 Hello, I'm from Tangent Animation, my name is Jeff Bell. This is my partner in crime, Ken Zorniak. So we're going to walk you through a little bit of who Tangent Animation is and why we chose to move away from Maya towards Blender and put our development... And we're also putting many, many development dollars behind Blender too because we see a great future for it. And of course he's coming from someone who actually developed the original Maya. Yes, we'll talk a little bit about that. Tangent was founded in 2014 with kind of the start of Aussie which was kind of our first major feature. And it released in Spain just on the 14th of October. This is going to be a third weekend in theaters and it's been doing actually quite well in Spain. I think it's in sixth spot right now. We were over, I think we did about 550 million euros last week or whatever. Not a million, 100,000. 100,000 sorry, Jeff. I'd be on a beach somewhere if we did that. But basically, and we have our next kind of big project coming up called NextGen which is our kind of big service show that we're working on coming up. But our kind of model with Tangent is to really have a kind of a distributed production model. You know, we have kind of two offices but that's, you know, we work in both Winnipeg which is kind of in the middle of Canada, a bit of on the kind of the prairies where it gets very cold in the wintertime. And of course we have a big office in Toronto which is kind of the animation hub in Canada for production. And we've worked distributedly but it also helps us in working with kind of other partners. And certainly on Aussie it was a co-production with Spain and we had a lot of kind of Spanish work in Spain that had to get done and we had a lot of interactions. We were very used to kind of working in a very kind of split method. We also are very technology focused. My background is that I had started kind of Frantic Films years ago which is a visual effects house. We had multiple offices but we also used our service production as a means to kind of basically fund our R&D department and we really aggressively went after doing development R&D and this is why, you know, service production is kind of means to the end of production because if you can strategically use your money that you're going to use to make a show to make lasting IP that you can then leverage for future projects it builds a much stronger company. And then finally, you know, the big part of tangent is really and the challenge of filmmaking and doing feature production is building financial models that really work. And certainly with Spain and the opportunity to be able to kind of access money that was there in Spain that could be spent outside of it we certainly know how to leverage a Canadian tax credits to be able to get close that gap on financing and then it's just a question of making a good compelling project that sells that can fill the rest of your financing. And once you have the model, you're in business. So basically tangent animation is three people. It's myself, Jeff Bell, it's Ken Zoniak and another partner in Winnipeg. So a little bit of my background. Is Jason Schleifer here? Hey, Jason. So we go back a little ways, right? How long? 20 plus years? So when SGI got the crazy idea to purchase alias research and Wavefront and stick them together as alias Wavefront, very creative, yeah? We were working on next-gen products at the time. So I was an animator that was hired by alias research to try and beat soft homage. So our next-gen product internally was called Maya. So I was basically the first animator to work on Maya and drove a lot of the workflow and feature set along with Jason and Corbin, who's also part of the Nimble Collective. So we got together, did a head-to-head, I think, of the products at the time, and then moved forward as a group to build and release version one and version two of Maya. Well, the last three years, actually since version 2.5, I really like what I'm seeing in Blender and this is why we're moving away from Maya and moving towards Blender and taking a lot of things that Ken was talking about in terms of doing development work. So we're rerouting all those funds that we used to spend on buying Maya or products like Maya to do our feature film productions and putting those into developers and money for artists. And we plan on basically taking all the development work that we do that's related directly to Blender and putting it back into the trunk of Blender. And this is certainly why we've sponsored two seats in the foundation. And also the other benefit is that, from a tax credit perspective, you're spending your X amount of money, hundreds of thousands of dollars on Maya, not tax creditable. You spend it on developers, tax credit, and you leverage that out and make it even more money. So again, the interesting thing is people think that the tax credit money is free. That's basically another way to put even more money up on screen. So those tax credit dollars will allow us to get another... Instead of two developers, it might be three. Instead of four, it might be six. So it's really important to us to try and leverage that and push the art and the technology forward. Blah, blah, blah, art goals, yeah. We kind of talked about this already, so... Yeah, we're not saving money by using open source. That's not the goal. No, we're just saving money up in fast movies. And we're also hoping that the work that we do and any other studios do, other studios