Uploaded September 2025 | Updated September 2026, 1 day ago
See how the Student Academy Award winning short film A Sparrow’s Song was created using Katana for look development and lighting, and Nuke for compositing. Vincent Maurer, Lead Technical Director, and Tobias Eckerlin, Director — both graduates from Filmakademie — will walk you through the project, starting with the concept and visual style, and showing how they established a clear creative direction while understanding the unique challenges of a student production.
You’ll explore their look development and lighting workflows, including the creation of a robust pipeline with Katana, that helped to accelerate these stages through templating, material variations, and multishot workflows, so they could ultimately focus on being creative. They’ll show you how they worked creatively with lighting to help tell the story by setting the tone and mood throughout the film.
Finally, they’ll explain their compositing template in Nuke, and how they made use of AOVs and custom tools to bring everything together and achieve the final look.
Join the Katana discord: discord.gg/Rgn9ucN
About Us:
Foundry creates award-winning creative software so global studios can turn incredible ideas into reality.
Subscribe to our channel and get the latest news, tutorials, webinars and updates from the Foundry team.
00:00 – Intro
10:23 – Why Katana was the best choice
13:55 – How to lookdev for 250 assets
29:08 – Creative lighting decisions
See how the Student Academy Award winning short film A Sparrow’s Song was created using Katana for look development and lighting, and Nuke for compositing. Vincent Maurer, Lead Technical Director, and Tobias Eckerlin, Director — both graduates from Filmakademie — will walk you through the project, starting with the concept and visual style, and showing how they established a clear creative direction while understanding the unique challenges of a student production.
You’ll explore their look development and lighting workflows, including the creation of a robust pipeline with Katana, that helped to accelerate these stages through templating, material variations, and multishot workflows, so they could ultimately focus on being creative. They’ll show you how they worked creatively with lighting to help tell the story by setting the tone and mood throughout the film.
Finally, they’ll explain their compositing template in Nuke, and how they made use of AOVs and custom tools to bring everything together and achieve the final look.
Join the Katana discord: discord.gg/Rgn9ucN
About Us:
Foundry creates award-winning creative software so global studios can turn incredible ideas into reality.
Subscribe to our channel and get the latest news, tutorials, webinars and updates from the Foundry team.
00:00 – Intro
10:23 – Why Katana was the best choice
13:55 – How to lookdev for 250 assets
29:08 – Creative lighting decisions
