 Let's get rocking and rolling. Welcome everybody. Again to another Logic Live. This is going to be a great episode. I'm super excited today. I love this guy, Naveen, and we have some great stuff to show. So let's get underway. Logic Live is brought to you by AJA. AJA develops an extensive range of solutions for the professional video and audio market, from conversion devices to IO solutions, digital recorders, cameras and more. The team at AJA has always been a real friend of the logic community, sponsoring prizes for one frame of white and for our logic parties at NAB. And I just want to give a shout out and a thank you to Steve Loci over there. He's always been a great friend and a huge supporter. And I really do appreciate his support of Logic Live and of the podcast too. So thanks so much, Steve. And these guys make the best gear out there. So if you're looking for anything in the IO market, be sure to get it from AJA. And this episode is also sponsored by Cinesis Oceana, Solutions Integration and Support for Digital Content Creators. As I've said before, these guys are my personal resellers and the relationship is just invaluable. If you need anything to get your business up and running, give Cinesis Oceana a shout. You can reach them at Cinesis.io. They've been supporting Flame Artist since 1997. My guest today is Naveen Srivastava from the Vanity in Toronto. And one of the things that makes these guys unique is how they use Flame for most of their motion graphics work. And Naveen is going to take us through a couple of those spots today. Naveen, are you there? Hey, Eddie. Hey, man. Oh, let me stop the share here. Oh, yeah. First of all, hey, here we go. Nice. Welcome to the show, sir. How are you? Thank you very much. It's great to be here. Yeah, I'm really good. You? I'm great. Why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself and about your company? Sure. So I'm Naveen and I've been doing Flame for about, well, getting gone almost 20 years now, really. We started a company called the Vanity about just over 10 years ago now in Toronto. We are a company of 16 people and we have six flames here. So you can imagine it's a pretty flame-dominant company. We have some CG here as well as a colorist who runs Baselight. But, you know, sort of our bread and butter since the beginning it's been flame. We've just been doing it. We love it and it's worked out really well for us. That's great. What about yourself? Do you have a design background or a motion graphics background? No, not really. I mean, only through Flame. In fact, when I started doing Flame, I'd say motion graphics and design were the weakest card in my hand. I understood the technical aspects. I really knew video things, but I didn't know anything about design. I didn't know anything about art. I didn't grow up in that kind of house and I certainly didn't look or do anything like that in school. Art is the subject I got the worst mark on in my entire life. I think about 53 percent, so just barely getting by. I guess as a kid, it was never really like a part of me and never really something I was drawn towards. But then once I got into Flame and I saw that I could just do something and then go, oh, that sucks. I'm going to erase it and then make something better. That was already way better than everything I had already done. It's just a relief to know that I'm not the only one who feels that way. That same creative process. Oh, that sucks. Let me try something else. Yeah. It sort of became this thing too. You're working with all these art directors. All these art directors are just saying like, oh, make it like this and they'll just name some contemporary artists that you're just expecting to know who that is. And you kind of feel dumb that you don't know who that is. So you then you start to learn a little bit about these contemporary artists or you start to listen to this music or you start to watch that movie. And then all of a sudden you've got all these influences and then your experimental base of like how you can kind of draw on or things you can draw from is like all of a sudden getting bigger and bigger and bigger. And then somebody says, can you do something with that super over there? Like, oh, yeah, I can probably do something with that. And then you show them a couple of things. Like, that's great. Like, thank God, that's great. Because before that sucked and now it's great. So the waters are really bouncing here. Yeah, it's really, really good. Well, you've got a couple great spots to show us today or to take us through. So I'm going to show the first one. Do you want to this would be the one I've got it over here, the card apart. Yeah, sure. Do you want to talk about it or give it a as they say on the late night shows, would you like to say a few things about the clip before I roll it? Yeah, for sure, set it up here. So a card apart is it's more of a music video than a commercial. So really was just on YouTube. It was it's for a Canadian grocery store called no frills and no frills is like, not a discount grocery store, but you know, as you can imagine by the name, it's called no frills. I mean, it's not the fanciest place in the world. You don't get a special tote bag frills. Yeah, exactly. None of that stuff, right? I mean, even from day one, I think like even in the 80s, I think you had to buy your own plastic bags there. You wouldn't give you so you just got nothing like you can. Yes, you can come and buy your food here, but then like, we're going to give you a really good price, but we will, you know, you bring everything else, you know, so, you know, so anyway, so they are their account is with this agency in town called John Street and John Street is a is a great agency to work with. They have very creative people, very smart people working there. And we love them a lot here. And so we're really appreciative of the work. And so they came to us with this project and they said, like, hey, it's going to be this music video kind of thing. You know, and they sent a couple of references, and then they just sent us a bunch of stills of food. And then we thought, okay, so I guess we'll make something with this. And then, and then, you know, and we knew there was going to be this this this really, you know, banger track on this thing. And so that we heard a demo of that, and which is awesome, like right off the off the gate, we're like, okay, so we really got to, you know, make something good here because because the music is so good. So the visuals have to be at least, you know, at least a six and a 10. So let's let's see what we can do. So yeah, I mean, that's kind of the the the nuts and bolts of it. But yeah, if you run it, and then we can kind of maybe show some stuff or whatever. Yeah. All right, here we go. Fingers crossed. Oh, times like these haulers need to come together by staying apart. It's time for all make sure to wash your hands and all the key, the key. Stay six feet at least or a six feet. Let's keep physical distance. Oh, leave the family home. Just like the bags on our own. Hashtag stay home. Shop ones a week and I take it home. Capacity stays low. We stay in safe in the snow. No hating. We holler and we wash our hands keep the distance. Make sure to wash your hands and all the key, key. Six feet at least or a six feet. Let's keep physical. Yeah. All in this together. So be kind to each other and don't overhandle the program. Wash your hands and all the key, six feet at least or a six feet. Let's keep phenomenal, man. Oh my God. Oh, thanks, man. Yeah, it's phenomenal. Super fun project to work on. You know, and I should definitely give as much credit as possible to Sean Cochran who really led this project. I worked on it, but he was definitely the lead, the guy in the chair with no clients behind it because we did it all in COVID. But, you know, it was really his baby. You know, and I was just like kind of like, you know, holding his hands like push at the right times and stuff. And so, you know, we had a great time making it. And even the audio, I mean, you heard the song like it's awesome. It's, you know, the