 Hello. Yay. Okay, goodbye. Thank you. Hi, guys. My name is Jason Schleifer. I am a huge fan of coffee, and I'm one of the co-founders of a company called Nimble Collective. I'm going to talk to you today about what we're up to, what we're doing with Blender, and what our huge plans are to help all of you, hopefully create content. Our mission as a company is basically creator success. What we want to do is help you and your friends create animated content, get out in the world, and do it super easy with nothing more than a web browser and an internet connection, which basically means we're building a cloud-based streaming collaborative platform, so you can just create content really, really fast. We're going to handle all the backend stuff, so you don't have to worry about file management, all of that. We stream the applications to you, so you don't have to worry about installing anything, and you just create. And usually when I talk about that, people are like, they don't really believe that you can stream applications over the internet, and it works. It's going to be really quick. You guys might remember this, or recognize this. This is the sci-fi armor concept by Andy, and this is Blender streaming in a web browser. You can see the little things up on top there. This is the type of interaction we get as we're working with Blender and animating. It's really fast, very, very clear graphics. It all looks good. You can see I can tear things off and resize the web browser and everything like that. All the video I'm showing you today is captured streaming stuff, so none of this is fake, it's all real. This is how we're doing films right now, which is pretty awesome. I am a total Blender newbie. I've been using Blender all of a year and a half, so most of you know it way, way, way better than me, and I'm super excited to be here to actually learn from all of you. This is my first Blender conference, and I saw there was a lot of you who was there first as well, so yeah, very cool. I know enough about Blender though to get myself into serious trouble, as I'm sure a lot of you do, but I'm really old in the animation industry. I've been in it professionally for about 22 years. This is a video of Maya, version 1.0. I worked for Alias Wayfront when Maya was first coming out. That's me in 1998. That's a cowboy. And that's the timeline. So this is a video from when we first released Maya. So I've been using Maya since very, very early on. After working at Alias Wayfront, I went to New Zealand and I worked on the Lord of the Rings trilogy, first as a character TD, then as an animator, working on Shilab and the Witch King and of course Gollum. After that, I went to DreamWorks Animation for 12 years, where I animated on a whole bunch of these movies. It was a supervising animator on Madagascar 2, and then head of character animation on Megamind and on Peabody and Sherman. And over all that time, I've done a lot of presentations, taught a lot of classes, tried to help as many people as possible learn about animation, and I've worn a lot of stupid costumes. This is me dressed up as a Renaissance guy doing a press junket for Peabody and Sherman, showing how we prototyped using multiple limbs and stuff on the characters to see if the director would like it. So what I've seen over the years, as I've worked through all these studios and talked to different people, is that studios spend a lot of time and money and a lot of energy making sure that their tools are set up for the artists, so that the artists can stay completely focused on doing what they do best, which is creating. And the reason they do this is they want conversations like this, where somebody says, hey, Amy, I've updated the latest animation to help the audience connect, and she says, cool, thanks, John. I've got it, and I've already tweaked the eye highlights. That's the level of communication and conversation we want artists to have at studios. It's focusing on the craft and focusing on just getting the best connection and the best talent or the best work done. This is what we usually see, though, is, hey, Amy, I updated the latest animation to help the audience connect. She's like, sweet, that's awesome. Where is it? Oh, it's the latest version. Cool, what's that? Is it Anim Final One or Anim Latest 27? Hold on, let me check. It's Anim Latest 27. Oh, wait, no, I need to fix something. It's number 28. Okay, loaded that, but some of the animation's missing. Oh, I think you need to relink it. Okay, where's the new rig? Hey, Andy. Yeah? Did you save out a new rig? Yeah. Okay, where'd you put it? Oh, hey, Amy, it's Rig Newest. Why'd you move it? Because it's newer than the old one. Oh, okay. Cool. Oh, wait, there's a new group in there. Oh, yeah, I added a new group, but you don't need to worry about it. Don't worry about it. Okay, cool, it's working. Hey, guys, yeah? I just did another pass. Can you add? Grab. Anim Final 62. So that's the conversation I'm sure you've all had before. And whether a studio is building a full animation pipeline or working on an asset pipeline, they really want to try and keep the conversation around here. Because this is where you get really great stuff and it makes the artist super, super happy. Because they get to focus on what they want to do, which is creating great things. To show an example of this, I'm going to use, can we bring down the lights just a little bit so we can see it? So this is a scene from How to Train Your Dragon. Have you