Watching Spider-Man this weekend? Lookout for this Malaysian’s name in the credits

The most talked about movie for the past few weeks has arguably been Marvels’ Spider-Man: No Way Home. While we’ll try to keep this as spoiler-free as possible, one thing we couldn’t resist talking about is how a number of viewers spotted a name as the credits rolled that sounded Malaysian.

As it turns out, Dayang Norrafida Abang Suhaili’s name was in the Spider-Man movie’s credits scene as she is the Visual Effects Coordinator at Australian-American visual effects studio Luma Pictures. Luma Pictures was formed back in 2002, first working on 2003’s Charlie’s Angels: Full Throttle. Over the years, they have worked on a number of Marvel movies too, such as Black Panther, Doctor Strange, Captain Marvel and Guardians of the Galaxy just to name a few.

According to her LinkedIn profile, Dayang Norrafida began work at Luma Pictures in January of last year, and has her name in the credits of TV shows like Loki and WandaVision as well as major films like Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings and Spider-Man: No Way Home. She is apparently a graduate of Multimedia University (MMU), and over the years has spent time in a number of production houses both in Malaysia and other countries in Southeast Asia, before heading to Australia to work for Luma Pictures.

According to the Twitter user who first pointed out Dayang’s involvement in the movie, Dayang has since messaged her to not only thank her for the attention but to also highlight the other Malaysians at Luma Pictures who also helped out with production.

“I am humbled by it, but I do wanna say there’s more Malaysians involved in this movie beside me and Liyana Omar (Luma Pictures Digital Coordinator). We have Amanda Chin, another VFX coordinator, Edmund Wong, lead animator, Pei Fen Lee and Slyvia Chin, animators.

Credit well deserved for them since everyone love the movie,” – Dayang Norrafida

Malaysia in general actually has a healthy and budding visual effects scene. While Dayang and her fellow Malaysians have since branched out to international production studios, locally there are many companies involved in visual effects too. In the game industry for instance, a number of triple-A games have had some of its visual work outsourced to Malaysian studios. Examples include Warcraft III: Reforged whose visual work was outsourced to local firm Lemon Sky Studios, while KL-based Streamline Studios have worked on titles like Pillars of Eternity, BioShock Infinite and Death Stranding.

It’s certainly great that more of our local talent have had their work recognised, and hopefully this will lead to other Malaysians getting inspired to carry on the torch in our thriving visual effects industry.