 Let's see if the fonts showed up. I think they did. It looks nice. Hey, welcome, everyone, and welcome anyone on the internet around the world. I see tweets all over of people like, you know, in bed in the middle of the night, kids asleep, Blender Conference on their screen in front, which is pretty cool. Let's give it a second for the slides to begin, and I'll start. All right. Looks like it's going. So my name is Patrick Osborne. I am a writer and a director and an animator, and I've been in this industry, the feature animation and visual effects industry since about 2003, so 19 years, which is crazy to me. I've had the opportunity really to work on a lot of pretty amazing projects. You know, I came out of school, landed at Sony ImageWorks for a couple years, and got kind of a crash course in all kinds of sections of the animation world, including doing milk cap cleanup and key frame animation. And then right around the Disney transition to the, you know, kind of the Pixar leadership coming in there for both entangled. And that really felt like this kind of revolutionary spot where 2D was kind of shifting into 3D and teams were merging. And I weirdly think we're about to hit another one of those with the AI tools, but that's another talk, probably. So during Tangled, I got to work next to John Carrs and Clay Katis and Glen Keane, who would draw over all of our shots as we animated, which was pretty darn amazing. And it also got me kind of in love with the drawn line and started me on this path that I think is still continuing today of working directly with software developers and artists and trying to make tools to make things that we want to see out in the world instead of just accepting tools as they were. So I got to work on a short called Paper Man as the animation director and spent two years working with one software developer to make me under this drawing tool that led us to do Paper Man. And Grease Pencil is the closest thing to meander that has ever existed. And meander has been kind of put into some of Disney and Pixar's story tools, but other than that, it hasn't really been used much. What Micrier in particular took off and really changed TAC when I got to direct and write my own film feast. So everything kind of shifted for me there when I realized that, you know, if I was going to do anything interesting, I could wait in line, you know, to develop a Disney animation for like 10 years, hope the bosses don't change or quit and try to make stuff on my own. So I left and became an independent director and, you know, it's a little bit weird of a, it's not really even a job, it's a vocation kind of, it feels like a calling a little bit because I'm kind of doing all kinds of different things in any particular day, but really it's about shaping a vision, like getting everybody on a team together and keeping that team morale excited, being this cheerleader. You get a lot of credit for doing this, but you also get a lot of blame when things go down in flames and that happens. And also you realize really quickly that you can't really do anything in the animation world alone, which is like super exciting, but also, you know, you need to be this team player and collaborator to make it really work. And there's a couple of different types of work that I do. There's the idea of doing branded content and existing IP and original ideas, and there's actually a fourth one that I'll get to in a second that's kind of a recent discovery for me, but with branded content and intellectual property, this is like, you know, commercials, films and TV based on books. Sometimes corporate funded films and existing scripts that come from other writers, things that I didn't come up with in the first place. Basically, it's stuff that someone else comes to me and asks to make. And then there's the other side, which is original content, which is me trying to will these ideas that I dream up with into existence, and this also kind of includes like maybe a book that I read that I don't own the rights to that I need to come up with a take, and basically, I'm the one who's trying to force this thing into existence. And you know, this is a lot harder than making IP than people already having the energy. You're like starting to push the car up the hill versus like it already kind of rolling in the other one. So a little bit of a recap of that. So, you know, I take on this existing thing, pitch my take back. Usually you're competing against other people, which is a little bit weird and disheartening, and they call it awarded, which I feel like is a terrible term, because it's like, congratulations, you get to work is a weird thing, and then you get to make it. And original, it's my own, you know, I, the process is usually assembling artwork in the deck, sometimes the animation test and then talking to people and trying to get money together to hire people to help. It really, nothing really changes from art school to the professional world as far as what making a film is. It's gathering a bunch of people and getting their time to help make something in that time in a big, in a big sense is kind of represented by the money. And lately there's this weird fourth category where I'm just paid to explore, which is like my favorite thing ever. I've found a weird niche of being able to do kind of paid experience experiments for studios too on the side, and it's been super cool. Ultimately directing a career is kind of spinning plates, balancing act. Most of the stuff doesn't pay until it's green lit. So I'm doing a lot of, you know, juggling, taking a commercial job, pitching, getting artwork and pitch materials together, you know, balancing, you know, life. And it's always just a little bit of a, of a play, original ideas against commissions, passion projects against survival, art and money, and, you know, love and heartbreak. Because the truth about all of it