 Welcome, welcome, welcome, good evening everyone for our official welcome to our December story-telling showcase here at McKinnon's Institute. My name is Alyssa Stone, I'm the Senior Director of Programs and Community Engagement here at McKinnon's Institute, and I'm so excited to welcome all of you fabulous faces for this pollinating show. Who here has been to McKinnon's Institute before? Awesome. Who is here for the very first time? Oh, you've been to many visits to our historic building here at McKinnon's Institute. For those who are less familiar with us, McKinnon's Institute was founded in 1854, so we are a very old nonprofit here in San Francisco. We are a cultural center, historical landmarks, gorgeous multi-stories, general interest accessible library. If you haven't checked out the library on the 10th and 3rd floors, please do so. It's beautiful. A world-renowned chess program here in the oldest chess club in the United States, and an event center like we're doing this evening. We have anywhere from 5 to 15 events per week here at McKinnon's Institute. Everything from story-telling showcases, author talks, books, rooms, writing classes, chess classes and tournaments, and all manner of things that you might be interested in. Please come and check out what we have to offer here by visiting mhinelibrary.org. We also offer a free Wednesday tour, every Wednesday at noon, and we have an evening tour coming up on Friday, January 25th at 5 p.m., so if it's been a while or you haven't had a chance to explore our incredible building, please come back for one of our tours. It's a wonderful way of learning about our history and our services and seeing all the different interest-based notes and crannies here at McKinnon's Institute. I'd also love to invite you back for some of our upcoming programs in January. This is somewhat our finale of our month of our year of 2023 and what a way to end it, but I'd love for you to turn your mind towards January events. Our Cinella series in January, Cinella Lit, is all about chess in the movie. So every Friday in January, come and watch a movie here or join us for an online discussion where we'll be showing our first film on January 5th, Cinella Lit. So it's a really exciting theme in January. We also have a brand-new program starting on January 9th, our digital connections program. So if you are someone who would like to explore more digital tech-savvy skills, our digital connections program is like for you. And we have our first author talk of the year on January 11th, where we have our second annual New Year Wellness and Renewal program. So we have a lot of fabulous things coming up at McKinnon's Institute. I hope you'll be back. And I'd love to introduce our incredible host for the evening, Corey Rosen, who is a producer and story-selling teacher based in San Francisco. He hosts the Moth Story Slams and Grand Slams and has a feature on the Moth Radio Hour, Alan's Radios, the Sarah & Vinnie Show, and K-pop The Fitch Files podcast. Corey is a performer at Fats Improv, one of the world's foremost centers for improvisational theater, and is the author of The Door Story, Well Told. Creative strategies to develop and perform stories that one-hour audience. He always files us here at McKinnon's Institute. I hope if you're not yet a super fan of Corey Rosen after tonight and hopefully should be, please give a warm welcome to Corey Rosen. I'm proud to be doing this news since many months now. Make that happen? Okay, so I think we should do this in September. So here's the concept. Oh, in May? Who's in May? Our first one was in May. Well, we haven't been doing it all summer. We took a little break though. We took a break. So we did one in May. And then I had to ask if I would come back and do basically once a month. So this is a monthly series of storytelling. And so what we do is every month I invite different cohorts of people and it's kind of become, for me personally, a glimpse into all of the aspects of what I like to call my lives, not just my life, but like different parts of my life. In the first month of the show, we had a lot of people that were involved in the mock, which I have a host of. In October, we did nothing because COVID was my life that month. So we did nothing. In November, I have some friends who run a show in New Portland called Backpack PDX, which is basically a random storytelling show involving us spinning wheels. Anybody here for that show? Yeah. Where the storytellers didn't know what story they were going to be telling. So it was storytellers basically being spontaneous in the moment and telling stories. So we had that whistic. Of course, when I was telling a story in that one, we had Casey Clemm who was DJing in that one. We did not like that there was a DJ for that one. It was very loud. So we are having no DJs in that one. Now it's December and because of October, we're bringing back the October storytellers. So let's hear from the storytellers tonight. We've been waiting for two months to tell them stories. So the people that are going to be telling stories tonight represent for me a range of people from my, as I mentioned, my lives. Me personally, I've worked in my career in various places, both in the theater, storytelling, and film production. So what I have done tonight is I've invited people from many of those aspects of my lives, both my theater life, performance world, and my film world, specifically in animation and visual effects, with the props tonight of behind the scenes. So all of the stories in some way will be connected to a behind the scenes scene. And they may or may not, because I remember this was originally the October, they may or may not be behind the scenes horror stories. They may not be, but they may be. Or they may not be. That's what they or may not part of that is that they may not. Or they may. So you understand the rules of that. So don't be disappointed or offended. Calibrate your appointment meter based on that. So that's what's going to happen. We're each going to be somewhere in the range of five to ten minutes in the storytelling, and the whole show will be over an hour, right? It's not bad for a Wednesday night, right? But here's what I want to do. I'm kind of calling it audible. Sometimes I like to do this. People seem like