# Kai Chang > VFX creative/technical pro Location: Emeryville, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/kaichang VFX industry veteran with tons of experience both in creative and technical aspects of production. Senior Lighting Artist/TD with over 9 years of lighting experience at Industrial Light & Magic and DNEG. 12 years of pipeline/support experience in a feature film production environment at Industrial Light & Magic and Tippett Studio. Artist work primarily on feature films such as Black Panther, Jurassic World 2, Hobbs & Shaw, several Transformers movies, 2 Star Trek films, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles 2, and some amusement park simulator attractions like Soarin' Around The World and Star Tours. Also some feature animation work in Lucasfilm's Strange Magic. Most recently worked as a Pipeline Software Engineer at Tippett handling tool development and show support on various projects from feature and episodic to commercials and special venue. Tool work in Nuke, Maya, and back-end, primarily in Python. Became company's color specialist handling varied OCIO configurations. Credits in Falcon & Winter Soldier, The Witcher (Season 3), Secret Invasion, with support work in others. ## Work Experience ### CG Supervisor @ Tippett Studio Jan 2024 – Present | Berkeley, California, United States Show setup including color pipeline, deliverables, and DCC apps. Deeper involvement in show strategy, recruiting, support, tool development on CG software including Nuke, Maya, Katana, Blender, Houdini, and Unreal. Directed junior engineer on tool needs. ### Pipeline Software Engineer @ Tippett Studio Jan 2019 – Present | Berkeley, CA Pipeline development and support in a small shop handling VFX for a wide range of projects in feature film, episodic, commercial, and special venue. Automation with Shotgun (aka Shotgrid/FlowPT) event triggers for creature FX workflows for fur and skin sims. General development and support tasks for tools in Maya and Nuke in a Linux environment. Built fur workflow for Yeti. Workflows to provide previz reference and motion-control data for stop-motion stage. Handled a lot of show setup tasks, most critically color setups in OCIO, becoming the key color specialist at Tippett. Some general IT/Administrative level support as well for file systems, servers, VMs, mostly in Linux, but some in Windows. Occasional Mac desktop support. ### Lighting TD @ DNEG Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada Lighting work with occasional asset look adjustments for Hobbs & Shaw. Worked mainly in Clarisse and Nuke. Included lighting on FX elements like smoke and particles like rocks, debris, gravel. (I should have a film credit, but me and several other artists, including leads(!!!), were missed in a production snag) ### TD @ Industrial Light + Magic Jan 2011 – Jan 2018 Mostly lighting in Katana using Arnold and Pixar Renderman and in-house software package 'Zeno', with occasional work in fire/smoke and water drip/mist simulations also in Zeno. Regular participation in technical teams creating or maintaining pipeline-level or package-specific (Maya, Zeno, Katana, Houdini, Nuke) tools, generally coding in Python, often with GUI packages like Qt and FLTK. Also work with the Shotgun database API, developing for it and investigating its viability for somewhat unconventional applications. ### Assistant TD @ Industrial Light + Magic Jan 2006 – Jan 2011 Scripts and Tools writing. Majority of code in Python with various GUI packages, most recently PyQt, but also GTK, FLTK, and wxPython. Tool written were generally run via command-line, but also did tools work for Katana, Maya, Zeno, and occasionally Nuke and Shake. Some work in Maya using MEL and Python as well. Areas of development included automation of media creation, tools to assist with dailies, adding features to simulation software to allow it to run on our render farm, asset/animation check-in. Assistant TDs also pick up some shot production tasks as well to build up shot experience. I've done lighting for Transformers (2007) and The Last Airbender (2010). I even assisted with some animation for the Star Tours update we did in 2010, cleaning up matchmoves and doing some light ship animation. Also included training and mentoring of promoted TA's, and general training of artist and production staff where necessary. ### Digital Matte Department Technical Asst. @ Industrial Light + Magic Jan 2002 – Jan 2006 Supported the Digital Matte Dept. Started as a Macintosh/Unix environment using primarily Electric Image, Form-Z, and After Effects to a Windows/Unix environment primarily in 3dsmax, Maya, and After Effects. Later on some artists used XSI and Vue. Supported desktop, render farms, and even some file server and web server machines on Macintosh and PC. Farm software included Autodesk's Backburner and a third-party system known as Smedge. On the Macintosh side we had internal software that scheduled/allocated render farm jobs. ### Computer Resource Specialist @ University of California, Berkeley Jan 2002 – Jan 2002 | Berkeley, CA Technical support work at Institute of Governmental Studies at UC Berkeley, which included its Statewide Database project which handles voter information often used during redistricting. General support ranging from systems administration to web site maintenance on Unix. Some desktop IT support on office systems on Windows. Also some database work writing SQL queries for GIS databases used for redistricting. ### Macintosh Technician @ Industrial Light & Magic Jan 2000 – Jan 2001 Setup and troubleshooting of artist and administrative Macintosh hardware and software at ILM. Includes Machine builds, setup/troubleshooting of CG Software and conventional office software, backups, etc. Mostly Mac OS 9, but beginning to pick up Mac OS X at the time. I actually also had extensive Unix and Windows experience, which was a plus in many situations. ### Engineer @ Rotten Tomatoes Jan 1999 – Jan 2000 Rotten Tomatoes was actually an internal project at web design firm Design Reactor, where I started work. As the site grew popular, the entire company shifted focus to that. Web development for RT website primarily in PHP interfacing with a MySQL DB. Included some Perl work. Built tools to help production staff input data and create pages and various features on the site and transition the site to run from a database instead of a bunch of HTML pages. Being a small startup company, we were all involved in discussions on product development and general conversations about the movie industry. I wrote reviews a few times myself. ## Education ### Bachelor of Arts in Psychology University of California, Santa Cruz ### Bachelor of Science (Incomplete) in Mechanical Engineering University of California, Berkeley ### Academy of Art University ### Art - Painting Berkeley City College ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/kairioca --- Source: https://flows.cv/kaichang JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/kaichang/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-10