Pipeline Heroes Inside-Out: Part Three

Janice Collier, Mammal Studios

2016 Pipeline Hero Award   

As a developer, I'm a real people person-- which sounds kind of awful, until you realize that, in a VFX facility doing pipeline, you're entirely at the service of others. The more hires we get, the more interesting the job becomes because everyone brings a different approach to their work. I like the moment where, in a group of people, something they previously found frustrating has been brought to light and corrected to improve the situation. We've solved actual facility problems in marketing-material photo-op "meetings," because getting to sit down and dig into those stories and get to the fixes is actually a lot of fun regardless of the context in which you're doing the work.

No Nuke gizmo or line of code is ever going to interest me in isolation as much as it does when it's placed in the hands of my fellow workers and I get to see how they're making use of it. There's a point in every project where I get a moment of relative peace and quiet because our collaboration has refined itself to the point where they're just working, and I can move on to the next thing. It's a good feeling.