will pick up on and expand upon so that it also helps our features going forward. I think also we hope to bring a blenders that obviously as a viable huge production, or as a production tool, we have to build a lot of shortcuts and things to kind of make things work and make it move fast, fast for production needs. And that's critical, too. I'm just tired of dealing with the damn licensing. Yeah, that's true. OK, so we talked a little bit about Aussie. Aussie's in theaters right now. It was released in Spain on October 14th, and I think it releases in North America. January. January, and also the UK in January, right? So I'm not sure what the other release dates are for the other European countries. Yeah, everything is, you know, the Spain and Germany are still being sold right now, but Scandinavia, Italy, and a lot more of the Eastern European countries will be all sometime this fall in January. And then US is sold, but not set yet, right? US and Canada going to go at the same time. Yeah, so we're pretty excited to have been able to do a full feature. Maya was not used for anything in this show. This show was 100% from front to back, from assets to surfacing to modeling, layout, animation, lighting, and render, and cycles. It was all blender from front to back. So it had a reasonable budget. It was about 8 and 1 half million Canadians. So that's about, what, $10 US? Yeah. $5 euros. Yeah, maybe five euros. So I mean, it was a reasonably decent budget, but a fairly small budget. And we built the studio, we built all of our tools and pipelines at the same time that we're also trying to get this feature film done. One of our developers is sitting right here on the front corner. This is Todd Bade, if you want to stand up and embarrass yourself. So Todd's been working on cycles and improving cycles. So we've done things like, and these aren't checked back into the truck yet because we're bad boys and we haven't gotten proper approval to do this yet. But we're working on that. So we have things like light linking so that we can actually link lights and light characters a little bit separately from backgrounds. We have per object and per material sampling and light paths, right? Yeah. We did the ambient reflection mapping from ILM's 2004 white paper for the ambient occlusion, right? And what was the other one? There's one other one there. Oh yeah, an improved 2D motion blur. Basically something very similar to what we had back in the stars day. So the one interesting thing about Maya users to Blender users is we developed a bunch of training courses in-house that help guide Maya users over to Blender. It takes about anywhere from three days to like 10 days that we find to get artists to get fairly comfortable in Maya and to start actually performing their craft. The very first thing that we tell people is, what is it, Jason? Right mouse button. Yeah, well, the second one would be, don't change your hotkeys. Yes. People have this tendency to want to change over to Maya's hotkeys, thinking that will make it easy to work in Blender. And that's just the wrong thing to do. So we really extoll the virtues of the hotkey setup in Blender. Once you get to know it, it's actually very clever and it's very sensible. So we make that a sort of core to what's going on in the facility. Also means I can sit down and anyone's desk and not bitch at them, right? So, hey, hotkeys that I know. Yeah, so it's actually the transition's been pretty good for us overall. There's been a few hiccups here and there, but nothing that we haven't either been able to work around from an artistic standpoint, from a technical direction standpoint, or a development standpoint. So it's been quite good. So we'll show just a little, this sequence is actually a little bit, I think the footage in this sequence is a little bit old, right? Yeah, that's a few months old. Yeah, so this stuff was rendered back in November. There's probably another version of this that where some of the lighting and some of the hair work has actually been improved. But we'll show it to you right now anyways. I don't know if you're gonna get sound, unfortunately. Just an example on Ozzy, this is kind of a little diagram of how we kind of work and how the work flows. So we mentioned it was a Spanish Canadian co-production. We relied on Spain to do a lot of the pre-production work, art direction design, and the director and writer were there, and part of that helped to satisfy the co-production agreement. But then you see kind of all down the kind of, the right side, we have kind of Toronto Winnipeg and how we kind of break up a lot of our work. So modeling and surfacing tend to get done more towards in Winnipeg office, but rigging, shot layout and animation tend to happen more in Toronto. Toronto is, of course, a wealth of animators and that's where we tend to staff up more at that department. Shot funneling and visual effects come back to Winnipeg, and as I mentioned, years ago I'd founded Frantic Films and there's still kind of a group, a community of visual effects artists that were left in Winnipeg after kind of prime focus had shut down the office there. So they work with us within our office and now are part of tangent and certainly the reason why we specialize in visual effects. Lighting was kind of broken up between kind of two, the both offices because it was obviously a very big job. And then we, as part of our agreement, we actually used a render farm in Spain in addition to our own existing