guys all seen this film? Yeah. Yes. Okay, I did not work on this film, but I love this movie. And I want to use it as an example to talk about how the artists were able to really focus on their craft to deliver a great performance. This is a scene called Forbidden Friendship. It was supervised by an animator named Gabe Portos. And the entire sequence is all without any dialogue, but it shows the connection that forms and the bond that forms between toothless and hiccup. So I'm just going to show a piece of that. There should be audio with this one. So this is a beautiful scene, and there's this one shot in particular. You can keep the lights down while I talk about this one. Thank you. This one shot in particular for me embodies exactly what I'm talking about when we talk about keeping the artist focused. Every single thing about this is considered the staging of how toothless is coming up and covering a third of the screen on the right hand, on the left hand side, how he's leaning in and pointing directly down hiccup's arm and how he is, like, quiet and small in the space and the super, super subtle movement of toothless leaning in and pulling back and then releasing and agreeing that he's going to become hiccup's friend. It's just stunning. And the reason why Gabe and the team were able to do this was because they were only focused on the performance. They spent all of their time thinking about what's the best way to tell the story, not where do I save the file, is the rig the latest thing, is lighting getting the latest stuff. They were completely focused. So that's great for studios, it's awesome. They can spend a lot of money setting up that pipeline but what about small teams of two to five people, people who really want to create films, they work at smaller places, they don't have the infrastructure. What usually happens is they have to build their own pipelines, they have to find artists, they've got to manage all their own files and data and I'm sure most of you have had to do this. You basically become your own IT department and you just end up with these barriers keeping you from what you want to achieve. It's really frustrating no matter how determined you are to get something done, you're just tearing your hair out because you can't achieve what you want. So that's what we're trying to solve at Nimble. We're trying to make it really, really easy for all of the artists to stay focused on creating art and not focused on building a pipeline. And the reason why we're doing this and why we're doing it now is that we think that creation and the way people create has been evolving over the past few years and now is the perfect time for us to do it. There's a huge pool of talent all around the world that is getting so freaking good, it's unbelievable. With the internet being able to collaborate super, super quickly with sites like ArtStation where you're seeing talent every single day that just blows you away with online schools, just the ability to collaborate and learn and get better and better and better is accelerating ridiculously. And when I come here and I see what you guys are all doing the distribution models are changing all the time. They used to be that in order to distribute your work you were really going to be an effects house that's going to be doing commercials, you're going to be going out to film or you're going to be doing DVD or TV. But now you've got YouTube where you can self-distribute your stuff, you've got Vimeo where you can charge people for your work if you want. You've got Netflix and HBO buying animated content. So there's a lot of stuff that's changing all the time and people are trying to figure it out. It's ridiculous with Microsoft just the other day announcing that VR is going to be built in to Windows 10. The projections for what this market is going to be for animation is gigantic. It's in the hundreds of millions of dollars in the next few years. And everybody that we talk to about VR is trying to figure out how to do it. What's the best way to tell narrative content in VR? Nobody's figured it out yet. So it's totally up to all of us to figure it out and everyone knows animation is going to be a huge part of it. It's an opportunity for us. It's really exciting. And everybody who's trying to solve these things, they're all looking to the cloud to figure out how to do it, how to work together globally, how to solve things for VR, how to release stuff. Everyone's looking in the cloud and sharing data. And we were looking at that as well. We were thinking, well, okay, cool, we could set up, if we want to help people, we could set up databases and stuff so that people can download data, work really easily, resubmit it. The more we thought about it, the more we were like, well, what can we do that's really different? What can we do that really changes the experience that we're going to have in the future? What can we do that really changes the experience that we're going to have in the future? How can we make creating animated content more of like a transcendent experience where you're just really, really focused? And we thought, well, what if this was your experience when you were creating? What if you were sitting at home and you're watching your favorite TV show and you suddenly get an email from your friend and she says, I'm working on an animated film and I need you to light a shot for me. Could you do it? And it's got all of your assets. It's got all the textures. It's got