Making of Agent 327, Operation Barbershop @ Blender Conference 2017

[Applause] good morning so when I wake up early in the morning after a long evening of drinking iced tea this is for my boys so I hope you guys had a pleasant evening yesterday so the agent agent three to seven octants right very safe in many many different topics to talk about is fairly successful is reaching almost three million on youtube so it's pretty good so there's so many different topics I can kind of dive into but I wanted to dive a little bit into the animation style because it's just a little bit about like what the choice is made and then like what did I at least learn from that experience so this you know to me is still kind of interesting this is the the 2014 tests that I animated and then another shot that I animated two years later women actually did two short film so it was it's like a proof of a proof of proof of concept the top one and then the bottom one is a proof of concept for a feature film alright it's different right like it's a different style and in some alternative universe we did the short film in the style of the top one of course but I'm actually really pleased that we didn't do that we could have done it and it would have been wacky and fun but there's something very different about the style like the path we went down it's a bit more real you know which you would think oh that's a little bit more boring but there's a reason for it like it's because the emphasis was on trying to get some empathy going on with a cartoon character and having you know any anything any danger happening it would have consequences so if somebody gets hit you actually see the bruising and you feel like you know this person is in danger and you kind of don't get that as much when you have something like the style above you know there's something wacky happens and it gets hit but it's kind of like Tom and Jerry sometimes you just don't get that empathy so it was kind of an interesting experiment of course a click there we go a lot of things needed to happen in order to get where we ended up being a lot of experiments of course you have to do the walk cycles and you've got to try out the different characters interesting enough this is a earlier version of you know they actually look like and felt like and you see the barber has a distinct different personality so within the beginning of the production we actually just completely changed his personality he's supposed to be this kind of posh snobby guy miss him I still miss him a little bit yeah some experiments you know it's a beautiful nerf gun there that I'm carrying this is fantasy so we're doing some experiments with like the snappiness of it how fast it would travel like when you act out things how abroad you do the different posing there's also just getting that appeal I mean I think Andy's gonna dive a little bit more into the character design but even then like once you have the character design and it's roughly where you need it to be even the animator though needs to take it to that extra level so as an example we have just kind of the same smile but in you know one side the right one it's a little bit more asymmetrical and that's just me tweaking with a lot of different bones just kind of getting that asymmetry in there and you know kind of see the difference so it's giving you it's invoking the same feeling this is roughly the same kind of relaxed smile but it's a little bit more appealing and then of course you got a new model sheets and you got to do that stuff it's like in hindsight now when I look at it it should spend a little bit more time on that even more than like the time I spent on this we did it for all the different characters but even then I think there's much to be learned about doing these things and exactly what expressions need to be done and from what angle because it really helps later on what you're doing the animation that every character feels like it's the same care from one shot to another especially when you're transitioning from a 2d character to a 3d character there were some interesting behind the scene you know little shots that we had very fun or poor Nathan but it's it's been like a long journey of figuring out what exactly is that style and you know that tangibility of it and you can see the kind of long evolution of it many in many cases like you go down the road and you realize no that's too far in one direction or the other so you kind of back up and you try something else so there's a lot of experimentation going on but I think we never like back down from the fundamentals of having it have consequences and feeling like every punch matters so that means that it's it feels more like an action movie or action short film or whatever rather than just kind of the same II cartoony thing and that's something we haven't really seen a lot like I don't I've never seen that in the industry before so it's kind of an interesting thing next up is Andy I think yes sir there you go I am I'm going to talk a little bit about the look development process on this project not so much about character design but also just on a pure artistic point of view on how we designed shots because I mean in a movie you're kind of the smallest entity are frames and I mean the like the bigger one sequences but really a shot is like the thing that you're more you're working on on a day-by-day basis so yeah I'm going to talk about the things that kind of generally that I learned in this whole process and I think those things are really valuable to keep in mind and some are obvious and now in hindsight I'm thinking like oh why didn't I think of that that's all like it's a real collaborative of process really so yeah looked about and we also