 how I hoped. Okay. Okay. Thanks everyone for your patience. Well, my talk is called Parts of Blender, a change driven as you can see. And what I want to talk about is something which I think is very important for Blender and for the community, which is how to reinforce the chain which connects people who perhaps don't even know about Blender or CG, right the way through the talent chain, right to the end, where you would say at the opposite end are the super experts and shall we say the Blender gurus of the world. Let me just get a handle on where the hell my mouse is. There we go. So I'm going to talk about myself for a few seconds, just so that you know who I am and how I got here. Then there will be a short bit of a short film or possibly all of the short film. There will be a little bit of a discussion about how it ended up being called the 3D movie school club, because at the beginning it wasn't, it was called animation club. What's different about the model? What could happen next? What needs to happen in order for what could happen next to happen? And at any time just jump right in. So my name is Pete Dakin. I currently have a day job. I work in a media and publishing company in London where I look after all things digital for that business. And I manage a team of technical developers basically. Previously I was with an educational software business in London where I managed a team of developers and I first met up with Blender in 2009 when I was looking for a kind of a free video editing solution. So I wasn't really thinking about 3D animation or anything like that. I just was annoyed with the corporate IT where I worked because they had blocked me from installing Microsoft Movie Creator and I wanted to edit a movie. So that's how I discovered Blender by Googling. So the motivation for me started more recently in this year when in my current job I was trying to just figure out how to make a cool logo. So I knew about Blender obviously by now and had been tinkering around with it usually on my daily commute on the train. And I was trying to work out how to get this logo to work and it actually wasn't that hard. It was all coming together in my head. But at the same time in my life my daughter was 11 coming to the end of primary school and I'd also in trying to figure out that thing had also discovered that thing which was done by Richard van der Roest. And I thought that was so cool wouldn't it be great if I could do something at her school maybe by showing them how to do that and somehow getting that thing in there as well. I kind of imagined myself making the next Transformers movie with a bunch of child prodigies. That's how it sort of coalesced in my mind. And maybe we were going to add some lightsaber battles or some t-rexes or spaceships or something up in the sky. I don't know. There was no limit. But unfortunately my ambition was quickly terminated as it were by several major roadblocks. I had a bit of a dilemma on my hand because on the plus side of the ledger I had this amazing free software at my fingertips. I had this amazing free model which I was able to download from blendswap.com. I had signed up to CG Cookie where I understood Richard had posted some tutorials and they were affordable and as soon as I looked at them I thought there's no way I can assimilate all this new knowledge in the amount of time I've got available and with my debatable abilities of the particle logo effect. It seemed like a quantum leap. So on the minus side I realised the transformer was too complex for the kids to achieve in some kind of school club coaching context. It was too complex for me especially given that I didn't have enough time to assimilate the know-how and this here would have been what I rendered it on anyway which clearly isn't adequate. So I had these difficulties and I didn't want to not do it just because of there were some downsides. So I kind of took them as challenges and I thought well how am I going to solve them. So the complexity issue I thought well the first thing is you've got to simplify it. You've got to make it fun. Probably make it less about blender and more about making a movie because it's more to making a movie if it's a visual effects movie than just animation isn't there. There's getting out there and being active and holding a camera, filming and all that sort of stuff. Too complex for me was man I was going to have to ask somebody to help me. Fortunately blender community is a great community. You only have to go online and see how willing everybody is to help everybody. I figured I should reach out. I didn't have enough time so I was just going to have to figure that one out and drink more coffee or something and the hardware problem was insurmountable in terms of I couldn't just ask somebody for a render farm but I did. So what I ended up doing was contacting Richard van der Roest and getting his agreement to assist along with CG Cookie who sort of loaned someone called Paola who does a bit of writing for CG Cookie to me and basically just as somebody to talk to for moral support and to keep me and Richard kind of focused on things. And then we just made this movie. So would you like to see what it turned out like? Well this is first of all I'm going to bore you with the process. Okay so hopefully this is where the sounds kick in. Let me just try about there. Okay there's no sound. Pumping, uplifting music should be playing. So in the first week I went to the school. I didn't really have much of a plan. Bullet points basically sums it up. We shot the outside playground scene where the transformer would land. The kids were absolutely manic. I bought a green screen on Amazon for 25 quid and took it along just because it was a cool thing to take along to a school club. We never ended up using it in real terms but it was there. You can see how excited they were. Week two we did storyboarding but the storyboarding was pretty primitive. It was about saying to the kids did you know that we storyboard stuff? Get a piece of paper and a pencil and let's work through this script that we're going to invent. And so they spent lesson two not touching Blender, lesson one not touching Blender but being active and having fun and being inspired by the process and being excited by it. I also discovered that's my rendering, sorry that's my tracking effort at the end of week two there that I can't do tracking. It is really hard. I was really confident with my, I had this Sony camera phone thing and I held it as steady as I could and I told the kids where to walk in that top scene so that they didn't come in front of where the car would be and I thought I'd done it steadily enough and I'd