Diolch yn fawr iawn am wylio'r fideo. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Tekstet av Nicolai Winther I'm sorry. Hello and welcome to the second day of the Expanded Animation Symposium with the main topic Tectonic Shift. I will give a slight introduction to the day's program all the talks that are presented today circle around the main topic tectonic shifts and we have different experts talking about different aspects of effects of the pandemic on production or also interesting part techniques in production that totally change and create a kind of a tectonic shift in cause of the work and craft ship in animation and visual effects yeah without further ado i just show you what's coming up today we have three talks in the morning i am the host of the first panel. My name is Alexander Wilhelm and I'm a professor in Hagenberg for computer animation and narrative design. So in the morning we have this program from Sabine Leimer, Annik Rittrichter and Tobias Treblyar, different perspectives on the problematic of tectonic shift in production. At the afternoon, 13.30, we have same aspects within game design and this will be hosted by Michael Lankes. Then we have a break and at 15.30, we talk with professionals out of the industry and perspectives on things like procedural paradigm shifts and things like that. So I hope you enjoy the show. And without any further ado, we start now the talk of Sabine Leimer. She will introduce herself. So enjoy! Hi from Wellington, my name is Sabine Leimer. I'm a digital compositor and compositing supervisor currently at Witter Digital in Wellington. I'm very honoured to be allowed to do this presentation today. When I came up with what to talk about, I thought I would just talk about the things that I know best, which is obviously compositing and being a mum of a three-year-old and how to combine the two. So relating to the topic of this speaker series Tectonic Shift I thought I'd touch on how the visual effects industry has transformed lately in my experience and how the COVID pandemic has created new opportunities for parents working from home. I'll be using my primary department compositing as the example. Experiences will probably vary between the different visual effects disciplines and studios, but I think the general trend is quite universal. A little bit about me to start with. I grew up not too far from Linz in Upper Austria. My education was quite generic. I didn't know what I wanted to be when I was younger. I would just play around with my dad's computer, coral draw and you know make funny clip art, that kind of stuff. And in the early 90s MTV was a big thing so obviously I wanted to make music videos for the Smashing Pumpkins. So I got a little camcorder for my birthday and I became the videographer of my friend's punk band. I would just follow them around and play with the in-camera effects which was I think black and white and sepia and open shutter or something. sepia and open shutter or something and I would just edit that on Premiere and make little little short movies like for example I got my mum to drive in reverse and I would film it and then play backwards and then you know the car would go forwards and the people walk backwards and i thought that was like genius special effects at that time um all this experimenting led to me applying for the digital media technology and design course at fh which seemed to me a good way to get into media the media world without actually knowing anything about it the curriculum was quite broad a lot of stuff didn't really make sense to me at that time like who needs to know how to weld a circuit board or what is a fast four-wheel transform I still don't know until I did my work placement at RA VFX in Munich like I said I didn't know much about the post production pipeline of film production in general I just knew that name Ari in connection with feature films and I thought that was cool so I applied and I kept just calling up the head of production every week and until he hired me as an intern basically just to shut me up and doing a few days in each department after that they they set me down in the compositing department and gave me a shake tutorial dvd to work through and then at that moment all the things that i had learned and i was interested in suddenly came together and it clicked into place and all the math and the programming and the color science and the photography everything just made sense all of a sudden I knew I wanted to be a compositor after finishing my bachelor's degree in Hagenberg in 2004 I moved to the UK and completed a master's degree for digital effects at Bournemouth University. Then in 2006 I started working as a junior compositor first in Munich at Scanline VFX and freelance. I worked on movies like Huibull, The Castle Ghost or Krabat and The Satanic Mill and then I met my husband and he's a composer as well which is quite handy so we decided to go to Sydney together and work at Fuel VFX on the movie Australia and then after that Wolverine. After that we moved to CIS Vancouver which is now known as Method Studios for a movie called Invictus and in 2010 we moved to Double Negative in London to work on Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 and 2, John Carter and a few more. and a few more. When in 2012 Witter Digital started hiring for The Hobbit we obviously wanted to go there because Lord of the Rings was that those movies were just the pinnacle of VFX for us at the time and I still love the movies so that those movies were the reason for me to be interested in visual effects in the first place. So my partner and I applied and we got a two-month contract and we moved there with a suitcase each and now nine years later we are permanent residents in New Zealand, we have a house here and a Kiwi daughter. Over the years at Weta I worked my way up from senior compositor to lead compositor to now compositing supervisor. The first female one at Weta by the way. I did the Hobbit movies, Planet of the Apes 2, Godzilla Iron Man, the BFG, Apes 2, Godzilla Iron Man, the BFG, Guardians of the Galaxy 2 and a bunch more. Here's a little screenshot of my IMDb page if you're interested. In 2019 my team and I were lucky to receive a BS award for outstanding compositing in a feature for Avengers Infinity War and there on the picture you see my daughter at four months probably the youngest person ever to attend red carpet event in LA she didn't really care much about it. Yeah and in 2020 I was a nominee for the Women in Film and TV Awards in New Zealand. The most recently completed show I was involved in is a CompSoup is Shang-Chi and the Legend of the Ten Rings. I think by the time you see this video the movie has just been released in cinemas and fingers crossed for a record-breaking first box office weekend. Yeah, so as you can see most of my work usually includes some kind of superhero or dragon or both. A little bit about Witter Digital. It's one of the world's leading visual effects studios for feature film and episodic post-production alongside Industrial Light & Magic, Framestore, Double Negative, MPC, Method and Skinline. Witter Digital is a sister company to Witter Workshop and was founded by Sir Peter Jackson, Sir Richard Taylor and Andy Selkirk in 1993. The studio has since earned, and I have to read that six visual effects Academy Awards 13 Academy SciTech Awards and six visual effects BAFTA Awards and 34 visual effects Society Awards it is best known for the Lord of the Rings movies and the Hobbit King Kong Avatar the Planet of the Apes, anything with big furry creatures. Recently Weta has been a key player in bringing the Marvel and the DC universes to life and last year alone we had 15 active projects such as Mulan, The Green Knight, Jungle Cruise, Umbrella Academy 2, The Green Knight, Jungle Cruise, Umbrella Academy 2, The Suicide Squad and Godzilla vs Kong. Around 1500 artists work in the Wellington offices and recently with some new leadership and new investors coming on board, Witter has also announced an expansion into original feature animation and is in the process of opening offices outside of New Zealand. In other exciting news, Witter is also making our proprietary software available through collaboration with Autodesk and SideFX and other partners is a cloud production pipeline package called Witter M and Witter H. I'd like to show a Witter VFX showreel now. It's not the latest latest one but I particularly like this one because it shows some epic work that we've done and also project that I have personally worked on and this clip gives me goosebumps every time so I hope you enjoy it. Have a game of riddles. Just us. The children can never know. This be where all my dreams are beginning. You could not live with your own failure. Where did that bring you? Back to me. Apes... together... strong. Together. Strong. Because you are......like me. I got you! I got you! Sorry, I can't remember anybody's names. We've come to it at last. The great battle of our time. You will find... There! You may not win, flower! I can't! You will! Avengers! Avengers! Assemble. So now what is compositing? Why not start with a meme? It's not composing and it's not composting, it's compositing. Other people, clients, departments probably think it's just putting a little bit of glow on top and press the make it pretty button. I'm also not a filmmaker, somewhere in between and it's usually pretty crazy. In more seriousness it means combining and manipulating various source sequences to a final image that appears to be shot at the same time through a single camera. Source images can include blue screen or green screen footage that was shot on set, or clean plates, CG rendered environments, animated characters, simulated effects elements like explosions or smoke, particle effects, 2D elements of some kind, background, matte painting extensions, magical effects, anything. We also do a lot of paint touch-ups and color balancing, adding optical treatment to give the illusion of a photoreal shot that is believable to the eye. This can be for feature film, episodic content for streaming platforms, commercials, special projects like theme park rides for example. Here's a very crude diagram that I made to illustrate the post-production pipeline. There are obviously a lot more interdepartmental connections going on, just to show that compositing is the last stage in the post-production pipeline before the final image gets delivered back to the client for final edit and digital intermediate and distribution. We receive the plates from the client. It usually goes through our editorial department. We receive individual CG elements or effects elements and animated characters from the upstream departments and then we combine everything and enhance it and make it look pretty. Our primary compositing software is Nuke by The Foundry. And Weta has also developed their own tools in Gizmos, for example a suite of deep compositing software tools. We also work with EDI, if you've heard of that package. It's mainly used for simulating smoke and fire within Nuke and it's really fast and super handy. This is an example of how a Nuke script can look like. This is from one of our shots from Shang-Chi. It was a really big shot, lots of elements going into it. You can see on the left there that long narrow screen grab is the whole node tree for this shot and on the right is just a little extract, just a very small section of it that is highlighted just to see all the inputs and then the operator nodes, merge operations, grading, all sorts of stuff that we do to it and it all gets combined at the end. So you can see it's not based, the different streams support multiple channels and layers and you can plug in masks on the side and then you get this huge tree that can get quite complicated and tricky to manage for a big shot. To illustrate a bit more what exactly it is that we're doing in comp I would like to show you a breakdown clip that I'm particularly proud of it's the BS reel for Avengers Infinity War. Enjoy. Compositing made a major contribution to the overall look of the Titan sequences. All work was carried out in our deep compositing pipeline. In this full CG shot with its many volumetric simulations we had the flexibility to update elements on the fly if their timing changed without having to undergo an expensive re-render of the whole shot. Nuke particles were used extensively throughout the Titan sequences for floating rocks and embers. Compositors had access to a new volumetric simulation and rendering tool in Nuke called EDDI which meant that tasks such as ground dust sims that would otherwise have come from effects could be handled by a comp artist. Doctor Strange's cloak was CG apart from the collar on every shot. The cloak was blended into the collar element using a CG match move of Strange as a deep holdout. Lookdev rigging an animation of Strange's mandalas was done in comp. Sparks were generated using Nuke particles, and smoke was an EDDI compositing sim. Look dev rigging an animation of strangers mandalas was done in comp. Sparks were generated using nuke particles and smoke was an eddy compositing sim. Set extension work usually involved rotoing the characters off the set and replacing the plate environment with our CG Titan. Using a deep base setup to generate environment haze allowed for a standardized approach across multiple shots in these sequences, with the ability to control density and depth including sun influence and scattering. This shot required a significant amount of paintwork to rebuild areas of the plate where the characters are overlapping. CG suitwork for Iron Man and Spider-Man often required extensive paint and roto work. Integration of CG characters into live action footage used match-move derived deep holdouts in supporting roto. We developed