render farms which is the reason why we've kind of rendered across everything. And then a lot of the final kind of comp tweak was all done in Winnipeg before it heads over to post which was posted back out in Spain. But of course, speaking certainly of the financial model this certainly satisfied kind of the requirements to get the movie made. But it was certainly a viable production model to be able to actually get this picture done in the 15 plus months we've worked on it. I had the terrible, I had to actually go to Barcelona to color grade it. It was terrible. Yeah. Yeah, Barcelona is a beautiful city. Yeah, so it's kind of a standard animation pipeline. Some of the stuff is also parallel, right? Like effects and lighting. Sometimes shot flying goes directly to both depending on who has to control the lighting or who has to go first, but fairly standard pipeline. We're bringing a lot of the stuff that we did in the past at STARS and other facilities. And internally we had our own Maya based asset and production management system that we wrote internally. So we're doing the same thing internally for Blender. Bring a very systematic database driven asset management system to Blender which is actually proven to be a little bit difficult because of the way Blender's linking and file handling is more complex than Maya. So Maya files are kind of like these atomic level things that you can point to and manage. Blend files are just containers for various RNA types which is really interesting. It's proven to be a bit challenging, but quite fun. How much time? 10 minutes? 10. So, pre-production. Let's see, I'm trying to figure out whether we can get through these in 10 minutes. Go look. Blah, blah, blah, blah. Okay, let's go here because this is kind of fun. Well then we'll talk about our next movie because that should take us about 10 minutes now. So yeah, as we said, Blender's our in-house tool now. There is another production in-house that is still on Maya but that's mainly due to the client and the history behind that show. So once that is done, that will be the last show that actually uses any Maya within our facility. Yep. We're about, let's see, after we staff up for our current movie, we'll be about 120, 130 people between the two facilities. Two facilities, yeah. Yeah, so we've grown quite a bit. We started with, hmm, Ken and myself. Yeah. About three years ago. It's erupted about 120 people. And again, you know, the Blender film is the biggest film that we've done today which is pretty cool. I guess one of the other big things too though, this summer I'm sure, I don't know if any of you heard but there's a large production facility in Toronto called ARC that shut down which Jeff was very instrumental in setting up years ago as well too and had a lot of really good friends and a lot of key artists we were looking to bring on but we were fortunately in the hiring mode with our show and we managed to grab about 30 plus of the top senior people for that facility. I think pretty close to 50 plus percent of the senior supervisor and lead staff from ARC. So the people that I worked with in the past, people that I worked at Pixar, Disney, DreamWorks and a variety of other very large facilities, very high level people that have done many, many feature films. And they're all really digging Blender and it's pretty cool to see some of the animation tests that are coming out on our next feature. If you didn't tell anyone, nobody would know what software did this stuff so it's pretty cool. And that's gonna be a great leverage for Blender too getting in those experienced people like that. Yeah, the budget on the show is four times the size of the previous budget. So it's a really fairly large budget feature film. So looking forward to what we're gonna be able to do. We're obviously gonna continue our development. Most of our work is gonna be focused on cycles because lighting for us, I happen to love lighting and compositing. Lighting is I think one of the things that makes or breaks movies. I know that our animators are gonna do a great job but if we can't deliver on the lighting side and take it, we gotta go way beyond what we did on Aussie. So to that end, we're looking at working with the Blender, the developers of the Blender Institute in implementing things like AOVs. Everyone know what AOVs are? Anyone use RenderBan? So AOV, if you look at the passes in the layers, instead of having preset passes, you would have a list of passes that you can add in and you can have as many of them or as few of them as you want. And you'll be able to do things like take, if you have your key lights or light, rim lights and fill lights, you can actually route those into separate buffers with separate direct and indirect lighting passes for glossy and diffuse and then reconstruct those in the compositor afterwards. So it really brings kind of the power of what's in V-Ray and RenderMan and Arnold over two cycles. That's a huge priority for us for this show. We're also looking to hire probably two to three more developers to work on Blender. We're looking forward to helping improve the physical simulations, so particle effects, cloth effects, anything that we can contribute back in that area we're gonna try to do. We've got some areas that we wanna clean up on the animation side, kind of based on Maya background and the background of the Maya animators. There's some things in the graph header that we wanna clean up a little bit and we wanna push the