watched a tutorial by someone called Oliver Villa I think his name is. All about tracking a basketball playground with a monkey's head maybe some of you have seen it and I thought I can just do this. And then I did it and it was awful and it took me two weeks of just night after night trying to re-track it and getting the solvera down and thinking I was doing well. Sent it off to Richard van der Roest to add the just to do his bit which is just add the transformer and he was like dude I can't use that it's horrible. So he did it with some Richard van der Roest magic and managed to make my terrible photography turn into a tracked object which seems to be stuck to the ground. I went back and hit the books that night and found another tutorial called track match blend by Sebastian Konig and sponsored by a blender I guess. Fantastic I recommend it to anybody. Went and did some simple kind of tracking stuff with dots on a piece of paper and we managed to do some tracking so just goes to show if you hit the right books you can get a good result. Then Richard delivered the transformer back to us and in week four the kids got to play around with a bit of tracking but the main thing we did was we just looked at what the result had been and I'm teasing it because I can show you the whole movie now but I don't want to. We just spent ages just looking at the footage over and over again like in the second one you can see that you know the through the glass of the car at the real world behind the glass and there's a little bit of refraction going on. The kids are actually really absorbed by how this was even possible because they knew that they'd just been in the playground and there was nothing there and then suddenly this thing was in the playground with them and Jake the kid in white there his reflection is in the paint. Oh that's just not possible but there it is so the kids were absolutely amazed and so was I and that one of the you can see the shadow of the transformer as it lands is on the roof of the school so all those little details Richard added in basically he did all the hard work for me and he gave me back 20 seconds or so of rendered footage for me to add into the whole movie so then we progressed on and we did the rest the kids were shown how to learn what I'd learned which was how to make particle text go which is actually pretty easy it's about 20 steps so that was pitched perfectly at the level of the kids and we spent six week filling in some gaps by this point we realized that we couldn't make the whole thing according to the original idea that we had which was to make a kind of a dream scene so we ended up making a documentary about kids who were learning Blender when one of them goes off and do a daydream and dreams of Transformer Lance so it kind of worked in the end we just figured out how to make it into five minutes of movie the last day we just spent finishing off and we put all the kids work into the final credits now I did plug my sound in and I did turn my volume up so would you like to see the movie now right okay so I'm glad you said that because I'm gonna show it to you anyway I'll get the player over onto here do this so far so good I'm hoping there'll be some sounds it's no sound that's disappointing be with me I'll just what I'll do is I'll just turn my laptop speaker up loud it's probably the worst way of all to it's just not outputting any sound is it well that's the demo effect as they call it isn't it so I've got actually my plugged in and the audio plugged in and my sound up I would have thought it would just output out of my own PC speakers mixer got everything turned up I'm gonna go to plan B because I do have backup this is actually comes out in a later part of my presentation it always pays to have a plan B because it's almost certain nothing will go according to plan okay well okay I do the sound effects she says if you said to me we could make a 3d movie I wouldn't have believed you because it's really hard and yet we did it she says it takes a big team to make a 3d movie words to that effect then there's a voiceover of a kid saying that we did some match-moving stuff and they had to play with all this that's Richard's transformer there and you know it's shaky and it's rough and it's not perfect but because kids have done this and there is a soundtrack to this sound really nice very disappointing that it's not working at all and you can see that they're all kind of just working around at their own level there's no pressure on them here to sort of achieve a level there's no time pressure they don't have to complete by a deadline this takes place over seven or eight weeks an hour and a bit each session it's coached by me or you know proxy of me is basically good with an expert in the background providing the necessary to give them something exciting to look back on so for me this whole process here is about the inspiration of we did something with 3d software these kids are 11 now they're at secondary school that just started they can't really focus on their careers they're not really thinking here I hope I don't forget all that stuff I learned in blender but they do know that they did something in blender using it it was really cool it took a big team some of them they never met building up now so the girls gone off into a daydream Hannah that's the cut away there she goes he says imagine if one landed right here he pretends to be a transformer you can see where this is going it's all building up so inside a daydream now it should probably be going like this so they're outside just this was shot on the last day because I didn't have enough bits of stuff to stick into the story to make it all glue together in time of the free soundtrack that had done so now you can hear the daydreaming girl going transform and here comes he's going boom so this is the bit Richard did which I think you agree looks amazing that's my gorilla pod so then they wake her up out of a daydream and I've fast forwarded it now because basically the end you see the credits roll and this is where the work that children actually did plays out and you get to see the get to see something probably you get to see the particle effect text they each of them made their own name so they're focusing on themselves which children love to do and this problem at home as well so the kids all made their names basically that kept them interested for the amount of time I needed them to be interested and got them exposed it to the blender kind of machine without giving them too much to actually have to achieve just kill that so there you go we made the movie just me a dad some crazy kids and a professional and all the time that