From Namibia to ILM: 17 Years of Breaking Into and Surviving VFX

It started when I was about twelve. Pixar had just dropped their early movies, and I was glued to the screen. Pirates of the Caribbean. Star Wars. I wanted to work at Pixar. That was the dream. Make those beautiful animations.

Then I watched Episode III and saw General Grievous. My friend and I grabbed broomsticks from the garage and acted out the lightsaber fight in the backyard. We filmed it on whatever camera we had, and I found After Effects. Andrew Kramer's Video Copilot tutorials. Frame by frame, I drew roto masks around those broomsticks, added glows, color corrections, the works. We had our own lightsaber fight scene.

It was terrible. It was also the most exciting thing I'd ever made.

Back in Namibia, there was no real internet. We had a 56K modem. You know that sound they use in memes now: chrrrr-ding-dong-ding-dong. Downloading anything meaningful was out of the question.

So we had LAN parties. We'd carry our massive desktop towers and CRT monitors to community halls, hook everything up to network switches, and play Counter Strike and Warhammer for hours. But the real value wasn't the gaming. It was the data exchange. Movies, software, files that would take weeks to download on dial-up got shared in minutes over the local network. That was the internet for us.

At one of these events, there was a Counter Strike tournament. Our rival team had put together this intro video for their clan. The Counter Strike characters were walking into frame, posing, looking badass. I was blown away.

I asked the guy: "What did you use for this?"

He said: "3ds Max. I used the biped rigs from the game and just posed them."

That was it. That was the moment. I got 3ds Max around 2001 or 2002, and I never looked back.

I learned 3D the only way you could back then: trial and error. No YouTube. No structured courses. Just the software, a lot of patience, and online forums.

CGTalk. Threedy.com 3DTotal.com . These communities were everything. I entered speed challenges, posted my work, got torn apart in critiques, and slowly got better. Every single piece of feedback from a working professional was worth more than anything a school could teach me.

By sixteen, I was building up my reel, grinding through tutorials, and getting more obsessed with VFX. Pirates of the Caribbean kept pulling me deeper. Davy Jones, to this day, is one of my favorite CG characters ever created. The tentacles, the subsurface scattering, the weight and expressiveness of a fully digital face performing opposite real actors. That character is a masterclass in what VFX can be.

Namibia had no film industry. No VFX studios. No path forward for what I wanted to do. But my grandparents were from Germany, so the logical step was clear: get to Europe.

I enrolled at SAE Berlin to study Digital Film and Animation. I'll be honest: the education itself wasn't great. By the time I got there, I was already largely self-sufficient in 3D. But I needed the bachelor's degree. Studios had it as a hard requirement. "Must have a degree to apply." That was the barrier, so I got it done.

What actually educated me was the side job. I worked at a lighting equipment studio that hired out gear to big events and live shows. I was rigging real lights, physical fixtures, learning what a gaffer does, understanding how light behaves in actual space. The inverse square law in practice, not in theory. How to set up key, fill, and rim on a real human body. What a stand-in is for. How doubles get lit on set.

That physical lighting knowledge transferred directly to digital lighting later. Every time I set up a three-point rig in Maya, I was thinking about the real rigs I'd built with my hands.

While studying, I freelanced for commercial studios around Cologne. Capture-mm, Brainpool, Pixomondo, and several others. It was commercial work: fast turnarounds, decent learning, and it paid the bills.

Then came my first animation feature film credit: Tarzan. A German production up north. Seeing my name in the credits of an actual movie was a massive moment. It wasn't ILM. It wasn't Pixar. But it was real, and it made the dream feel possible.

After Tarzan, I moved to Stuttgart to work at Mark13 on Maya the Bee, then south to Munich to join Trixter Film. At Trixter, I was doing effects work for TV series. But what changed everything was sitting next to colleagues who were working on Iron Man.

Iron Man. The suits. The HUD. The repulsor blasts. It was happening right there, in the same office, on the monitors next to mine. That was the moment I realized: this is the level. This is what VFX looks like when it's operating at full power. Feature film. Blockbusters. Real pipeline work at scale.

I needed to get there.

I applied for VFX positions in London. MPC hired me, and that was my first proper job at an international VFX studio. I worked on The Jungle Book and another project. I wasn't at MPC long, because Cinesite offered me a position as a Senior.