timeline forward a little bit because it's a little bit, it could use a few more features, so we'd like to add some stuff in there. And I know the node system is on hold, but we would actually like to contribute some development time to that because we think that's hugely important going forward. And as we stated earlier, basically everything that we do as long as we can get the stuff approved, we're gonna put it back into the open source. So in case you wanna read between the lines, if anyone's interested in coming to Canada for a little while, we'd be loved to entertain kind of anyone who had any developers who were interested and artists as well, too. So we still have quite a few that we're gonna be hiring for our show and we're really gonna be getting into that, the latter part of this fall, so. I'll show you a couple of design images from our next movie. We're right in the middle of doing our first three shots. These three shots are actually probably five months ahead of lighting. A little bit, yes. Yeah, so the idea here is that we're trying to cram these things through our whole pipeline just to see what breaks and to sort of push the look a picture and figure out how far we can go with the rendered look and the effects and the character animation and all those sort of things. So the artist grumble leads grumble, but they understand why this stuff has to get done. Unfortunately, it's not ready to show yet. It would have been next week. We have a couple of images though that will show that gives you a general sense of what the movie's gonna look like. So as we discussed before, it's a very large budget. All in, it's about 30 million U.S. So we're currently in pre-production. All of the art and design work is underway. We're doing pre-viz. We're utilizing Blender's sequencer for pre-viz. So we love being able to put the shots together and retime before they get to editorial. So editorial sends over a locked sequence length. And within that, the pre-viz people are able to push and shove the shots around to sort of change the overall length to suit the sequence. Then that goes back to editorial for conform. We're also using cycles for outputting our playblasts. So in addition to doing the camera work and the director photography work that you have to do for the camera and the cinematography, we're also doing our lighting because we want to be informed of what our lighting's gonna be even way before we get to lighting because sometimes that actually helps you with the composition of the shots as well. So we're getting render times of like, but all the samples crank way down about anywhere from 15 to 30 seconds a frame. So and it looks really cool because we've got our motion blur. We've got like shadows and contact shadows and people have actually, the animators have actually started using grease pencil to sketch you in effects. Yeah, it's pretty cool. One of the most common things I hear is, Blender does that too? So yeah, it's basically a movie about a girl and her robot. It's got robots, guns, lasers and fighting. So yeah. It's a kung fu fighting, yes, martial arts. Yeah, so it'll be about 120 to 130 people. And as we said, we'll have at least four full-time developers dedicated to proving the features of Blender plus the developers that we're sponsoring at the Institute. So you are welcome. Glad to. So a couple of images. These are design images. Turn the lights down a little bit. So the robot is basically, well, tentatively called 7723. The little girl is May and a stupid little dog here is Momo. He's a very ass. If anyone's staying at the park hotel, we didn't steal it from the restaurant over there. He's a smart talking dog. Very interesting character. It ends up being a two-hero sort of story. You think it's about her, but in the end it's about her and the robot. One of the interesting things that we're doing with the lighting in here is typically we light theatrically. So we'll do things like 3D vignettes with spot lights and try and guide and direct the eye to certain places. In this, the production designers actually taking a look back at movies from the mid to late 70s, particularly movies from Kronenberg. And we're letting characters sort of filter in and out of lights more naturally as opposed to doing it completely theatrically. So it's interesting. We've had to sort of change our mindset on how to get this stuff done in it, but it's nice. You go back and look at some of the classics and bring some of that stuff forward in the work that we're doing. It's really kind of the, we're trying to capture kind of the look of the future from the 70s perspective. Yeah, essentially. There's lots of browns and lots of rounded stuff. A little bit of wood grain here and there, just like the old Atari. There you go. Robots, lasers, explosions, screaming, dogs. A soccer field. Laser soccer field. A curved laser soccer field. Laser soccer field, so. So yeah, we're really excited to go forward this and we're really excited to actually be doing it at Blender. So thank you for your time. We also have a 10 minute kind of making of video of Ozzy and it's gonna, obviously it has a lot of our artists on there kind of talking about the use of Blender on the show and how it kind of put together. And we'll get that up on the site or get Francesco as a link in that. So we'll have, it'll be circulated at some point. Yeah, we talk a lot about Blender on there too and how he uses it. A little bit of our facilities and everything, so. Thank you.