guy who did it is this guy Didier who has a company called Soundworks in town. And he made this track really by himself. Like he wrote it, he composed it, he's singing on it. He mixed it. He had the only person that's not him that's on this track is the guy who was rapping and he just drove to his house, stood in his driveway and fed a microphone into his window from the, from the driveway and said, okay, rap. And then that was it. And then they had this song. It's phenomenal, man. It's just so great. It's just, I mean, we've all worked on the, you know, that in these unprecedented times, you know, COVID spots and those. So this was just like genius. And also to represent the whole concept of social distancing with stacks of chicken nuggets, by the way. I got a, I mean, you know, just, you know, why don't you take us through, take us through the spot and take us through a couple of the shots. Yeah, for sure, man. Okay, so let's just do a little screen share here, right? My share. Let's try that. You and me both, Bob. Okay, cool. Yeah, so let's, let's go through it. So, I mean, you know, one of the things that's kind of probably more interesting about this, from a process is that it was really just, like I said, kind of the audio house, and then, and then the agency and then us, and then I don't think anybody else was really in the mix there. So, there was no offline edit. So, you know, right away, we knew that we were going to be doing all this stuff distanced. So we had to figure out, like, what are we going to do? Are we going to make this work? A lot of our flame artists just don't have audio through their screen sharing apps or whatever they're using to log into the machines or from the machines at home. So, so we, we made this dope sheet, where, you know, it's really using some of the basic tools in flame, you know, where kind of if I go down a couple of tracks here, you can see kind of like, there's just sections and each section gets a, you know, has like just the words, the lyrics, I guess, of, of that individual bit. But then, you know, the just through the metadata, it's reading, like what frame of that section it is, you know, and then when we go up a level, now we've got this other little thing on the top level, which is kind of showing us, okay, this is part of the intro, this is the hook, this is the bridge, and that was more like, you know, kind of like music video-ish sort of terms that we could kind of use to, to guide ourselves to figure out, like, okay, cool, well, like we did this for the bridge last time. So let's do this, you know, something similar next time or like the verses coming up, like, let's do this, you know, that kind of thing. And then, of course, we got our, like, our timecode burn in here, which helps us out a lot, just to show us where we are in the whole timeline, which section we're in, you know, and so it's really, really, it was a really helpful way of figuring out how to break this thing down, because again, you know, we really didn't have anything to start with. There was no nothing shot, of course, and not really anything given to us other than a bunch of pictures of food. So originally, that's kind of what we thought it was going to be. So let me just pull up. So, you know, Sean and I do another, I say Sean and I, but there's like loads of creative, talented people here who worked on this. You know, we just kind of like, just started making stuff, you know, and Sean, you know, like, so we just kind of made like, I don't know what, like, Sean was kind of teaching himself Blender during this time. So, you know, he kind of made this like, sim with bananas falling into a box. And like, that was kind of interesting, you know, and, you know, very, I think he had just randomly done a banana as part of like a tutorial that he was doing at the time. Have frutuitous, have frutuitous. Exactly, right. So, you know, and then there were certain things that like we did like this that like just made it in from the get go. But again, we were kind of doing all this stuff blind. Like we didn't know we, I don't think we'd heard the track yet. When we made all this stuff, we were just kind of giving a couple of references that we knew was like somewhat like internet inspired, right. And I know I'm kind of like brazen through these visuals, but they're, I mean, some of these didn't even make it in. They're just like, you know, ideas that we had like, I kind of like this idea of like just like miles and miles and miles of like imperial army worth of sandwiches or whatever, but you know, stuff like that. So, again, you know, like, they just, you know, we just kind of had this stuff. And then, and they gave us a track, and then, you know, just like any other process, you know, any other commercial thing, like it's evolved. And so the music company did a great track. And then, you know, there were some client changes, major changes, little feedback here, like, okay, we don't want to say that we want to focus on this. So let's, you know, let's do it that way. So, so, you know, they made revisions, we made revisions, and we just kind of all like held each other's hands. But obviously, we didn't hold anyone's hands because that would be terrible during COVID. But, right, we just kind of looked at each other through monitors and said, okay, that's something. And then we made some more things that were something. So, yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, you know, as I'm kind of going through this, I think that probably one of the unique things about the Vanity as a company is that we don't have like a traditional computer graphics design department, like a bunch of people running After Effects, making stuff like this. So, Sean and I and the team here, we've just typically done everything in flame for years. And as much as anything, it's just because it's what we know, you know, it's the tool we know, it's the tool we go to. And quite often, you know, Canadian budgets aren't known to be great. You know, we have about the tenth of the size of the population of the United States. But it's an audience that expects the same kind of quality and the same level of production that you see in American stuff. So, you kind of have to make the best of what you got, you know, it's kind of one of those things. So, you know, so we... I mean, I think to quote what has to be the single greatest batch group name of all time, it's like olives down the pickle tunnel. Well, yeah, I mean, that's exactly it. It's just olives down the pickle tunnel. And we can go into that batch if you want. I think like Martin Short said, like, when Americans watch TV, they watch TV. When Canadians watch TV, they watch American TV. And that's kind of what... That's reality, right? That's kind of what we do. Yeah, so, I mean, you know, these are all motion graphics. If you don't do your motion graphics in flame, I can understand it's not necessary. It doesn't necessarily have all the tools that you'd expect, especially typographically. But, you know, there are definitely ways of doing pretty impressive, pretty cool stuff very quickly. And so, you know, it's mostly just trying to be smart about stuff. So, here we go. So, here's an example of something we got. Here, you can't really see it's too big. So, you know, it's just like this skill, two olives and a pickle. And I don't know if there's no alpha channel on this. I don't know why, because it clearly there should be, because it was definitely not shot on this perfectly beige background. But it's gone. So, you know, at the start, because we were just making stuff so quickly, we just made like in that first real, I pulled out, we made like 45 different pieces of content. We just kind of arbitrarily said, okay, 100 frames each, like that's fine. You know, so that's 4500 frames with the stuff that we just made. And most of what we threw away. But, you know, then we got to round two, when we probably made another 4500 frames that we threw away. But that's kind of how you get the good stuff too. So, you know, I would just do like the simplest things, like just simple keys to