a synthetic lens flare utility that generated flares very closely matched to those we got from the production's custom built anamorphic lenses. This enabled the flexible use of flares from any position on and off screen. This shot required removal of the actor's body and integration of a digi-double of Strange. The Strange time-slicing effect was comp-based, including an eddy volumetric smoke sim. Okay diving a little deeper into the comp department, I'd say the role, the compositing role is 50-50 artistic versus technical. Even though we're called artists, there are only limited creative freedom in the job. It's essential to have a good artistic eye, ideally from a background of fine arts or photography, but it's also important to understand the basics of computer graphics and programming and maths. Artistic direction is given by the filmmakers, the director and the VFX supervisors and the compositor's job is to execute their vision. However, probably related to the fact that we are considered to be one of the more artistic departments, there is a relatively high percentage of female crew, around 15 to 20% roughly, which is still fairly low, but higher than compared to other more technical departments. higher than compared to other more technical departments. What's interesting though is that women make up about 10% of leadership oriented roles in the compositing department. And when comparing those percentages across genders, women are not too far apart from men in terms of whether they hold leadership roles versus non-leadership roles so that's a good thing. I want to say that I'm not a believer in quarters I think roles should be filled by merit not by gender but even our clients nowadays requesting to work with more female leads and supervisors. So one of the reasons I'm doing this talk today is to maybe spark more interest in women for this kind of work who maybe didn't even know that these jobs existed like me when I was younger. jobs existed like me when I was younger. And that is that there can be very interesting careers in this field. The work environment is quite fast-paced and it's all in a very condensed timeframe. Like I said, we're at the end of the pipeline. Any delays from the departments upstream, late turnovers, delays from pre-production, editorial, animation changes, anything results in compositing time getting squeezed at the end. Often creative changes happen really late before delivery and the composers have to work efficiently to be able to address client knots and keep the render times as short as possible. Sometimes artists have to turn around multiple shot versions in a day. That means we have to be super flexible and our working hours towards the end of a project are really long usually. Working overtime is quite common. It's like part of the visual effects culture across the globe. In Vancouver, for example, I worked 52 days straight without a day off on one project. And most studios until recently didn't even pay overtime. And we're mostly contractors. Contracts are short, usually. There's very little regulation and the unstable nature of the industry and shifting timelines and small profit margins prevent the studios from keeping workers employed as staff. It's fair to say that VFX artists and probably compositors especially a very special breed of people who take the a lot of pride in their work sacrifice their life for movies they are excited about and as I said earlier we take all these bits that other people created and we put them all together and we are the last ones to touch the shot so in a in a sense we make it ours it's our baby before we hand it off to the client so it's yeah there's a lot of personal attachment to our work um and so it's been quite normal for partners to not really see each other for months on end in this line of work. And for many years, I had just accepted that I would not be able to have a family if I wanted to continue working in this role. I just finished up sipping on Infinity War when I got pregnant. And since working from home wasn't an option at that point, I assumed I would just return to work after maternity leave for, I don't know, two or three days a week, pick up random work here and there just to help out with QCs or some low-hanging fruit shots, but not do any significant work. And I thought I was okay with that. That's just how it was. I thought I wasn't going to be able to be a supervisor for many years, if ever at all. That was fine. So for the first three months after returning to work, that was just that, reduced hours, insignificant work, taking it easy. Weta had 48 hours to transfer all of their 1500 workers into working from home before lockdown would prevent anyone to enter the facilities. Remarkably, they managed to do it. It was an incredible effort by the facilities and IT team to set everyone up with remote workstations and equipment. And from day one of lockdown, the big wetter machine surprisingly just kept churning pretty much as usual. Who would have thought? It didn't really take much time to get used to the new situation, and we ended up delivering whole shows completely from home. This is a significant shift that Witter and the whole VFX industry suddenly was forced into, shift that Witter and the whole VFX industry suddenly was forced into. And it brought the realization that it is actually possible to work from home. And in some cases it's even more productive working from home than in an office and more cost effective. Time saved by long commutes, not having to sit through endless meetings in a conference room and you can just listen in while getting work done at your desk not getting disturbed by open power open plan office noise all that stuff that's all not unique to visual effects, but still applies. But the main thing that up to March 2020 had prevented home office for us was the film studio's strict security requirements, which were heavily audited. No content was allowed to leave the premises. Production networks segregation was in place. Access permission limitation, all sorts of stuff. And now the security measures that are put in place for remote work have proved to be successful. And this has opened up a whole new way of working with opportunities for individuals to work the way that fits the circumstances or personality best and therefore be more productive. Some people for example want to be home to see their kids for bedtime. Some people like to check on renders after dinner without having to drive back into the office. Some people might have a sore knee and can't drive but are still fine to work from home. Remote work has also proved to be more cost effective. For example a lot less people are now required to be on set for a shoot. Not just because only a small bubble is allowed but also because it's easy for the VFX soup to just zoom in. Another great thing is that we now certainly have access to talent that we usually wouldn't be able to hire because I don't know if they are in LA and they don't want to leave the US and don't want to come to a beautiful Aotearoa but now we can work with them remotely which is great. Obviously there are downsides to working from home. Some people are just not suited for it. They tend to fly under the radar and get distracted by things at home and others might work too much because they think they need to prove their productivity more again others need the daily ritual of putting on pants and getting a coffee on the way to work that kind of stuff there's also a lot of communication overhead that we noticed during our productions that um if half of the crew is on site and half is off site um there's extra time that needs to be taken into account to communicate the notes and the meetings and um it's just a huge difference like you kind of need an extra person just to deal with off-site crew and manage them onboarding is another thing someone not familiar with the winter tools and pipelines it's difficult for them to get into the groove of it if they're not there and having a buddy sitting next to them who can help them out. So yeah, even with all the communication tools available, nothing ever compares to talking face to face and spontaneous problem solving, like I said, at someone's desk or the good old hallway and water cooler chats. like I said at someone's desk or the good old hallway and water cooler chats. For me when I worked from home what I personally missed was just being with the team. In a leading role you kind of want to you know have a bit of fun and banter with them or just you know hang out in person and then also you want to see the pictures the pretty pictures that get created you want to see them on the big screen in the conference room not just on your tiny little computer screen because that's what makes us excited about it so for me personally it needs to be a mix of both but now the good thing is at least we get the option to choose and make it work for each personal circumstance. And the studios are now able to massively improve artists' work-life balance and increase productivity at the same time. I'd like to refer at this point to a very interesting discussion panel by John Petty Research in collaboration with the Visual Effects Society and the Foundry, recorded end of last year, where amongst others, one of our senior VFX supervisors, Eric Winquist, talks about the changes in the visual effects industry post-COVID in more detail. It's called VFX in 2021, what works, who works and what's changing forever. So I recommend checking out that link. The silver linings. For me personally, the silver lining of this horrible pandemic is that it made it possible for parents, mums like me, to work in a leading role because hours can be managed more flexible between office and home. Meetings can be listened to on the go. For example, I've attended meetings at the playground while pushing my daughter on the swing, for example. ground while pushing my daughter on the swing for example. And work can be done in the evening without having to leave the house. This for me was the most important part because pretty much every night I could be home, I could do bedtime and then I could tie up loose ends, just finish up my work from home without having to drive away. So when I was approached to soup again on Shang-Chi I was reluctant knowing that I wouldn't be able to work long hours with my daughter. She's three at the time she was only just over two when I started the project and she already goes to daycare five days a week so I didn't want to put any more strain on her on top of that and I also didn't want to lean on my husband too much because I didn't want him to sacrifice his work and his passion either so the deal was, or the experiment was, to try and have me soup part-time. Which at Weta still means something around the 30-35 hours mark. Nobody in the history of Weta has ever tried to do that. I love my job, I like souping. I wanted to give it a try and be the guinea pig and see how it goes. Also, we don't have any family here in New Zealand. Grandparents live in Austria and due to the COVID travel restrictions, nobody was allowed to come and visit us and help out so we had to rely on the help of babysitters and nannies and my husband and we had two nannies coming twice a week for a few hours in the afternoon that kind of thing and for long stretches of the project, especially at the first half and a bit, this was fine. I was able to do my job in less than 40 hours, which was great. But when it came to short delivery time, things started to get a little tricky, I have to admit. So here's a typical day in the life of a mummiviser. A comp soup mum, 9am drop-off child and attend the first meeting at the daycare parking lot. Then meetings all morning until lunchtime. Then from 12 to 2, the quiet hours, that was my time that I actually got any work done at my desk. More meetings in the afternoon, reviews, send-offs, dailies, and then pick up my daughter, bring her home, feed her, then the nanny would come play with her for a couple of hours while I could do more work from home. And then after bedtime After bedtime, from 8.30 on to the wee hours, I would just work from home. Again, do QCs, that kind of thing, which was quite exhausting, especially because QCing is a type of work that needs a lot of concentration. And your eyes get pretty tired after 10 o'clock in the evening so yeah it was a hard thing to do and it was far from ideal and then with crunch time I had to end up relying on my husband a lot more because client calls would start nine in the morning and all of a sudden yeah he had to do daycare runs and help me out even more um yeah and doing that six days a week um yeah it was hard um the project itself was challenging um and the crew resources were especially tricky because New Zealand borders are still closed to anyone who is not a New Zealand resident or citizen. So finding crew was tricky, especially on short notice. And yeah, I would, working on Shang-Chi with my circumstances was probably the hardest thing I've ever done in my life. But I think the end result is worth it. I'm unfortunately not allowed to show any material of it yet, but I suggest you go and see it in the cinemas. Would I do it again? Yes, I would, but maybe not like this. Ideally, I would share the job with a second person, if that is at all possible, crew-wise, just to reduce the number of shots to look after and, for example, alternate late-night cover, etc. cover etc what i personally take away from the experience is that you just have to put enough all back people in place and make sure that you are not the one person everybody else relies on so that means leaning on the leads more than I would probably usually do. And then in turn, they would have to pass on lead type tasks to more senior compositors, which can be a good thing