Node '19 | Nidia Dias - The Power of Collaboration

[Music] all right time to get our next speaker I'm very excited about this one superstar we have a superstar everyone else now this is the superstar he can't have a favorite our next speaker is a freelance art director and designer from Portugal currently based in London her work is focused mainly on style frames and look development for motion but she also produces illustrations for prints she loves travelling drinking hot chocolate and pretending how to play guitar and this is a surprise bonus she's also dragged her husband Martin Gunnarsson along to speak with her time now to welcome nidia Diaz right so hi everyone so it was interesting to hear the talks this morning as well about collaboration and that's kind of what I'm gonna be talking today so these are the projects I'm gonna talk about and I try really hard to get three of the parts to be Australian Weiss could only get two but I think it's a good ratio so for those who don't know me a little quick intro so hi I'm Nydia Diaz this is my husband Martin Gunderson and I'm gonna talk a bit about me and also explain why is here today I'm sure you're surprised so yeah I was born and raised in tiny lovely Portugal I have a background graphic design that's actually the University course that I took and a deep love emotion and besides Portugal I've lived in Sweden UK and Canada by their order and I'm actually in Portugal now back this year so that's great about what do I really do right so it's a bunch of titles I do love making stills pretty much that's pretty much it just I just put a bunch of titles and that's it and I've worked over nine years or in the industry so for those who don't know me I'll just gonna show a bit of my reel and the music was done by him but that's not the reason why he's here [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] thank you very much so I'd like to start with the project that I did last year or a collaborator last year called semi-permanent and the type of collaborations like to talk about is across the globe I was approached last year by choice to help her in a project for the semi-permanent titles and this was really interesting because first we're all scattered around the world and the idea was in this project that each one of us had a section but each section flow from one to the other so we had to be mindful what we are kind of the beginning and ending of our sections here's a little graph map of where we're all standing and at the time I was living in Toronto I was actually having a full-time job there so most of this project is actually done it weekends and nights and as you can see I'm written as animation and as I said before I prefer doing stills so what was this project about so nobody no one better than the director to say so I just copies from our website inspired by Ernest Echols work the title is delve into the microscopic world and bring to life the real beauty of this insane world so when Joyce approached me she already had an animatic some style frames and a mood board to show me and I really like the the works of Ernest like this one so I was really inspired and I really wanted to I really wanted to help on the project so I definitely said yes sign me up so because this is a long piece and we're short on time I just gonna start by showing the behind the scenes of what I've the parts that I've worked on and then I'll talk a bit better about each other so here it is [Music] [Music] so as I said before I I really love to instills and look that and when I was approached to this project I was it was pretty much doing the whole part of my section from designing to animating and comping and everything so I usually start with the creative side first and ideas but for this project I actually flip it the other way around and I had to start first to the technical side because I'm not that technical and I I knew that I've if I wanted to create something like a shape that was quite in like crazy and and sculpted a lot I'd have to do a rig which I don't do so I had to kind of create simplified way since you know free to kind of animate it in a simple way so this is present much as most lines and spine wraps and once I was happy with how he was looking and the movement of it just a bit for my own sake I start doing a bit of like to look there and and kind of figuring out how I wanted the things to look look and how the shading and all this stuff and also as well to send to the director to see if this was on the right track so I'll gonna show the final video because it's beautiful and it's every one of us had like their own different styles and everything got together really well and then I'm gonna explain a bit about this idea of having to start first with the technical and then the design afterwards so please enjoy [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] Thanks so now comes the reason why my husband is here um Coast trains so not from him so this project like I said I had to do the technical side first and only then I had to actually figure out like of the the lookin design which means that I actually had end up doing a simple animation I'm I'm very proud of what I've done but I know as well that I could accomplish much more if I were just dedicate to what I love doing so this is not so all to say that you can do anything but not everything so it's good to know your boundaries and know what you're capable of and what you actually love doing and it's okay as well to ask for help I realized that as also in that project that I could have done much better if I would just delegate more what I want to do and then could have help of something that I'm not that great at so with that in mind when I got approached for last year for another project I learned from my mistakes and that time I asked my husband to help so this type of cooperation that I'll talk about is collaboration with a partner or a friend or you wish so and here I was just mainly focusing on design and look there and I helped I asked him to pretty much do all the hard tasks of the animation and