called this what is it phase and this kind of became a catchphrase in the studio because at some point people just were staring at the screen and like asking ripping their hair out and why Wow what's wrong with this so yeah most of the things that I want to talk about this like I said is a collaborative process so everyone had their input into into these things and I think it's great at the end of a project to kind of sum them up so I think most instrumental in in this process were here John I mean the idea for like when it comes to animation everything but but also a character and Colin in terms of just how we build a shot how we make sure that the viewers attention is in all the right places so in the in the beginning like there were some things that they were really unclear so we tried to focus on the things that that really didn't work so much so these are like I think right now here is an example of what we were at right before the conference last year when we last talked to you guys and like we just were out of the character modeling phase we kind of had the characters there but not quite and we completely neglected the environment so of course for a whole for the whole shot design to work you you need really a environment but also you need the the layout and layout just started at that point I think Colin just came in and then he and him they sat together and kind of really polished and nailed down the layout even through the animation phase so there were just like these barebone shots they are like this is not even a shot from the film this is also not a shot from film this is just a test and but but these things already were great you know great grounds to talk about certain aspects of how this film could work or how it couldn't work and there are some things that there are just a bit weird because like we had this probably and problem in the beginning that the characters were very cartoony we we were still fine trying to find the animation style you know grounding them in reality making making it possible for you to relate to them and the environment was was always kind of too realistic but we couldn't nail nail down to exactly what was the thing that made it too realistic so lots of tests if that was one of the earliest tests of the agent coming into the barber shops and then barber shop no of course nothing is done in this shot so there's lots of work in progress things and not all the props were there anyway there are some things that magically worked so for example there was like the the earlier instance of this shot here that I think yeah the personality of the barber changed but but somehow this shop really liked striked as a thing that it kind of works it's everything is is really nice like the the characters like the characters look like like that thing you know Wow yeah also this shot of the barber I think this was a later version of the shot but there was also one where the barber was more you know less zombie ish with his scar but but also this shot kind of kind of worked so yeah to just dissect the things that we learned and with these few examples and how we applied them over the whole movie that's the that's the things I'm going to talk about so it's all just loose sort of arrangement of things so I'm gonna start with the most obvious so props have to fit into the characters hands that's I mean that it's really obvious from a point of view as like when you're making the props the characters have to have to handle them most obvious example is of course the agents gun he has these huge shove Li hands and of course we can't have a realistically proportioned gun and and have it fit into his hands it doesn't work and of course other things that the characters interact with but the the not so obvious thing especially when you're working on a bigger team where other people are where some people are working on the main props and other people are working on the background props it's not so obvious that that these things of course also apply it to the background objects because that's hugely important for making the whole world kind of fit together and gluing everything together making that style work making sure that the style works here's an example that that was a test with the the dressing tables in the barber shop which was modeled after a real dressing table in and the actual barber shop that served as a template for this movie here it was a test where we just try to make the shapes of it broader we try to thicken the knobs under under draw the straws and we see that it kind of gets into a better place you can also see the different texture we try to make sure that the textures are not so realistic that the contrast is slightly less pronounced and of course you can bring it to the extreme where you kind of cartoon if I everything so we have to kind of find the right the right balance of making a cartoony making it believable so yeah another example is for the ice cream truck this was modeled after a real situation H bus and even though the the the surfaces are really kind of realistic we try to try to simplify some shapes and some aspects we try to take less of the details like on the grille there's less of these stripy intersection things and we try to kind of over overall like keep the idea of the same of the bus but just take a few things out that that just make it too realistic and remove the details that are too small another one using visual clutter to our advantage we had this test here very early on which the the barber shop was still working in progress and we were doing so many things that we didn't have time to do all the picture frames on the wall and those were kind of crucial because in all our design examples we we had pictures of those barber