is if you don't really love, if you don't really love, sorry, I clicked too fast. Dink, dink, dink, dink, you already saw this. There we go. If you don't, I've learned that you have to love every single thing you're doing because if you don't love it, you're not going to do it well and it's going to suck. But you know that like 90% of what you work on never gets seen by anybody. So I really love that I kind of get to share a few of these like things that haven't been made out there with you. And maybe that kind of will things into existence a little bit because Blender has become the center of tool of my pitching process and trying to get things made over the last couple of years. And I'll tell you how I got to that. So at the start of the pandemic, I I was directing a movie at Blue Sky and Disney and Fox had the merger. Blue Sky was going down in flames and most people on the movie were removed, including me. And we decided to move back from the East Coast to Los Angeles, moved in with our in-laws while we were looking for a house. And my father-in-law wanted to paint an Adirondack chair in the front yard and I'm like, you know, I heard Blender's 2.8 is cool. And maybe I'll be able to try. I've tried Blender before. I never really hooked in 2.8 hooked in. And I know that that was the plan. I think with the interface stuff, but it was great. And I I mocked up their Adirondack chair silly, but it got me into it. And then and I started seeing these people doing like AR kit experiments and like puppet things. So I was like, I'm going to, you know, all these calls are on Zoom. Wouldn't it be so much fun to join calls as an animated character? So I made a little AR kit puppet in Blender and did like a little rear projection trick, you know, with a video in the background and some lighting effects to join Zoom calls as this guy in the car or an alien in the Smithsonian's downloadable Apollo 11 capsule. And this is all able to happen in real time. I was just kind of grabbing a version of the screen and putting it into my Zoom calls. And EV was a real revelation to me because I've always hated the fact that like when you're animating, it doesn't look anything like the final. And you're really missing a lot of the emotion and a lot of the the understanding of a shot when you don't see lighting in real time. And the ability to do this was something I always wanted and to be able to animate and see things in real time like that really easily and in a way that I really connected with was great. So what Blender has become is this little hub where I use it to create pitch artwork, I use it to work out and prove new pipeline ideas, because often I'm trying to do something a little differently in the studios or like, what are you talking about? That's crazy and you have to like prove it. And then last year I did some live action and I was really nervous about that. So I used it to block in and pre-plan lighting and shot ideas. So I knew when I was got to the location what I wanted. And then I also do a bunch of weird crazy shit that gets people excited about funding a project. So I'll get through each of those really quickly. This is an example of how I how I what I do for the pitch artwork. I usually kind of drop in a bunch of, you know, bad looking, simple models really quickly. And then I will paint over that and procreate to sell the look of a particular show. I've done this for many projects in development. Most of them don't ever get made at all. But the neat thing is that once you're already in 3D, it's a short step to actually getting something that it animates. And I did a project for HBO last year, this QAnon thing, really small thing. And part of my payment was that they bought me a Rococo suit because I couldn't have done it any faster. So now I use that suit though to kind of get an early blocking step. And I feel like I do have an advantage because I'm a keyframe animator. So I use it as a start and then I polish it and make it better. But it gets me there really quickly. It also people think that it's my like wetsuit and it's cool in my garage in California. And I just don't tell them that I'm not a surfer and then it's a motion capture suit. And then also I've been proving out some pipelines and workflows that are really interesting. One of the things that came from this, you know, playing around with ARKit, I was like, I really wish I could do this with other actors and have like more people in the car. And I couldn't do that at all. And this little demo that I made in Blender got the funding from Epic to make a tool called Future Stage, which is a thing that allows us to motion capture an entire Zoom call of people, essentially, and beam them all into an Unreal session in real time. So you can do an improv show. It's about two seconds delayed from reality, but it's so much fun because you can be in there directing and, you know, there's AJ if anybody knows him, former Pixar guy. And then it's all beamed into a stage and you can kind of trigger animation and stuff. And we did all the animation and building here in Blender, but the actual real-time stuff isn't Unreal. I can't wait for the version of Blender that has like simulation or a clock, I think, something live because that will make some of the stuff possible entirely in Blender, which is cool. And then previous and post-vis for live action. So last summer, I got to direct this special with Robert Rodriguez on Disney Plus. We, I got the call from my studio, Nexus, my advertising studio about three months before the project needed to be on the air. Billie Eilish wanted a rotoscopes kind of Jessica Rabbit sort of vibe in three months on real locations in Los Angeles. And then we were going to do an entire show at a venue called the Hollywood Bowl, which is a classic Los Angeles 18,000 seat arena. It was going to be empty and Los Angeles Philharmonic would be there. We