because then they learn that job too. Also communication as always is super crucial. It's just important to set everybody's expectations straight. From the get-go, production or the team, the crew just knows your working hours. I would just say, okay, on these days, I'm available from 9.30 to 4.30, anything outside these hours. I will try to check my iPhone but if I not respond please talk to the leads for example. Yeah I'm not saying juggling family life with a young child and a senior visual effects role is easy. No it's not. But it is possible and with good planning and good communication. Weta supports that because there's just a lot of talent out there that would otherwise be lost. So I want to encourage new moms or caregivers, dads with young children to not simply accept that they have to revert back to low level tasks, but instead ask how a studio can support them better. So what's changed? Currently, there's a lot of traction in the visual effects industry in efforts to support and improve gender and cultural diversity, personal well-being, inclusion and equal opportunities, especially after MeToo and media reports of toxic work cultures, bullying and sexual harassment. There is a big movement happening at the moment. At WETA that means, for example, including te reo Māori language in a day-to-day communication, I'm still learning, WETA pride groups and events, women's committees, parent network, a brand new code of behaviour and a parental leave policy that we didn't have before, just to name a few. So these are all great steps in the right direction to break down old behavioural patterns. While working as an artist in visual effects will never be a 9-5 job, and the filmmakers will always dictate the pace and the craziness of a project. With working from home and the new incentives I just mentioned, we now have the tools to find a better work-life balance for artists that we never had before. Hopefully everyone is seeing the benefits of working from home and film studios and VFX houses will continue to allow it as an option once this virus is under control and life returns back to normal. Okay, thank you all for watching. I hope you enjoyed my little presentation and I will see you all at the Q&A. Bye! Yeah hello and welcome back after the talk. We are now at the Q&A session with Sabine Leimer and yeah we are super happy to have a live chat to New Zealand. Hello Sabine. Hi from Wellington. Great to have you here on the show. Yeah so there are some questions we have. Shoot. So shall we start with just a few of them or do you want to intend something? Okay so yeah we have some questions in the chat and I also have some here already prepared. So maybe I think I start with one that we briefly talked about before. This question of, yeah, composing means that you bring all the elements together and it's such a crazy amount of data you have to to work with so how can you stay focused on that and what's the trick behind it to get that overrun um try and stay tidy not create a noodle salad if possible um yeah we have I've come across artists that work in spirals and this is not great obviously, if you have to hand over a shot. Usually we only have one artist working a shot at the time, but you know, sometimes people get too busy and they have to hand it off for whatever reason. And yeah, the main thing is to be organized yourself. We always keep still pen and paper, write lists of what you need to do. We have certain tools to keep you on track, obviously as well, but yeah, stay tidy, stay neat, and then things should flow pretty easily. Okay. So we talked about this before, but I will ask once more, how many people are working on show or let's say a shot you said, there's just one person that is responsible for one shot. Ideally, yeah. But you have scenes cut into each other and I guess people, different people working on different scenes that are then composed in the shot together or in the scene. So how do you keep the consistency between these different looks or how to be aware of the look? Yeah, usually we try if possible to assign shots of the same angle to the same person. So if there's a lot of them, it can get a bit boring. But yeah, if there's the same shot of someone talking, you usually get the same person to do it. So there's a little bit of copy and paste and it's faster to work that way. And then obviously the lead or the supervisor, they have to look after continuity. So we have tools to compare shots, to build contact sheets, and compare if the colors are right, and everything works together across the sequence. And then obviously the VFX supervisor checks everything at the end as well. We have a comment here from Elmar Glaubauf, who's a visual effects guy I know. Huge respects for managing the great result of Shang-Chi. Oh, thanks. I haven't even seen it yet. Okay. He seems to have a little head here. How do you cope working with junior talents in remote situations? This also leads to the question that we maybe discussed before, how to discuss exquisite details. What is, what is, yeah, what can you do? Yeah, on Shang-Chi, I was a bit lucky. I didn't have that many remote people to work with. And the ones I had were actually quite senior people. So they were fairly easy to deal with. But we see across the board now with New Zealand's borders still being closed, we can't hire anyone from external. We've got a lot of shows on the go. So we have to get people from overseas and not all of them are like just the most senior people most experienced and especially if they haven't worked at Weta before they don't know the pipeline they don't know the proprietary tools it's yeah it's the onboarding process is definitely more involved now we've got a really good trainer for compositing and for all the other departments as well they've put together a lot of material for onboarding and then i think we even have a buddy system but obviously it's not the same as you have someone sitting next to you that has worked here for a while and can show you the little tricks and details of how things work. So yeah, there's a lot more management involved with those people and we have to make sure that we communicate with them even more than you would normally do. Just through calls, face-to-face calls if possible. And in a review situation, it's, it's tricky because usually people are a bit intimidated if they are like big conference room with the supervisors and all the senior people and everybody tries to hide in a corner. now with everything being online people don't want to turn on their cameras maybe because they're a bit scared of actually showing their background or whatever they're wearing so it's just really important to see the face and on with my team, when I do regular catch-ups with people, I try to actually encourage them to turn the cameras on and then also show them around with my laptop the people that were in the room actually on site so that they can actually see their team members. And then through that, they can actually make connections and ask a bit more freely and maybe not be so scared to ask questions yeah okay yeah allow this so uh victoria wolfersberger asks thank you for the great insight what do you like the most about working at vita digital as well as living in new zealand when you when you compare it to other production companies you've worked for, I'm not sure. Yeah, I've worked at a few places and Witter was just the one that stuck with us. We just like living here. It's a good work-life balance. London is great when you're young, but maybe not ideal if you want to have a family and live in a tiny flat that is super expensive and you can't go anywhere. Here in New Zealand, it's, I know it's very far away from everything, but at the same time, this can be a good thing. I prefer the calm and the quiet, but for some people it's too small. Like I've had people work and live here that left because for them wellington was just too much of a little village um yeah weta for me i love the know-how that is there um there's a lot of research going on a lot of um yeah new technologies coming out all the time um um it's very very talented people um lots of very senior people that have worked in the industry for a very long time and they actually really know what they're doing and there's so much to learn so yeah at the moment i don't want to be anywhere else that's great um yeah another question that have shown up is how do you keep your skills up to date you talked about it do you get time at rita to study stuff or is it on daily basis um yeah like i said um you get an overview in the onboarding process um but then you kind of have to keep up with it a little bit yourself all the material is available internally there's lots training material videos um tutorials all that sort of thing um but it's there's just not that much time when you're working on a show to do anything else so it's usually in between projects when you're just ramping off something and ramping on the next project and if you get a couple weeks in between where it's a bit more quiet then yeah this is a good opportunity to catch up on things we do um sort of monthly meetings where people show their latest tools that they wrote um but those meetings always kind of drop off a little bit when everybody's super busy um so yeah um there is a big emphasis on training obviously i'm doing some training at the moment as well um and yeah there's always so much to learn yes like we all know so uh one thing that i also wanted to ask is uh what would be your advice your advice to younger people that try to get on the same journey that you decided to do um uh basically just um watch movies as much as you can watch breakdowns of movies they're all on youtube um befores and afters how things are put together um buy a camera take photos make videos play around with it, look at the environment around you, look at how clouds move, look at how shadows move, what materials reflect, all that sort of stuff, just keep your eyes open, and then, yeah, once you kind of have the artistic side of things down, Yeah, once you kind of have the artistic side of things down, everything else you can just learn. You can always, all the tutorials are available. The software will come after that, I'd say. Okay, yeah. Yeah, there are questions. I'm not sure if I can really, my questions here would be, if I may ask one more. Where do you think all this, My questions here would be, if I may ask one more. Sure. Where do you think all this, your composition and so on, would head in the future? Is it even possibly necessary to get it more realistic, whatever this means? Well, when I look at it, there's always things we can do better. Maybe not so much visible for the general public, you know when you look closely there are always things that could be better and um more efficient uh it's all about you know it's a business it's a service that we do so we always try to make things more um easy to do faster cheaper uh to make more money so yeah there's always things to improve goes ahead i mean you're uh you're in your uh i'm saying you're special yeah i'm saying in visual effects it really relies on realism whatever this means so often it's about how sound and visual impact come together it doesn't have to do anything with realism in the real world so um is there something where you think about okay stylized animation could be interesting or so or are you really totally on this realism um me personally personally I'm the most happy when you can't see what I've done um yeah I'm I'm more on the photoreal side of things personally but um we have also ventured into some more um really in your face effects magical things um more abstract things. I mean anything Marvel is always bombastic in all the colors. So yeah, for me I'd prefer something a bit more subtle. But yeah. Okay. Yeah, so I guess we are running out of time, but I'm really happy that you could answer all these questions. I'm super glad that you found the time to talk to us. So we wish you a very nice evening at New Zealand and thanks a lot for joining in. Thanks so much. Thanks for having me. So, yeah, next up, we had a little time shift because of the Q&A. Next up is Annegret Richter and she holds a talk on issues that Sabine already mentioned, the troubles people get into production with the COVID pandemic situation. And she made this research on this topic. So see this data, see what she has to tell about it. And it's a more serious talk about the real advantages the production side had. Good morning, everybody. I invite you to my presentation with the title, A Look at the Good from the Bad. How the COVID-19 pandemic positively changed work life for women in animation in Germany and beyond. I'm sure many of you might think positive changes from a pandemic and especially for women? No way. And yes, I'm aware of that women and families with kids are not seen as the winner of the pandemic, not in Germany and anywhere worldwide. However, I wanted to find out how and what had changed for them in a positive way. I had a look on the situation of women in the animation scene in Germany and talked to several people about it. And in May 2021, I hosted a panel at the International Trick Film Festival in Stuttgart, where I interviewed four women from different areas in the industry on that topic of their experience since March 2020. In our conversations, we found out several aspects that had changed for the better in the industry itself and for women in particular. And I will show you a picture of our talk. yeah we so in our conversations we found out several aspects that had changed i'm aware of that some of the positive changes that work for women to also apply to all people working in animation industry not just women but that is a good thing however my focus here in this presentation