 Can you hear me? Okay. Okay, as you can see, my name is Nacho, for real, that's a name in Spain. And I'm an illustrator, and I'm going to tell you my journey from illustrator to 3D artist to having a 3D studio in just three years, that's what happened to me. And yeah, for, I'm going to tell you everything about what happened, the good, the bad, and the ugly. And I used to create simple illustrations that were easy to relate, simple characters that talk to you. Usually I have a rule, if my mother can understand this, they work. They need to be simple ideas that you can feel like they are talking about you. And the thing is that, while I started working on this on 2009, and they work immediately. Like I had a big following from the very beginning. I think that three years ago, I had over half a million followers. And things were going really well for me. The thing is that I even have four, I opened four stores in Barcelona for the project Naulito. People come there to meet me, happy times. Like, okay, so if this is going so well, why happen? Why change in something? Okay, the reason is this. In the 2.8, as many others, it is for me a new world. I always liked 3D animation, but the reason that you don't even try to do that is because at least for me, I used to think like, this is something for Americans or big corporations like why even bother? And yeah, I wanted to try, but the difference with me is that I already had a running business. So it was a risky move for me. But I still tried. So I decided that if I was able to create an animation based on one of my illustrations in a month, this is something that I can explore. So in August of 2019, I decided to give it a try. It didn't go well. And this is why I told you that I'm going to show you the ugly. So in one month, I had to learn particles, modeling, rigging, at least the basics just to be able to tell a simple story. Yeah, I was really, really struggling as I told you. I wasn't making it. But the thing is that I didn't sleep much that month, but step by step it starts getting shaped and, okay, this was looking already a little bit closer to what I was illustrating. So this is the illustration that I created. It wasn't good, but it was good enough for me to consider it done. Whoa. Not playing? Nope. I don't know if it's me. No. The video is not playing? Nope. Anybody can help? Okay. And nothing without videos. Please. Nope. Is this going to happen for all the videos? Let's see. Okay. This is when it's playing. Okay. So you are going to have to imagine that this animation is super funny. Okay. It wasn't really good animation, but it was enough for me to tell, okay, I can do the animation now. It took me a month. It's important for me because I work in social media, so times are really, really important. So, yeah, I thought at the time after finishing this, okay, I now can create an animation in a month. That's enough, and it's going only to get easier and faster from here. I'm just going to get better. It's going to be a linear learning. And no, I was wrong. I wanted to animate this one, and the thing is that it was really, really ugly. The thing is that I didn't really understand 3D. I was lucky with the first one. It was smooth process sometimes happens in 3D. But this one wasn't happening. But while working on that first animation, I discovered something that I consider to be a hidden in Blender called grease pencil. And I was doing 2D, so that felt more natural to do for me. So, in order to be able to use Blender a little bit more, I decided this is a little bit of the experiments I did. Okay, so let's try to create first 2D animations. I'm going to get more comfortable with Blender and see how they perform with my audience because, you know, it's hard to change what you are delivering to them. No audio either. Can you look into that? No, no audio. Sorry, guys. Do you want me to do the voice? Okay, I'm going to do the voices. But after this, there is a trailer with music. I'm not going to sing as Danny Martinez Lara. So yeah, this is... Okay, thank you. Okay, so those are tiny ideas that translated well to animation, but just imagine that this would be way more complicated to translate if you wanted to do 3D. Like, how much detail do you give to that mountain or those cars or whatever. But this allowed me to create many, many quick animations that were performing really, really well with this one. So yeah, this was getting a little bit easier and I was getting a thing a little bit better. I'm starting to do ideas not based on any design. You have seen this one? Yeah. So yeah, now I'm good. I know how to do this. It's going to be easy from here because I'm comfortable with Blender, right? Nope. This is ugly. The thing is that when you try to learn 3D, you have the temptation to do everything super realistic. It's a glass shader. Okay, I'm going to use that. And it's going to work really well. And the thing is that it doesn't. And in the way you create so, so many ugly things. Like, you are going to do an avocado and you place a super realistic texture to the avocado and you do so many tests. But you know, you start to understand that I was doing the opposite thing that I was doing in illustration because in illustration I was simplifying those characters so they had an appeal that you can represent by