nice people. And some of you have commented people that you know, some of you have not come with people that you know. Sometimes I like to start the show by having the audience tell stories to each other. Are you paying for that? If you're not, you don't have to. But here's what we're going to do. For exactly one minute, each of you in the audience, I'm going to invite you to turn to somebody near you and I encourage you to not talk to someone that you know. It could be somebody that you know or somebody that you don't know. But I'm going to say if you came with someone and you want to tiptoe out of your comfort zone, turn to the other way and encourage them to do that. You don't have to. You can talk to your friend or you can talk to your cell phone. You can even calibrate your experience however you want. But here's what I'm going to ask you to do. And it's going to be a very interesting exercise I think for some of you is that the challenge is to tell a version of your life story in one minute. And when I say a version of your life story, the thing that I have in mind is that it's impossible to tell your whole life story in a minute. So think about a version of your life story. Maybe your love life story. Maybe your geographic life story. Maybe your academic career. Maybe it's your pet life story. The pets that you, something that's just like narrow the scope to a topic until that life story in one minute to somebody near you. So first of all, just identify who that person's going to be. So figure out if there's somebody that you know, it's still a good challenge for somebody that you know. And when I say start, you're going to tell a real life story in one minute. Does anybody need a partner? Raise your hand if you need a partner. Ready? I'm going to start the timer. I'm glad we came up with it. Anybody need a partner? Raise your hand if you want a partner. We have one person for you to be my partner. Come on over here. Okay, ready to begin? And begin now. That first one is going to take about a second. Okay, ready to start? The other person has a minute. Tell a version of your life story in one minute. And begin now. Are you ready to start? There's everybody. So I'm going to tell a personal behind-the-scenes story of my environment. I'm going to start to get to our first storyteller now. I'm going to invite to the stage one of my dearest friends of New Yorkers who I'm just thrilled to know and to welcome to the stage. She professionally works at Pixar Animation Studios and her name is Lila Cheswell. Please welcome her. Is this the first birthday party? It's my birthday's in four days and I've lost a quarry of birthday parties to them and it was the best day of the year at Island. So when I started there back in 1996, I was pretty much just having an college right there and all I wanted to do was write from that was it. That was my goal. I was like, I want to write from there. So my mom said to me, you need to make some money. And I had a little apartment in San Francisco. It was like $300 a month rent to share a little apartment underneath someone's house out of the avenue. So it was really awesome. So I took a job at this place, Island. I'd never heard of it. I didn't know what it did. I didn't know what anyone did there. But one of my friends from Infraud, she said, oh, I work there. You don't want to work there. I said to my mom, I know you have a connection there. Thank you very much. But my friend said I didn't want to work there. And my mom said, what have you got better to do? I took the job. So I took the job as a administrative assistant to the technical assistance. I had no idea what they did, but I said, okay, what's my job? So this woman, Wendy Hendrickson, remember, she says to me, okay, this is what our job is. You're taking over for me. All you have to do is walk around and just post things on the walls and talk to people. And there's a mat underneath the desk. You can sleep there. Crazy. So I said, I'm not doing this. So I walked around and I said, okay, well, the technical assistance are very easy to see. So I started talking to them and my two graduates and computer science, their Stanford PhDs, all these people, I want you to know, you're amazing. He was my teacher-husband. He's amazing. I was in awe. So I said, I want to do what they're doing. So they started training me. She needs to go and sell it like this. This is incredible what you do. I can do this. So I said to Corey, you know, I want to be a technical director someday, like all these eight years. What are you crazy? You're crazy. You can't do that. You're an English major. You don't, this isn't, you don't, I might decrat this somewhere. I just sort of started following along. What are these guys doing? Learn from them. Learn from them. I mean, I was learning what I found out from the best of the best, right. So this is guy, you know, Kurt. So he gets me on a show as an assistant technical director. I'm like, okay, this is great. I'm loving this. I'm doing whatever they tell me to do. He says, write a script to compress texture. I'm like, okay. I'm like, I did this, right? I learned scripting. I learned all this stuff. Compressing textures. Okay. So I go to my machine. I write a script. I'm good at learning. You can teach that very teachable. Okay. So I write this script. And then I'm like, oh, this lunchtime. I'm going to go for a bowl of lunch. But lunch is nice. Lunch. You gotta be close. Have lunch at Iowa. It's like, nature's a beer. It's an amazing thing. You should do a spring frog. Okay. That's his story to tell. Okay. So we had a lot of fun in previous lunches. I come back and I know this. My machine is just sort of hanging and some people were just going on. And somebody said, ooh, it's like your machine is swapping. Okay. My machine is swapping. I knew that wasn't a good thing. Okay. Suddenly we're getting error messages. A lot of error messages. My machine goes down. Okay. So I remove my machine. I have to go to Kurt. I have to tell him, oh, I tell you, he used to work for NASA. Okay. This is cool. And I say, listen, Kurt, I had my machine swapping. I wrote this script to write, to compress textures that was going. It was talking along. And now it's my machine work. And I think it goes, what did you keep along by? That's a great