 Welcome to the special CUBE Conversation. I'm John Furrier with theCUBE. We are here at Sundance Film Festival Sundance 2018. Special coverage, all the top stories. We're obviously in the Intel Tech Lounge all week's up in our home base. We've been out in the streets getting the best stories but one of the most biggest compelling tech stories is the VR revolution is here and the impact to artists, the new creative. My next guest here is Michael Smith who's the Chief Commercial Officer of Ziva. Welcome to this CUBE Conversation. Thanks John. Thanks, pleasure to be here. You guys have been a very impressive company. You're here at the Intel Tech Lounge. You're displaying Ziva, I saw a demo over there. You guys are bringing, I mean, really studio grade quality of animation and integrated into storytelling and this is not new for you but one of the themes is democratization. So you guys are a key tell sign in my opinion of where the developer, creative developer market's going. Talk about what you guys are doing and some of the big things you've done. I know you have some big films. Share a little bit about Ziva then we can have a conversation. Sure, sure. Yeah, we like to say, I mean, truly we believe in characters and at the heart of our technology is character simulation technology. So here at Sundance, you know, in Intel, we've been working with Intel for a while. They gave us the opportunity to be here. You know, when you think about stories, stories kind of are driven by characters and great characters make great stories. So in our world, great characters are characters that are simulated through physics and anatomical simulation to achieve levels of plausibility and reality that previously was maybe only accessible to the very top, you know, budgeted productions or the very top VFX studios of the world. And what have you worked on? Just share some of the films have you worked on and some of the tech? Yeah, I'll give you a background of where the, I guess the previous kind of legacy of the technology comes from. But in addition, my partners who are here with me have a storied record. They actually co-authored the software, you know, 10 years ago or so, that the drove characters in titles like Avatar and Apes and Hobbit, James and Simon, if I think they're on a floating around back there, they've also got a SciTech at home for the engineering work. And the vision here is that, you know, they did that work and they were really motivated and enthused to do amazing work, amazing results, provide amazing results. They want to enable that same and provide that same kind of functionality to small studios, big studios, game studios, independence, anyone who wants to tell a great story. And there's a huge tsunami, we've been talking at theCUBE with the folks watching, know that I've been on this narrative around a renaissance and software development. Now we're seeing a renaissance in creative development and we call that the new creative because an organic trend is brewing pretty fast. And it used to be not just indie filmmakers, we're talking about kids, adults, creatives who are doing filmmaking things in virtual reality and some of the successes that we're seeing, like Baobab Studios is one, they're having the hits around the characters. So there's a thirst and a demand for technology, for characters, but it's hard to build. This is an opportunity for you guys. What's your view on that trend? Are you guys going to be a supplier? Can I just use your technology to get characters? And where does this fit into the evolution of, say, VR? Sure, and touch on that concept of the new creative because those who want to build and create amazing characters to tell rich stories, tell immersive experiences, they don't want to be like anything else in our life these days, like anything else that Intel is powering in our life these days, automation of the simpler tasks should be a given. You don't want creatives to get hung up on, trying to make your cheek look exactly the way it needs to look over 500 frames when you want them to be bringing the story to life. So our software basically automates a lot of the nuance of organic characters and properties and the things that make us realistic. And I think Empowers enables those creatives to tell the stories. And how can they tap into Ziva? Because I believe that you guys are on the cusp of something really big, a big trend that no one's really talking about. And we come at it from a tech angle so we can see historically what happened with open source software. I mean, 10% of the intellectual property and most big breakthroughs is the unique IP, 90% of it's reused software. So you can almost see these dots connecting in this new creative world. You guys seem to be at the forefront of that. Is that part of how people can engage with you? Is that a role you guys see yourselves playing? And how does someone get a hold of your technology? Do they buy it? Do you license it? How does it work? Great question. I mean, yeah, we focus on software to make characters and that's what our customers license from us. We license to studios, we license to indies, we license to academics. We license to people who want to try it out for free. So if there's a plug opportunity, the URL for the website is eva-dynamics.com. You'll learn a lot more about the company, about some of the work. How expensive is it? I mean, can you talk about the number? Is it expensive? Is it affordable? How does someone who's experimenting might have their art and their storytelling vision coming to life and might not have a big budget? Yeah, so the indie licenses basically work out to about 50 bucks a month per user to leverage software. Which when you think about previous, maybe less robust implementations of this kind of thinking, we're limited and we're at the tail end of multi-million dollar investments by huge studios. So we think that's a pretty good value equation. Where are you guys located? Talk about your company and the culture and what drives you guys. Yeah, we're located in Vancouver. You know, we're in one of the epicenters of a lot of creative work and a lot of filmmaking. In fact, I mean, within a short radius of our studio, the number of game and visual effects studios, it's amazing. So, you know, but our team's international. In fact, one of our team members is kind of mostly based in Wellington. Another one's actually working in Norway these days. We've got somebody in Los Angeles. So we're kind of all over the place and our customer footprint. We've got users in every continent, but Antarctica. I wish you could have come on the panel, but we were kind of sold out and we've got a small footprint here, the Intel Tech Lounge in Sundance. And the real theme is the new creative. So I got to ask you, in your view, what does the new creative mean to you? The new creative is somebody who is curious and they're not scared. They're not concerned with necessarily what it is that they're going to be making or the media format they're going to be making. They're curious about what story they're going to be telling and they're going to pursue anything and they're not going to be shackled by artificial constraints. They're not going to be shackled by budgets that make them take creative ideas off the table. They're going to pursue what they can do themselves. They're going to leverage technology in unique ways and we're going to see some pretty amazing stuff happen. Yeah, and as always, give them more time to work on their art, not worry about the scaffolding and the software. That's exactly it. What's your take on Sundance this year? Obviously the theme, obviously VR here in the studio, but AI has been an Intel theme as well. We see AI as a critical part of automation, the role of automation in software to assist and augment and give more opportunities for developers. Yeah, I think it, again, it's people that've developed expertise and we shouldn't look at AI and automation as something to be concerned about. We need to look at it as a tool and it's to say, well, how do I do the last mile? How do I do the last 10% of what I do really good and have all the other stuff kind of taken care of for me? Michael, what's the hallway conversation? That's as you know, hallway here in Sundance more of this sidewalk. When you're out at dinner when you're done here at Intel, when you're out in the streets with your peers and colleagues and new people, what's the conversation like this year at Sundance 2018? Conversation at Sundance. I mean, it's a conversation that to me just goes beyond where Sundance has been before and that I think we heard it in some of the panels but some of the emerging technology used to be like the additive thing, like let's go see what's next. Now it's just a part of the big story. And certainly the filmmaking has legacy, has more experience, has a lot of amazing stuff. There's so many amazing filmmakers and amazing content coming out of this place this year. But it's just the variety, the diversity of everything that's happening is just blowing me away. Michael Smith with ZivaDynamics.com. Check out the website. I think this is a trend that you guys are on. I think the sooner we get to ease of use of the creative developer, whether it's a filmmaker, VR, and or content and digital, they need characters. I want my avatars. That's right. Thanks for spending the time, appreciate it. Thanks John. I'm John Furrier here for the Cube Conversations Sundance Film Festival 2018. We are covering it on the streets and also here, Ground Zero for us is the Intel Tech Lounge. It's been buzzing all week with immersive media, not just VR, really showing creative developers a new way to reimagine storytelling. Thanks for watching.