everything you need. The cameras are set up. The animation's all there. All you do is adjust your lights. You submit the render and you close. And that's it. You don't worry about where anything is. You don't worry about where you sent it. You don't worry about telling anybody you did anything with it. It's all done for you. And you're sitting on your couch with a $250 Chromebook in a chicken soup because we all have great personal lives and so we do. That would be amazing. So about two years ago we got together and we decided to prototype this concept and so we looked at virtualizing the desktop and we worked with a company called Citrix to try this out and we basically said, okay, we're going to do a short film called Animal Facts 271. It's available on our website if you go check it out. And we did it with Maya and Arnold for rendering. And we basically streamed the desktop so it was kind of like working locally except you weren't because you were looking at a virtual desktop. And what we found was it was really compelling. It was very cool to be able to be working at work on one computer. You go home. You're doing the exact same work, same files, same everything. You're not carrying your computer back and forth. You're not doing anything. You're just basically using your computer as a thin client to look at another machine. And we loved what we were doing so much. We went and presented it in front of 6,000 of our closest friends at the Citrix Synergy Conference which was terrifying because the room was, like, imagine this room by 20,000. It was just like huge. And we're like, oh my God, look at all these people. But the response to it was really compelling. We got a lot of feedback from a lot of artists who were like, I want this. And so we said, okay, we're going to start building a product. We're going to work to do this. Then we went to SeaGraph and we saw this film which was mind boggling. We were like, what? You can do this with Blender? Like, holy crap. This is exciting. So we started looking more into it. And then we heard about this and we were like, what? We can make Blender work in a pipeline? This is awesome. So then we started meeting everyone in the community and we were like, oh my God. These people are so cool. Like, everyone was so passionate and excited and there was conflict and resolution and art and talent. And it was so exciting that we were like, all right, that's it. We have to work with these guys. So like Tom mentioned, we're really excited to be supporting the development of Blender especially with 2.8. It's super thrilling. I love it. And as we were starting to realize that we wanted to work with you guys, we thought, well, we should probably learn it because it's great to be like, yes, we have Blender on the platform and someone goes, how do you use it? And I go, I don't know. Go online. Look at Andrew's tutorials. So we decided to start learning it and of course the best way to learn anything is to do some production. So we decided to do another short film. Awesome. It's very exciting for us. We're like, yeah. And I'm going to show you something super embarrassing which is the previs for it which I drew in Blender using grease pencil. And this is an early version of grease pencil and it's my drawings so I apologize. But this is the previs for the short film of what we're going to do. So a little bit of trivia. 4039 Productions is 4039 is the street number that our first building was in for Nimble Collective. So we just thought, ah, 4039 Productions. So immediately I knew I needed a good designer because that was not going to work for a design. So I went on to Behance and I just started looking around at all these different designers and stuff and I saw this woman, Irina Korsak, who's Polish and I looked at her designs and I thought they were absolutely stunning. Just very, very graphic, really bright, very cool looking and she happened to have a whole bunch of roosters and I was like those are fantastic. I would love to actually make something that looks just like that. Not make something that looks like a CG but actually looks like a 2D design but do it all in 3D. So I thought I would reach out to her but before I did I wanted to make sure I was going to pay homage to her work and not destroy it as we turned it into computer animated stuff. So I went into Blender and I modeled my first character which was this rooster basically taking her art, trying to figure out one of our in-house artists. Haley did all the texturing and surfacing based off of Irina's work and after we saw this we were like okay cool first of all I can model in Blender so that's exciting and second of all we can get it to look really, really close to what Irina had and we asked her to redesign one of the roosters as a hen so she did shrunk the neck, changed the tail, perfect. It was awesome. And then she started working on some of the backgrounds for us and then she started working it in and then the final result and this is what it looked like in Blender. So we wanted to keep everything as close as possible and actually if you look at the final film we pulled out some of the sheep and then basically did projection maps and then did shape key animation on their heads to make it look like they were eating and the windmill moves as well. So little subtle stuff which was fun. While we were doing all the stuff and learning about how to use Blender we wanted to share everything that we were discovering and first of