simulation so yeah so last year I got approached by an agency in Brazil and what was the brief so they had this client which was a Brazilian brand that does they have like Brandon code and daddy issues and this agency called art card they're pretty much their idea was to invite 12 artists to pretty much do one video each so the idea was each video fee per month on Instagram and their idea was pretty much you had to be loopable they gave us each one issue to be which will be the center of attention and then for the the idea that they guard was each artist will get a keyword based on something that they wanna showcase on the project so the key word that they gave me was comfort now usually what I start doing is trying to get an idea and how I gonna and try to kind of pitch back the ideas or one or two to the client in see what they liked now not always is easy to like get an idea of the badge and at a time when they say the key word is comfort I had totally no idea what I was going to do and and I didn't wanted to visualize it in a very technical way where the part of the comfort comes from the shoe so I was actually having a hard time thinking what am I going to do and we were in a trip in Montreal because we're living kind of last time last year and I saw some kids playing in a posse castle and I was like that's fun is it comfortable probably so this was a mod part that I sent to the client and the idea was that I wanted the first I didn't want to shoot to actually become inflatable because you're selling a product I don't know if the clients would like that I would make it inflatable but then I realized oh maybe I can have the environment gets inflatable and that was actually one of the requirements from the agency or the client like they didn't want to have this kind of studio background so this was a bit of the mood board that I sent to the the client they don't smelly like getting this I was just trying to show this the colors that I was thinking of and aesthetics like I really like the the stairs and the arcs and the columns so I really wanted to apply that in the environment that I was doing and a lot of the stuff that I do is very abstract so from it was also a good challenge to try creating an environment which is something that I don't normally do so how do I usually get started so first off in this project it did send me a 3d model a 3d scan of the shoe and I just put in the materials because there was no pictures of how this she looks so first thing was getting that out of the way and asking the client it stays out your shoe looks good next and then after that was really trying to figure out what was the environment kind of beam now I also wanted to explore the lighting like shadows and all everything was combining together and I did send this to the client for them to approve and I realize he was very close to the mood board and also he wasn't it looked a lot like a dollhouse because the problem here was having this shoe feel like he was not a big piece in the earth living room but just like an actual normal size shoe so the client did approve these environments but I hated it after extending it so I scrapped that and made a new environment and so this was the final environment and it felt much more open much more like I could play much more with the lighting and like sky background but at the same time it kind of felt he was closer to a bouncy castle in the sense that you do have when you see the pictures like those kind of free walls and all the stuff and and also there was much more elements that could be used to create this environment of inflatable castle so as I was doing this it wasn't like a linear process that I just pass into him so we were working both at the same time and I was exploring the environment but I was also at the same time trying to figure out how the balloon thing would be so he was doing some tests on and simulations and he would pass it to me for example this one and then out and and in Tennessee no for yo just like really trying to get the material to look like as I wanted so as I was working on this Martin was doing the hard work not sure it was all the hard work I think you pretty much gonna nail that thank you guys for being here today I'm Martin and thank you James for inviting us and for Nydia for letting me be part of her presentation normally I'm sitting there in the sidelines so today we're gonna focus a little bit about the animation side of this so neither came to me and she's like okay I have this project with some a lot of simulations going on this is something maybe we'll be able to help me with and I said sure yes I probably didn't have much choice but so go for it so my go-to tool for this was inked off in Maya and it just gives you a lot of nice shapes out of the box you don't need to play too much with it before you start gaming something that looks interesting right and also because at this early point of the production like Nina said we still can change the environment around the roads so we needed something that could adapt to whatever objects we were throwing at it so all of the creases and like nice details you see here is all done in the simulation pass so that was handy to kind of save ourselves some time so when we had that established we know that the shoe we kind of go down touch the floor and create this kind of ripple effect for the full simulation to start so we set up in two layers one was the main ripple that cannot trigger the underlaying effects of the cloth kind of being underneath it and 100 aspect here that was pretty handy was that was also in short of the animation of the shoe so these two elements together needed to kind of work when it kind of bounces on the floor right so having this go from a hard surface up to this kind of balloon if I'd won it it was kind of tricky to get it right so not make it too floaty or just make it not too violent as well right so we had an effect down now this is trying to find out a way to get this onto all of the other stuff into an environment and trying to not blow things up in the process as well things like