 Good morning, so I'm just gonna start by playing the movie in case for those who didn't see it last night There should be sound right now And there was sound but now there is Now there is Could you just dim the lights a little bit? Apologies for the sound on that it's so the sound that's not how the sound supposed to be but you get the idea Maybe but yeah, so Firstly I'm just gonna talk about how I came up with this story. We're gonna have to rush through this I guess but That was the initial idea As a cartoon I drew like when I was 16 or something turns out this cartoon has been reproduced by many other cartoons over years It's not exactly an original idea But that was the basic idea that I have two characters that have very Different perspectives on the same thing and both of them think they're right both of them are right But they're also wrong in arguing. So that was the idea of the initial idea and from there Basically, I worked it up. I was I went into a lot of discussions with various people including healthy and so on until we arrived at the idea of a gallery an Art gallery where people were arguing about art themselves so I set to work on a storyboard and This came down is that started doing initial Basic concepts. This is before we'd even decided on what the characters look like Who they were whether they were male or female? So it's actually probably better to show you the frames So you can see it's very rough but I Figured by drawing really simple drawings I could figure out if I can communicate the story in a simple way and if I can do that then Anything else is just going to add to it. So Yeah, basically That's how rough it was at the start From there, we went into a lot of story discussions to change it to embellish it and try to make it A little bit better, but actually we ended up adding too many characters and it got really complicated Far too complicated as you can see even in this initial stage. We've got all these extra characters happening and When I ended up pitching this idea to everyone at the studio at the blender Institute It fell flat. There were some funny moments, but as you can see I've got crowds. I've got Smoke simulation the guy sets people on fire You know, there's some things which could have been funny, but we didn't have an unlimited budget. So And we wanted to do something really quick that the idea was to do something within, you know a Month or so to six weeks. So I went back to the drawing board and stripped out a lot of the ideas and just Got into blender and and came up with a simpler animatic. So this is an early version of that this is just using the grease pencil tool in the video sequence editor and Just getting the ideas down quickly. I Did actually write a script too, but I found that wasn't very effective because basically this is a visual cartoon. So It's better to do this the story ideas Visually I found when I wrote the script and when I read the script out to people no one laughed Everyone just looked at their shoes and was rather depressing. So that's a bit of advice If you're going to come up with a cartoon get drawing as soon as possible and get your ideas down visually So anyway, you get the idea. I still haven't got the the concept for the characters I've just made one of them pink one of them blue round and square just to get the You know so you can clearly see who's who but I there's no idea for characters at this point But you can also see that actually the story is quite well formed by this stage Like this is more or less what happens in the final movie There were a few revisions to get to this point, but yeah once I've we hadn't even designed the characters before you know getting the story together so then It was over to Sarah who started designing some characters So for the concept Well before everything like when Bjorn started Talking about the story and it has sorry session. Well the first time You weren't you weren't talked about that story for me at least the first time I heard it we were in the tie the famous tie and Was a really strong concept. So it's two characters talking about art and looking at paintings and so And one is positive and wasn't one is negative. I'm sorry. I made nice Oh no, and they're pixelated I Anyway I'm talking about the concept. So anyway So the thing is who are those characters who is positive and who is negative and how do we see it and one of the the the key things for telling that story visually was do we care More about the paintings themselves or do we Care more about the characters themselves so that was also why the story is told through the frames and not and not Otherwise because it's about what they think of art and not about the art themselves So we could really focus only on characters So I'm gonna show some preliminary sketches Do I put this full screen? Yeah, so these are really the first sketches Because when we did the story sessions and as Bjorn told there was many characters at the very beginning and Well the good thing about that it was that We came up also with the flexi rig idea that was we needed to make Many characters, so it had to be simple. We need to make one rig where we could do many characters at the same time Stuff like that. So the very first sketch. I was just trying to come up with the simplest character ever and searching how how do I make a Variations quickly just by changing the shape more round or more slim or more muscular or Feminine like it's a real problem that is still ongoing now that we're having a flexi rig On the go. It's a real problem. How do you make a character? Flexible enough to be any character so really complicated Um, so I tried different styles like more Realist proportion more cartoony And then I also we also tried a Search what we're going to be mean and max Because we didn't know was it going to be a girl and a boy was it going to be yes? Yeah, you don't say in the movie, but that's the two main characters mean and max Yeah, of course it's obvious that it's not and Yeah, it's like minimum and maximum positive and negative it ended up being mean and max because it was easy Even though means the positive and max is the negative it's switched Anyway, because when we were doing the story session we say