting team, additional artistic and technical problem-solving responsibilities involved in leadership, and important ways that lighting design contributes to storytelling in Pixar’s films. Finally, he’ll briefly discuss his journey to Pixar. There will be a lot of pictures!

<h3>About Tim Best</h3>Tim Best has been a lighting and technology supervisor, artist, and software engineer at Pixar Animation Studios for over 20 years. His current role as Lighting Technology Supervisor for the studio’s central TechHub is to oversee development and deployment of lighting technology across all studio projects, which include the upcoming films Inside Out 2 and Elio.Best was the Technical Lighting Supervisor on Onward, one of two Lighting Supervisors on Coco and The Good Dinosaur, and the sole Lighting Supervisor for the short films Partly Cloudy, Lifted, and Mike’s New Car. He was the Technical Lighting Lead on Disney·Pixar’s Academy Award®-winning feature Brave, and he shared the 2013 Visual Effects Society Award for “Outstanding Created Environment in an Animated Feature Motion Picture” for his work on the film’s forest setting. In September 2000, Best started at Pixar as a lighting artist on Monsters, Inc. He has worked as a lighting artist on many of Disney·Pixar’s Academy Award®-winning feature films including The Incredibles, Ratatouille, WALL·E, and Soul.Best earned a Bachelor of Arts in Visual Arts from the University of Maryland Baltimore County (UMBC) in 1997. As a student, he completed internships at UMBC's Imaging Research Center (IRC), where he helped design and produce animation for client projects and internal research. He continued in a similar role after graduation, becoming the first IRC Technical Specialist in Animation and Design and receiving the first IRC Post-Graduate Fellowship in 1999. During this time, he also worked nights and weekends on a personal short film project, Pensive, which was featured in the 2000 SIGGRAPH Electronic Theater.Best occasionally runs marathons and posts silly animations and pictures of cats on various social media platforms. People semi-frequently tell Tim that they aren't sure when he's joking.

Tim Best: A Pragmatist’s Guide to Cinematic Lighting

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Tim Best: A Pragmatist’s Guide to Cinematic Lighting

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