want to have animated interstitials in between every song that she sang live and I never done anything like this. I mean, there isn't a lot like this, so whatever, but like this was a daunting thing to get involved in. So I started, we started thinking about this is Rob Ruppel's amazing artwork inspiring how to graphically represent Los Angeles. Challenges here are, you know, motion capture. Billie had three hours total. So we couldn't do real rotoscope. You know, I was going to get three hours with her. So we figured we'd motion capture her in locations, but we had to shoot the plates first, the backgrounds for the motion capture first. And we only had six weeks between the live concert to delivering the thing and three weeks from the concert shoot to lock and edit. And obviously this is going to be crazy. So it ended up being five editors and three VFX teams in London, Los Angeles and Sydney at 24 hours a day working on this. Individual studios never worked a lot of extra time, but we, but I never slept. And I'd never done live action before. So I tried to do all that I could, boarding, like planning, like thinking of, I went to the scout of these locations and like polycam scan them. I wanted to have reference of all of that, you know, built 3D models of the Porsche, of the James Dean car here that we were using. And basically what I ended up doing is from those 3D scans and measurements and some Google Maps data, I previous as much as I possibly could before shooting the mo-cat with Billy. And this allowed, this is like the actual cemetery graves that we were using in real space. And this is all just for me to have confidence that when I go to the set, I can show people some of these videos. This is what I'm looking for. Cause I'm an animator and a control freak. And I didn't want to leave anything unturned. And it ended up being a really, I mean, I don't think a lot of the people on the sets, especially for music videos had ever seen this sort of planning. And it kind of blew their minds that this was the thing that people could even do. And it's all possible because Blender's so accessible and kind of usable in a simple way to get these things done. And then the other side of it was after the shoot, we had live plates and we had all this motion capture of Billy herself. And I ended up using Blender to match the cameras in these scenes and basically post-vis with that Mocap FBX character, all of the spots where we would need to have her in the show. So you'll see a couple of these things as they come on in a second where it's just the rough version of the character blocked in. And what it is is me kind of choosing the proper parts of the motion capture data that will end up being cleaned up by dropping them into Blender plates. And it has a lot of, I leave notes to the editors and everything on the screen because I'm never sure if I'm gonna talk to anybody or if they'll be in another time zone. So it's always good to be as clear as possible. And we blocked in the entire show this way. You know, about 10 minutes of animation in Mocap and an hour long actual show. One other version of it was pretty neat is I was actually able to use some of those polycam things for real as almost actual plates and get these little handheld things. If it's blurry enough, some of those 3D scans work wonderfully. And this is me just kind of basically being an editor in 3D with the Mocap data and the video there. And it was pretty amazing to work that way because then I could just send it off to the other animators and get them to polish it up. This is what it kind of ended up looking like. So it's got a tune shade thing, kind of doing a Ralph Bakshi cool world vibe. But for three months, I'm pretty excited about how it turned out. It was a breakneck pace. And that was done with a lot of collaborators. So I have to thank some of them with Nexus. Robertino Zambrano is another director there that did a cool section in the middle. Pablo, the DP, carry the live action director for the show. And then Robert Rodriguez for being an awesome mentor for the whole thing. And then I do a little bit of this crazy shit. So I'm gonna end with this. Like last year, this really famous writer that I can't mention who's really funny saw some stuff I was doing and we made, we attempted to make a weekly political sketch show using Blender and financial things didn't quite line up to make that possible and the world went into lockdown. But you know what, it was really fun to pretend to be Mark Meadows in Trump and what's his name? And Pence. And this is me literally using VR controllers to puppet hands. Like it's a very simple thing, but I think it looks kind of neat. And applause to the Claydough shaders that were for this demo here. Another really cool thing is I've gotten into making an immersive theater project where I chased these ideas that I think are interesting and I thought how cool would it be to have like live mo-cap actors in one building and a flashlight that's a VR projector and cast shadows of ghosts in a building. And I built the demo that has been used to finance the project using that Blender just showing people what it possibly looks like. So directing really is this willing this kind of vision into something that is shared, something in your head. And for me, Blender is like a huge part of getting those initial visual steps. And it's this thing that finally I feel like uses all these weird talents I have of, I'm a campfire guitarist, did a lot of these things. I can be good enough to like play a tune. I can kind of draw, I can animate, I can kind of light, but Blender's enough to like build a pretty confident and inspiring looking thing. Right now, I just did, I did a Love Dead Robots last year. I'm doing more next year and I'm boarding them with grease pencil, which is awesome. And that's it. Thanks, everyone. With 30 seconds to spare. Thank you.