idea. I will totally keep along by the next time that I do this. I remember. So he totally, no problem. I feel out of it. My machine comes back up. I feel out of it. I'm like, okay, restore backups. Because there are hundreds and hundreds of gigs of corrupt textures at this total out of Friday afternoon. So no vendors are going through. Everything is broken. The entire facility. That's how I feel. Star Wars episode one. There is no Jar Jar Vegas right now. Okay. So what happens? This is the moment we realize. And I put in this request that the backup system or all the backups go longer. And they haven't been working for the past four months. They switched to a new system. So Kurt looks at me. Mr. Bass on all seriousness. It goes, well, yes, we're going to make new textures now. Doesn't give me any grief. We just go through. So in textures, no problem. We're doing all this work, everything. At the end of this, he says to me, ladle, we learn two things here, right? One, we're going to keep a log file. The backup system doesn't work right now. You know what I did in return for Kurt, Mr. NASA? I'm introduced into my childhood best friend, Sara. She's a dentist. And they are married with two children now. So go down, go down, my friend. It's right. It's like making up stories and in the moment. So one of the things that we were trying to do physically, because when we worked at Island together, we were very sedentary. We would sit at a desk all day, usually on a computer. It was also the age where we discovered carpal tunnel syndrome. You're literally not moving. You're moving your wrists all day, and things are very painful. So we discovered there was a nearby gym to where we worked, which was across the Richmond Ridge. You're in San Rafael to Richmond, California. There's a big municipal mandatory called Plunge. Any fans? Yes. And so by then, I also did improv theater together. So one of the things that we would do is we would swim across the pool. We would do laps, and we would surface out of the pool. Lila would say, once. And then we would swim entirely across the pool every one month. And I would say, then upon, we would tell a more than a time story, the pace that it would take to go entirely across the pool. So every lap was a word. So you would be like wondering, so it wasn't like the spontaneity of improv, where you were like really in the moment. You had like those 30 seconds to then you would deliver the next word. And it was so satisfying whenever that word was, because you weren't getting a word every minute or so. So next time you're swimming with a friend, if you want to tell a very slow story, I highly recommend that you tell like maybe like a 25 word story. All right, are you ready for your next story? Tell us. We're going to mine from the world of ILM and movies who also have just own rich history in so many aspects from Clown College in Florida to a recent in the circus to working at Universal Studios Hollywood, creating makeup and masks and creating creatures themselves. Please welcome to the stage my good friend, Mark Siegel. So this isn't behind the scenes story, but and so it's kind of funny, I vote. But part of it, because it was originally scheduled around Halloween, is a bit of a horror story, in particular for one of the crew members. And it doesn't involve ghosts. Really not in my creature making career while I was still working in LA. I have been fortunate to be hired on the crew of the original Ghost Busters at the Boston Richard Edlins Company in Burrida, Del Ray. And my main assignment would be to work on the puppet for the Ghost Slammer. And when I was hired, Slammer was already in progress. Our creature supervisor, Steve Johnson, had already finalized the design when I showed up for work. On my first day, Steve was already sculpting the main head and body section of what would be the puppet suit. Another artist, Kevin Brennan, was sculpting Slammer's arms. And my first project would be to sculpt the inner parts of Slammer's mouth, the teeth and gums, and the tongue. So we took a casting of my arm in hand. And I did the tongue sculpture over that casting. And so the final rubber tongue would fit my arm perfectly, perfectly. And then I would be the puppeteer whenever the tongue had to work in the shot. Well, as it turned out, the tongue would only need puppeteering for one shot. But this was a really important one. It was the first time the character appeared close up on the screen in the scene where Dan Akra discovers Slammer in the hotel hallway, gobbling up food from plates on a room surface. And it was a pretty tricky shot to get. And I'm going to try to describe to you how we accomplished that shot, which is pretty ingenious and kind of fine. But first, before I try to do that, I want to give you a description of how the puppet was constructed and generally how it worked. And you probably know us by now visually. Slammer was overall a very low-tech puppet. It was one big piece of MMI section that was cast out of a very soft foam latex rocker. Mark Bryan Wilson was the lead puppeteer who bore the puppet suit and he was strapped in with the kind of harness made out of a light webbing. His arms were in the rubber Slammer arms that stuck out through the cobbles in the side of the body. And Mark would do all the big body and arm sort of here. The bottom of the puppet came down from above Mark's waist. Below that he had a long black skirt and we got on the black stage so all the on-camera puppeteers were flat. The top of the puppet came up above Mark's head. Now because it was all soft foam latex, we had a fiberglass understall inside that head so the head would hold its shape. And that understalled me attached Slammer's eyes and the rubber palate with the gum to the teeth that I had created. And we also attached a few controllers for facial expressions. Now Mark's head was tightly secured in a custom-spit fiberglass helmet that we could attach into that understall. So that Mark's head would support the top of the puppet. And Mark's face, this is the really important part, Mark's face was directly behind Slammer's big mouth and we got holes in the rubber at the back of the throat covered them with a thin scrim fabric, same color as the interior of the mouth so that the camera couldn't see in but Mark