 Hello everyone, welcome to this special Cube conversation at the Intel Tech Lounge at the Sundance Film Festival. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We're here with Ari Kushner, who is the founder and managing partner of Missing Pieces, doing some really amazing work on the future of filmmaking. It's got a great entrepreneurial spirit and creative desire to deliver a great product. Welcome. Thank you. So talk about Missing Pieces and what's going on in your world since context. Take a minute to explain what you're working on. Well, the premise is to be at this intersection of storytelling and technology and to make stuff people actually want to watch. And VR and AR are parts of it, but not the whole. So I know some of the conversation focuses on VR and we're just as excited about where storytelling is headed in terms of what technology allows us to do. But the key for me is I'm just passionate about a new thing comes out and I want to figure out how to make something really great but meaningful and powerful with that. We were talking before you came out about filmmaking, I'll see training in the discipline, I'll see variety of other things. But I want to get your perspective. We've been talking about this new generation. What does that mean to you when you hear that new generation, a new creative is coming? What does that mean to you? Yeah, I feel like I've ridden the wave of the thing as it's happened, I mean, and the company has too. So I went to film school in the late 90s and it was the first time you could buy the first final cut and the first wave of that so you could make our little movies on the weekend you no longer needed even to go to the school itself to borrow the equipment that was revolutionary in 1999. And then 2005 when we started thinking about the company, Vimeo, YouTube, Video iPod all come out within five months of each other towards the later part of the year and it's a revolution. It's clear that the distribution, not only can we make it and edit it in our laptops we can put it out and millions of people could watch it. And that was the first time that was possible and it was revolutionary. I think it still is to some degree. So we've just, you know, as it evolves what I see is that it's not, I've always felt like it's not enough to make the sausage as they say it, you know, the directors that I, the talent that I signed now like the project that we have here at Sundance, Young Jake. Young Jake is a great example of a creative who you can't fit in a box. He's a internet artist. He's a rapper. He's an interactive video maker. He did an app called emoji.ink and he does celebrity emoji portraits. He has 100,000 followers on Instagram so he can command his own audience. So when a brand or an agency comes to him it's a very different approach than when they come for a very straight up work for hire, direct as commercial kind of thing. That is the future. I mean, the future is about having a passionate audience, making things for that audience, understanding it and being able to communicate with them on a daily basis or weekly basis in a powerful way, right? Through story. I mean, you're right on the wave and the waves are getting bigger. One of the things we do, we do a lot of tech coverage and we see this in cloud computing where software changed from waterfall to agile and now the craft's coming back on the software side but still now software is eating the creative world because now a new wave is coming. So speak to that because you're, this is, you can almost look at the old ways you mentioned the commercials and films almost like the waterfall. Craft, craft it up and you ship it and you hope it works well. But now you have this new model of iteration where it's more agile creative. How do you do agile like your artist and not lose the craft? Yeah, well it's a challenge. Look, I've had so many opportunities in our 10 plus year career to kind of go in that direction of just like quantity over quality and we just could never do it. I mean, we're just not cut out for it but at the same time, I never ignore how to optimize the content based on data and based on what the landscape is looking like. So an important thing for example that we consider in every project is context. Like what, how is this project gonna be released? Oh, it turns out that it's really a big social media push, it's not a TV thing or it turns out specifically it's Facebook versus Instagram and that's a very different type of edit and a very different type of way you start the video because you've got a certain, even a different format and a different way of looking at the content. So you start to get into and then you start to iterate and look at the different ways in which you can repurpose and re-release the content but customize it for each thing. So you get into this really interesting place where the data is driving the story and the feedback is driving the story in real time. And the audience is part of the journey. Yes, and the comments and the way in which people are taking the thing that you made and re-interpreting it is really interesting and part of the story. Yeah, I mean, you trigger a lot of emotion in me when we're talking because as an entrepreneur, I started media business as turning into it and no one's ever seen this kind of media business before but I have no media training of any kind. You could be a science major. So there's certain and I've observed that there's dogma in the journalism business and this, but how dare I challenge that or others. You're doing the same thing. And so I want to ask you, what is the dogma of the old world? Because the naysayers are usually the ones with the dogma say, oh, that'll never work. So you're on the front end of this new trend but you kind of have visibility into what they're thinking. What is that? The dogma is the whole like, there's only big name directors and it's a certain caliber of work and that craft is the ultimate thing and that you just have to make the thing great and it'll do the thing that it needs to do without any thinking in terms of context or media buy or how it can actually become a socially engaged piece. So the thing that we're always fighting is some version of that. And then because we came from a scrappy place but we're now a pretty legit thing, I think people, some people still be like, well, that's kind of like, the problem solving sometimes gets interpreted as scrappy which is a word I really don't like. And I think we- It's compliment on one hand but some people look at it as an insult. Oh, he's just scrappy. He's not legit. You never want to be the cheap solution. You want to be the solution