Aardman's Laura Howie on lighting from inside the set, not around it

In a career-spanning profile, Aardman senior lighting camera operator Laura Howie -- credits include Chuck Steel: Night of the Trampires, A Shaun the Sheep Movie: Farmageddon, The Pirates! In an Adventure with Scientists!, Chicken Run: Dawn of the Nugget, Guillermo del Toro's Pinocchio and Wallace & Gromit's latest feature -- describes a working philosophy built around getting the camera physically inside the miniature set: "I like to position the camera within the set as much as possible. I like to be in the set with the characters." Her lighting approach follows the same logic: "I have quite a naturalistic approach to lighting... I am lighting a story rather than a set." She names the scale mismatch as a constant physical constraint of the job -- puppets are typically much smaller than the camera department's own kit -- and shoots on Canon 1DX Mark III and Canon R6 bodies with Altman Ellipsoidal and Osram Dragoneye LED fixtures, the same lighting hardware she used to build Vengeance Most Fowl's submarine interior into its own light source.