could see out through the mouth in order to work. Now the facial expressions were also pretty low-tech. This was a few years before we started using radio-controlled methods and it was simple bicycle cable controllers. And the cables extended from the head down through the bottom of the puppet out to the side connected to controllers with levers. And puppeteers would pull the levers through the different expressions. We could move Slammer's eyes back and forth. We could blink his eyelids, pop his eyes out a little bit, wiggle his nose, mirror his upper lips, and move his eyebrows. And for the shots when I didn't have the puppeteer at the top, I was lucky I got to choose my puppeteering features. And I chose the eyebrows because I saw the most potential for a big comical eyebrow. The mouth was also extremely low-tech. There was no structure or mechanism at all in the lower jaw. It was just soft foam latex. We didn't have the plastic gums and teeth mounted inside the mouth. And then just a little metal bar in the center of the lower lip with a rod that extended down through the bottom of the puppet. And the puppeteer underneath for Kate and could pull the rod so we could stretch that now really wide open or push it closed or twist it side to side to give a wide range expressions. And for most of the shots, or all the shots actually where the tongue didn't work, we had a casting of the tongue that was just cast inside the mouth and could just walk around. But that eating shot, the Slammer actually had to use the tongue of that, got a little more complicated. So this is the setup. On the shooting stage, we had one of the metal rolling stage equipment cards that served as a stand-in for the room service card. It was stacked with all kinds of plates. Some of them were made out of plaster so that they could break easily. And the plates were piled with all kinds of nasty food. We had like wilted lettuce and chunks of jello and lots of mashed potatoes and pasta, some half-eaten slices of pizza, theory rolls and other chunks of bread. And Slammer would have to reach out and pick up the plate and dump the food into his mouth from the jaw and have to work on the tongue. Move around. So because I had to operate the tongue with my arm, I had to be squeezed in when really tightening behind the pocket with my arm in the rubber tongue through the slit in the back of Slammer's head into the mouth. Remember, that's where Mark Bryan Wilson's head normally was. In order to make room for the tongue, our hand was bent the same way down below the mouth, so my arm and the tongue streamed sitting on the top of Mark's head. Also, because he was bent over, he couldn't be in his helmet as he'd already was. So Steve Johnson, our team leader, was squeezed in right behind me, intimately behind me, with his arms in, and his cheeks. I didn't support the head down, but he also used his fists to march the rubber cheeks around like to give some more movement to the jaw. But most important, because he was bent down, Mark could not look out through the back of the mouth as he normally could. Mark was working completely blind, and working blind, he had to somehow, finally, lift it way over his head, dump the food into his mouth, throw it all over the tongue while I'm working the tongue, and make the tongue slip. And that meant that Mark was actually dumping all of his food into the back of his own head. Despite all of this, bent over, blind, food all over him, Mark did a stellar performance. He even added nuanced movements, like slimmer, casually tossing an empty plate over his shoulder, or lifting up his hand to wipe his mouth between bites. And the action was truly hilarious, and by the time we finished shooting, the entire crew was cracking up laughing. Everybody except Mark Grand Wilson, who was still stuck bent over in the puppet, which was not easy to get in and out with food all over him. After a few moments, we heard this muffled voice coming out of this rubber puppet, get me out of here. Which of course made us crack up even more. And even though he was very low tech, I think Slanger did a wonderful on-screen performance. He was very funny. And as some of us actually predicted while we were shooting the puppet, Slanger became a really popular character. He even got his own animated cartoon show, and reappeared in Ghostbusters 2. I just have to say that in my nearly 40 years as a creature maker, working on the original Ghostbusters was some of the most fun I've ever had, working on a TV. One more time for Mark Siegel! Congratulations for Range Eller. I love it every time I see you. And are you still ever at Walt Disney Family Museum? I go as often as I can. I volunteer there. Since COVID, they cut back a lot of the time. I volunteer for special events. Have you ever seen Mark? You're ever at the Walt Disney Family Museum, because he has full loads of Disney spaces. Thank you so much for sharing that with us, and we will move along to another. This is like a tour of my favorite people in the world. The next storyteller is one of the first people that I met when I moved to the Bay Area. I was a college student still at the time. I was an intern, and I became fast friends with him maybe two short years later, less. We were roommates for 10 years. So this is someone who I know a lot about and have a deep, deep history. He is honestly one of my truly best friends in the world, and he is himself incredibly gifted and talented designer. They'll make her a storyteller in every sense of the word, and I'm not going to tell too much. You're going to hear from him the words of George Hall. Give it up for George Hall! Just a moment around, but I don't think we ever have any. My story starts off, I'm 20 years old, early 20s, and I find myself, I get to my dream, and my first big opportunity is to become the Visual Effects Director, and I'm assigned to work on the movie Mission Impossible. I got this. This is amazing. I finally got to the big times, and I find myself invited to fly to London to a meeting with Tom Cruise, Brian De Palma, and the visual effects supervisor of my boss, John Null, who's famous himself for inventing this small program called Photoshop. So this is like the big shots, and I'm literally only there to draw some images to help these big guys figure