shops that have have these huge walls covered in pictures and strange strange objects and so on so we never quite in the early phase got to that point where where we had enough material to put on the walls so when we were putting these shots together we kind of asked herself so what is wrong here I mean there are some things missing but but how many how many picture frames do we actually put in that place and and of course there's things like there's the there's the patterns are too regular all over the place it's it on a design point of view there are some areas that you're I just get attracted to because there's repeating patterns and parallel lines and stuff like that on the set design point of view of course you would have a more messy set but these are the things that just also contribute to the fact of this job not working here asan for example it paint over that carton did just on a set dressing point of view we wanted to make it more dirty of course and we want to make sure that it kind of feels like a neglected place here is some layout tests for the arrangement of picture frames thing there was me just trying to duplicate things and see what shapes work and what don't this was the out of that which was like okay I think that idea just came from ton and he suggested to her just make the place so full that your eye just gets gets you know your you get the attention to the place that is kind of empty where the character is and yeah that kind of worked this is a final shot and of course we had to do some things with lighting also and and and color grading to make that work but yeah this is an example of how we use too much visual information to produce these empty spaces that your eye can kind of rest onto that's another example here but of course the thing that is also instrumental to making this work is the lighting and kind of the focus point of the whole shot and that's what I'm going to talk about next we had to we had this very early version of this shot where the agent is sitting down on the on the dressing table and he gets his hair cut and the the early versions of this I mean we knew that some things were not I mean most of the things were not done but but still like the composition is kind of really strange and there are some there's lots of things that that just drag too much attention like the glossy containers on the table and here's some paint over that we did I think the the one side is from jarton and the other one is from me and we just try to find some things that we can do to focus our eye better on on the action that is going on on the screen and yeah that that kind of worked it's mostly it's a mixture of trying to find trying to find these areas of contrast that you produce on the screen and trying to balance them with where your eye needs to go for example there was the problem that the the texture on the drawers were this was just too contrasty and the the tables were too bright and the mirrors were too clean so what we ended up doing also as to kind of tint the mirrored reflection so we don't have you know a clear a clear vision into the space into the reflective space beneath them and also we kind of try to dial down the reflective areas so yeah I think this is oh yeah this is another example of how we try to deal with the focal depth because I think that's one thing that Colin had a very strong opinion about because I mean he knows about about actual real filmmaking and and in the real world so we tried to find the right lens values that worked for this without making it too blurry so I think this is as as f 2.8 this is this is at f/2 so we're trying to make the depth more shallow and we're trying to find you know the right focus point where we can where we can tracked the cameras attention this is at 1.4 and this is at 0.7 so I'm not sure if it's yeah it's pretty clear here on the screen that it's kind of too blurry so we ended up at 1.4 at in the end of the shot and which makes sense I mean you were you'll have a film camera in that space and it would kind of be a low light situation so you might have to put those f-stops down this is the final version of the shot and of course I mean it was a combination of just the lighting the textures the set dressing and but also the color grading I think Colin and Sean welds the greater did a great job at you know making sure we just look at the characters here and that nothing else gets gets too much attention here's a kind of obvious one but it makes sense on as a design choice when you're just working on props but yeah you shouldn't make things too glossy or too bumpy and those were the main culprits of that we were just trying on really to figure out the style and we were ending up copying things too much from the real world so things were - the kind of realistic hashtag PVR but we tried to dial that down later on so for example here again in this shot we try to lower the bump and the specula of the drawer of the cash register in the foreground conceded here and we try to separate the specularity from the diffuse from the diffused lighting so that means that we had some lights that were purely diffused and some lights they were purely specular to get all this stuff to work we had to you know create a huge array of light none of these shots was actually lit realistically from the window coming into the inside and kind of filling a space we just have to fill everything with lots of huge area lights kind of like you would like a movie set mmm here is a more clearer example there there was this painting that the agent is turning around and we were we could never quite figure out what why why it wasn't working so I think Conan and Cureton they just suggested to remove the bump making it less complex and