 I'm Eric Campbell. I'm the lead animator at Uproxx. Jamie and I have this opportunity to create a animated horror short film. The coolest thing is we're actually going to be taking it that much further and we're going to be doing it live up on a large building in downtown LA in Gallery Row. There's artists from all walks of life throughout LA. So when you're going from gallery to gallery, you can see it actually in motion and corresponding with a live actor. In the midst of all this rich art history, it's going to be very exciting. We're going to be collaborating with a few other artists on this project. This group of guys from New York Optical Animal do this amazing work with projection mapping. I'm Max Nova and I'm Austin Wolfoak and we're creative directors at Optical Animal. This entire thing is an immersive experience we're creating. So we're taking this short film concept and taking it outside of the confines of a 169 square and projecting it on a large surface in Los Angeles. What they do is they go after they do a site visit and they build a template for us. So once they build a template, then we're going to bring that template into After Effects and generate that space in a digital world. And then they take what we create and translate it back into the projection mapped version. So they're capable of doing things that blow your mind. You know, you don't really expect to be possible with just a video projector. And we're working with the musician, Sweaterbeats, who's going to be scoring this live experience. I'm Antonio Kuna. I am composing the music for this whole live experience. I've always been a fan of sci-fi and fantasy. And I get to take all the soundtracks that I grew up watching and put it into this project. I've always wanted to score a film. So it's going to be epic. It's kind of a very spooky and dark little narrative. So that's the whole inspiration for the music that I've made. Like techno, like dirty sounds. With Intel Optane Memory, I pin the sample library. I can pin this and then drag a sound from here into Ableton. Put some drums. Cool. Every time I use it, it remembers the habits of, hey, you should load this and it loads faster and faster every time. And that's great for me. The rhythm, the beats, the melody, all of those influence the way that the story is told in a way that should create a really mind-bending illusion for people who are walking by. The story calls for an actor who's walking home, dribbling his basketball, and his shadow slowly starts to turn on him. A person actually walks in front of the wall and then gets chased by their own shadow. And as they turn around, the shadow looks normal. But when they look away, the shadow grows into this monstrous creature that is stalking them. Imagine if you turned around and you saw that your shadow had grown into his giant werewolf. I mean, that's absolutely terrifying. This environment through our shadow that we're going to be projecting, that is forcing people to question what's actually happening in the real world. The theme of this specific short is something I think people will really be able to identify with. There's always that feeling of something right behind you when you're in the dark. And I don't know, it's like as soon as you turn off the lights, there's definitely something there. We have multiple artists all trying to work together. Jimmy is building these layers and layers and layers frame by frame. You know, there could be hundreds of frames of artwork. And then we take that and we bring it into After Effects where we actually build the animation out. And with Intel Optane Memory, what we're really going to see is the amazing responsiveness of the computer when jumping back and forth between Photoshop and After Effects. We're really going outside of our comfort zone and trying things that we don't typically do. We're actually going back to a very old school method of animation, which is cell animation. There's a process called onion skinning, a technique where you draw an image and then it's on a light table and you have that next image, you pull up the sheet and you draw the next one over it so that you can see where your previous frame was so that you can create that motion smoothly through time. What we're going to be doing in this process is actually creating a digital version of that. It's a whole new tool, it's a whole new interface. It's a new learning curve. Any key moments where we're having a cool transformation or any hands, things like that, we're going to do in the stock. And then when he turns around, he goes back to human. Yep, exactly. We're taking something that kind of has been lost in a way, an art that's kind of disappearing and we're bringing it back to life with a new technology and kind of merging the two together. So it's really exciting to be able to do that. I want to see how far we can push this, especially when you throw in the projection. Over the past five years, technology has really changed what's possible. Back in the day, you wouldn't be able to even edit a 4k file on your laptop. Now we're able to run this 6k file in real time and do projection mapping. Like that's just something that hasn't been done and hasn't been possible with previous tech. Just dealing with this concept of a shadow is something that's very difficult with projection, is that you can't project black, so how do you project a shadow? And so I think working on how to emulate lighting and being able to communicate with that with the animation team is something that all together we're going to have to learn, is like how do we create this effect when we're projecting light. Horror is one of my favorite genres and we have the ability with this project to create something that brings out those fears that we all have is not just a film that you're going to sit down and watch, it's more it's more of an experience. The ruling work and the time that goes into making animation is all worth it when you see that. I'm excited about merging it all into one thing that hopefully will be really cool. The art will get you. We've come a long way since our first site visit where we scoped everything out, we created our initial template and we handed that over to the animators and uprocks and now we're bringing in the sweater beats with the music and bringing it all together to have our full presentation tonight. This is unlike anything we've done before because we're actually creating a live experience where there's a live action actor that's interacting with the projections in front of an audience that's unsuspecting. Something as elaborate as this just to be something that you happen upon is really rare. We had people working all over the country, we had optical animal based in New York, we were working back and forth them this entire time getting it all to work. The entire effort was huge. We've just been sharing our visions and elevates the whole narrative on an emotional level. I'm excited to hear everything come together. They got the six massive projectors outputting all of these video signals, all of our animation coming off of one laptop. You got the updated file? Yes. Here's the drive there. So we move the shadows and stuff a bit. Well yeah, it looks like it's spot on now. With Intel Optane Memory we're able to run these multiple applications that we need, switch between them really seamlessly, bring in different files. It makes some last minute changes so we had to swap files out and we didn't have to wait at all for those files to be loaded in. It was just loading in pretty much instantaneously. This is different from anything that I've ever done before. Having to interact with something that's physically there, like a 3D animation and having to syncopate things, it's on another level. We are five minutes away from putting like a month's worth of work, music, animation, projection to the big reveal of the shadow. It is a little nerve-wracking but once your adrenaline gets going, it's actually kind of cool. I came ready for this. Roll camera, back in the back. This was just amazing. Bucking down the street, hearing the music. It's so exciting to see it all come to life finally. I'm really proud of everybody that worked on this thing. Yeah, it looks great. It turned out incredible. People who are working behind me are like, what is going on? This is sick. Everything went great. I guess it was everything we could ask for, really. It was so satisfying to see all of the hard work and vision come together and be as mind-blowing as it was in the end.