out an action sequence. So in this script, there's, service can be like, and then a battle ensues, and I just leave it and they later figure out later. So in this script, there's an action sequence where Tom Cruise is our big guy, there's a train on top of a train with a bad guy, and there's a bad guy in a helicopter machine, and they know that they want this action sequence, the train, to go into the channel from home between England and France, and this helicopter to be chasing after Tom, and there's going to be this explosion and crash, and Tom just nearly escapes death with this helicopter to stop, but they can't figure out why a helicopter would ever go inside a tunnel. So we're at this meeting, you know, it's a gorgeous hotel, and is this exclusive, and you know, a couple hours go by and they're taking around ideas, and all of a sudden Tom goes, does anyone have ideas? And in my head, I feel like this excitement like surges through my things, like see my like success montage going through my head. I say this genius idea, everyone's like, who is this guy? They're like, maybe they need to talk to directors, and I'm going to cover a time magazine, and I'm like, all of a sudden, I'm thinking about this, I've thought of zero ideas, and then Tom goes, yeah, I've got it, and I'm like, oh, shit, I have the money. I got it, I got it. The train is racing to the tunnel, racing, racing, racing, and the helicopters are behind them, and at the last minute of the train, you know, the train goes in the tunnel, at the last minute of the helicopter, there's nowhere to go, it pulls up, I've seen the helicopter, it does this giant loop-to-loop, at the end of the loop, it has nowhere to go but into the tunnel, and I'm like, I'm so jacked up to say my great idea, I can say the first thing comes to mind, and that is, well, that doesn't make any sense, Tom. I see my boss looking at me with big eyes, I didn't see Brian Paul looking at me because he's playing it for a long time. There was a reason why no one said anything during that time, because he's the commander of the show, and I'm like, I think to myself, did I see that allow? Why have I been going with this? I'm like, well, you know, why would a loop out there at the end of the loop go inside to stay on the trajectory and go in the tunnel? I'm like, what is a loop-to-loop? I mean, isn't that just a loop? I mean, I'm lying to my boss and I'm like, he's getting in the eyes, I'm like, stop talking, because to Tom's credit goes, the kid's got a point, let's keep working on this. So what happens in the film is that Tom, you eventually come up with Tom, puts this table onto the train and forces it into the tunnel, and you know, there's not too many of them in the movie, you know, he's on the nose of the train and the helicopter crashes and the plane just barely comes into the tunnel. But I think that I think to myself sometimes that if it wasn't for me opening my big mouth, there would be a giant loop-to-loop. And that was Tom George's last helicopter movie. Jordan also, I can now brag, designed, if any of you is a fan of the new June movie, the Hornetopter helicopter. Yeah, George, if you got your leg up. It comes out in February. All right, thank you, George. And let's move on with your tour acts. Our next one is also about your, it's only favorite people. Like, if you're a fan of this show tonight, I want you to come back again. We do this every month. It is always, always the last Wednesday of the month, except right now, which is not the last idea of the month. But our next show will be the last Wednesday in January, which is actually the last day of January the 31st. I've invited another group of my favorite people. The theme of that show will be pets. Pets. They will all be pet stories. And you can probably tell them that I'm running out of ideas. I want to encourage also everybody, if you have an idea for upcoming show to visit my website, which is just quarryrozen.com, where I'm social media story Rosen. Tell me what to do. Tell me about the great show you would be interested in seeing and coming back for, please. All right, so moving on with the show. Our next storyteller is a happy city among many incredible accomplishments in his life. It's one of the founders of Bats Improv. Bats Improv, which is the longest, most successful theater or improv theater company in San Francisco, not the West Coast. One of the co-founders of Bats Improv. And now still in it's, what are we, 30? No, no. Seven. Seventh year. 37. 37th year of doing the improv theater. Bats Improv is located in Fort Mason Center, where everybody can do live improvised shows. He's also a stage actor. He's also an incredible teacher and performer and runs a company called Fratelli Foclonia. Anybody who's a fan of their incredible work? I'm going to say less and just let him do the talking. So please welcome to the stage, William, a lot of unwelcome sometimes. Can make all of it. My father was a physical surgeon. He was obviously a physical surgeon, but before that he was an advertising man. He said that in his passport, he was advertising. He told me the story of that transition. He said, Bill, I work from an ad agency, and they gave me this thing to count to work on. I did marketing research. It was a big deal. That's the massive deal. I had to do marketing research for douche. Yeah. He said, you know, they didn't understand why they wanted what they think it is. So that program, that's the last project of the year. The client, they over. The boss, congratulations. Great work, Bob. Fantastic work. I've got to do a client for you and a product. Enema. In that moment, it was crystal clear like that, that there are better reasons to stay awake at night to remember what color to make enema, to make what we do look like. So he left that job, went back to school, became a physical surgeon. One summer, years later, or was there, he was the director of a summer camp in the Shenandoah Valley. If you've been to the Shenandoah Valley, this is for marketing review. It's just so rural. It's just so nestled in this valley. So he understood. I mean, it's just beautiful. New York, way out. Well, he then decided that he was going to take all the units, that 13 people, four of them in the property, for a canoe trip down the Cleveland River