Mac Miller - Balloonerism
Client
Mac Miller Estate
Studio
Hornet Animation
Role
Lighting/Layout Technical Director
Type
Music Video
The lighting had to walk a line — soft but present, intimate but expansive. Mac's music lives in that liminal space between melancholy and hope. USD multi-camera workflow kept dozens of shots feeling like the same emotional world.
Hero fur character lighting across all scenes · USD multi-camera workflow for sequence consistency · Environment lighting and atmosphere · Fur shader collaboration with look dev
Intent
The film needed to feel like a waking dream — soft but present, intimate but expansive. Mac's music lives in that liminal space between melancholy and hope, so the lighting had to walk that line. Nothing harsh, nothing clinical. The fur characters needed to feel tactile and warm, like stuffed animals you'd actually want to hold.
Challenge
Fur is notoriously difficult to light well. It absorbs light in unpredictable ways, and Karma's fur rendering required careful balance between physical accuracy and art direction. We also had dozens of shots across multiple environments that all needed to feel cohesive — different times of day, different moods, but the same emotional world.
Approach
I leaned heavily into USD's multi-camera workflow to maintain consistency. Rather than lighting each shot in isolation, I built environment-level lighting rigs that could be inherited across sequences. For the fur specifically, I spent a lot of time with rim lighting — it's what gives fur that soft, halo-like quality without flattening the forms.
Reference
Spike Jonze's "Her" was a touchstone — that film's use of warm, diffused light to create emotional intimacy. Also the work of cinematographer Bradford Young, who finds these impossibly soft gradients in natural light.
Technologies
Production Co.: Hornet
Director: Samuel Jerome Mason
Executive Producers: Greg Bedard, Michael Feder, Hana Shimizu, Miller McCormick
Producer: Heather Hardin
Animation Director: Daniel Callaby
Editor: Minseok Kim
CG Supervisor: Richard Kim
Story: Sam Mason, Roland Kennedy
Designers: Alejandro Diaz, Amalia Lage, JP Rooney, Kelechukwu Nwakudu, Laurie Herman, Margherita Premuroso, Matthew Corsillo, Mike Altman, Natalie Labarre, Sami Healy, Simone Noronha
Costume Designer: Karina Ochoa De Baker
Design Interns: Paris Powell, Patrick Sholar
Graphic Design Intern: Esther Yeseul Lee
Storyboards: Soren Bendt
Storyboard Editor: Joseph Comar
CG Technical Artist / Render TD: Joseph Chen
Pipeline: Natalie O'Leary, Rui Zhu, Joseph Chen
Pipeline Development: Nikita Shtarkman
Character Lead: Frank Lee
Modelers: David Vardanian, Giovani Kososki
CG Generalist: Angeline Rivera
— Titles —
Animators: Jay Asava, Jin Jindawitchu
Lighters: Christina Ku, Jonathan Lee, Joseph Ibrahim, Laney Lai, Natalia Perez Melendez, Nicole Noel, Rui Zhu, Saad Moosajee, Sam Mason, Weichieh Yu
FX Artists: Joseph Chen, Stephen Hallquist, Sam Mason, Rui Zhu
CFX: Natalie O'Leary
Groom Lead: Jesus Fernandez
Talent Coordinator: Jon Chun
Director of Production: Karen Lawler
Head of Creative Development: Kristin Labriola
Head of Production: Dez Stavracos