get isolate these things. And then, you know, get the pieces I want. And then, you know, like I'll just kind of hide all these olives. So, I wanted to start with these pickles. And I kind of like the idea of just being just a huge, you know, vast whole of pickles that you could fall down and or like a tunnel. And, you know, it's kind of cool and like, the whole video is sort of like internet graphics inspired. So, it wasn't about like, okay, well, let's give it all like ambient occlusion and make each pickle like shadow each other and all that stuff. Like, it wasn't about that at all. It's just like make just make some cool stuff that's kind of interesting. And it's, and it's pickles. It's already weird. So, and I love pickles. I mean, but, you know, right, right? I mean, doesn't get any better. So anyway, so, you know, kind of looking at it from the top view. And with your icons on maybe to be, and then you could, you know, there we go. Twice and then you'll get it. Okay, there we go. So, you can kind of see like, basically, it's really simple setup. Like we've just got, you know, kind of a circle of pickles and other circle of pickles and other circle of pickles. And that's all done through replica notes really. So, really, I've got like kind of my main pickle, which you can't even see at this stage in it. And then once I put the first replica note on, where are we seeing this right now? Oh, camera's not, the camera is like in the long spot for that, because it's actually the the foreground most one that we can't even see. So total waste of everyone's time. They're sorry about that. So we'll go back to, and now you can see anyways, that was like a single ring. And now we have multiple rings. And, you know, they're just like offset using the replica note, which we, for motion graphics, I love this thing. Like, so I've just got 20 of them, and I've got them offset and Zed, and I've also got the rotation offset just slightly. And that seems to make this nice, you know, like I kind of figured out like that was the right, you know, spiral pattern I was looking for, you know, but it's great because it's so fast and interactive, right? Like you can make very different looking shapes just by, you know, changing that value and like, okay, cool, I want them all to be the same. And like, that's totally different and super interesting too. Equally weird, I think, but you know, that's cool. And then with the olives, again, like, you know, really, they're all just flats. I didn't worry about trying to make them like, you know, putting them on a sphere or like a weird oblong shape or something and then projecting them like I knew what I was going to do. And so I, all I did was really like, you know, because we were just trying to create all these stuff as quickly as possible. It was about, you know, how do we make this in a, in a very efficient way, knowing that a lot of the stuff we make is just going to get tossed in the garbage. And then if we come back to this, we might improve it, we might do some other stuff to it, but for now, this is good, you know. And so I, you know, I made this thing without the type and then Sean actually put that in the piece you see like, you know, a bit of like a, like a whatever you call this thing, like a ring with type on it. And so he just used one of the flame standard pieces of geo and then textured it with the type and then, you know, just kind of use the olive mat to, to hold it back in the right place. It's great. Yeah, the replica note is, is one of those unsung heroes in flame, you know. Yeah, I mean, a chance to use it. It's fantastic. It's unbelievable. And like, you know, you can be really, you can do some really powerful stuff really quickly. So I'll show you maybe another one with that with replica note in mind. This is pretty cool. This is the thing still hang on. So again, like this is, was just labeled ice milk. I don't even know what ice milk is, but it looked like a cupcake to me. Then I looked at it and I thought maybe it's ice cream in a cupcake container. I don't know how I would eat this, but my kids would definitely eat this. So, you know, and it was on this supply down this kind of like cool like rainbow gradient background. Maybe that's the, that's actually the tagline for ice milk ice milk. My kids would eat this. Yeah, exactly. Okay, so at the end of this, we'll have a free spot just for ice milk. And if you're an ice milk, you know, enthusiast, I guess, yeah, enthusiast, then you can maybe you call Andy and we'll work out the details. So, so anyway, so what I knew is I like, I knew I like this rainbow color and obviously the agency must have liked this rainbow color or the client because it was on there and it's playful, it's colorful, it's got all kinds of like charm to it. So I wanted to make that in flame. So the gradient tool is a great way of doing that because you can build it in adding as many colors as you need to down here, which really made it like, you know, pretty quick to make this thing. And then the best thing is, you know, is that as your, you know, as the animation is going, you know, so here's my here's my result. So it looks pretty similar to what it was, although no one really cared if I matched it exactly. The best thing is this little cycle thing at the bottom here, because as I, you know, go through that animation, I can just have those rainbow colors just, you know, drift and repeat in a mirror fashion, which is just awesome. Oh my God. I never knew that was, I never knew that feature existed. I love it. It's great. Like I've done multiple mnemonics with this, more or less just with this node, filling all the gaps for, for how to actually bring color and life to something. And yeah, for like a rainbowy kind of a thing, it's just the best because building that on your own would just be just, you know, it would just be so many extra steps for something that's just all built into this one node that's just great, you know, totally. So getting into that batch, I mean, again, now we've got some ice cream, or again, ice milk. Oh, these ones are ice milk, ice cream. I don't know who added that label. You know, just crept in photoshop. So somebody's done some some kind of cutting out job here for us now, which is nice. And again, you know, replica node of the rescue, right? So really very simple setup, where, you know, I've kind of just got, let's just see if I hide all of this. And then if I unhide just this, you know, if we can son, I see where that stuff is. Yeah, it's just over there. So, you know, that's just kind of like a row of, of these ice milks or whatever. And then these are all just rows of them as well. Different ones in different order to try and make it feel a little different. And then, you know, kind of group them together. And then once we group them together, we get something like this with a Zed buff ratio, which will inevitably be fixed. You know, with that maybe. And, and then, you know, again, replica node, right? Like we're just getting into some really great stuff here, where I'm using replica. And then I'm using just like a few axes, you know, which is like pretty common tree setup for me for sure, where I've got, you know, kind of the main one. And I've got like one that's got a negative value in X here and another one that's got a positive value in X that's pretty much the same value. And, you know, in this like, in this little moment here, again, this probably took like, you know, minutes to build in the first place. And we've got this really cool little graphic, you know, that's, that's awesome. And then we put a bunch of type over it and integrated in the video pretty nicely. That's great. Maybe some other cool stuff. Why don't we look at, I think this one's good for what I was thinking. Come on. You know, when you click something, if anybody has any questions for Sean, I'm sorry for Naveen or Sean, but if anybody has any questions for Naveen, just be sure to type them in the Q&A panel that way we can keep track. I think everybody's running to the refrigerator right now. Nice. Yeah, exactly. Get the food. And, you