in West Virginia. Nine canoes, big man, couple of them, a kayak and an older guy. 16. My mom too. So we're unloading the canoes, getting into the water, draining a little bit. We're kids. We're going to camp out on the river. We're going to camp out. We're singing our songs, paddling. It's just beautiful. It's just Western Virginia. It's incredible. As nice as the Shenandoah Valley is, this is untouched. You're not seeing any houses. We're canoeing along. It's just beautiful. It's just gorgeous. We're like giddy. We're out here on our own. Of course, it's raining, but that's not going to be you. We set up camp that night, set up our tents in the new rain, and we'll keep there in the rain. Sleep in the rain in the morning, raining, so we would have us in the rain. So it's just so beautiful. We're just so excited to be there on our own. It's all right. It's all raisins and peanuts. Yeah, okay. Yeah, it rains that day, and we camp in the rain, set up camp in the rain. We sleep in the rain in the rain, in the rain, up in the rain in the morning. Everything, everything is wet. We're paddling long, and it's no longer like, look at this beautiful stuff, because I've been in this business going to stop me. So something snapped at me, and I looked at it next to my dad. I found it next to my dad, and I looked at it, and all the seriousness, like a 14-year-old boy came and mustered it. I looked at it, and I said, Dad, this isn't funny anymore. Come on, yeah. Never want to even miss a moment. It's a deep breath. It's the constant balance right there. He puts that in, and he says, in his beautiful quiet tone, he says, what would you like me to do? In that moment, he left me here. I was an adult. I was an older kid. He just opened the door, everything changed. Everything changed, and now the daddy couldn't fix it. Well, we were all pretty wet. We found, we were living for a place of care at night, because we didn't pass any house. They said it was rural. We played nowhere. I wanted to do rapids and stuff. Finally, we find, like, this hill, uphill, uphill, about eight feet. Then it sees this stone standing roof, four posts, a concrete slab, and a roof. So we came there. Again, argues with himself about whether or not to use the wood, because it's not ours, because it's this thing. And he decides, oh, yeah, we can use the wood. Yeah, fire at night. Tent, no purpose, putting those up. So we put out our sleeping bags. We're all on this concrete slab, at least of the rain. I wake up the first thing in the morning, like, see how wet. I open my eyes. I go, there's water. Hey, everybody, look, look, there's water. Look around. There's water all around. I look over where the river is, and I don't see a river. I don't see a bank. I just see the flowing water. The water's come out that hot. Oh, God. Oh, the guys, guys. Oh, brother. There's a learning thing. And my dad comes and he says, Art, Bill, you and Tim, I want you to go find the talent. The little talent, I think it's happening. Paul will camp, set the van, then come back and find us. Meet us where you are. We'll get out. Now, I'm an adult. I run into the woods with this old boy, and we're like, you know, we're going to find this big man. We're going to leave the backyards. I hope we get close to a town. Find the town, little town. Not really even a town. It's unimportant. It's nothing, but a couple of shops. We phone them, and we'll meet you there. Send them in. We go back and find the, find the dad and the kids, mom. We leave them through the woods back to the backyard, into the town, into the bridge. You see the man on the other side of the bridge. The bridge is covered in water, because the water is overflowed with banks, and it's rushing past. And we see trees and stuff, but I mean, it's like, it's like a thing. Again, there's this thing where he's, Lock-oners! He goes, I'll get it. No, you won't! He made it across. We get into the van, we go back to the camp, get in the fresh, warm, dry clothing. We have a nice meal. We can calm down, come back to who we are. It just doesn't experience it happen to us. It was a day later, the sunshine was out. It's like it never happened. Our bodies are full, but it's like, like something that happened to us. It's not real. Sunshine! Dad said, we've got to go back. Dad, why? The canoes. We've got to find those canoes. They weren't ours. All right, Dad. Get in the gas car and drive back there. Make our way through the backyards, up into the woods. As we get into the woods, my mom and my dad and I, the cloud passes over. We're walking. Temperature drops a little bit. Wind picks up. You know, it's just all clouds over. And I remember the three of us stopping. I don't remember us talking very much. So I remember the three of us looking at each other, going, turn around and walk back in the car. We all talked about it a little bit later. It was a feeling of, I let you go once, then you go back. That happens not on stage, but behind the scenes. These big moments that change everything. But those moments can give us a crystal clear vision of how the world works. It changes in an instant. For that reason, I hope you all have these unwelcome, unplanned, horrible things happening. It's kind of on the theme that we've been talking about. You've heard a number of stories about people in the film industry, in the visual effects industry, and mine is similar to that vein. Something that I was always impressed with in the special effects and visual effects, tension and detail. Like having an incredible eye and training that eye to spot even the smallest imperfections in everything. When I started in this business, I was very young. I didn't know much about it. In fact, I had the fortune to start at the company that people talk about, that's what I imagine, right at this transition period where things were becoming a little less of the handmade, painted, crafted, puppeted creatures and starting to develop into the digital realm of computer graphics and animation. What that meant is that since we were still shooting everything on film, there was this analog to digital handoff that had to happen. All the film would scan into the computer and then hand it to the computer graphics department. Along the way, they discovered that the film was imperfect, that things were