that was going on I was kind of whirling away thinking this could be a thing this could work for it could scale on one level it could have been just the end when it got to the end of the process that could have been the end of the story and it still could be but you know the reason I'll come here today is to present the process and to do a bit of networking one more minute because the other guy over and quite a bit so I I learned quite a bit about the process and it adorned on me really that there is a continuum of know-how and skill starting with the newbies and ending with the gurus I'm about there probably I reckon probably a self-taught person you know I haven't done higher education animation studies or anything but I've taught myself a bit mainly by watching Andrew Price tutorials and stuff like that and becoming discouraged at my lack of ability but it you know along that continuum you've got kind of three groups you've got your beginners you've got your mid-levels and you've got your experts pretty much normal continuum of learning and this could form the basis of a club model in fact there are other stakeholders here though there are these guys on the top line who have something to be interested in to do the school class parents from educational engaging safe and affordable things for their kids to do after school until they get picked up at five o'clock the other guys want similar things but they also would like them to be aligned with some sort of educational kind of standards then you've got these guys and these are the things that they want you know kids want to have fun and maybe learn something and brag about it coaches probably want to upskill themselves as well as the kids and probably want to get paid unless they're volunteers my discussion today is about not the volunteering types but the types who would like to be paid so the money comes from schools and parents parents pay their kids to go into after school clubs in the UK probably know the country as well and money arrives actually with the coach this could be any school club model doesn't have to be about animation it could be Minecraft or robotics sewing anything but as soon as you add blender into the mix and you have experts like Richard van der Roest who say yeah I'm prepared to lend three days of my time but I'm a pro you got to pay so that's fine should be paid deserves to be paid it's something awesome and then you have in your itself they may not be interested in school clubs but they've got an agenda they want to be funded they want to be well regarded and be in the front of mind when it comes to small teams and individuals according to the vision statement so then if you were going to make a club using all of those things you could not rely on it all just organically happening because it just can't happen and it can't be just one person or just two people who just try to do it because it can't scale but what you need is something that takes the responsibility for coordinating the clubs and essentially an umbrella which hires the talent the school won't hire someone because they have taxation responsibilities and all that nonsense so you need someone to act as an umbrella and that's where I felt something like 3d movie schools as a club concept would work so we fit into the kind of universe of all these things and so some questions was this about education or an activity what do you guys reckon but there's no curriculum I reckon it's just about having fun and doing something inspiring was it about blender or making movies personally I think it was about making movies using blender when you had to should it be more technical could it have been more structured was it self-paced I would say no this is one of the major differences things like the CG cookie type of tutorial model it's all self-paced learning with where at the end of it you get to know how to do something but you don't get like a rubber stamp that says you have qualification or something like that probably you could stick it on your CV and say yes yes it is possible and to me it's really exciting that you can take something and demystify something as complicated as blender and the whole pipeline of everything and just demystify to the point we can just go blend is cool and you know there's no pressure to achieve they knew what blender was by the end of it it did enhance a bit of collaboration between community members and you know they all know now when they watch a movie they don't know about Maya they don't know about Z brush they don't know about any of that stuff when they see the Avengers they say that was done in blender bag or something like that you know that's that's where the mind is this is the same model Apple users probably there's a bullet point up there about that but you know oh yes they're going down so you know Apple likes to get its iPads yes and this is why I think this model if it was actively supported by the community and blended kind of got on board and said you know this brand this group this collective is what we endorse in schools then you have that kind of foundation level support that's driving and schools you can go in there and you can say we're supported by this software foundation you know it's free there's no entry barriers schools love that kind of stuff everybody wins your parents win the kids being engaged inspired you know they're getting value they're not sparing babysat kids get something the teachers love it schools well you should have seen the head teacher's eyes just litter the blender community wins because the coaches and the experts are also getting some kind of additional funding because everybody likes to be paid at the end of the day I kept adding to the list actually about an hour ago so I apologize I just was ranting so there is another video but I'm not gonna show it because it won't work but you know essentially I believe that the model of 3D movie school clubs whether it's that brand is conceptually quite sound and anybody who wants to talk to me about you know how we could work together I'll be happy to shake a hand or three or more hopefully by the end of Sunday that mission impossible that ties into the movie I'm not gonna show you sorry that scene and mission impossible when Tom Cruise is hanging out the airplane just look pretty cool probably works without sound you did this in one hour in my kids on cruise needed a whole airport an actual airplane that was what if you had to see that again on YouTube or something there's a little piece of my banister in the scene because we couldn't cover it up yeah so there you go that explains that and that is the end of my presentation thank you anybody like to ask anything