know, we knew that we were going to have to do something to kind of like demonstrate social distancing in some way. And, you know, we didn't have actors to push apart from each other. So we thought this food thing would be good. So, you know, the, you know, the best way of doing that was, you know, again, replica node and, you know, just lining them all up in the same, at the same cadence. So they were all kind of like one after another. Same thing with a bunch of avocados. You know, I can't tell you how many times I've done not with avocados and chicken wings, but I've done stuff like this. And I end up just duplicating and duplicating and duplicating this giant tree as opposed to using the replica node. It's like you get all the, you get it for free. And I imagine it's also instancing in a way too. So it makes it more interactive because it seems like you're just shuffling through this stuff. Yeah, I mean, well, these are renders. So like that, that worked out really well here. But I don't know that it is truly instancing. Like I'm sure that somebody can sort of speak to that. But it's definitely, you know, it's definitely super cool. And you get, like I said, you get places really, really quickly. And, you know, half of that, half of this game is that like just, how can I get like halfway done and then like look at it and decide like, is this good? Maybe this is good. Maybe this is nothing. And then either like, you know, stay the course or abandon ship and do something better, you know, the bananas part is pretty cool. So I'll kind of show you this banana part. So, you know, this is kind of just like really making, you know, we have this like giant still of bananas. I don't know why I keep doing that. Really just, you know, bananas are fully shot with some nice shadows and lighting and stuff. And, you know, but not at all how we're going to use them. So, you know, we quickly like isolated one that we thought was was the hero banana. So that casting director got a very nice phone call and used it here. It's on black. And really this action is just like up to here. Now all I've done and Sean actually built this park is put it on an HD frame. And so now it's just like the hero banana in an HD frame taking up kind of as much of the canvas as possible just to kind of maximize the pixels and you know, what we can get in resolution. And now this is where like really the magic happens where, you know, again, if we look at this from the top to you, we can kind of see what's going on. Of course, with the icons on it'll be even more impressive. There we go. So, right. So it's a lot, right? It's a lot of stuff. It's a lot of bananas, right? Like, like a Harry Balafonte song that doesn't happen. So here it here is. So there's the camera, you know, you can see the cameras here and it's like kind of, you know, trucking along through the shot. You know, and it's just kind of moving forward. And there's this one moment where you can see everything kind of changes. And that's, of course, where we're doing the distancing itself. So, so, you know, as we see it from this from this angle, you know, you can see lots of icons here, I'll turn the icons off because in a band, it's kind of just separate from one another. And, you know, what's kind of cool here is obviously the separation that happening, and that's all happening all, you know, somewhat automated because of the replica node. But also, you know, Sean did this other thing here, which I thought was really cool. So one thing he's using is Stingray depth of field to give it just a little bit of fall off in the blur in the background. But the other thing it's really nice, I think is this light because this light, obviously, like if I turn it off, it doesn't, it just kills everything. But if I turn shading off, you can just see it just like, it just flattens everything out. But, you know, just with that little bit of lighting, it's nice. We're just kind of feeling it. It's sort of working the way that like, you know, you could use fog, I guess, if I don't know fog doesn't always work, I find for me, but you could use fog to maybe get a similar effect where you want things to just kind of fall off into darkness. But, you know, in this case, it's really just a light that's doing that. And it's really great. I think it's super smart. It's just simple setup. I mean, look at that. It's amazing. Yeah. I mean, and it like, it's crazy because it makes it makes all this stuff, right? Like, I mean, it's, this is what I love. It's bananas. It's bananas. Exactly, Andy. Oh my gosh. Good night. Chiquita Banana Company is going to be sending you some free stuff every day now. It's going to be really good. I know. Okay. So this is kind of, yeah, then, you know, this is kind of how this setup works. Let me jump to something else that's maybe different. Another one here, this is like, I think our, Sean might have done this, but it also might have been a guy named Andrew Farlow who works here. He is, he's like a guy who's just on the cusp of being kind of like a more senior guy now, I guess, like he kind of, he's one of the guys that we hired. Most of the people that we hired here that run Flame, we've hired them more or less right in the school, and then we've taught them what Flame is, you know, showing them everything, and then, you know, taught them to work in the same way that we do, which has been to our benefit, although it's a steeper learning curve, but then they just do things our way, and that's been really, really good. So we've had a lot of success with that. Andrew Farlow is, he's kind of the one exception that we, we, he worked for a company that does a lot of stair stop conversions for feature films, and so he was running Nuke, and he'd been doing that for a while, and he just wanted to get out of that, because I think he felt that that was more of like a, I don't want to say factory environment, but I think that was his word, you know, because he just kind of felt like he was one of, you know, hundreds of people working on the same thing, and like, yeah, it was like Spider-Man or something cool, but it was, you know, it was really like, okay, let's paint this, this, this thing out in the background so that we can, you know, show the left-eye version of this or whatever. So he wanted to do something new, and so he came, when he came aboard here and we showed him flame, he was just blowing away at all the stuff you could do, and like, you know, it's something that after you do flame for quite a long time, it's easy to forget about how amazing the tools are and how complete the tool set is, where you've got all this stuff for visual effects, for compositing, for motion graphics, like I'm trying to show here, and then also, you know, just the timeline, the timeline is the, and the desktop are just like the unsung hero of the whole thing, because it just pieces it all together in such a brilliant way that you, you know, try and do that in something else, and good luck. Amen. So here, I'll show you this thing. So, you know, here, we're using a text tool. Look at that, you can use it. It works pretty well. So, Text tool. Yeah, exactly. So here, again, we're using not replica, but just a couple of axes. I guess we're using the resize here to make it this kind of shape, but we're just using a few axes here to lay this out. And then it's just really like, you know, one type, one piece of type is going one way, one piece of type is going the other way. So really simple, simple, simple setup. And then we're going to get into this action. And really like, I guess I should show this part here, because here we just got like Ivers blobs, you know, which, right? Blobs. And then that's been frozen at this moment here. And then here, we're using a Gmask. And, oh, we're not even using the blobs. I think that was probably an abandoned process. But that is kind of our, our displacement map. And as the type runs over it, it's like a, you know, a flag or something. I mean, not a flag, but, you know, I'll show you a flag next, maybe. But it's just got a really nice sort of bend to it. That kind of really