is on the situation for women. Another factor should also not be unstated. Many of the changes involve family life, so partners play a big role in the fact if and how the situation had a positive spin for the women. So please let me explain why I think that many women in animation in Germany profited from the lockdown measurements in spite of all the additional burden it brought and why they hope that some of the transformations might be permanent. When the COVID-19 pandemic hit the world at the beginning of 2020, many things changed at work and in families. And things changed quickly. In Germany, the lockdown was installed on March 16, 2020. on March 16th, 2020. And for many people, companies and families, this came out of the blue because the situation before seemed to be under control. Some of you might recall the Berlinale Film Festival where life seemed to be on normal terms with big meetings, parties, celebrations, and no masks. A month later, everything in Germany came to a halt to save people's lives and stop the virus from spreading. The industry had to adopt with people working from home, families had to cope with closed schools and homeschooling, and everything had to be installed quickly in a digital way. So in April and May 2020, the German animation association AG Animationsfilm did a short survey among people who work in animation. We wanted to know how people cope with the situation, how it influenced their work. As in many other industries worldwide, everything came to a halt in animation. Many companies thought the lockdown would only last for two weeks and so production were postponed. In our survey, 23% of the people stated that their projects had been cancelled or put on hold for unknown time. I will show you the statistics. And 20% of animation freelancers said they had less job offers when the work at cultural institutions like theaters, opera houses, or the live action film production stopped completely, and they had also less assignments with other industries. Especially TV series that were not yet in production were put on hold. Broadcasters did not decide on projects and founding institutions delayed their decision process. Bigger international co-productions were put on hold as well or had a problem continuing when they were in the middle of animation production because Asian subcontractors could not deliver the needed work. However, after the first paralysis, the animation industry in Germany and also worldwide adopted really fast to the new situation compared to other industries. It was due to the circumstances that they had already a lot of experience in working remote and they had digital pipelines through the international co-production. Many people had worked with digital conferences before, and projects that were already finished with the animation process accelerated the introduction of new digital ways to continue with post-production. Dora Meersmann, who works as director and scriptwriter for the German preschool TV series Bobo Siebenschläfer, a series co-produced with WDR, she stated, and I will show you that. Gladly, we had finished with animation and we were in the state of audio post. However, because of the lockdown, many actors could not come to the studio, but we found a remote system how to work the audio post, which before we never even thought of. Through the tools, the production was even faster than if we had done it offline. She also stated that working with commissioning editors that are often involved in many parts of the process became much easier when everyone was working at home. All of a sudden, scheduling meetings was not difficult anymore. Nobody had to travel a complete day just for one meeting. She also stated that most of the digital conversations were more effective because it was just more straightforward talk due to the limited time of the conferences. During lockdown, the broadcasters were also in need of more content because of the lockdown. There was just more demand for shows for preschool kids and school kids. So keeping on good terms and speeding up the production was a win-win situation for the broadcaster and the producer. Maite Vohkertocal producer at Telescope Animation and at Ella Film had just started with production of the animation feature film, My Fairy Troublemaker. Even though the production was on hold for a couple of weeks, it was really easy to put up a remote setup. But for the creative process, they also tried to bring people back in the studio. They did so by making it a bigger studio and to install intensive hygiene plans. Here she said the funding institutions helped to finance extra costs especially since animation takes such a long time to produce and they could work and continue production compared to live action for example. So people worked remote and could go to a safe studio if needed. That actually showed a shift in mindset in many studios in Germany and also worldwide while coping with the first lockdown in March 2020. All of a sudden it was possible to work remotely. It was possible for people in all parts of the production. Not many companies in Germany did offer that opportunity before. Elisa Plotchaniak-Alvarez, a young freelance animation filmmaker who had moved to another city shortly before the lockdown set. I lived in Leipzig. My production was in Ludwigsburg. I will show you that. Just a minute. I lived in Leipzig. My production was in Ludwigsburg, and before, when we worked remote and everyone else was in place together, it felt awkward not to be present in the studio. But now, everyone worked from home and everyone was in the same situation. It was also easier for freelance animators to find work in productions. Working remotely was possible before, but not all companies did it, because they wanted to bring the people on board and create the creative studio team spirit. And of course with animation it is much more difficult to establish and work a pipeline when you have a lot of dailies. You do need good tools for feedback and communication that in most companies still had to be implemented. Big challenges but they were there are things possible now that nobody thought before they would work. Tiffany Feeney, who's the founder of Talent Outpost and recruits people for animation projects of all kinds worldwide, she said it took studios about six months of transition time to see how to work the pipelines and get everyone comfortable with remote work. Especially bigger studios who worked for licensed content and sensible IPs had to follow intensive security protocols and massive rules and regulations and include them in their infrastructure when allowing remote access to their systems. It was important that the system would be intact and nobody would compromise the project. However, one year later, working remote seems to be the new normal. Maite Wockerk, for example, is setting up a new studio for a new project in Hamburg, which will be actually be a completely remote studio. And she said that she was thinking about it before the lockdown, but actually the lockdown accelerated her decision to do so. Since remote work has become more normal, it not only offers more possibilities of jobs without relocating to a new city, but also helps young mothers. Because without fixed office hours and commuting time, they could now participate in jobs they had to refuse before. Dora Meersman said that before the lockdown, especially women with small kids had to stop working completely in the business because they could not manage to go to the studio and commit full time to a project. Now the work can fit better to their lives and because most people tested the remote work situation it is much more accepted now. With kids around remote work also implements a shift of hours and work in your home compared to the office. Because you can shift your work hours slightly to times when you have support from your partner or when the kids are sleeping and you don't have to fulfill a nine to five job. Here another aspect of the lockdown comes to light. When working from home, all of a sudden other people living in your household could see what you are doing in your job. It was much more transparent to kids and partners to see what your other life, your job life was about. And in the best of worlds, that would give you some empathy and understanding, for example, you some empathy and understanding, for example, when you had a really stressful day and they would know why and could more understand on the end of the day. A survey from the Allensbach Institute for Demoscopy that was carried out in April and May 2020 among 1,500 parents with kids under 15 years showed no significant signs of systematic extra burden for women to the situation before, which is not necessarily good though. And I will show you the statistics. For 59% of the parents, nothing in child care to the situation before the lockdown but 20 percent and that is a good thing with 20 percent of the families stated that the situation even changed for the better and they organized the child care on equal terms between partners during home office and home schoolinging. So in many families, the appreciation for the job of the partner and for the intensity of childcare was now a mutual thing. Elisa Plotcheniak-Alvarez added another aspect. She said she and her partner shared childcare equally between morning and afternoon shift, but with a kid at home, she still had less time during the day altogether. However, time became more precious and she would focus much better on what she really wanted to do. Tiffany Feeney said everybody being at home even helped in business meetings. Before and I give you the screenshot again. Before COVID, we all had different roles depending on whom we interact with, the business role, the mom role, the friend role, and so on. Now that you live in this COVID bubble in the household, your partners and your coworkers are seeing all the versions of you that you are aware of, but they did not see where the blurred lines crossed over. And that is something to be appreciative of, and many of you might relate to. Remembering the times when a kid crashed your digital conference and it was a disaster and everyone was like, oh no, a kid in the meeting. now there is much more understanding for what it means to be at home because we all have a life around us even when we are in a video conference so that is something to know. But, and that is the good thing, it accelerated many processes that would have taken much longer without the pressure of a lockdown. So what are the good things? I have a screen. First of all, the shift in the mindset of studios. There we go. First of all, the shift in the mindset of studios. Remote work is now something that will become the new normal in many studios. It does not mean that all animation studios work has to be remote, but that it is possible to do so. Studios now have the technology and the experience and even the security protocols for remote work. People experience that it is possible to work remote and still develop in-depth relationships over Zoom, even if you never meet your co-workers in person. However, it is agreed on that animation is a team sport and people look forward to meet in person again. Second, work and family. Being able to take up work on a remote base and stay in the job that you like, share your talent and your experience, even if you're a young mother, that is a great step forward. To be able to join a project that you're interested in without relocating or long commuting times, that offers you much more opportunities as a woman and also as men, and it gives you more flexibility to organize your family life. more flexibility to organize your family life. Third, less traveling. Not only families profit from the digital meetings and less travels. While many of us are looking forward again to participate in on-site festivals, events, and presentations in animation, it is agreed on that many meetings can now easily put up digital instead of having someone traveled for many hours. And another positive side effect, you can keep your carbon footprint low. Fourth, appreciation for all aspects of your life. Appreciation for all aspects of your life. Digital conferences are normal for everyone and it is normal that you sit at home. It is easier to relate to co-workers and conference partners when everyone is in a familiar environment and it is easier to relate to each other's situation of life. Interruption by kids or your family or someone calling or ringing the bell are much more normal to everyone now. And even your partner at home might become more appreciative of what you do in your job and support you. Fifth, time is more precious for all of us. When working at home, you have different roles to fulfill in one place and you have to spend your time wisely. So time management became even more important in the past two years, not only to clarify who takes care of the kids and when, but also to schedule your online meetings. And online conferences now have a certain time limit. Many conferences before went way longer than intended, and it was hard to leave without feeling guilty for not staying on when you're in a conference room. Now it is not rude to drop out of a digital conference when the scheduled time is over because time is precious to all of us and we all learned that boundaries are necessary. Also, it became much easier to state conferences with, let's say, commissioning editors or officials in institutions because they are now also often working from home and they are also now keeping to their schedules and meetings. So to wrap up, the COVID-19 pandemic, and I'm trying to show my face again. So to wrap up, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated several processes in the industry that many of us thought not to be possible before. People