not right. As a company that valued itself on tension and detail, a department emerged from this that I, being a very junior at least person in this field, found myself in the good fortune to be hired as a dirt remover. A dirt remover. Yes, the lofty position of the digital version of Enchanter, that I would look at each frame of the film and scan it for little imperfections. Now this might be a scratch or a smudge or a dirt that had gotten on the negative, but when it got scanned, it would create a little white pop on the screen. In order to do this, we used a program that was like a photo version of Photoshop, and you would look at one frame at a time, and you would scan through it, an incredible zoomed in. You would scan through the film until you saw something that looked like it didn't belong there. And then you would beat it out and move along. Just like when you next save your table, it doesn't use a lot of your brain to do the same process. So I would listen to a lot of books on tape. I would listen to a lot of music. I was occupying my brain otherwise while I was in the other side of the scanning through this in the glorious film industry, cleaning film one frame at a time. And the first project that I was brought onto this process for was a remarkable one. It was the movie that kind of made me want to be in the entertainment industry in the first place. It was the special edition of Star Wars. So I got to work on Star Wars, a movie that came out when I was a child. Now I'm working as a professional being paid to clean Star Wars. One dot at a time. And one of the first shots that I got to do this on, a star field. I'm not kidding. A frame of film with nothing but white dots. To determine which white dots did not belong, which did, was a very important position. I framed my frame to eliminate all of the white dots. My next shot after I got through the star field sequence was, and it was a very important shot. It was a really shot of the movie where the star destroyer is kind of chasing him. It was very exciting. But the next shot that I got to work on was even more exciting than me because it was a shot that had been eliminated from the original movie was being added in. Added back into the special edition of Star Wars, which was a scene, a deleted scene between Han Solo and, yes, Jabba the Hutt. Jabba the Hutt, the famous, you know, bad guy of Halloween who was talked about but never seen until Return of the Jedi. And now we're actually going to see Jabba the Hutt in a piece of film that was filmed back in the 70s with a very probably angry actor who was in the biggest movie of all time and was cut from the film, right? He was this Irish actor who was wearing kind of like a big brown trunet, kind of like a toga, do you remember that song? Yeah. And so he was filmed and he had this whole scene that was eliminated from the movie. And then later when his character showed up, he was simply replaced by a giant slug, of course, under the hood of Jabba the Hutt. So my job was to clean that scene. And of course, we're going to replace this guy with the slug again, computer graphics. And so I'm going through it. I'm listening to my books on tape and I'm listening to the things and I come to like a little piece of white, done. I remove it and I keep going and I'm going through until I've removed all of the dirt. And then I go to this little view station. And we would play it back and I noticed in my shot I'm looking, I'm scanning it for little white dots. I see, no, I've done a pretty good job. But there's one thing that I did that I shouldn't have done, which is that there was a consistent white dot that I removed consistently from every single frame that wasn't actually dirt at all. It was Harrison Ford's ear. Every time I come to it, it was like this little spec of something. And I thought that it was dirt so I painted it out. I didn't know until like the whole thing back that I actually removed. Now I'm so dumb and so green on the job that I'm afraid at this point. If they find out that I did this, I'm screwed. I'm fired. I'm out of here. So I let it go. I went to dailies the next morning, what we call the theater, right? The B screening room. And I'm sitting there with these idols of mine, people who have shelves full of Academy Awards for their incredible attention to detail. And they're looking at my shots in silence. Looks good. That shot. And I said nothing. And so in the movie Star Wars, ladies and gentlemen, there is a scene where Han Solo has no ear and learn something very important about him. Despite the fact that I feel like in some small way I ruined Star Wars. I also realized that while important attention to detail is a very important attribute of any craft that we do, the bigger lesson is what detail? Because if anybody is looking at Harrison Ford's ear, you're clearly looking at the wrong thing. Thank you. So I will say no more than to introduce the one and only your finale for tonight, Reds Graham! Guess what? We're not going to use the mic right now. I am the stage actor, so that's why I'm going to stand here and stage projects too. Also, I move around a lot, that's what I do. My name is Reds Graham, and since I got my introduction, I'll briefly introduce what I do. I know great through Patrick Rotten, through just impotent forming and general impotent form, but it's been a lot of my career doing games and working in games. So I'm working in video games since 2005, so for an hour or so I'm not going to be eating here or something. This is a story from a game you made for this called The Sims 4. Mostly they have a programmer on that game, and when I first arrived, the production cycle was not ideal. Here's briefly how games work. You have a designer or a set of designers, and they make things. So the designer will say, okay, I am going to make the relationship system. You have relationships. We want fathers, mothers, people who are in love, platonic love versus romantic love, all of these things. So that's what I want. Now I'm going to be pulling some engineers and some artists, sound people and production and everyone. So involve these people in, and then we make the thing. That's not how it works at EDA on The Sims 4. The way that it works is that the designer will come up here and say, okay, I'm going