then just reducing the complexity in that in that painting and making it bigger another thing that is just on on a pure artistic point of view of really important is to to simplify colors overall when you're lighting something I think the the thing the point where I really where I really understood that is when when your tongue made all these great paint overs of of the reel of the comic books because we looked out at these comic book pages that we're trying to emulate and I mean there are comics and we are making a film but still what what kind of ideas can we take from the scholar that the color scheme - into into our interpretation and the colors in the comic books are really beautiful because also the paper and the the medium it's printed on kind of effects it this is for example a paint over that returned it for the interior spaces kind of just filling the colors and then adding some subtle shading and kind of lighting it semi realistically but it gives you a really clear idea of how like how this palette is kind of limited you shouldn't just make it you know add all kinds of colors in there red green and blue or so it wouldn't work mm-hmm so here's an example of of a shot in a movie that Pablo lit and we yeah we needed to have a clear understanding to where the light actually comes from so we needed to have a clear separation of outdoor light and interior light because there was this big window that was casting this big you know it was the actually the main light source because there was this bright light coming from from the outdoor and we are trying to balance that with the interior light because the the interior light of course is very useful because you can kind of highlight the characters in a better way most of the action was actually happening from the direction of that window so if we lit it realistically it would look really flat and and not really nice so using these interior lights meant that we have to separate the colors from the exterior to make sure that we still have know we're in visual space we are so we went for the kind of obvious thing so let's call color the exterior light blue that's color the interior light yellow it kind of works here's a here's an example of course that the big challenge was also to make it not look too artificial and I think that's that's going to be really tough with the with the next project to kind of make sure that this this natural likes light still kind of feels natural and not like you put a put an aquarium in there or so mmm-hmm here's a good one sculpting with light clarify form and readability which it's not really obvious but it makes like it makes total sense if you're trying to you know make characters look appealing because you want to make sure that that you can as a viewer identify how they you know how they are constructed and that anatomically and again beautiful paint over from cartoon where he he I think his idea was because cars are so important in Martin's universe he wanted to paint over some cars but what I really liked with this is that that the surface that that is in Martin's drawings it's very it's it makes sense from from a perspective point of view I mean it's it's stylized and it's an artistic interpretation of of you know perspective but still it kind of has a shape in the form and I think what curtains paint over shows is that that shading it really nicely kind of helps also making it more appealing and that was also one of the things that really worked with this shot and I think if we just dissected it the characters are lit in a way that makes them appealing also these ones here were very early examples that kind of just worked and it's it has to do with you know finding the right position for the lights and that's that's just a lot of trial and error that was a really early example and that ties in to what I just explained with the window so this was how it would look like if we lit it from the window and there was this huge like white balance and all that kind of stuff so the exterior like have is really bright so we want to white balance for that so it's kind of white your lighting everything with this huge white light from from your point of view and that makes everything look horrible so in this little lighting session with Colin we kind of try to push push the light around kind of like in movie DP or an a director would do to kind of make sure to seat it but still make it believable of course there's other issues here where the background is to details and we get too detailed and we get too much attention on the background so in in the final movie we kind of tried to approach it more film noir ish where we we we really put some spotlights on the characters and just try to you know carve them out of this of this room to make sure that your attention is completely focused on them here's also a good one that was I was constantly I think at this point Conan was in the States for a short trip so he was sending me all these notes and I was lighting this whole sequence and one of his notes was I mean this wasn't almost this wasn't his notes I made that up but his note was basically that we can't figure out the planes of you know the sculptural planes in this thing there's too many flat colors or all over the place and we can't really separate the agents hands from the tables so if you kind of squint you don't really know what is going on here so as a resulting step we kind of darkened down the I mean everything basically and just went back to this kind of spotlight situation and of course we darkened down the texture of the dressing table and I think we also tweaked the the specularity of the gun to kind of make it more you know fit into that space another example this was the first iteration