Yeah, exactly. It's a very good word. Only if you put the emphasis on. Yeah. Well, you know, it's something that a director pointed out to me, not that long ago, which is that in, you know, regular people will never use the word occlusion in their entire life. And yet as visual effects people, we use it like 55 times a day. And, you know, like, as long as we don't occlude that, oh, we can't have any occlusion on this shot. And he's like, what a good point. Dude, I remember I use that in front of my family once and they looked at me like, like, if you ever try to put your dog on the phone, you know, like the dog doesn't really know. Like you can't connect. And that's the kind of look I got or like that. Maybe I was, you know, I was speaking in another language or something. But yeah, that's a perfect, perfect, perfect analogy for what we do. It's awesome. It's awesome. Here, so I'll go to jump in something else here, maybe as part of this, which would be, what was I going to show next? Oh, this is cool. This is another one from Sean. This was the batch that's loading up. Hey, it's white. Okay. So this is the flag, really, which, you know, I think it looks great. Like, it's got really nice little details to it. Very simple to build though. You know, and I'm sure like you, we've had to build flags so many times that we've got kind of a way of doing it, I suppose. And that way, you know, has changed over the years, but at the, you know, there's sort of like a nuts and bolts to it that have stayed the same. Oh, this is just the longer version. This is the one I think we actually used. So we're using like some caustics here. And then I think we're, this is another example where I think we're actually going to throw that away in a second. No, then we're not, we're going to keep it. Okay. So that's kind of like, it's giving us this, this overall like deformation that's like, you know, subtle and it's little bits, those, those small ripples, like the bigger ripples are fine. I find are quite easy to make with a G mask or something. And Sean's done a great job here with this G mask where he's just made kind of like a line. We used to do this thing all the time in paint called a scribble mat where we would just literally scribble on a frame, advance a frame, scribble on a frame, advance a frame, scribble on a frame, advance a frame, and then motion time warp, all that stuff together. And you get kind of this like weird, weird thing. But this is, this really worked out quite well here too. Wow. Right. So really simple, but it's all for the displacement map. And so, you know, it does a great job when we combine those two things, because now we have kind of like the, the small little ones. And then we also have this kind of like much bigger, more abrasive, you know, thing in the wider parts of the image. And then, and then Sean's doing this averaging thing over 10 frames, which I think it's just helping with the motion. And then once we get into here, actually, before we get into here, let's go into the setup here of, this is just kind of like building the artwork lockup here. So again, you know, we set a lot of this type ourselves, maybe all of it. That's a banana that Sean rendered in Blender. And he didn't really care about like the lighting so much, because he knew he was going to do much stuff to it. So, and it's an open XR file. So tons of latitude there. Then we got into also like this little thing here, which was really nice, which is just like, what do they even call it? Is it cloth? Is that what it's called? Knits. That's what they call it. Knits. And it's just, I don't know if it comes across in the zoom very well, but the texture of it is great. It's just like a nice little bit of fabric texture to add into something like this, that kind of really seals the deal on the idea of this being like flowy fabric, you know? And so, you know, we've kind of just got this little isolated area here. That is actually my past. And then we'll go in here. And you can see like just in the, you know, in the letters, you can see, you can feel some of that texture. And it brings it, brings it up quite a lot because really this is like a flag that's on black. And, you know, quite often a lot of them flag motion we get from, from seeing the shadows and from seeing that occlusion. I'm going to use the word again. But, you know, we don't really have any of those, any of that shadowing, any of that ambient occlusion here because it's on black. So, or you, you know, you can't really feel it. But, you know, really effective, you know, technique, I think, to get that's going on here, you know, yeah. Nice. That's great. All right, cool. Well, we do have one question for you, Naveen. Sure. It's actually going back to, and if you want to save this, I don't know, if you have anything else to show and you want to show it that that's fine. And, you know, we can come back to this before you go to the next, the next spot. But someone did have a question about how you built the dope sheet. Oh, okay. Yeah, that's pretty cool. So, and, you know, in fact, it'll, it sort of will go back to that on the other project too, but this one's really good. So, really simple stuff. So, I'll kind of go through it through the layers. So, you know, so we just hit a black, we've got our audio track at the bottom. So in each of these little, you know, as I zoom into this area, we'll see this is just like a batch effect where really, we just got the type. And the type is just coming up in time with the music or with in sorry in time with the lyrics, I should say. And then you can see that this section counter is updating as I move along the timeline. And that section counter is just is simply from the, the burn in metadata that we're just counting the frames in that section. So, you know, again, really great for a collaborative project like this, where we're passing it off to multiple artists. And we're saying, okay, I want you to do the by staying part of part section. And like, you know, right away, he or she knows that that is 45 frames long. And that's all we're going to use there, which was really, really helpful for everybody. And then, you know, this thing here at the top, we've just kind of that's like a custom build thing. Again, it's just a batch effect. But it's got a new layer of burning metadata, which is just, you know, the sequence as it pertains to how we've broken up the song into intro hook bridge first. So, so, you know, our intro we're on frame, you know, 270, whatever. And then now we get into a hook and now it starts over again. And, you know, all that's automated, like it's really, it's, it's a great tool that we don't take advantage of here enough. But as we do, especially during COVID, where we've been doing a lot more motion graphic center projects. It's been great to take advantage of that and really understand that that's, there's a lot of value in there and communicate things really quickly that way. And also for our clients for that matter, like quite often, we'll, you know, we'll send something out and we'll put some burning on it with a frame counter just to show people like, okay, this is what it is. And that way the clients don't say it at the six second mark of the quick time, because the six second mark of the quick time is nothing. That's like, okay, so is that with my two beeps? So is that at the eight second mark? Or is that the four second mark? I failed math, I think too. So this is Tuesday. I think it's Tuesday. So, so here's the, it's so anyway, so thank you. More time code layers. So again, now this is, now you're seeing the bottom track or the bottom information is now the record time of the whole, the pieces of whole and also the timeline number is the timeline as a whole. You know, again, pretty useful for us. And as we make postings for the agency, you know, if they have feedback on, you know, a section that says, you know, don't over handle the produce, like, well, if that comes up three times, then we want to know which time they're talking about it. So this is like a great way of showing them that. That's great, man. Thanks. Yeah, we