had to think of new ways of working together. For the animation industry, one can say it worked for the most parts and had also a positive aspect for the life of women in animation. But one aspect did unfortunately not change. The lockdown did not accelerate a rise in the wages for women in animation. So thank you very much for listening and I'm looking forward to all your questions. So hello and welcome to the Q&A with Anniket Richter. So we got live here from, I guess, Germany. Hello, welcome. Hello. Nice to be here. Welcome. So, yeah, thanks for your super interesting talk about the situation the animation industry came into with the pandemic. So maybe we can point out some more perspectives on that or questions that came up. So, first of all... Was ist weg? Ah, das Fenster muss weg, Entschuldigung, sonst zieht das jeder da und. So, jetzt sind wir frei zu sprechen. Alles klar, das ist live, so gehört sich das. Gut, ja, one thing that came up and also Sabine Leimer did mention it, this co-workers from all over the world. So is this a thing that's coming up and does it work? Do you have any ideas about that? Well, remote work was possible before for some projects, depending on what kind of job you had. But what lots of people don't know, and Tiffany Feeney in our discussion always pointed it out, is that to be able to work remote with a company that's not based in your country, this company needs to have something, like a dependency in your country, otherwise you're not allowed to work. So there has to be some relations to your country in order to connect with the company. So you can't just go and work for the US as a freelancer if you don't have a company that is having a relation to a US company. And so this is something you can't just work with everyone worldwide remote. Technically, it would be possibly on a legal way. It's not. Okay. But this could mean that there is a lawyer somewhere that holds kind of the cooperation or does it have to be a real office? Often it works over the company. you have a company taking on contract with a client and then you contract with this company based in your country and then you're basically working for a big project say in the US, Marvel, Disney, Pixar, but you work with it through a German company, for example. Okay, well, cool. So another question that came up and I also asked Sabine about it is the studying time because software always have to be up to date, new processes are getting involved. So people have to study a lot to keep themselves up to date. Is this something that within the pandemic was even possible at this time or what is something that just came to a halt because people were stressed with everything and also had to do the job could they study and was it necessary maybe you know something about that we didn't talk explicitly about it but with the animation crowd it's a little bit different maybe with the VFX where technology really has a fast pace in innovation. That's more about techniques and being used to certain things. And you learn a lot on doing a certain job. So when you start a project, you have to be comfortable with the software and the processes, and then you learn everything on top of it. So it's more of, have you started a new project in the pandemic time? Then it might be difficult to combine the learning and the production process. But if you were already in production, I think this was not a problem. Yeah, for sure. production process, but if you were already in production, I think this was not a problem. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I already mentioned it, the problem, do you know anything about freelancing and software problematics? Is this solved in a, how to say, in a legal manner? Sabine already pointed it out, the security protocols were the most difficult part for all the bigger companies, not to compromise the project for the clients. And of course, they had to install the software for the people who needed to work on certain aspects. Often that was differently from company to company. Often they already had a lot of licenses for software. But to secure the access to the images and the IP security, this was even much more difficult than actually putting everything on a table to work on the project. So do you know something about quality management in production? It's a big issue, I guess. Yeah, it wasn't, well, animation is a creative process and then it's actually also a team process, especially when you work for a bigger studio and a company, not when you're a filmmaker and you like working on your own, then it's different. But often, and that's what a lot of producers said, they are missing sitting in a studio and answering questions that come up right away. So now you had to find different ways of communicating with each other. It was totally, I mean, you really had to find different tools and how to also manage questions so that they would not become a big challenge or a problem. And you had to see it even not seeing the people that might have the problem. So this was definitely a big challenge for people and supervisors in the studios. And they had much more telephone conferences and calling up people and just asking, how are you doing? Something you would usually do when you go to a studio and in the morning with a cup of coffee you just ask people how that day was and how the day is and how they're feeling and if everything is going well but now you really have to call them and ask explicitly is there anything wrong? Can I help you? So this is much more communicating way differently. But one thing that I want to point out also, I think the communication process is also, because they change, they help people to understand what it, for example, means to lead a conference. I have heard from different people that they said, when we have the conference, we changed the person who would host this conference. So everyone would be in the role of managing all these questions and comments that come up. And that gave a different idea of what it means to hold a team together. And this is something that also builds up team mentality and strength. So everybody has to have the sensitivity for what exactly. Well, the job of the other person, also for the job of the supervisor, for example, or the leader of the team. Because when you change roles in the team and this is something that not only in animation but also in different other industries happens that if you take up different roles and you change your perspective you just appreciate what the other people is doing. talk about is what the unsecurity of jobs um have there been some problems have you heard about it that you start working on a project and suddenly the budget is gone and and everybody goes on a hold um you talked about it um yes we did uh with with the animation industry in germany uh talking about tv series that often um uh connected with a tv station, a broadcaster in Germany or feature films. In Germany, films are often in general fully financed before you start working on the project. So they have the budget, they know what to do and during the pandemic uh you even got they even got money to put up the hygiene plan and uh cover things that that came on top because of certain security aspects um so no i haven't heard any uh one saying that a bigger project had to be cancelled that a bigger project had to be canceled or put off. They had delays because of switching from a studio mode to putting everyone remote because nobody knew in March 2020 what would happen. Totally. Yeah, I heard some things from America that people work that, you know, suddenly everything came to a halt and they had real troubles. But okay, this is fine. Yeah, and Europe financing of projects is a little bit different. So you usually secure the finance or the budget before you start the production. Otherwise, some of the funding procedures wouldn't even work because they rely on a closed financing strategy okay everything fine yeah we are running out of time i guess so i thank you really a lot for your talk and for the q a and thanks for having me here maybe see us at the etfs or something like that real in real life face to face thank you and thanks for everyone listening. It was a pleasure to participate. Thank you. Have a nice weekend. You too. Bye bye. Bye. So and now we are back on track. Next talk will be held by Tobias Trebelia and he's a very talented animator and visual artist so to say. So have fun, see you at the Q&A. Hi there, hope you're doing okay. My name is Tobi Trebelliar and welcome to my talk. I am a concept artist and filmmaker and I currently live in Leipzig, Germany, where I mostly freelance. future-to-be company called Blaupump & Mose that I co-founded about a year ago with my good friends Karol Ratajczak and Elisa Pluczeniak-Alvarez. I've been working in the wider field of VFX and entertainment industry for roundabout 20 years at this point and I collaborated on films such as Klaus for the Spar Studios, Lego Movie 2 and a variety of Clash Royale short films, as well as trying to be my own filmmaker and artist. Today, I would like to talk a little bit about the winding way that got me where I am now, because it was definitely not a straight one, and what I learned along the way and hopefully also about some helpful tips that hopefully helps you realize project on your own when it comes to being in the industry and trying to do your own stuff on the side. Because when I look back at my life so far, I noticed that during different times in my life, I tended to have different motivations for creating things. I would say that now that I'm age 34, my reasons for pursuing any project are a lot different from what they were back when I was 15 when I started working and that is going to be a major focus point for this first part. In the second part of my talk I would like to address some techniques I have picked up over time to keep myself working on my own stuff next to having a job. Honestly, that works sometimes better, sometimes worse. I think we all can all relate. But I keep trying. So that's all one can do, right? And finally, so that this is not just like me rambling on about things, I will do a very quick doodle in Photoshop, a little color doodle. And maybe while doing that, talk a little bit about my methods when it comes down to throwing an idea down very quickly and easily. Also, and I would really like to emphasize this, this is not supposed to be a talk where I tell you that you have to like push yourself to the limit every day, stand up at 4.30 in the morning, go work out, go run, and then like work for 16 hours straight every day, seven days a week. In my opinion, there's already a lot of talks that do this, that tell you those things, mostly American talks. do this that tell you those things mostly american talks and um they are good and fine definitely but i would like to focus on something else today which is rather how to maintain a little bit of fascination for what you love doing and for being creative especially um especially when it's your job right this is important because it can feel like a chore sometimes right like when you're working in the industry you try to do something in your own time can be hard maybe not if you're that incredibly lucky person that works on something professionally that is totally rad and amazing that you can 100% stand behind creatively and morally. But let's face it, it's kind of rare, isn't it? For example, I personally, I'm a huge fan of horror media. I just love it. Movies, books, podcasts, you name it. But in the world of professional animation, it's kind of rare to find those subjects, mostly like children's entertainment, right? So you have to make do with what you have. So first of all, some things about myself and my motivations throughout the times. I specifically want to talk about the motivations because I believe it's important for whatever you want to do to become aware of why you're doing it with creative endeavors maybe more than anything. I was born in Germany in the year 87. I cannot remember ever not drawing and painting, mostly drawing early on. And that early on in life, when you're like three, four years old, that is the purest form it can be, right? You just do it for fun. It's the joy of painting, literally. And I did it a lot. It was my motivation but as I got older I noticed that no matter where I would go I would always be the kid who draws best of all and with increasing social contacts a second motivation came in I could define myself through it right it's very nice to be the best at something especially when you're a super nerdy kid like I was so second motivation comes in here and let's call it the need to be seen right to be recognized for what you do so the first forays into project work in quotation marks was some video game that I wanted to develop with an old friend of mine from the Boy Scouts when I was about 11 or so. Of course, that didn't go anywhere. But hey, it was sure nice to be a part of something that's bigger than you. I had never really thought about a career or anything that point of time. Wanted to become a diver, I think, back then. But when I was 13 years old, a schoolyard acquaintance slipped me a copy of a popular 3D modeling software and I was hooked. Now, another motivation came in very soon was technical fascination. I just wanted to see and experience what I could squeeze out of that piece of clunky software back in the days. And with that newfound fascination, when our first mandatory school internship came up, a couple of months later, I applied at the Fraunhofer Institute for Graphic Data Processing in Darmstadt, next to where I grew up, and they took me. And I learned a little bit more about animating and modeling and voila, the next two years I spent buried in my new 3D toys and trying to get better