of first or second iteration of the lighting of that shot and this was the final one and you can see that you know we can we get a much better sense of the shape of the faces and everything mm-hmm and also of the drama and again the the the the color grading really helps to kind of this is a final graded shot so the color grading did like added just a bit more on top of the existing lighting mmm-hmm then the final thing that I learned is it's really just a pragmatic one when you're working on something working on the big picture is is always better than just focusing on that small entity of a shot that you're working on I think it's really it's really important to try as many things as you can on a wide variety of things and just fail they all replace and it doesn't matter because the sooner you failed the the sooner you can make it better right and yeah hopefully we felt enough and we can make it more awesome next time that's it Wow this is great art I'm going to take I don't want to take all the credit for what I'm going to show now I will actually give proper credit and you know these artistic processes iteration is so fascinating to witness when you're in the studio working day day by day and see all the struggles and see everything come together but then really that's what everybody wants to know that's why you're all here or at least that's what usually happens after you know show in the movie and everything like one of the first question comes how do you guys do and and so really like you know we've been we've been I will talk about a few things our overall pipeline and the biggest rendering challenges and flamenco our render management software and attract our production management software and just give you a bit of an overview of how much we developed what what changed the scenes you know we bring this topic up almost every every year to show our progress and it really helped to move things forward but really how long did this take to render so I just show you some you know it's a random graph just to give you the illusion that I'm gonna tell you how long it took to render the movies 5555 frames so it's an easy number so I remember it and with that you can do some math but so you know in some some cases it took up to a hundred hours per frame to render I'm not talking about final frames because you know before you get the final round of time you have to iterate a few times in some cases it might even get up to 400 hours we didn't actually waste 400 hours of computing because we want to save the planet so we render at a smaller resolution but then you can extrapolate and you can go like okay this actually might take 400 hours so maybe we should fix this and in terms of memory the the shots were not really too complex compared to for example cosmos laundromat where we had to deal with the caches and particles to a whole different level so we are talking about like 20 30 gigabytes of RAM but really in in the end after these hundred hours of projected computing time we actually managed to bring it down to an average of 8 10 hours per frame which is not too shabby actually and I have to give a special thanks to IT for innovation which is a super computing center in the Czech Republic that provided us with a lot of render power we did a lot of rendering on our end to make sure that everything was ready to go for final over there where we had a supercomputing availability to actually make these hundreds of frames render and just to give you a measure of what kind of computers we were talking about is you know enthusiam 24 core so it's like dual core machines dual CPU machines with you know a hundred gigs of RAM and and yeah 24 cores so it's like not really you know they have a lot of memory but in our case our machines didn't have that much so we needed to make sure that we would fit and so that was never a problem and and the computers themselves they were you know industry standard but nothing incredible what was the hardest shot of the movie that's also something that people want to know like your worst nightmare the one that kept you awake at night and it was 11 1 a eleven when I was a very difficult shot who knows what 11:1 a is okay miss to you people know that okay I actually had to look it up because it's already fading away but then you're like okay yes eleven when a is this shot so this shot is very important because it was one of the first shots that we started experimenting with when doing motion blur tests and basically we found out something that I mean it was already known which is a motion blur and hair is kind of problematic and we didn't really know the level of problematic mass but basically what we did it takes in some cases some some frames of this shot would take you know factor of 1020 factor a hundred like you know the time of the average for rendering the shot so instead of rendering in one hour or in ten hours you would actually render in 100 hours just one frame why so of course to to get before going to Sergei complaining that cycles doesn't work we had to do a little bit of homework and at least try to render things so then I made this very simple you know overlay of plotting different kind of computers rendering the frames with the render time for each frame and you could actually then pinpoint exactly which frame was was causing issues and that's when I'm Sergei got to work and and he turbocharged cycles and did some magic to even out these random times so here's like the science so we wrote a little article about this probably some of you seen some of you have probably seen already that that picture Sergei called him really fast and it's actually I was quite a quite popular article quizzical share the also outside of the blender circles maybe