to make this thing. I'm going to work really hard on it, and I'm going to talk to some of my other designer friends, and okay, now who do you guys think it is? Okay, I'm going to read you back some stuff. This is all on paper. Okay, now I think it's ready. So the next step is to go to the Council of Design Gods and say, here is my design. I'm going to say, we shall schedule you for three days hence. And the design gods are eating grapes and drinking wine or whatever the designer sees, and they look at it and they may say yes or no, but it's a very gladiator thing. Proved or not, it was not approved. They go back and they redo it. And this happens a few times. This entire process can take them days, weeks. So then what happens? Well, then what happens is it's approved, and they celebrate. All the designers gather around, and they all sing songs and pull out hoots and things like that. They show them the barrel of a mortar, and they launch all the way over where we are. The gameplay is here. It lands here, and we're sitting there stroking our ears and solving problems that nobody had. We look down and we see, it's designing here. Yeah, this isn't even going to remotely work. Okay, so we go and we red line it up to stop and we say, no, this is going to work. We have our own work. We launch all the way over here. In fact, design, they look at it, and they go, oh, shit, I guess it's not going to work. And this happens over and over and over. It could take a month or something like this to go down. It's a mess. It was terrible, right? It's not a fun thing to go through. And it didn't create so much a wall between us. It created a rift between us. That's the much better word. We were not only, probably going to talk to you, but we were going to work in the same building, but we were actually discouraged from it. No, no, no, no. Let's go through the design review concept. That's what it's there for. Senior design leadership wants to pull on high and say, this is what needs to happen. So that should happen for quite a lot of people like that. They're all sorts of things. And then one of the problems that we asked for, for example, was engineers are like, how much money does this cost in the company? Let's do some back to the napkin estimates and see how much this stupidity is costing the company. And I laugh at it now. We kind of laugh and joke about it now. But it was, it was, it wasn't like we were miserable. We were frustrated. The engineers were frustrated. We were there going, wow, why is it like this? And that was just us. That was not because it's high in the sky. What do you do a little taste of what their experience was quite different? I'm going to do that with a visual. Is there something on the floor? Corey, you have a design. I guess you're going to come through. The designs are done. Someone is going to say, you are the next one on the list. So you're the next one who needs to have a design. Do you think as I go down the side, just tell me what's on the side. Right here? You're sure? I'm sure. Corey came up with, this is him. This is not anyone else. Corey, you must design a nine of hearts. That is your job, all right? You can design a nine of hearts. I can clean the dirt off. Can you do that? I'm sure this will all sorts of forums out there that are like, how is it a weird mission? I want to make it that close. It's a nine of hearts. It looks like a nine of hearts. It works like a nine of hearts. So we engineers look at this and we're like, this is never going to work. This isn't going to be a nine of hearts. It's all wrong. So what the designers heard from us, whether or not they're saying is you can't design. You design will never work. That's what they heard because of course that's what they heard. We sat there and we went back and we said, I don't know why the camera didn't go dark. They said, look, here's one reason it won't work. Here's another. Here's another reason. Here's another reason. These are all reasons why it won't work. So we take what is left of your shattered dreams and designs and put it away. We put it away in the box of shame. This is why I chose Cory because I thought it would be okay with that. So we put it into our box of shame here, just like this. You have a, what it wants is for you to take this pen. Mark, like you can sign it like the front part or the back part or anywhere. It doesn't matter. We leave the box of shame over there. So that's what they heard. And that's the problem. And that's a huge problem, right? The communication was the actual issue. We weren't actually saying that today. We were saying it won't work for these reasons because it's our game to set up. They've heard everything is bad and they've literally torn everything apart, but that's not the reality. Yeah. I'm not a plant. I want you to do is I want you to, you are a true sayer because as an engineer, I have an experience because it's not an experience. I want you to make the truth of what's in that box, all the pieces of your torn and destroyed design that I want you to dump it out for everyone to see. All the pieces, okay? That's the reality. Hold it up for everyone to show. I'm just holding it. That's the reality. It's not perfect. It'll never be perfect. But it's close. But it's closer to me though. I mean it's closer to me though. Corey, I need to give you a little piece of paper. Would you take your receipt from that piece of paper? Because the thing is, it's not going to just put a card in there. But I didn't. I'm not touching anything anymore. Since I touched it, you were like, he's a magician. He's doing magic. Would you pass the card in front of everyone? If that corner perfectly matches. This is our show. So let's bring up to the stage all of our performers. Join us all as we play the long, uh, uh, plate, chess. The picture is more important than anything. Well, that's all this is about. Give it up for Alyssa. Tonight, we do do this every month and I would love it for you to come back, bring friends, check out CoreyRosen.com to find out upcoming things who the cast are going to be. And also let me know what we should do in the future because we have more shows next year. Delight to see you all. Thank you for being here. Keep telling stories. Have a safe journey home and through the holidays. And thank you.