all to do a project and then second of all to try and teach someone else how to do stuff that you're doing. So we started releasing a whole bunch of tutorials and material on our site about how we're using Blender how we're customizing it, how we're working with it and just trying to help people learn as much as possible and what we were excited about was that people were really responding to it so we've had over 50,000 views which is not a ton, but since that's not our main business of what we're trying to do this means a lot to us when we've been reaching out but what really means a lot is that we have a lot of people who have not had experience with Blender before. So this is a quote from Aaron Smith who's a CG supervisor. He's been in the industry over 20 years as well and he's been at DreamWorks and Sony at a bunch of places. He saw the tutorials and then sent me this which basically he said, I've taken a closer look at Blender I've been absolutely giddy with the possibilities it offers the cycles renderer handles beautifully lighting with the tool is a pleasure. So that to me is like okay that's awesome we're really helping people grow but we kept thinking back to that transcendent experience that we wanted to have we wanted people to really experience working in a way that was totally unconventional and totally focused on being an artist and also lowers the barriers of cost because every time you buy an expensive computer that's another 3,500 euros or whatever it is to buy a nice computer to work want to see what we can do to bring that down so I went on to Amazon.com and I purchased a Toshiba Chromebook 2 with 4 gigs of RAM and a 16 gigabyte hard drive for those of you who don't know a Chromebook does not run any operating system that can install anything except web apps it runs Chrome OS so literally there's nothing I could do to create animated content on this thing but I purchased it, I opened it up I logged in and I started rigging my chicken and blender it was that quick and that fast to get started and that easy this is an over the shoulder shot of one of our co-founders Scott Lafleur showing how you can use the chicken rig and animate it, move it around show what blender looks like on a Chromebook we couldn't do a screen capture of this one because there's no good screen capture tools for the Chromebook so we had to do over the shoulder but you can see basically scrubbing working fine so most of the actually all the animation, most of the rigging all of the nonlinear editing was done on the Chromebook and the rendering was done using cycles we used Nuke for compositing we could have used blender's compositor if we wanted but a good pipeline uses multiple tools so we wanted to make sure we could do that and we basically did the short pretty quickly this is the first animation test of the chicken so again my first rigging challenge in blender I was trying to figure out how to do it one of the challenges I had here was that because of the stylistic design the feathers go straight down over the part where the arm inserts into the body so I had to figure out what would happen to detach them and stick them back on top within the animation luckily he doesn't do that in the short so you never see it but that's what he does and we also decided that motion blur wouldn't work for this after seeing this test we were like ok we'll render it without motion blur not because we couldn't we just figured it looks better without it so I'm going to show you the short right now and if we could bring the lights down that would be awesome stick around because there's something right after the short that you should see like I said stupid costumes for presentations this is how much I'm excited to love you guys I will do this one of the great stories that came out this is really warm by the way sorry make sure there we go so one of the great things that came out of this production that was really exciting for us is one night while I was doing the final edit of the film I realized that shot three which is the farm shot which has all this dust in the air and it's a compositing shot I had updated the animation and I needed a new version of it in order to get the final thing done so I emailed Haley who was doing all the compositing I said can you rerun the composite for me so I can finish the edit she was at her mom's house and she didn't have her computer but she had her mom's ipad so she grabbed her mom's ipad she logged in the website ran nuke updated the composite and shot everything back out for us which was just like holy crap that's so cool like she could do all of her work without having to worry about what machine she had or anything like that it was really really exciting for us so that was great for what we're doing but our company is not really about us creating shorts and creating films it's really about trying to empower you guys to be able to create stuff this is what we really care about our dream is that every single one of you can create a film super super quick super easy and get it out there and share it with the world so when we announced what we were doing at synergy back a year or so ago we got a lot of interest from a whole bunch of creators people who had never made animated films before had always wanted to make animated films but didn't know how to do it some of them had been in the industry but not in a director role in like a different role and they all said you know I would love to use your platform to