was because of the click blade hit title how we made cycles 10 times faster which actually was kind of true in some instances so the technical explanation of this is of course explained there we wish we actually could document this better but as you can see the idea is to you know to tackle those specific cases when you have a hair motion blur and compute it in a more efficient way so that you have a more predictable render time because that's what we try to do we we render if we render frame from a sequence and we try to get an idea okay this shot is going to take more or less this amount of hours that's okay let's continue and render the rest of the sequence and based on that project how long is going to take so this is one of the many rendering challenges we had to face we don't have a lot of time to dive into all the others but I'm actually going to talk about how we fit this into our open movie pipeline so these psychos improvements of course were instrumental for rendering the movie and we render the movie using flamenco before we start I would like to give a big props and credits to sibron and to Sergei of course who helped and Pablo who did a lot of UX design for for the web tools and the lie and Bastian who all teamed up to give us help from any direction be it from scripting side asset management side you know web development a lot of work to make these tools come together so here is our little overview of how our flamenco system works which should be known used with just a little recap for those who have never heard of this thing before we are running it on the blender cloud we are running a component which is called the flamenco server which is connected with the rest of the land a cloud infrastructure in successive obeah the web browser and also via under directly and the server itself then is connected to different flamenco managers and the flamenco managers are the one that are actually in charge of sending the actual data down to the nodes which are doing the computing and this this design allows for different managers to exist so we could have our own little manager in the studio and then we could have managers somewhere else and in the future at the time there was the future now it's the present this allows people to actually have their own render manager outside of the Linda cloud infrastructure so they can control their own assets they can control their own workers and then just use the blender cloud server for having a nice interface and a nice way to dispatch their jobs but then the actual computing and asset management happens on the own on your own side so one one interesting development we did was progressive rendering this is a little overview of how progressive rendering works basically we wanted the the biggest challenge the the most important target when working on a on a shot and getting it to render is to get it back as soon as possible getting as quickly as possible and idea if we are going to fail or not because failing immediately is the most important thing as and the first just explaining it's valid all across the board and the idea is to render iteratively a low number of samples for every frame and and then iterate over them so you can review them and then there is another iterate so we render for example shelters 300 samples so we render 10 samples for every frame we look at it and then we can say okay continue rendering so then we render another ten or hundred samples and then we can sample merge them together and and then that gives you 110 150 or whatever many samples you want in the end and this is also very useful when you get to the end of the project and you have the bad line of doom that is over you and you go like okay we really wanted to render this with a thousand samples but this is really going to work so we can render it to 500 it doesn't look too bad and then if there is time we can render another 500 samples that gives you an amount of flexibility which is fantastic because in some cases like this thing of rendering with the high number of samples is more like placebo and reality because you have this shot that is like a hundred frames long in the middle of an action sequence and even if it has a little bit of noise nobody's actually going to notice and that's why it's very important to work looking at the sequence because it really informs where like you really spot the mistakes because when you really get to the point of finalizing the last frames before the day before sending everything to the final grade you really need to spend your time wisely so trying to always keep have a step back and have an overview is very very useful and talking about having an overview of what is happening let's talk a bit about the tract I have this little video that shows some of the things we did we did that of course a big props to sibron who basically took care of everything to make this work and it was extremely extremely helpful especially in the final part of the film I have been you know following the project for a while while it was happening to almost one year but then it was especially in the last few months that was really on board helping out to set shots and to check them and to send him to the farm make sure iterating together with everyone in the team to make sure everything that was render was actually good to go and we had this fantastic integration of attract within the blender video sequencer so we were able to select and change their status and update their status on a server so then with a web browser you could actually go and see the entire shot list and see what every task was looking like so we could have layout animation lighting effects and you would know exactly what was going on in every in every stage and we