at them. Now in that time something else happened. That was the release of the first Lord of the Rings movie. And I had always been a huge fan of the books, mind you. But with those films came the concept art, especially of two artists called John Ho and Alan Lee. And I was absolutely mesmerized by that art. I crystallized a new motivation one that I don't really have anymore nowadays and that I maybe miss more than anything else and I will call this one the land far far away. Don't get me wrong I still love that stuff, the fantasy things, but the feeling back then was that i wanted to be in those worlds so badly that i think i thought my heart would break right it was almost unbearable and as i said it was a super nerdy team that was of course also the time where tabletop rpgs and medieval markets came in for me and what i did i picked up watercolors. I barely touched my computer for about two years and it was all in search for this land far far away feeling right. When I was done with school I was still a lot in that mindset and when looking for things to study, I found that there wasn't really anything that suited me, that catered to my tastes. There was classical art studies that was a bit too minimalist and back then too politically charged for my liking. And when talking about graphic design or illustration, they seemed to focus too much on like web design and typography and I wasn't interested in that right I wanted to do this awesome fantasy art with dragons and what have you. So back then I was back at the computer again was publishing 2D 3D hybrid art in a variety of forums CG Talk for example and in fact I received a job offer from a small video game outsourcing studio in Bavaria called Virgin Lands Animated Pictures and I took that job. So now I was independent finally, but only after I moved on to became a freelance artist about two years later in Hamburg. I found one of the biggest motivators in adult life finally and that is the need to make money with your creative output. Which I didn't do very well at, I gonna be honest here. It was several years of living from hand to mouth pretty much. What I did as side projects during that time was not much as well, mostly some assorted fantasy art. And I think I was still trying to capture that land far, far away feeling. But soon I had to realize that it wasn't the same anymore. I had lost this, the feeling for it that I had. And there was a void inside of me where this feeling had once been, and I didn't know how to fill that void back then. Finally, in 2013, I made the decision to go study after all. It took a while, but I did it. And this decision was mostly born out of the fact that I felt, when looking at those motivations that I couldn't fulfill any of my previously mentioned ones, right? There wasn't much joy in creating, I wasn't getting famous, technically there wasn't a big challenge in my day-to-day, the land far far away had been lost to adulthood and I truly didn't pay the bills. been lost to adulthood and I truly didn't pay the bills. So I enrolled at the Film Academy Baden-Württemberg which was in my opinion the best decision I've ever made in my life because it finally gave me a lot of those things I had looked for all those years. I graduated in 2019 after realizing several projects there were also met my current studio co-founders, Carol and Elisa. And nowadays I freelance still. I have a relatively secure income. I feel creatively challenged. And when I don't do this in my job, I know how to keep myself busy and like challenge myself in my private life. know how to keep myself busy and like challenge myself in my private life. Um, well, and it seems I'm doing it well enough that some Austrian folk want to hear me blab on about it. So I must do something right. I hope. Um, so yeah, this was my path so far. And, uh, we have to look back at it. There's some different motivations here. Right. we have to look back at it. There's some different motivations here, right? And I think it goes well to keep those in mind for whenever you feel lost and don't know why you're even doing what you're doing. Think back to those motivations and say like, okay, what is important for me right now? And the importance of those obviously may vary. Maybe one will go away throughout your lifetime but i would always keep in mind that they exist and they're each important and good in their own way and remembering them will be a great boon to anybody who wants to create. So let's now get into the second part where I want to talk a little bit about how to start a project and maybe even more importantly how to continue a project. Also, maybe a good note here. the perspective is of course my own. That is the perspective of somebody who is good at drawing and painting and in some ways animating also. Not so good in other parts of the filmmaking process and who mostly comes up with short films, right? If I have just free-form ideas, it's mostly short films that I'm thinking about. But I hope that these seven tips that I'm going to lay out here can be adapted to whatever your modus operandi is, whether you're a writer or somebody who deals with real-time graphics or what have you. So let's jump in with number one related to that, and that is start with what you're good at. So especially in film, you often hear the quote, story is king, with lots of people quoting the Disney and the Pixar writers to say that. And while I think that notion holds true for when you want to make an American feature animation film, I personally never found it particularly helpful to shoehorn myself into script writing. shoehorn myself into script writing. For one, I suck at it. And also, most ideas I come up with start from different points. They don't come from characters and conflicts between characters, but much rather from a feeling or the mood of a scene or even music or a certain kind of rhythm. I don't really think in words per se. And when I try as a first step in a project to write a script about my ideas, I end up with a bunch of clunky sounding descriptions of what's going on on screen. sounding descriptions of what's going on on screen and again I'm not a poet so those texts mostly fail to evoke the emotions that I had in mind in the beginning. What I can do though much more easily is draw or paint those moments. So my first step is always a rough storyboard or a free sketching session of whatever is in my brain. The script comes later for me. Mind you, this is the right way for me, I found out. What I want you to take away from this is that know what's the easiest way for you to materialize the core of your idea and choose that way. Don't try to write scripts just because Pixar tells you to. Onto number two, find out what motivates you. This can be a very hard point to know, as funny as it is. It taps into a bit into the classical notion of art as self-discovery, right? For me it took a tremendous amount of time to find out who I am as a creative person, as described earlier, and what my influences are. More concretely, I only got there when I went to the film academy. Schools have a certain way of forcing the issue that regards my experience, which is a good thing. They give you time to explore what makes you tick. And you can find that out the easiest way by looking back at the work you have already produced and see what unifies those things. you have already produced and see what unifies those things. For example, I'm interested in what I call a rhythmical filmmaking. Lots of things I have produced in the past, no matter if they're supposed to be funny and entertaining or if they're like dark and horrifying, They start similar to making a music track with a build-up, a hook, a refrain, and a crescendo and so forth. One of my favorite films when I grew up was a little flick called Asterix and Cleopatra which might have influenced that quite a bit because similar to what you would find in for example old Fleischer cartoons and opposed to all other Asterix films that one seems to have like an inaudible beat that runs through it right it's almost like it's timed on a metronome and all the actions on the screen seem to follow that even if there's no music in a scene. I love working like this from a rhythm rather than from a story point and when I run dry on ideas of don't know what to do it's really a good thing to refer back to that. Also and that is also both simple and hard just do what you love and don't be ashamed of it. Some of the things in the past few years I have enjoyed the most and I found the most rewarding was doing fan art, actually. Some for a podcast I love, for example, like the Magnus Archives, a fantastic horror show. I listen to an obscene amount of podcasts through my workday, so that comes naturally. amount of podcasts through my workday so that's comes naturally and for some youtubers i did some stuff and for some video games um for a youtuber called vati vinyam for like bloodborne spec thing and the positive feedback you get from those experiences and the joy that you bring to people with these i consider great motivators in my life and a big reason to keep going. Number three don't start at your computer. We all know the blank page right? You want to start something and there's an empty screen staring back at you. Really scary point. My tip for this is to never start anything while you're on the computer. I personally have a much easier time with the new tasks if I take my sketchbook and a few pens and I just go out into a cafe, sit down for a few hours, let my mind loosely circulate around the subject at hand, and try to capture what comes to mind. Those scribbles look mostly horrible and not nice to look at. And that's absolutely okay. They are just for you. They're not for the client or anybody else to see. Similar compared to when you write a note to yourself just to remember something and you have horrible handwriting, right? That nobody can decipher, but it doesn't matter because the note is just for you and as long as you can read it, then all that matters in this moment. And when you find a cornerstone, something to hang your hat on, so to speak, with the creative endeavor, I can then go home, get onto the computer and start translating those roughed out ideas into something more presentable in Photoshop or what have you. But that first step, it speeds up a lot the rest of the process to not do it at the computer. Number four, don't try to solve everything at once. So now you're getting started with what you're doing. And the worst thing, my experience, what you can do is trying to solve all the problems, all the creative questions at once. For example, a lot of my commercial gigs are production paintings, they're called. So it means artworks that in the best of all cases are meant to answer a bunch of questions for the production, right? Character design, set design, lighting, shading, composition, storytelling, you name it. If you're trying to keep this all in your mind at the same time while working on one of those, you're in for bad time. You are paralyzed by all those variables. So my advice is try to reduce the variables one by one. First sketch out some compositions just with stick figures and some very simple lines. Then try to design the actual characters. Then you gather references and design the set. And last, do color thumbnails to find out what the light situation should look like. All those steps can look very dirty and in fact it is beneficial when they look dirty. That way you won't spend a lot of time on them and fall in love with something because it just looks pretty and subsequently you won't feel bad. If an approach isn't working you can just throw it in the garbage and just move on to other things. Number five. Keep a sketchbook and don't stress out too much about it. So having a sketchbook can be great fun. I'm very bad at maintaining one lately, but I try and I have done so many of them in the past. The trick here is not to view it as a chore, in my opinion, but as something fun, a free space where anything goes. And I would advise you to treat your sketchbook like you would a diary. It's not for the public. It's for you. It's for your eyes only. Unless you want to share the contents, of course. And treating it like that will take a lot of pressure away for putting nice and flashy things in there that will gain you a lot of likes on Instagram or what have you. That's not the point of a sketchbook at all. It can be nice if you do something pretty, but no need. In fact, I've posted a series of images on Facebook a while ago that I called My Shit Sketchbook. It's an attempt to combat that need that I perceive of being perfect and displaying yourself and making yourself this larger-than-life figure when it comes to social media. Sketchbooks can be shit and they're a lot more fun for it in my opinion. A book that I highly recommend when it comes to these things is called Mut zum Skizzenbuch. I don't sadly know if there's an English translation on it. It's by Felix Scheinberger. And he describes a lot of those fun principles for keeping it going. And yeah, in the end, oftentimes when I feel uninspired or I'm out of ideas, I can open up one of my dozens of old sketchbooks and those weirdness dumps that I collected over the years. And more often than not, I remember those weird ideas and they can lead to new cool ideas. Well related to this number six social networks and what to do with them. While not all of your sketchbook belongs on Facebook some things do I think. When you have created something in Photoshop or in the sketchbook or whatever, that's actually cool to look at. It's like, oh, wow, that turned out nice. I highly recommend posting that on social media. The interaction that you get with people and the positive feedback that you get there can really help boost your morale when