like it a lot. Should we jump to the other? Yeah, let's jump to the other, the other spot. Okay, cool. Play that for everybody. Yeah, let me just switch projects here. And I switch projects without restarting like a monster. Okay, here comes. Hello, I'm Larry David. Obviously, somebody put me up to this because it's generally not the kind of thing I do. But I basically want to address the idiots out there and you know who you are, you're going out. I don't know what you're doing. You're socializing too close. It's, it's not good. You're hurting old people like me. Well, not me. I have nothing to do with you. I'll never see you. But, you know, other, let's say other old people who might be your relatives who the hell knows. But the problem is you're passing up a fantastic opportunity or once in a lifetime opportunity to stay in the house, sit on the couch and watch, watch TV. I mean, I don't know how you're passing that up. Well, maybe you're not, you're not that bright. But here it is. Go home, watch TV. That's my advice to you. It's phenomenal, man. Phenomenal. Thanks, man. Yeah, so that one was pretty cool. No agency or real client, I guess, behind it. It was early in the pandemic. And you know, we were kind of, we were all just getting used to working from home and all trying to figure out, like, how does this all work? How can we, how can we collaborate with one another when we're not in the same space? Because, you know, we're so used to just walking up to one another and saying, like, Hey, like, how does this, you know, what do you think of this? Or like, how do I do this? Or, or, you know, I remember two weeks ago, you did a toilet paper ad, you had a thing, do you still have that, you know? And so we wanted to, you know, figure all that stuff out. But also we wanted to bring the team together. That was a big part of it is like, we wanted to figure out like, how do we get everybody involved or as many people involved as possible in doing something, you know, that could help benefit the, you know, spraying the word for the pandemic, like the, the, you know, public service sort of stuff. But also, you know, we knew that, you know, we were currently working on, like, you know, a bunch of things where it was like, and they all made sense, they were all very nice and, you know, appropriate. But they were all like black and white photos of nurses and, you know, protective gear and all that stuff. And that was all, it was, it was great. Like, these people should be, you know, put up on pedestals of heroes, absolutely. But it's not really our job to do that here. We didn't seem like, it just seemed like, you know, we'd be like, you know, profiteering or whatever it is on that stuff. But we didn't want to do that. So I was watching something on YouTube and it was just, it was like a random thing. And it was like, I think some LA based news show. And I heard Larry David's voice on it. Really tuned in on it. And I thought, oh my God, this is like just a message. He's just sitting in his living room. And if you Google it, you can see on YouTube, the original one, he's just sitting in his living room, you know, talking into his iPhone. And, and he's got a certain mannerism and he's got his, you know, his way of speaking and his way of putting things that just, it makes sense. And it's very difficult to argue with, you know. And so right away, we were just drawn to this piece of piece. And we thought like, okay, well, let's use this, this can be cool. We could still make something about, you know, COVID-19 about staying home, about doing all the right things, but it could actually be funny. It could actually be interesting too. So if we can make it entertaining, why not? So we got that. And then we kind of like, Sean and I tossed some ideas around with Stephanie, our executive producer, and with Josh, our head of CG. And we came up with something like really, really quickly. And we gave ourselves a deadline too, which was really good. So right away we knew like, okay, cool. This is how, this is how long we're gonna have to do this thing. And it felt like a real project. And it felt like, okay, there's some energy, you know, building here. And so we've got something to go on here. And everyone liked the idea of it. And so again, like we, I'll do, I guess I'm not sharing my screen here. Let me just share my screen here. So, you know, we kind of came up with some ideas right away. Sean had some really great suggestions, really great ideas. And we throw the through those around. And then, you know, we thought, okay, we're going to start with this TV guide thing. So like, I kind of whipped this up in Photoshop with just stuff, you know, images I found on the internet of Larry David, or and just looking at like magazines like TV guide and like, how do they lay on their graphics? And like, oh, there's a shape that has, and it'll say something like 32 sneak peeks. I don't know what the sneak peek is for, but you're sneaking. We have 32 of them, but you're sneaking a peek right now, my friend. So, so we just wanted to do that. So obviously, this is just like a Photoshop file. So pretty big, or high res, I guess, you know, just the type kind of lay down. And we ended up using a different picture actually in the final piece. But, you know, it kind of had like, sort of the just of it, which is that, okay, we're going to make something kind of see say sort of like a, you know, like a regular like motion graphics kind of like piece that we've seen. But, you know, let's try and have some fun with it. So, you know, we kind of did something with his address label right away because it seemed like an obvious choice because he says, you know, I basically want to address the idiots out there and TV guides, you know, a shift or at least when my grandmother got TV guide, I've never actually gotten TV guide. When my grandmother got TV guide, it had a little address label on it like this. And, you know, yeah, it would just come with that. So, so I handed that off to our CG, I had a CG Josh and he took that and he made it way better. And he he made like this great setup with, you know, this Larry, the company, you know, the cover and like the remote and like this fake Lysol wipes thing and all these pop cans and these, these like Chinese food take-up containers, which we don't really have in Canada either, but we just thought like that would be a nice American touch to give this thing. And then another American cultural icon. Yeah, Chinese food take-up. I just wanted that so badly as a kid. All I wanted to do was eat food out of a container that looked like that. Man, oh man. Anyway, so he kind of, you know, he did this thing where he tosses the TV guide in and he hits the remote and the pop cans and we got a little sheen on the cover and then of course, we're just kind of like moving through the, moving through the guide as the type comes up and letting, really letting Larry drive the bus here. Like we were trying to make sure that, you know, at the end of the day, we knew we were trying to make cool visuals for something that Larry David was already saying. And so that was the coolest part of this thing. And then we were just trying to be not the least cool part of it, even though that was inevitable because there's only two things. So we got, you know, so we kind of had this highlighter thing going, which was great. And then, you know, we were kind of working independently. So anytime when we transitioned, that had to be done in Flame later. So even though Josh made that, I think in Maya and rendered it out, we had to make this transition to this kind of like printing press sort of setup that Sean actually built in Blender, which was I think his first Blender project that went into production here. Sean is of course, or not of course, because, but to me, of course, like an amazing Flame artist who can teach you stuff ad nauseam forever. And now he just got this in his toolkit. So good on him. It's just like, you know, sort of the silver lining of the pandemic is that for him anyways, but he's been able to take the time to learn a new