it. So I started, I mean, I studied a lot to be able to translate those. And yeah, I realized that the more simple I created those characters, the best they were translating. So I keep experimenting, trying. And this was getting closer to my characters. So okay, I feel like now I understand 3D a little bit better. I was more humble now, like a little bit. But okay, let's try to create a banana animation. And I'm going to forget how a banana look. I'm going just to keep the bare minimum of feet just so you are able to spot it and see how it works without looking disgusting. Okay. And this works. And now I'm doing a fish. I don't need to give it scales or anything like that because at the time I wasn't going to be able to do that anyways. I mean, not different yet. The thing is that many people around me were telling me, like, are you crazy? Like, you have a business at... I stopped completely illustrating because of Blender. So I almost pruned myself because of Blender. And the thing is that while I was posting those illustrations, two things happened. One is that I realized that I was able to use this as a tool for my brand and for my characters too. This is a Black Friday campaign I created actually for my store. It's okay. So yeah, that was a way to make some sense of creating all this without focusing on what's working. And the other side is that I have over half a million followers. And among those, there were many brands. And big brands approached me, Netflix, PlayStation, and they asked me to create 3D, they asked me to create animation that for once was easier because they didn't have the limitation of my characters. They didn't have tiny arms here. You are not able to animate those. So yeah, this also was some kind of validation for me. Like, okay, if those brands are thinking that this is good enough for them, it should be good enough for me. So I kept creating animation and here is where I made the biggest mistake because I created this animation in seven days from scratch. And then this is where I assumed, okay, if I'm not able to create a 3D animation in just a week at 30 seconds animation, I'm going to be able easily to create a short film, right? So yeah, I launched a Kickstarter campaign for a short film, 12 characters, multi-locations, over 10 minutes. I'm going to do this in two months. Nope. But the thing is that this campaign also brings a lot of clients. So I saw myself in a position where I had to choose between working for those brands, which is great, but there is only so many hours that you can work. So I see this moment as the obvious moment where you start hiring people. And the thing is that I initially felt like, okay, you are going to hire people and this is going to be easy, they are just going to work and this is going to be faster, but you need to change everything because they are not able to read your mind and you need to create a pipeline. And you know, it's a process of learning. It wasn't hard, it was hard, but you know, this is hard to represent here but there is a lot of struggle to be able to develop a pipeline for someone that comes from outside of the industry. But yeah, this is my team now, by the way. And we are working on a way that we produce 50% of the time working for clients and 50% of the time working for knowledge of productions which is allowing us to develop bigger and longer projects. Like you don't need a project that is done in a week and at the same time that allows you to improve the project because I surround myself with people that are way better than me obviously. I'm not going to surround myself with people that are worse. They are bringing so much to the table and they are helping me to give so much life to those characters. And this is how they are bringing me closer. Actually this is what I'm going to share now is the trailer for Homework, the short film I launched. And this is the first time I show it and I'm going to finish this, we are going to finish this in a month actually. So this is it. Minutes was too much, actually it's 15 minutes now. But yeah, the thing is that we are finishing this and this is thank you to... I think that tools like Blender are going to be a revolution to the way the content is created because it's allowing tiny studios or tiny teams or even individuals to... Obviously they are not going to compete in production values with huge studios but they are going to be able to create content and that content is going to be more risky, more smaller, more personal and that's just as a consumer that's interesting and also that aligns with the new ways of distribution, distributing those contents. So because of that we are betting completely on creating content in the new ways to consume that. We are working right now in a show actually, just not a short film, a short film is not enough now. Now it's a full show and this is a tiny teaser trailer for it. This is just a tiny thing. I like to put myself in some limited environment where you need to create, find ideas for just... All the characters are cactus so they can't even move so it's really limiting to think ideas but that's something that I'm really eager to create. And I don't know, three years ago I didn't even know Blender and now I'm right here. So thanks to Blender for existing and thank you for having me here. Thank you.