keeping yourself working. It's very good at satisfying this need for being seen, right, from the motivation chart. Just don't let it become an obsession. Try to see it as a morale boosting tool to keep you going in your endeavors and not as like a thing that has its own value per se. And relevant for people that are newer in job obviously being on social media can also massively increase your visibility to potential gigs potential clients and that brings me to number seven that is know when to share things with others at some point when you're developing something you will want to share your ideas with friends, with co-workers, with families, what have you. And I always make sure to pick the right time for doing that. An idea has to grow naturally. Like a very tiny plant when you expose it to the elements too much, it will not survive. Right? Tiny little tree and there's a thunderstorm coming, goodbye tree. I would make sure that when you get an idea that it's sturdy enough to weather a storm, if you want to have that way, before you get it out there into the world. And get it out you must because there will inevitably come a point where you're stuck and you need help. I think the right point for doing this is when you have made it clear for yourself what the central point of fascination should be with your idea and have at least produced one piece of art in the medium of your choice of the medium that you're good at that represents that fascination well so when you're an art person like a visual person like me one image one very cool looking image that sells it or when you're a writer a small treatment that captures people and say like hey this is why this idea is cool. And then when you're at that point, you have a solid base, you know what you want from this project, you can engage in constructive feedback sessions with people. Okay, one last thing I wanted to mention after those tips, there's a speech by John Cleese of Monty Python fame. You can find it on YouTube just by searching John Cleese on creativity. It is a relatively old one. I assume 80s, early 80s. But this speech is about an hour long. And in my opinion, it's like the smartest train of thought that I have ever heard anybody have about all those things that i just talked about right those kind of being creative things highly recommend watching that okay so we're gonna start with blocking in very roughly what we want to do and so putting in the head in here, some arms, the idea is to make sort of like a kid playing a guitar, a little bit of an Asian feel to it, on top of a little ledge. And at this stage in the painting process, I'm really not at all concerned with like details. This is literally just figuring out for myself what element will go where very roughly as i talked earlier about this is for me right this is not to show to anybody this is just a sketch for me and first pass is already done i'm gonna color it blue so i've I can draw the second pass on top of it and I find it very easy to figure out things and images if I keep this iteration process really really fast. So instead of trying to go straight from a very rough sketch to a more finished looking thing. I take, in this case, one step in between, but sometimes you can also take two or maybe even three steps, whatever you feel comfortable with. So I'm repositioning it a little bit. I'm not really married to any like layout for this image, specific aspect ratio. So at this stage, I feel free to reposition elements. This is also the beauty of this step that you're really not at all worried of shoving elements around, right? So you don't have to make sure that you have clean edges meeting each other. You can literally just lasso tool something out and shove it around so put putting some little antlers on her head there uh thought it might look fun and um yeah also here i'm going into the facial features uh again with that rough indication it's um it's it's just easy to put those things down and And also, yeah, here you see I'm shoving things around because I felt like that arm was a little bit too long. And yeah, you don't have to worry about stuff like when you're at this stage because you know there's going to be a third pass on top of it, right? And also I'm giving a little indication here of some sort of a background scene. It's going to be like a tree root with couple of mushrooms growing on top of it and now i'm just like finalizing that stage okay this is the second pass done same process as before i'm gonna color that blue to make it easier for me to distinguish my new drawing and now I'm gonna go into what will be the final line art stage of this artwork. At this point in real, not sped up time, I've spent around like seven or eight minutes on this. So it's really, really fast iteration process and it just helps you get going of like freeing you from this obligation to do everything perfect in the first place. Okay, so laying in some hair, some spiky hair, getting a little bit more detailed on the hands as well. Putting some things on the legs of what I want to do with the legs with like a little like a bandaging style stocking situation. And also now you see there's like distinguishable fingers. It was not in the stages before. Extending the canvas a little bit. And also I'm going to give some indication of what I want to do with the wall, right? Putting in some stones, putting in the proper antlers. And this is going to basically be the sketching stage of what you want it to look like when you present it to somebody, right? You want to show your first pass. This would be the first pass that you can show to somebody. Say like, hey, is that cool? Now I'm mirroring the image around a little bit. I found that very helpful throughout all my career because it gives you like a fresh look at your artwork, right? And now we come to the stage where we're blocking in the basic shapes. So I'm using the lasso tool here. If you hold down the Alt key, you can make heart angles even if you're in the lasso selection mode. And I'm basically just going gonna outline the girl and fill her with a specific color right so i'm gonna go over the antlers here and not the tree root because i want this to be separate from it make a new layer and boom there you have it this is just uh this is a very technical step i'm just not gonna go over everything here. I'm gonna make a little time skip here and I just go basically body part by body part or material by material if you want. Now I'm doing the skin for example and I give each one a different layer and a different color. Okay, and here we are with the final blocked-in colors for everything, right? And you notice it's not really skin tones or like the final tones of the cloth that I wanted to have. It's like the opposite. It's complementary colors. And the reason for that is when I start blocking in the proper color that I want, as I'm doing right here, I'm using sort of like a textured brush, this one here. It's kind of my go-to brush. And I want little pieces of this underlying blue hue to shine through. That gives the colors a lot more vibrance than if you just use the base color that you already want to have as your fill color. you just use the base color that you already want to have as your fill color and at this stage i'm just starting painting in those selections that i have made and taking care of some like very basic stuff like cast shadows i actually want the hair to be bluish here so i change the base color to yellowish and i use some blue to go over it as you see here and I go through that with all the different kinds of elements that I have going on here with the hat just like filling that in and I'm making sure that I define gradients right at this stage it's all about flat colors but also about how the color shifts in this flat right like you see here in the hair it's making gradient from dark to light on the tip of that hair the nose i haven't done this as an extra layer because at some point you have to make the decision what do you want to have on a separate layer and i decide okay i don't need the nose i want the eyes and the mouth okay i don't need the nose i want the eyes and the mouth distinct but the nose i'm perfectly fine just doing a lasso selection inside of this already existing layer and just painting in it manually so the eyes again complementary color i want them to be bluish in the end so i choose a orange sort of hue now as an underpainting and i'm very careful with too much shadow here so then very easy mistake to make especially when you're talking about cartoony characters but i found also in like realistic characters that you're overdoing the details in the skin right that you don't spend enough time with gradients, but go straight into little details like wrinkles around the eyes and stuff, especially when you're talking about young characters that can look very unsettling very quickly. And also I'm taking it very easy on the highlights. Another easy mistake to make is put too much highlights on the skin, make it look glossy or plastic. Skin is a very matte material. And yeah, you still see those little patches of blue shining in here and um i'm going ahead face is kind of more or less done i'm gonna revisit that later on and i'm gonna go to the cape i'm gonna give it a sort of yellowish tint and use this selection just to separate out basically what is shadow and what is light right this is like the very basic thing to do is to just make for every object it has two colors and a shadow color and the light color that's the most simple way you can define an object and i it's very helpful to remind yourself of that. And now we jump forward a little bit in time. This is the finished result of this pass of the coloration process. You see I made some light accents on the mantle. And I did the wall in the background with some nice green gradients. And here I go with a pass on top. Just basically putting one layer on top and start freehand drawing the detail pass right this is just lines for the most part and still using one and the same brush for the entire image I didn't change the brush once throughout this project and yeah it's like I think it's one of one of James Gurney's books where he says, when you want to display anything, you can break it down very easily in a flat and a line. This is what everything breaks down to. And I found it a very effective process to define a gradient and then put lines over it. It's a very simple way to basically fake details that are not actually there. simple way to basically fake details that are not actually there and for a cartoony look or if you want to just do a very quick color doodle like i'm doing right here this is perfectly suitable to just like indicate what is there right it doesn't have to be perfect it just has to convey the right idea i'm also making very heavy use of the color picker tool here. So when I'm making those strokes and extra details, I'm staying true to the colors that I put underneath beforehand in this project. Also, yeah, some extra details on the stones here with some light. And yeah, it's very easy. And here we see the final image so as you can see looks quite all right obviously not perfect but took me around 25 minutes or so in total added some moss there behind her and on the stones on this layer here and i also made an additional light layer using the hard light blend mode to set some additional light accents like at the rim lights on the hair or on the mushrooms and the tree in the background and yeah that was it this is a very very quick rundown of my process when doing color scribbles and I hope you guys enjoyed watching it and hearing me talk about it. So that was it, you guys. I hope you enjoyed the talk as much as I did making it for you. If you want to see more of my stuff, you can check me out at my website at tobytrebelliar.com. at tobytrebelliar.com or you can follow me on instagram at toby trebelliar or on facebook as well at toby trebelliar enjoy the rest of the conference and maybe see you sometime soon goodbye Yeah, and we are back. We are back. Yeah, we have now a Q&A with Tobi Trebellia, a very talented designer and animator, I would say. So we are happy to have you here. Hello, nice to see you. So yeah, thanks a lot for your talk. Quite impressive. Thanks for having me. Especially students will be super happy and other people who are professionals will see, okay, this guy knows what he's talking about. So really cool. So we have some, would have some questions. At the beginning, I have a very hard one. It's just one I would ask mostly any designer. Character stuff. Do you have an explanation why all characters are going to try to look the same? Not yours, but a lot of the things we see out in the world seems to be all out of the same world. Why is this? Do you have an idea? Are you talking specifically about characters that you see in like mainstream animated films for example like Disney and Co so everyone is really triggered by them and yeah okay I think the reason is because this is the case is because they're in the world that we live in today there's quite obvious monopoly on animated content with which is disney i think nobody can argue with that they are the ones who uh produce like 50 of the content out there and make the most money out of it and they started really early on like in the 20s and the 30s developing this formula for characters that have the most appeal ever, right? And I think we're still living in this world where this holds true because they researched it since like 100 years almost, how to create a character that is appealing to the most amount of people. I think when you look at stuff that is off the mainstream, there's, of course, a huge variety of ways to design a character. Like, for example, just the short films of Felix Colgrave. I'm a huge fan of them. And