would have some sort of logging to also keep track of who was changing the status if people are adding nodes we even had an SV n hook which would allow us to commit something and mention a task and and say ah this task is done so then in the when when browsing it from the from the website you would actually be able to see that things were actually what happened there basically goes when you get a problem you want to start tracing it back the first place where you go is a track to say okay did someone write anything about this is it broken who touched it last time and so on so having that information in an easy to access platform that was very important and we actually did it during this movie next up we have BAM which is the blender answers manager which is also the best kept or ignored blender asset management secret in the entire blender ecosystem and the reason why I'm saying this is because sometimes I I talk to TVs or companies that are looking into blender or that want to provide services revolving around land there very often it's a rendering services and everybody has to deal with this problem now everyone here probably who has dealt with more than three bland fires at some point had to deal with this problem I want to move my three bland files from A to B and and I want to be able to open them and have everything working and that's what the BAM is for we've been talking about this many many times but I thought that I would dedicate a special slide just to explain how to use it basically BAM is a package that you can install with the v3 install blender BAM command and then you can run it and that's it you don't need to implement your own blender asset management system a lot of people we are like we have our special requirements we have you know our render farm we need to pack the blend file and we made our own brilliant solution and then you know that way we can send the Feist that of course fantastic but please have a look at this because it saves so much time and if you have more development efforts towards this one package that's very that's very good one of the reasons why this is actually an external tool from blender is because you don't really need blender to take care of what is linked into it and it's also very useful because it doesn't all isn't we are not always talking about den files we're also talking about images sometimes we're always talking about movie files or external textures or something like that so you really want to have something these outside the blender that takes care of all these things all this is now available in the cloud for everybody which is fantastic because designing something for your own pipeline is already a struggle to make things work to make things on time for the film and to really do your own custom development and that's the first iteration is really good but making something that everyone can use like with the more generic mindset that's that's a big challenge and I'm really happy with the I really want to thank Cigna and publish specially for the work they did on the on the blender cloud platform for making this for making this possible and yeah I think that's pretty much it on my side if you have any more questions we are always around and we are happy to talk about this I give it up to town now thank you guys so there was also a reason why we did it apart from that's really fun and cool and awesome to make movies the plan was to make an animation - that's how it all started at alt presented a pitch and said well let's try to find out what is this universe of the agent and especially how can we transform the comic from the seventies eighties the touch commit into a modern look and with the animation from and try to sell it because that was of course the main goal to have a feature film and development in our studio in Amsterdam so aside of having a team working on the teaser animation test or as we call it we also had people working on a story that first had a just writer called combining it with Colin they produced a synopsis and together with the barbershop we took the synopsis to the market and we tried to find out the interest from everybody unanimously everybody loves barbershop at every level in the film industry they really see how fresh and how unique it is is is really something that stands out but this is not the average copy of another kid's film what everybody is trying this is fresh this is new and this has a potential but the the response in has for the stories we had in development was quite low it was not really interesting we were not even enthusiastic ourselves a lot and it was still very early in development so I was very happy that during all these connections I was having but also found two guys who were very very much happy and available to work with us this is the robot and death robot in stock but in all the relays and Los Angeles for 35 years we went to Hollywood to start working on the Iron Giant and since then he works for blue sky for DreamWorks and he ended up for elimination was head of story or moving slightly speakable me and all the other stuff in the Netherlands Robert is well known for his superior quality of writing and story development and he happens to know Martin law right has the writer of the comic really well from Martin already introduced me to available this advisor to talk to him because maybe they can help so I met them in Los Angeles she introduced me to Dave whose was working for a lot of studios as the person who comes in I slashed to rescue the whole story right up it you always make the mass house ghost and every person from the big studios they always have problems and then you got in there Fanny will start working on it and trying to solve things so together they work