piece of software. A whole new toolkit. So I'll kind of show you maybe how this part works, just because it's interesting in the sense that it's really simple. But, you know, it's a kind of thing where I think that if I was learning Flame today, I probably wouldn't even consider doing it this way. But now, because I have been doing Flame for so long, I don't know why you would do it any other way. You know, but it's pretty old school. I think there used to be a tip about this on like FX guide like 100 years ago, when FX guide came to you on a tablet or something like that that was given to you. So really, we're transitioning from, you know, A to B, like anything else. And, you know, the way that we're doing it here is really like a page field kind of a thing where we've got this little address label and we want to peel it back and then we're going to kind of dive through that hole. And so, you know, and you can see it. The deform mesh. Exactly. So the deform mesh is really, it's really great. And it like, again, like it's one of those things where if we weren't doing it this way, I don't know how we'd do it. Like I've certainly tried to do this with extended bicubics and bilinear before. And I find you're always fighting all the things that paper doesn't do, you know, like the right corner has to do something, but I can't even see the right corner right now. So what's it really going to do? Right. So just by moving this deform mesh across, like we're getting a really great, like simple curve and bend to it. And, you know, again, it's all happening in three space here too. So, you know, regardless of your angle on this thing, this will really work out quite well for what we're doing. And yeah, it is, you know, a page peel really, but I think it's the best way of making one, you know. So then we just dive in and then of course we end up full frame on this, on this printing press kind of background. And then Sean's printing press animation takes over. Sweet. That's a great technique, man. Yeah, super fun, super cool. Another flame artist here, Mike, he did all these in flame, like, and it's just awesome stuff. And, you know, again, this is a perfect example, like Mike is a very talented flame artist, incredible technical skills, and probably the nicest guy on the planet, other than you, Andy, maybe, but, you know, it's a long, it's a longer list thing you might think. Okay, fair enough, yeah. I've never been approached. So, he built all this stuff in flame and, you know, he doesn't get to do a lot of design projects in flame typically, for whatever reason, you know, like, it's either the stuff that we give them or, you know, just how the cards fall. But so, it was a great project for him to kind of work a little bit out of his comfort zone to try some other stuff and to get to make some stuff that was just kind of cool, you know. And then we get to, again, another like cool little transition where we're just kind of like, you know, like having this little poster kind of fall off. And then we've got this living room setup and this living room setup is one of our CG guys, Joaquin made this thing and it's just awesome. I mean, he made like this old TV with a VHF and UHF knob and he's got like a original Nintendo there at a VHS machine. And Joaquin is like, he's like a baby. He's like, he can't even smell 20 yet, you know, like it doesn't make any sense. And like he made this thing. Did you man on that a little bit? Yeah, I was, yeah, sorry. I didn't, I never noticed the Nintendo. Oh my God, that's great. There's the Nintendo there. There's a VHS machine. And so like I said, and you know, it says like, I don't know, I don't even know what it says on the TV. It says television. It just says television. But, you know, and it's got like all the knobs that you used to have or whatever, like there's a volume of brightness and, you know, whatever this was, contrast or something. Yeah. Oh, probably didn't really do anything. And then, you know, he's got like little details in there. Like as we switch channels, like that knob is moving and that's, it's just awesome, you know, and it's just like great detail to build in. And, you know, we have lots of fun, like picking the content of the TV shows here. Like, so we kind of try to find iconic stuff that people would recognize and then, you know, just switch out the type and make, you know, we just, we paint things down and and replace it with whatever we needed it to, you know, to say. And like I found like the Gillingens Island Fond. And so that was pretty cool for this, you know, and, you know, the Blue Blockers ad, which I still love that infomercial for whatever reason. I love infomercial so much, Andy. Right? You know, and to say a once in a lifetime opportunity just seemed to fit so well with that idea. House and family ties and the original Batman and then the Knight Rider, of course, in South Park. And then we kind of zoom in, we push past all the pixels here and this is kind of cool. I can show you something here. It's nice because it's like, so this is actually, again, Andrew Farlow, that guy I mentioned before built this. And it's really, you know, computationally like quite cheap, right? So like it's very interactive. You know, so really we've got just like a surface with all these little, whatever you call them, scan lines and stuff like that little like Trinitron kind of squares on them. And then we've got like, we've got some HDRs or whatever that we use like this is one that we tend to like for stuff like this. And, you know, you can kind of get this like this feeling of like coming through a screen like really, really easily and quite quickly. And like I said, it's very interactive. Like I'm, you know, I can scroll through this and scrub through it. No problem, you know. And then, you know, he kind of did like, you know, again, like creative stuff like, you know, like Google isn't really Google. It's like, you know, Andy or I mean, Larry David with the glasses and stuff for the O's and stuff. You know, it's got like, all these like sort of legitimate feeling results. But of course, it's all driven by the type or the words he's saying, like, you know, and so it's just all the bits that need to happen in there. And then, you know, just like really simple, like, you know, vignetting and like a little Iver chroma warp never hurt anybody. And then, and then, you know, just some grain or whatever just to make it all seal the deal on all that. Yeah. And that's kind of, you know, you know, another, another great up and comer on our end, Adam did this like gift page and it was like, this is perfect. Like, you just kind of made it and it was like, yeah, I buy this is like a gift page. This is great, you know. And then we kind of made like this little end card that looked kind of like the cover sheet to every book report I ever did in school, which I like, you know. And of course, we wanted to give credit to Larry David. And it says, you know, on behalf of the governor of California, because I think it said that on the original video we saw the audio on. Of course, we have nothing to do with any of those people. We're just kind of made this thing is like a fun like, Hey, let's do this thing, you know, and we made it in four by five, which is kind of weird for us. But I'm not weird because we always have to make stuff in four by five for other people, but we made it that way thinking like we would mostly share this thing on Instagram. That's kind of what we would do. And then of course, because we're the guys who just make the content, we don't know anything about Instagram and awesome. I'm a thousand years old, right? So I don't know anything about Instagram. So I make, we make this piece and it's a minute and four seconds. And so that means that you can't actually show it in your Instagram feed. It has to go to IGTV. IGTV, right? Which like, and then IGTV is 16 nine. What are we thinking? Okay, boomer. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Oh my goodness. Dude, I got one question for you here from Brooks. He wants, he was wondering how did you make the scan line photo? The scan line photo. Brooks, you mean in the TV? Let's see. Yeah, in the TV, I saw on the screen itself, the old CRT. I'm not sure if I understand the question. What do you mean by the scan line photo? Like the scan lines? Oh, the transition to get to the Google page? Yeah. Oh, the transition through. Yeah, yeah. I mean, so if we just step through it, I mean, really, and truly, it's just like a zoom in to our South Park animation. And then when we get there, like it's really cutting from that one to this one. But we're just again, we're so tight on these like, I'm calling them Trinitron pixels, because again, I'm a thousand. So that's the term I'm going to use. It doesn't mean anything. It means everything. Well, it does mean everything, doesn't it? I mean, if you didn't have a Trinitron, you had just a garbage TV. You just had some RCA or some Zenith piece of shit. Yeah, exactly. I had a Zenith and it had a button on it. My parents had this and it said space phone. And so you would press it and you could make a phone call on your TV. And this is like early 80s. Okay. So and it was like, wow, that's amazing. It was just the worst phone you could imagine though. Like, so you could make a phone call on your TV. But why would you? And if somebody called while you're watching TV, you know what? Your TV show got interrupted by this phone call and you couldn't see them. It wasn't like a pause. Yeah. It's like, oh, we're just now we're just talking to grandma. Not great. Oh my God. That's great. Yeah. Like cool. Dude, does anybody else have any other questions for Naveen? Man, that was fantastic. Thank you so, so much. I'm happy to do it. Thanks for asking me. Oh, of course. Excellent. Well, thanks to you. Thanks again, man. Thanks for taking the time. And, and you guys do amazing work. And it's really inspiring to see how you, you know, how you figured out a way to come up with something that everybody could participate on. And I think doubly so, when the lockdown started, you know, it was almost like it had like a a dual use, you know what I mean? Like you were trying, not only were you trying to keep everybody creatively inspired, but also you figured out a way to do this remotely. And that obviously served you as the, as this thing went on longer than the two weeks we were promised. Yeah, for sure. I mean, and that was kind of, you know, a lot of the inspiration of it was really just to do that. Like how do we bring everyone together here? And, you know, how do we, especially the pen at the sort of the beginning of this thing, like a number of people who work here, like I have a family and, you know, a wife and two kids and all that, but, you know, a number of the people work here in their 20s or in their early 30s, and they, you know, they live in their apartment alone. So not only are you not coming into work, not only are you not seeing your friends, but now you're isolated in this place by yourself. So, you know, I think it's just important to reach out to those people and to, you know, to call them. And I really do mean call them, not a text, like a text is really nothing, right? I mean, but like an actual phone call and just to say hi and just to get them involved and just let people know that you're thinking about them in some way. And that's just for, on a human level. And then here, I mean, obviously this is the team that we've built here and I care about all these people deeply and I, you know, I want them to be safe and I also want them to be, you know, have like good mental health and, and, you know, feel like they're valued because they are, you know, so we're 16 people. And so luckily, during this whole pandemic, we didn't have to lay anybody off like everybody got to stay on and, you know, we kind of, we run a tight ship and sometimes really busy and, you know, we're kind of looking at each other like, why are we doing it this way? This is crazy. We should have 40 people here. But then there's times like this where it really makes sense and it works out really, really well. So that's great. Thanks, man. It's great. Brooks was wondering doing motion graphics and flame. He says he's always fighting the animation. Any tricks on moving your keyframes? Yeah. Okay. So a few things. One of the tricks that I've been using a lot lately, actually, has just been translate X, which is a feature or like a function, I guess, that I didn't know about for the first number of years in flame. Anyway, but just being able to select your keyframes or take all of your keyframes, whatever you want, and then just move them over along your timeline or along your animation curve is a great way of experimenting with like how quickly stuff should happen and, you know, how it, when it feels right, you know, because it's really about like, it's about that. It's like, when does it feel right, you know, to you? So like it depends on obviously the kind of thing you're animating. Like I like, you know, with a video like for no frills, we've got like snappy animations where things are happening like really quickly, they enter kind of slowly and they ramp up and they slow down a little bit and stuff like that happens. But, you know, if you're doing like a really emotional spot for Dove, that's going to be the wrong choice. So it's about finding the right balance and, you know, having the two things work as one, right, form and function together. That's how you do great design. Totally. Well, thanks, man. I really appreciate it. And give my best to Sean. I mean, he's there. I'm waving to your name on the screen. And I look forward to seeing you face to face sometime, man. Really, I would love to come up to Toronto and hang out with you guys. Yeah, for sure. Of course, you're always welcome in New York. Yeah, I mean, I'll come again soon. I haven't been there in a little while. He's been stopped going on. So, but I will go. I love New York. So yeah, wonderful. Well, cool, man. Let's finish this out. I'll share my screen one more time. I'm going to throw in the chat here links for all the upcoming or for the next three upcoming logic live sessions. I'm really excited about the next two. We're going to have a two-parter here. All about building and running your flame business at home. There's been so much talk on logic, obviously, about, you know, how do I, how do I run my flame business at home? How do I take care of accounting? How do I find new work? How do I keep that work? What kind of machine should I buy? How do I keep it running? What type of storage or backup solution should I be looking for? So, Renee, Tim and Randy McInty are going to give us a back-to-back two-parter here all about building and running your flame business at home. And that's going to start next week. You know, I want to thank them both. This was their suggestion. And it's just another great example of if anybody has a suggestion for something you'd like to see in a future logic live, please let me know. And the same thing's true for the session we're going to do on August 16th using flameless shotgun. I got someone reached out to me on Facebook Messenger and said, hey, I'd love to see how people are actually using shotgun flame with shotgun in production. So, we're going to do that on August 16th. And Alan Latteri and his partner Jesse from Instinctual in LA are going to join us and show us the system that they've put together. The Logic podcast, I released an episode last week with two of the systems engineers from Synthesis all about remote workflow solutions. So, definitely check that out. And I'll have another episode up for you not this coming week, but the week after. And of course, you can find all the past Logic Live episodes and a bunch of other great content on logic.tv. Please take a moment if you haven't already to subscribe to the YouTube channel. And a huge thanks to AJA for supporting Logic Live this month. And of course, thank you to Synthesis. Solutions integration to support for digital content creators. Synthesis.io supporting flameless since 1997. That's going to do it for this week, everybody. Thanks so much and I'll see you next week.