why why if it's two boys so we don't have stereotypes like the girl is Positive and the guy negative and what is it if it's a couple a gay couple or whatever like we had we went through a lot Why if mean it is a negative one and she's with this really dark woman and and Max is just a really positive guy, etc And this was the selfie stick girl that we we did when we had a version with many characters We had just this annoying girl in the music on the Abu take selfies everywhere and Basically, I show it because she was funny and it ended up being inspiration for For how mean and max ended up and also you can have a Steve a really first version of Steve the dog guy That was inspired from that early sketch. So really rough sketch, but that gave the the initial So this is just a first research where you have the selfie stick girl that never ended up in the movie But was still a funny funny start That was the first version just early research where we didn't have a girl and Then doing more concepts Trying the frames Thinking a bit of how do we represent the emotions? I did this that is a bit like a comic book Because since we are going through frames It was interesting like to take that framing a bit like as a comic book and put really high contrast Emotions on the background which was afterwards really interpreted and and and worked by by Andy that did all the motion graphics, but that was just a rough idea like How how can we? Express those emotions with just the background and This was Yeah, one of the last research I was trying to do two aesthetics two different aesthetics like when they're just looking at the painting and where they're just have Their own texture and now when Motion graphics starts when they start Talking about what they're seeing and what they're feeling then the background feels itself with motion graphics and they become black and white We tried that at first in the movie but it did it wasn't really working when they were going black and white it was really working well when When the background was black was black and white more or less was didn't have too many colors But it wasn't working always so that got rejected afterwards That was one of the first tests in 3d with characters that were just made of Different pieces of polygons. It wasn't even one It was a lot of shapes So what we were really trying to see how can we do many characters because it was still the idea to Be able from one rig to do all the characters and We were really trying with simple shapes to do the characters So that was one test and well ended up being Like that ended up doing actual modeling In which you have more control and Yeah, that's just how it ended I think and Steve, we got to show Steve and Steve That guy Everyone loves Steve So yeah, it was a process It was all a process And yeah, I think that for the concept part I'm done Yeah, that was a real Real help to the story when Sarah did and she came up as soon as I described the idea of the story to Sarah She came up with that idea of let's do it from the picture frames. That's great I mean, we don't judge the art. We only see it through the characters eyes and that's really cool. So for the production We wanted to do something it was Not like the previous open movies in a few different ways One is I wanted it something that anyone can download and render on their own laptop With lightweight assets nice and small and compact and also I didn't want to have to deal with huge render times So we did started discussing the idea of since we were doing it in a stylized way in a very graphical way Of just doing it all in the open GL viewport rather than using cycles or blender internal or any other renderer We just do it all in the viewport so Andy said to work doing some Initial tests, this is all just in the viewport and to me this stuff is like black magic. I Don't know exactly how we did all this stuff But I all the stuff's on the cloud so you can have a look at this but yeah such a good strong look that we decided to go with that and and and it's it Actually freed us up in a lot of ways Meanwhile, we had the initial rigs and healthy got started with some animation tests. We wanted to have this Graphical like motion blue, so not like a standard motion blur We wanted to try different ways to make it look more cartoony and this is this more of like the style that we ended up settling with this Sort of more like the the traditional Warner Brothers, I guess, you know dry brush technique or Disney or so and that's just once again using the grease pencil we just do a paint over and Tom was kind of horrified It came in. He said well, that's not 3d It's supposed to be 3d, but actually it is 3d the grease pencil smears that we've done in the end Sitting in the 3d space. So if in the future we do a stereoscopic version Then it's all gonna work. So What else oh, yeah, let's quickly play this hopefully the sound is gonna be okay. We got the voice actors in Yeah, so these are two local actors Actually, he's Canadian. She's American, but they live locally and they're effectively Dutch now and Yeah, they're from the improvisational Comedian circuit in here, you know once from boom Chicago and the others from easy laughs and they I thought Improvisation actors would be the best since we're inventing a language the language by the way Some people asked the language has no meaning Or it does it. No, it doesn't Or maybe it does So anyway, we got these guys in and we did actually two sessions with them because it took a the first session was Kind of okay, but we needed something better than kind of okay So got them back for a second session and did well. This is just a clip from their improvisation from their rehearsal and and Yeah, well, we've seen it already so So yeah, after that we went in did a second session and it was far more successful I had to write a script for them actually You wouldn't think so but I wrote a script basically saying what the characters would be saying and they worked off that and In the end. Yeah, it worked out pretty well So yeah, what else the rig I Actually switched over to blender for this so This is one of the main Issues of the production. You would have thought using doing a NPR rendered like