the staircase like you want to be able to preserve the original shape of it but also make it interesting in a way when it's kind of blown up so that was that's pretty fun so here is a final kind of piece just showing all of the different elements together right and you can see like Nietzsche said before you needed to loop and go back together so I think we had like five second or something for the final piece so it's not too much time to go up to this date and then back down again it's all for Instagram right so you need to be able to do so without too much further notice gonna show the final video and when we deliver this we didn't actually add any sound on it but looking over it over and over again we realized that something was missing right so we added sound into this one hope you enjoy [Applause] so yeah he does all the heavy duty and I just get the credits and I do all the talking joke aside now it's been great working this and then early this year or this year one of our last projects that we actually worked together was for the Australian Chamber Orchestra and this was a really fun project and we got approached by Scott which I think is somewhere here and please yes so yeah so when Scott approached me I said where do I Martin would be on this project otherwise I cannot do it so yeah so we want to talk at this type of collaboration about corrosion across software's because we do use different softwares but this this work as well as a project is quite interesting because again we're six different artists each one had its own video and music but there was also collaboration with the musicians and the song that we were given so that was very interesting but before starting on the project I want to give a shout out to the other artists that did amazing pieces and and I Rick is here and I think Rory as well maybe they're probably somewhat yeah they're over there say hi to them as well and yes so the the idea of collaboration even if in with different projects is that we were all sharing like a Dropbox and and slack and we could all see which what everyone was doing so he was super inspiring to see everyone doing really great work and you've been like oh my god I need to be better so that was that was an interesting point of this but it was at the end was so great see how everyone was doing completely different styles and different looks so what was our project in what was the idea so the idea came from two things first each song had like a interpretation with it so we could see what the music was supposed to kind of talk about and then also we were listening to the music and that gave us a bit of an idea of what we wanted to do so a little bit of what from the music that we got was part genius is being in touch with the physical and in the divine in such a compelling way so this talks a lot about spirituality and and one we're thinking about this we really wanted to create a creature like a divine creature and at the time we were in between projects both of us and I just finished doing a personal project it was the one on the top with a pink background and and I thought of like repurposing that for the matter of the time that we had and so one of the ideas was kind of using these appliance and this is part of the mood part that I sent and it was either having the splines kind of wrap around the shape like you can see on the boudoir on the head and the body or actually have this flange itself being the creature so once we we send it to Scot into the agency and they're like the approach it was time to find that the creature right well what do these define creature be now I knew kind of that I wanted to be kind of this kind of client based creature and how we kind of flow but but the look was we realized early on that it would be very influenced by the movement of the creature so with that sense we realized that maybe was better to do some exploration first on motion and really feel how the movement would indicate the look and design of the creature it was good to have like this that all of the base looks on the Nina had established and we danced I went out and tried a lot of different stuff a lot of it ended up just looking at pasta but that's not the point here so we are trying to figure out like how would this creature articulates and how would it move through space in a way that's kind of interesting and also you need to be able to be working on a close-up level because when it yeah like it eats you look interesting I'm sorry we even use motion capture in some early points just to be able to establish like a level of realism underneath it so it was cool to try but not really right for this particular one so we kind of settle on this longer strings approachin I think it was you that kind of told me that like why don't you try something with wings just like an angel or something similar to that so we found this kind of nice sweeping motion and this could work on like of close-up level and also in a bigger scope that you might not be able to see the whole character at the same time but it's still kind of more interesting so this this week had Blake's so once we were happy with kind of how the movement was was going was time to go back to the drawing board in finding the look and so with that test that Martin did I quickly put it up in June free and I was trying to find this interesting shapes out of it and in forms so at the time I was I was going for a more like a mood like a dark mood and a bit of like this gold into it and at the time we were I was doing this we also started doing Dyna Matic to really understand how the the movement and the story will flow with the music so I'll show you now Dyna mattock and the very the very first animatic in as well is the chance to listen to the music and you'll and then I'll explain a bit like we realized that we wanted to start first with close-up so we wanted to make it a bit ambiguous and an abstract and only more as the the music flow we wanted the creature to really be like the hero shots [Music] [Applause] [Music] so once the client and Scots were happy with it it was