that people call because nobody else can solve this problem for you. And I think there's a strand of the company that's like the kind of like pick up the phone and we'll figure it out and the impossible project that nobody else can do. And then there's another strand where it's just like you just want to make stuff people actually want to watch. How hard is that? You know, the thing where you could just buy the media and expect the results is trickier and trickier. I mean, you could be different and innovative but that might not be good but if you're good doing it, you're differentiated and you're innovating. That's right. What's the filmmaking track on that line because certainly there's a lot of innovation and with innovation comes failure but people are trying to be different and being different actually is a good thing. What are some of the trends that you're seeing where people are having some success and where are people stumbling? Yeah, that's a good, I mean what I see is the things that do well take cultural context into account and again speak to the people in that way. So it's like a feedback loop that it's creating with its own audience and we almost always, there's almost always a time in the process when we're dealing with an agency or a brand where if things start to go a little bit like too much in a direction that you all wanted to say somebody usually me or someone will say, look if we make these changes or if we go in this direction, we won't want to share it and if we don't want to share it, nobody's going to want to share it. So that becomes a key thing while as before you could sort of get away with some of that. Now it's like, well, it has to pass a certain kind of litmus test in terms of like, are you comfortable sharing this thing because it speaks to you or not? All right, so I got to ask you the hard question. We're here at the Intel Tech Lounge. Obviously Intel is doing a lot of tech things. They're trying to get all this new tech and I see that on, whether you watch the NFL playoffs with the camera angles and the games on basketball games. You see in them using the first power technology. We're actually working on an Intel Olympics VR related project that got a little tease at CES so I can just say that. Yeah, so what's the tech? What's the cool new game changer in your mind as a tool that you need to be more successful and other artists could use? Well, you tend to, yeah, I mean, I think we've heard... Four horsepower, more compute, more... No, I mean, it's really the return. What happened with the AR was really interesting which was everyone realized, oh, the phone's already in our pocket while the headset needs to be something that really needs to be standalone, it needs to be $200. You know, there's different kinds of headsets, of course, that do different kinds of things but that's an extra hardware. The phone we already have in our pocket so everyone started taking AR seriously, including the big players and what that allowed was a rethinking of what the possibilities with story would be. So in some ways this last year has been a readjustment and a rethinking of, well, what can you do with the phone that you've already got in your pocket in terms of expanding the storytelling or placing a story in the middle of your living room, a layer, using the phone as a window and a layer but I'm equally as excited about what's coming in VR and interactive VR, room-scale VR. The project that we have here is an interactive 360 project with the phone. It's called On My Way and the artist is Young Jake and the original conceit of it is it's Jake, there's four jakes in a car and every time you move the phone to a different Jake, it changes the Jake. So as soon as it passes the quadrants of the four quadrants, it kinda swaps the Jake and that creates a really fun and interesting thing and he actually designed it for the phone vertical because that's the way most people are gonna experience it but it's playing on a headset as well. Well, you're definitely new creative, love chatting with you. Final call, I have two questions. First one is Sundance, what's the story this year? What's your report? If you had to go back and from your friend to ask you to give him a report, hey, what happened? Ari, what's going on Sundance this year? A combination of really interesting high-end VR projects, some of them leaning into this kind of like more psychedelic, less narrative-driven stuff which I really like, kind of like really embracing the fact that it's another world and taking you there and then the AR stuff, there's a thing called Tender, Tender AR or Tender Tundar which is a play on Tinder by Tender Clause which uses augmented reality and emotion and machine learning, everything that you could hope for in a really interesting way so that's kind of showing you where it's going. So I think those two things. The psychedelic's interesting, I always, I mean, this is kind of tangent but I've been saying on the CUBE interviews, I think we're gonna have a digital hippie revolution and it's coming, I mean, you can feel it. It's a different culture. A lot of people are scared to, I mean, VR is a really great consciousness expanding way to get into other worlds and with all the crap on on the world today, you can almost look at this as a 60s-like movement in this modern era where it could be a major catalyst for massive change. Yeah, and there's a piece about this female shaman that rose through the tribe in Ecuador and became the first ever female shaman of her tribe and there's a piece called Chorus that within it, which is super weird and trippy and almost has no plot but is amazing. All right, now you gotta run. Quick sound by, what are you working on? What's exciting you these days? Share a little bit about what's happened. A variety of, you know, again, it's the full spectrum of storytelling so it's not one thing. It's really pushing experiential, pushing branded content, pushing original content. We're getting a lot more into that game long form series, VR series, really that's kind of the next way for the company is to set foot much stronger in the original space and create our own original IP, our own original content. Awesome, Ari Kushner, managing partner and founder of Missing Pieces, check them out, a lot of great work and again, there's a whole new game changing from storytelling to the tech, the collision between technology and artistry and creative is happening. It's here at Sundance at the Intel Tech Lounge. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE Conversation here at Sundance, which is part of our coverage of SiliconANGLE Sundance 2018. Thanks for watching.