Her Story
About Shweta
Shweta Gupta is a lighting supervisor and entrepreneur with 25 years of experience in VFX animation and the food business. She started as a 3D artist before moving into the lighting department, where she specializes in defining the look of films and series. Over 12 years she worked with various companies, then ran her own firm for eight to nine years handling corporate films, animation series, and VFX. After pausing operations during COVID she rejoined Framestore and contributed to projects such as Fantastic Four, How to Train Your Dragon, Paddington and Peril. She recently relocated to the U.S. and is rebuilding her VFX animation company while launching Fitaholic and Cravings, her food business. Shweta holds a five-month intensive animation course from CDAC following an interior design program and began her professional journey at Graffiti. She is a member of Women in Animation and performs voluntary work training and supporting other women in the field. She attributes her success to persistent effort, self-belief, and continuous reinvention, values discipline, experimentation, empowerment, and resilience, and advises balancing career ambition with family and health while staying current with industry trends such as AI.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Shweta
01What do you attribute your success to?
I feel that if you keep working on what you want to do, success will come naturally to it, but all you have to do is keep going, because the moment you stop and doubt yourself, that is where you kind of keep the success bit away. You have to make sure in your mind that I am going to be successful, no matter what circumstances. If you set your mind to something like that, I think you are bound to be successful.
02What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?
The best advice that I have received is never give up, and just keep going. Keep reinventing yourself, because it's never the end. You're not starting over ever. It's the courage that you should have. Don't just rebuild professionally in a new environment.
03What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
It is a very difficult industry because I have faced a lot of things which are very difficult for a female to cope up with, because there are long hours. Family has been compromised at a certain point when you're trying to prove yourself initially. Work is important, but your family is also important too, so don't burn yourself just to do this. Do it, put your mind to it, put everything you have in it, but at the same time make sure that you stay healthy, and at the same time you give importance to your family as well. It's a very competitive industry so you need to make sure that you know most of the things which are in and around. You need to have a passion and the courage to be in the industry.
04What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
The biggest challenge right now is that AI is coming and that kind of has an impact on the industry for the job scenarios and getting more work around is getting a little the graph is going a bit down for those zones. But in terms of opportunity with AI, if you are going with the trend right now and you are updated with the recent things happening around there are opportunities which people have just because they are keeping themselves upgraded with AI.
05What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
Discipline is very important. I would say experimentation. Empowerment because if you limit yourself to one identity or one thing you can never grow so you need to keep doing that. You need to have empowerment which is very important. Obviously it's because that again gives you an option to transfer completely across different industries. And resilience because it does require a lot of courage and persistence to start something all over again. Reinventing something.
Join Influential Women and start making an impact. Register now.