they're really uncanny almost, but they're niche, right? They're not appealing to the widest audience possible. right they're not appealing to the widest audience possible and because every mainstream movie needs to sell tickets and needs to sell merchandise this is the thing that's i think very very prevalent that's why they all look like that okay yeah so i'm always wondering if it's not something like a kind of a self-evolving repetitive system that, you know, kids see things they like and then it looks like that and so on. So there are bases. I'm totally aware of that. But sometimes I have a feeling that's a kind of a feedback loop that something is running in itself all the time. Yeah, that of course as well. But that's also the problem of design by committee right like the more people are in the loop when creating something the more the vision becomes muddled down that's i think in every area of not just character design for movies as every area of of creating anything that's the more the more people talk with it the more generic it's going to become because it has to serve multiple masters and obviously if you have a film which is like a big financial risk to take for everybody involved then a lot of people are interested in putting their opinion in their design it's a shame of course but i don't know if this is going to change anytime soon well i really i don't think so but i see But I see this chance of niche, like you said, with Colgrave. It's a very interesting thing for a person to get involved. So I'm always thinking about our students, how they can participate in the world of films and see two less experiments sometimes. have the feeling okay that they could experiment much more um so maybe this would be a question do you think um there is a there's a chance to be in a niche as an artist for a while or is it too hard to do this yeah obviously there's a there's a niche for almost everything right um some some niches are very hard to get into. For example, in the area that I work most of, which is like a big money animation, let's say like that, like feature animation, there's always these kind of people who do the very initial like inspirational exploration work, right? For example, Lego Movie 2, for had a there was a couple of folk and there's very few i wouldn't put this on your like i want to become this person because it's almost impossible that they're all like 60 year old folk and they do all exclusively acrylics or crayons and they do these kind of very abstracted artworks you see this in all disney artworks as well when you look at the very first concept art for hercules for example you have this kind of almost um egon schiele style expressionist drawings which have nothing to do or almost nothing to do with like the final product but they define some idea so there's definitely uh roles that you can have even in paid jobs to do more abstract things and i think no matter what you want to do it's important to explore those things because it helps define you your personal style like why people approach you as a creator and i obviously i'm trying to talk more from the industrial side of things because obviously if you're just your own creator you can do whatever you want right there's no reason to like discuss that but like in the industry there's definitely a need for it and I think just for yourself to like hone your own identity it's important to open yourself up to those possibilities I know a lot of people It's important to open yourself up to those possibilities. The challenges too, right? Yeah. I know a lot of people or I've met a lot of people throughout my life. And I have been that person that said like, oh, modern art is all shit. Like, right? Where's the old masters? They were so great. And there's like this disdain almost for some people who like doing fantasy art. Like I like to do fantasy art to say, oh, everything that's like abstracted is, I don't know, it's not worth anything. But that's dangerous to put yourself in this mindset, to close your mind like this and say, okay, I just want to do epic stuff because every art, no matter what you do is an abstraction in some way and to be able to control that like the level of abstraction that you want to go into it's it's important even if the stuff that you do is just drawn a realistic it's always going to be staging i think it's sometimes it's something that really comes with the age that you that you understand more and more that behind every concrete. A picture, there is a kind of an abstract composition that works in this way and guides guides your eyes and things like that so. yeah and realize if you do it a long time like this um yeah I wanted to talk to you about this hybrid animation I just want to point it out, we gave a very. about this hybrid animation. I just want to point it out, you gave a very interesting and special talk at the Pixel Vienna, which happened a few months ago. And yeah, it was great thing and you worked there with Grease Pencil. So Grease Pencil is a hybrid or is a paint tool inside Blender, which is totally integrated, but it can hybridly interact with 3D objects too. So I saw your work, which is also to mention the street chase as one of the things you did there, but you told that this was the first one and I was quite impressed by how advanced this already was. And it's a really complicated shot you did there so maybe um do you see the potential or what was your experience with that are you experimenting more with squeeze pencil this would be the cloud question i have yeah no absolutely i'm definitely doing more with grease pencil in fact we're in the last steps of finishing the second bigger project like me and my colleague carol what we're doing and we're hoping to release that end of october round about um really looking forward to that it's going to include a little bit more 3d um to like honor this kind of hybrid technique and as street chase it was kind of a funny genesis story because the last shot was the first shot so what i wanted to do is like okay I knew there was a software out there and I come from 3D background right that's how I started out in the industry as a 3D artist my first job was as a V-Ray rendering artist um and so I have this this fondness for working in 3D okay this pencil blender is free okay, grease pencil, Blender is free. Let's download it. And what is something that is really hard to do just purely in 2D if you want to animate, right? I did a bunch of storyboarding in Photoshop before. So I knew what, one of the hardest things to do is excessive camera movement inside of a shot. If you want to move the camera like parallaxing through the scene, maybe swinging around, tracking characters through something really, maybe swinging around, tracking characters through something really, really hard to do in purely 2D. I think in Disney, Tarzan, they had this kind of very revolutionary hybrid technique that they used for exactly that reason. They developed that. It was like, OK, let's make a shot where a motorcycle driver comes out of the street, and the camera swings around, follows him while panning backwards a little bit and then there's something changing right so all i wanted to do is basically sketch out a storyboard and it was great fun just like setting up the seat and drawing it and basically i didn't have much to do at the time was done with academy and basically waiting for my first job to start and i just kept on working on it and polishing the shot until it was done it was like a finished animated shot and i published it on youtube and voila like a lot of people liked it and i said like okay cool that's really fun like the blender community reached out to me which was a great thing it's one of the things i enjoy most because if you ever work with uh autodesk or god forbid Adobe, you know how hard it is to get anybody to give two shits about what you're doing with their software, right? So yeah, those guys were great. They reached out and said like, hey, do you need help? Ask me what you need. And so I did the rest of this 30 second film, which was like three months, four months, months around about um yeah it was a great experience and um yeah again like this hybrid of 2d and 3d that you're in a real 3d space and doing 2d animation there i think that's the biggest benefit of it right i'm not sure if i would recommend it because i see a lot of productions now saying like, okay, we want to do it in Blender. We want to do it in Grease Pencil, which is great because it's free, right? I'm not sure if this is the best choice if you just want to do very, very classical 2D animation, right? If you have two characters having a dialogue with each other in front of a static background, I don't know why you wouldn't use Grease Pencil because it's a great painting tool but compared to like because vector based right compared to all pixel based stuff there's still some issues like the drawing is not as responsive you cannot erase as deeply in the color spaces but as soon as you introduce complexer scene buildups right camera movement parallaxing build-ups, right? Camera movement, parallaxing. Then I think it's a fantastic tool to marry those. Great. Thanks for the insight. And we will look forward for your release on October. Is it around the Blender community? Will it be shared there? Or is it in the production you talked about? Sorry, come again? The production you talked about, which come again like just the production you talked about which is in october um where will you present it where can we look at it oh i'm sure we're going to put it on the youtube channel as always and obviously i'm also going to share it on my instagram and my facebook and uh i'll make sure that i probably gonna also post it on twitter i'm usually never on twitter don't have a Twitter account, but I never use it. But somebody once told me that all the Blender communities are on Twitter all the time. So once a year, I go in there and post something and hope that it gets liked. I'm very interested. What's his name? Daniel M. Lara? He's the guy who creates Squeeze Pencil. And then he's a classic animator. And I guess he has deep respect for your works. Yeah, that's great to hear, man. It's like in my talk, this is a big motivator. And I wouldn't be ashamed of it. Like this need to be seen by community, I think it's perfectly valid. And it's great reason to keep going and to motivate yourself to create. Really cool. Could you say something about analog experiences? Because you said, okay, bring out the blank sheets, take your pen, go to the coffee, live there, hang around. I'm doing it pretty similar. I started two years ago or something like that working with clay all the time, you know, instead of going in ZBrush and modeling, I started to make it with the hands. What is your feeling about this? Why is it important to get back into the analog situation? Yeah, I don't even know if I can pinpoint the exact reason why this is the case it's almost that's something that's almost magical right like for example let's go away from painting or like just writing something down right if you write a text on the computer versus you take a pen and write something down like like a like a diary entry right something about doing that with your hands, with a pen, sort of like commences in your mind more like as a reality that you're creating right now. I'm not a psychologist. I don't know what the reason for this is. I just know that it works somehow. It's kind of easier to create. Maybe because there's not this kind of electronic barrier in front of you or it's easier to... It's funny because in photoshop that should be the easiest thing right you can just like create and erase and create again um maybe we're just old and like people who like grew up more with the computer because i have only started using when i was like 12 30 years old right maybe they don't have this i just know that for me it always is easier to like get into this playful headspace if i'm not at the computer when i'm sitting down in photoshop i'm kind of my brain tells me you have to do something proper and um that's something that also i recommended this uh john cleese talk on creativity my talk and that's something that also I recommended this John Cleese talk on creativity. That's something that he talks a lot about. This kind of mode of playfulness that you need to achieve in order to be creative. I mean, he's from Monty Python, right? So he talks a lot about humor, having humor in what you create. And no matter if you want to create something serious or fun, it's always important to keep this play space in your head this space where it's like anything goes nothing is wrong nothing is is a bad choice and um creating analog i think there's a lot more potential i always see a lot more potential for this kind of style of playfulness. Okay, this makes sense. Yeah, thanks a lot Tobias. I hope we will see us somewhere in the future again. Very nice to see you talk and also your Q&A. Thanks a lot for this. Thanks for having me. It was an honor to be part of this. Yeah, and I wish you a pleasant day. I hope that some we will really meet in real space again. We will make this possible I hope. Absolutely yeah I hope so too. So all the best and bye. All the best for the rest of the day. Bye. Bye bye. So, yeah, now we are back and we go into a break for a while. So I have to look at my papers here. I think the next... Oops. We can send in the trailer, I guess, and we can send in the panel what's coming up next around 12 30 there will be the next part of tectonic shift with jasper jules and yeah this will be helped by michel lankes so thanks a lot for your attention attention and bye-bye Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr iawn am wylio'r fideo. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.