At Cinesite, things clicked. I worked on Spectre, Fantastic Beasts, and other projects. I stayed for a good stretch. The quality bar at these London studios was a serious step up from anything I'd done in Germany. The supervisors had calibrated eyes. They'd look at a specular highlight on a helmet and tell you it was catching at the wrong angle relative to the key light in the plate. And they were always right.

This is what separates good from great in VFX: the people around you see things you don't see yet. Your job is to absorb that calibration. Don't argue. Don't defend. Just absorb.

During this entire London period, I was constantly sending speculative applications to the big studios. ILM. Weta. DNEG. Updated reels, polite follow-ups. Every few months, casting a wide net and hoping something would land.

While I was in London, around 2012, I started my YouTube channel. The idea was simple: learn something on the job, then present it for free so others could benefit.

No paywalls. No gatekeeping. Just production knowledge shared openly.

That was about fourteen years ago. Over 100,000 subscribers later, I still do it. The channel has become one of the things I'm most proud of. Not because of the numbers, but because of the messages I get from artists who landed their first job because of something they learned from one of my videos. That's worth more than any subscriber count.

I still remember the email. ILM Vancouver wanted to talk.

Not San Francisco. Vancouver. They had a studio up here in Canada, and they were looking for lighting artists. I went through multiple rounds of interviews with some seriously important people. Technical tests. Portfolio reviews. Long calls.

When they offered me the position, I talked to my partner, and about two weeks later I was on a plane. Vancouver. Alone. Long-distance relationship for about a year until my wife moved over and we started our life in Canada together.

Four years at ILM. Transformers: The Last Knight. Ready Player One. Aquaman. Jurassic World: Dominion. The Witcher. The talent density is absurd.

You're sitting next to people who built the tools described in SIGGRAPH papers, who invented techniques you only read about. Every day felt like a masterclass.

But after four years, I wanted something different.

I joined Image Engine as Lighting Lead. Two years later, I was promoted to Lighting Supervisor, which is my current role. I oversee all the shows on the floor, support the leads across projects, and make sure cross-department communication stays tight.

The hardest part of supervising isn't the technical knowledge. It's the communication. Directors don't speak in render settings. They speak in emotion: "This shot feels cold. Can we make it warmer?" Your job is to translate that into "shift the key 200 Kelvin and add a warm bounce from the ground plane." That translation skill takes years to develop, and you only get it by doing the work.

Image Engine has been home to some incredible projects. The Mandalorian. Obi-Wan Kenobi. Ahsoka. Dune: Prophecy, which earned an Emmy nomination. Those are shows I'm genuinely proud to have my name on.

The YouTube channel grew. The community grew. And I kept hearing the same frustration from artists: marketplace fees were destroying their income. Creators selling tutorials and assets on existing platforms were losing 30, 40, sometimes 50 percent to platform cuts. That's money taken from artists who are already underpaid in an industry that chronically undervalues them.

So I built CG Lounge. A marketplace where creators keep significantly more of what they earn. Where the platform exists to serve artists, not extract from them.

A VFX artist building a tech platform sounds absurd. The first version had bugs everywhere. We fixed them. The current version is what you're using right now.

Your reel is never done. Stop polishing. Start shipping. Add new work, remove old work. A two-minute reel with recent shots beats a five-minute reel with work from three years ago.

Learn the department next to yours. If you light, learn comp. If you texture, learn lookdev. The most valuable artists in any studio understand the pipeline beyond their own task.

Move if you have to. The VFX industry is global. I've lived in Namibia, Germany, England, and Canada. Every move was scary. Every move was worth it.

Work on a real set at least once. Physical lighting knowledge makes you a better digital artist. Period.

Share what you know. Every piece of knowledge I've shared publicly has come back to me tenfold. Teaching forces you to understand deeply. The YouTube channel didn't just help viewers. It made me a better artist.

Here are some of my earliest videos. Looking back, they're rough around the edges, but they capture the energy of someone figuring things out in real time.

flipVideo 360° ad, one of my earliest projects

Interior Visualization, early lighting and rendering work

Chevrolet Camaro SS V6 Burnout Simulation

The industry has real problems. Crunch is real. Rate compression is real. Studio closures are real. Don't romanticize the grind. Advocate for better conditions.

It's worth it. Despite everything: the moves, the long hours, the uncertainty, the imposter syndrome. Building things that millions of people watch on screen and feel something. That's worth it. Every single time.

Now close this article and go make something.

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