create tools that are to create films and of course the platform wasn't ready yet but we decided we really wanted to help these people so we started a pilot program where as we were building up the platform we could help them make their films helping their artists helping them out creatively mentoring them teaching them what it means to be a good director which is definitely a challenge and really helping them achieve their goals with their films and as the platform came up we would be moving them onto the platform definitely for all the rendering for a lot of the infrastructure and stuff like that so I'm going to show you a sizzle reel of some of the work that's been going on while we've been helping these people out Hi my name is DeCosta concept designer, artist, illustrator in Vancouver Canada and I'm putting out a new concept called Sunny and Gert Hi, my name is Captain McNeil and I am the director of Roadside Assistus I'm an artist and a writer living in Los Angeles and I am working with Nimble Collective on a show called Disrupted Hi, my name is Nick Arioli I'm the director of Coin Operated I'm so excited to be working with Nimble on a tremendous team and I think they can do great things so it's been awesome to work with each of these artists and help them build their dream and tell their stories we got a quote from Mac Bo Ross who's been working on a couple of the projects he's an amazing animator he uses Blender primarily and he sent us this quote the picture was totally unprompted but he said Nimble allows me to do what I love while being close to the people I love and that is exactly what we want we've seen too many people have to move their homes, move to various places in order to be able to actually create their art and this allows people to live where they want to live with their families, creating the films that they want to make and so that speaks exactly to our message along with the message about helping people we want to hold a contest so we've gotten great response from the chicken short and what we'd like to do is really see you guys do something with the chicken what we're doing is we're putting together a little contest here and basically we're going to give you the chicken and the environment and you can do whatever you want with it you have until November 28th and whoever makes the best film or the best short or the best anything with it, voted on by you and your friends you get a one hour one on one project review with me where I'll Skype with you or do a zoom link with you we'll talk about whatever you want, whether it's the project itself or whatever you're doing elsewhere you have a one year subscription to CG Cookie for donating that $50 gift card to the blender market so thank you to the blender market and then also a nimble t-shirt like this second and third place we'll get a month subscription to CG Cookie a $25 gift card to the blender market and a nimble collective t-shirt fourth gets a $15 gift card to the blender market and a nimble collective t-shirt and then fifth gets the best prize the nimble collective t-shirt I have with me, you can come and meet me up afterwards I have these cards that I would love to hand out to you if you're interested, you grab this app called Augment and then you can scan the QR code and secretly if you scan the little graphic there you get the chicken in AR with a little background which is kind of cool and you can make them bigger so if you're interested in trying out for the contest, go ahead and grab a card scan it, fill out your form, you'll get the rig and you can do whatever you want with it if you're interested in getting a bigger rig that would be awesome too, we could share that lastly I believe this is something that nobody has seen before so I said we've been working on the product working on the platform building it up you guys are the first ones to actually see the pre-beta version of what we're working on so it's a little teaser of what we've been doing with our product super excited to show it to you and I hope you guys like it take a look at what we've done to create and whether you're painting, animating or giving feedback your best work comes when collaborating with others with the Nimble Collective platform we've strived to make it easy for teams to come together and create using nothing more than an internet connection and a browser starting with storyboarding and design artists can quickly navigate their project and get bright to creating without having to download or install anything and because of Nimble's cloud infrastructure assets that are created for one task can very easily flow into the next bringing design straight into modeling all the way through surfacing and into animation feedback is simple and direct and artists can easily inspire and help each other for greater results with integrated rendering you can tweak your final images using high-end compositing tools or even use your assets for other things like AR and VR with Nimble Collective's streaming collaborative platform it no longer matters where your artists live or what hardware they have on their desk they now have the immense power of a professional animation studio available through an internet connection and accessible through anything with a web browser even $149 Chromebook Nimble Collective be your own studio thank you guys very much come and see me if you have any questions or thoughts I'd love to chat with each of you and have a great rest of the conference