for three weeks or a complete new story and I went four weeks ago to Los Angeles to work with them further and they gave up it said is the picture of the pits of the new thing it was hilarious three hours of totalitarian seeing two people two persons who are so incredibly experienced and first in this whole story thing what we have now is an artist title in the next slide honor first the name of the movie workaround currently is the Einstein Enigma that is the story I'm not going to tell you what the story is yet in development but it stills the agent the store place in the 70s so has all gotten at the Swiss secret agent but the stories are much more personal is really about a person who gets into troubles because of his own personalities in a way that you don't really align with it plus it is really exciting with lots of stuff that justifies unemotionally so that's the status of the stories that we have a good story now that can be developed into a script that's fantastic these animation and then we want to do some business so what's the the the goal that we want to call the blender Institute and that's we can do many things I can I know I can do many things but what I would realize over my passion is in making sense as a part for making Brandon I'm also very passionate about making media content mostly animation from it's just the best thing ever and so the four blenders future if we want to keep growing and want to make blender more complete and a better more professional product I think it's a fairly good future we would be able to grow the blender Institute in an animation film studio with 4050 people of which like 10 more are engineers software developers working on blended working on an open source pipeline for creation I will still be shared with other studios and do some business with making commercial movers that's what I'm working on that's what we are pitching and we have three strategies for this one is of course at the Netherland the agent Comics is considered to be our cultural heritage at this everybody all that are 45 has 55 my age they all know it those are the people who are sitting on the pots of money here they do under subsidies this is just very commercial thinking of me but it's in it works because I know where the dutch film found and others there is no doubt about that we deserve the support to make this film what I'm still hoping is that there is some wealthy internet millionaire out there who will be grew up with the comics - and who sees this video on think oh my god I wouldn't want to fund it so this you never know it could happen couldn't happen the second strategy is of course how well can you find the money for film not in the Netherlands right if you got to 3 million for a movie in Holland then you have a big film in Hollywood that would not be that said that's one episode of a TV series maybe but you Hollywood animation production go easily into the run on over 150 million we don't need that much but if we want to make the agent a decent movie for the international market our budget is around 12 to 15 million euros what we think of with mayn't and the only place in the world that they know how to make money with movies in Hollywood we also thanks to the blender parts that have nice connections now so I've been introduced to do all kinds of interesting people with very interesting lunches in Beverly Hills place I can talk to you about the other private but for example we now have an agent an agent for the it's a movie but if you aren't Hollywood you listen agents and if somebody's - what - friends you what let's those people who have really big buildings with with people with elevators without buttons for example for the center to another fighter that automatically takes you to the floor where you can talk to a person it's crazy stuff but we have an air so I gave a pitch and I said ok they're going to represent you somebody else said yeah but you're cently the lawyer so here's my lawyer you come to get this lawyer the cigar who's working for Lou pressure on for example and it also says now this is quite stuff if you are going to into negotiation in Hollywood we were happy with that so that's that's super important this is the stuff that if such variability but of course that takes time it takes time when we are sending out all the stuff we'll have to send us a new story I will Oh Clara fantastic oppa movie book that's now over there so we are still feeding them and trying to find out if something is coming back at the last - Odyssey which is probably more feasible is european co-production I don't know people some people are here filmmakers Europe is divided in all kinds of nice little countries every country has a little bit of money well this is quite common in Europe is to combine the fund the public funding especially from three or four countries I put it all together I don't work with three or four different pollution or even studios to work on a film and finish it I'm talking to several of those studios in the European Parliament ceremony for example to see if they don't work on it together this is all going on and I will keep doing this for a while I hope to have a quick announcement one day but currently it's only the title of the official film [Applause] and of course everybody knows that we have a new film in development called spring no no and this time we have a much director all the stuff and we have to cut because it's late I thank you

Channel: Blender

Views: 88,567

Rating: 4.9167333 out of 5

Keywords: talk, blender 3d, 2017, vfx, bcon17, amsterdam, bcon, conference, academic, blender, 3d, science, presentation, open source, education, de balie

Id: JKlgCnp_57M

Length: 56min 11sec (3371 seconds)

Published: Tue Nov 14 2017