time to move on into really nailing the the look in the style one of the colors they we got from the agency color palettes and one of the causes to Canada yellow and the salmon so I went crazy bold with those colors and I got away from the gold because at least for me it was very like Christianity and like in Portugal and other stuff you have a lot of gold in the churches but we really wanted to appeal to any type of spirituality and religion so this was interesting but it was too simple so for some reason I thought he needed a head so I went in to see no furry and I started explore different shapes that could work into this creature so then I applied it back and it was getting there he felt a bit like jellyfish but I'd like jellyfish I was fine with it and and it was getting there and at the time I was already pushing a bit more into the material look the shading but I realized as well because our animatic had a lot of close up so it felt like the splines itself needed more than just being that interesting material so I just gathered some assets that I had and and then I just kind of because this spiritual thing kind of premiere comes a lot from nature so I thought that this would go well with a creature so then was time to apply them into the creature so at this point I was happy with the amount of detail that it was there but I was hating the colors and melly because the yellow is taking too much focus the background was taking too much focus from the creature itself so I turn it back and push the yellow into the actual the creature and and these are some of the skills that we developed for the print and the interesting thing about this project was that the print stage and the stills came really early on and usually would do motion and then itn will show some of them so these stills actually come from that initial test that martin did with the wings and then i just virtually inferred he just found like interesting interesting shapes and i just kind of rotated the head around to make it look like he was moving so yeah so it was very interesting that we had to push really for like right at the beginning of the project into the Steel's while we're still actually figuring out how the character will really look and move it's kind of funny like we yeah like I said we still haven't really figured out what this creature was but we kind of had the idea of it from the front of automatic down so now it's time to make like a proper rig for it and kind of trying to apply the things that we saw from the from the automatic and make a proper setup so we had added incorporated the head we added in the tail that had more like clumpy can attributes on top of it and also we had a more resolution into this - himself because we saw how close up we needed to to go to it and so we that said we the animation part of this project was also bit different because we didn't really know the shots so a way to set it up was to have more can I simplify loops of animation like 45 seconds and with those things do we can cash it out and place different cameras around it and kind of looking for interesting angles around this and I think it gave us a lot of opportunities to find things that we would probably normally have not found otherwise and we that cannot done it was time to export out and get over to cinema so getting the splines only set up over and in to us a lambic and all of this is to say that software just is tool right it doesn't really matter how you're working with it it's more about end results and working with something that you're comfortable with would probably mean that you're more likely to get better at it in the long term yeah so for us there was never a moment where I tried to comfort him to see you know fully Ori try to convert me to Maya and pretty much what we decided just we used the best of you know of the software's and then we just created a workflow that worked for us and this is in you know 40 with the HISP lines and his deformation on the head and then I just added the rest of the elements so early on I expect about the prints and I just want to kind of show quickly how they were used afterwards so they were used in the booklets and also some flyers that we found here in Melbourne so we were very happy to see it and as well they're using posters so each one of us got posters and we actually saw one from Scotts in cinemas and it was really nice to actually go back in you're so used to doing things for online Instagram and web and actually walking around and as we were visiting Sydney and Melbourne to actually see these things around so that was great so now it's here is that actual final video and you hope you enjoy it [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] so last but not least the future so what's up next for us in what type of collaborations so we love love writing with each other obviously that for me it's great because he does the work and I just take the credit but no really we love working with a lot of different artists and studios and agency and it's something that we really want to continue working in in the future yeah like here's just here's just a few things that we've been noodling with in the last couple of years here and it is fun to explore different styles and different way of approaching like live-action or like character animation some live installations as well happening recently and yeah like she said we just want to try to reach out to more talented people around the globe and do more work just have fun yeah so thanks everyone beautiful and amazing thank you very much he's you and you and also want to give him a big thanks for flying from the other side of the world and of course thanks to our sponsors for allowing that happen so thanks for being here guys [Music] [Applause] [Music]

Channel: TheNode

Views: 901

Rating: 5 out of 5

Keywords: melbourne, node, node fest, art direction, C4D, nidia dias, martin gunnarsson, portugal, FutureDeluxe, Tendril, Analog, Blur, ManVsMachine, Mainframe, motion design

Id: RubwlG_wG1k

Length: 29min 33sec (1773 seconds)

Published: Thu Jun 18 2020