stylized short We're going for a cartoony look that the biggest problem would be rendering and actually no it wasn't The biggest issue we we encountered was rigging Firstly, we didn't have a rigor available We approached a few people and they weren't they were either not available or anyway in the end we did the rigging ourselves with healthy and I and or mainly healthy and I and This is I just wanted to show you this. This is like the early test for getting the eyes Nice cartoony eyes now the standard way of doing this is normally just to have a Hemisphere that you rotate but you end up getting weird sort of intersections where the hemispheres Join and it looks very strange So look some people do this and they like it But we really wanted to have horizontal lines They go up and down the eyes to get the really nice cartoony look that you see in 2d cartoons So healthy set to work on a few of these ingenious methods Well that one doesn't work at all, but oh only down. Okay. Here we go. Okay, so there we go That was an initial idea Using shape keys, is that right? Yeah. No, it's don't feel embarrassed you what we're going somewhere with this. Okay This one is Yeah So reject and so we move on and this one's getting closer, but you can still see it's got ripples and This one is I think closer to what we ended up doing But we found that when we applied it to the flexi rig and if you're confused about what we mean by flexi I'm getting I'll get to that next It wasn't it wasn't something that was easily scalable and applyable to applicable to Multiple characters because the idea was rather than making a bunch of iris We just make one and apply it to a bunch of characters. So the one we ended up using Was based on how these Concept sorry the shader isn't working right now, but basically It's got it's got a nice clear eye line so We can see it You know see the where the eyelid is on the character and it's very flexible and you can even and You know do all the squash and stretch and all the cartoony stuff that you need Then we also had the issue of the mouth this is once again healthy getting to work and Coming up with a solution that works quite well. So this is an early test by the way the deformations aren't brilliant here But we actually got away with a lot with the fact that we were using shadeless shaders So there wasn't much you couldn't see too many of the ripples in the mesh, but Yeah, this is an entirely bone-based solution there are no shape keys, so it's actually quite ingenious Yeah, so It looks super complicated, but actually it's based on some simple principles and it applies to the topology quite nicely and Yeah, that got us across the line when we basically needed to have some nice clear round shapes on the mouth and And we got it we got it this way So then we moved on to the flexi rig because it was the other idea of the production is not only Do we want people to be able to download and render this movie on their laptop? We wanted to come up with a flexi rig so that people could make their own movies in this style So in the previous open movies, so for example, if you download the Sintel files and so on You can only do an animation with Sintel So we were hoping to make something that you can then use to make your own movies that aren't you know with your own characters So this is actually work in progress. We're going to be releasing it on the cloud next week But it just gives you the idea of how we can do various transformations on this character and Then there's a script that you bake and I won't do it in front of you now because it trust me it'll be next week, but basically you can just totally customize this character to whatever shape you want and Wind up with your own character. So we use that to generate the extras that you see in the background on the movie and Yeah Also, well the idea is that for the flexi It's to make the flexi the flexi rig also come with different haircuts and hopefully the clothes and stuff so really just by combining different proposition of shape and haircuts you really cannot come up with a Bunch of characters All right, so we're rapidly running out of time. We've got two minutes left. I just wanted to yeah, I know The other thing is so really quickly. Let's just describe the animation because you know So just have a look at that dope sheet there Basically, it's animated on Well, actually, I'll show you that the graph editor so you'll get the idea There's stepped keys. So Well, he's put a few splines in there, but in general we're using it all in step mode. So you're making it pose by pose and It's more like the 2d traditional 2d animation style So you end up with a whole bunch more keyframes But you get that snappy animation style that that seems so appealing people people like it and that's pretty much Define the character of this movie really and I'll just show you this one as well. All these files are up on the cloud if you want to subscribe to the blender cloud And Only a note Yeah, so we were animating on twos Well for me, it was the first. I don't know. Did you animate on? Yeah, I think for all of us It was it was the first time and we're like, oh, that's cool on twos less keyframes. No It was so long it was a really long process Animating onto this not easier than animating on once just How long per shot or how long? Like I don't know like the Depends on the animator and depends on the shot depends on shots have multiple characters some shots Only have a couple of emotions to go through but yeah, just want to do but Really long. I mean for like the big shots that were like 30 seconds long. It was Like three four weeks. It was really long Yeah, the shot to do to do and to get it right so, uh I guess we're coming to the end. I I encourage you guys to I mean, it's not Isn't a sales pitch But I encourage you guys to sign up to the cloud because there's all these it's very interesting to go through these files and and and just see How we did these things I basically relied on on some very good artists to help me make the movie and That some of this work here is just spectacular. So Yeah, I guess that's the end of the talk. It's 10 30 now and That's it. That's glass half If anybody has questions we are we are here