Seize The Play!

Star Wars, Slice-of-Life, & Supersize Screens

• Spillt - Ryan Summers • Season 1 • Episode 2

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It's our first ever STUDIO SPEED RUN – let's take a trip around the shop and find out what's inspiring, exciting, or even scaring the team a little bit.

Who will be the winner of the 2023 Emmy for Outstanding Main Title Design? 

Yu+Co titles for Star Wars
Behind The Magic of Mandalorian S3
Justin Claus's Ahsoka

Marvel at the new Redshift Toon Shader from You and Me Academy:

Check out some tasty 2D cel animation:

Anime's growing influence in advertising:

Will Blender's Grease Pencil become the go-to solution for 2D animators?

Vashi Nedomansky's BTS video of an Indie Virtual Production

Join the creative conversation on all things animation and motion design:

Check out our studio website for Spillt's latest and greatest work!

Until the next time, SEIZE THE PLAY!

Ryan Summers:

This week on Seize the Play, we're going to take a spin around the studio to see what's inspiring the team. We've got Star Wars, some slice of life animation, some really super sized screens and a deep dive on cinematography. All that and more on today's episode of Seize the Play. Hey, hey, to all my key slingers, my pixel-peepers, pencil pushers I'm so glad to talk to all the motioneers out there, because today's something special. We're going to take a speed run through the studio to try to find out all the different things that are inspiring everybody here at SPILT. And inspiration. We all just need a little bit more, no matter if we're faced with that blank page or we've got a whole heap of work to try to get done. Sometimes we just need to find something new to light our fires, and whether you're an animator, a designer, you're just getting started or you've been around for a while, today you should be able to find some of that creative caffeine to keep you going through your day. Some episodes of Seize the Play! are all about taking a deep dive on a subject and other ones? They're roundtables meant to stir up conversation and figure out where we're going as an industry. But today we're going to blast through all the news and exciting discoveries we've made in the last week or two. That keeps us excited and hungry for doing the work we're talking tools and techniques, artists and studios even a question that's been on our mind for a while, that's kind of scaring us a little bit.

Ryan Summers:

First off, it's that time of year again the 2023 outstanding main title design nominees for the Emmys. Those title sequences for TV. There's never a shortage of hot takes, controversy, and how many times did that person get nominated? Or why wasn't that one included?

Ryan Summers:

Now, before we get too spicy, let's go through the nominees and see who actually might win the big award. All right, here we go. I'm looking at the list and we've got some familiar names and one studio that's kind of come out of nowhere with multiple nominations this year. That one would be Plains of Yonder with the Lord of the Rings, rings of Power and White Lotus, season 2. Now, one of the favorites that always shows up in this category here's Imaginary Forces with Hello Tomorrow, and then we've got a little bit of spooky season coming from both the Mill, with Guillermo D'Otoro'Del Toro's Cabinet of Curiosities, and Filmograph, with Wednesday, and the last nominee is someone who really doesn't need much of an introduction, seen as that they've won quite a few of these before. We've got Elastic with the Last of Us. So I went around the studio to see if there's anybody brave enough to say who their pick to win was, and here's a few of the responses we got.

Samantha Mireles:

The title sequence for the White Lotus. I just really loved the beautiful imagery that they used and I feel like it didn't give away too much, and each time I watched it I noticed a subtle hint alluding to different characters that I thought was really interesting, and I really loved that song. Hi, this is Rebecca Olson. I am picking the Last of Us main titles for the Emmys. I love sci-fi and I just find the main title beautiful and mesmerizing and, above all else, it's just the type of work that I love to be involved in.

Brian Eloe:

My pick for this year's best title sequence is White Lotus. I just what I loved about it was, in a weird way, the simplicity of the actual artwork itself and the little micro details that are in it and, of course, as it progresses, seeing the little Easter eggs of the debauchery and hedonism that are sort of buried within the actual artwork. I just I really feel like it tells a story within a story.

Ryan Summers:

Now I'm not even going to try to predict which one is actually going to win this year. It's almost always a fool's errand. You can either go with the hot hand, the new voice, maybe go against a studio that has more than one nomination, but this year I can tell you which one moved me the most and it was an easy pick. For me, it was the Lord of the Rings Rings of Power Sequence from Plains of Yonder, and I will admit I might be biased. I know of a couple of the people that have worked on this way back in another life when I worked at Digital Kitchen, but that's precisely why I loved it. I'm such a huge fan of those old Digital Kitchen classics like True Blood and Dexter, the ones that had this really amazing mix of things that were shot on a stage with live action that have then been augmented either by editorial or even CG. There's just something about an old school Digital Kitchen and now Plains of Yonder title sequence that immediately speaks to me, and this one did the same, and it goes back to something that I say quite often that even though we're in a golden era of TV with more title sequences than you would ever imagine, I really don't see a lot of title sequences that work for me. Now, there are tons of titles that look beautiful and there are even more title sequences that look really, really difficult to create. But for me there needs to be something that draws me in, that makes me want to see the title sequence multiple times, or hints at something that I didn't know about the show or the world. And that's exactly what Lord of the Rings Rings of Power does. They take this unbelievable idea of semantics, the ability of music to move and shape things and create patterns and tie it directly to the lore within Lord of the Rings that there were these beings, that the music they sang was so beautiful that it actually created the entire world around it. Under initial viewing if you're not a huge Lord of the Rings fan, you may have no clue. That bit of lore. But I'm, repeated viewings If you find yourself mesmerized, if you start putting the connections together that the music is actually time to the animation, it might make you lean in and actually appreciate it a little bit more and might even make you go and research and find out why didn't they do this? That's another great thing that I love about the team over at Plains of Yonder. You've got to go to their website, go to this work and check out the amazing behind-the-scenes footage that explains how far they dove into research and experimentation. For my money, that's what I love about a title sequence.

Ryan Summers:

So do you agree with us, or do you have a different favorite? Or maybe you have a hot take on the very existence of these awards in the first place? Whatever it might be, we want to hear from you. This is the creative conversation on all things animation and motion design, right, and we have a really easy way for you to do that. If you head over to speakpipe. com/seizetheplay, you can leave us a little voicemail and, to make it even easier, just go to the show notes and hit the link and tell us what you think is the best title sequence of the entire year. Maybe it's one that didn't even get a nomination.

Ryan Summers:

Being nominated for your work as a motion designer, especially when it's something like the Emmys, is kind of like going to the Super Bowl. But when that work is associated with something you love, like Star Wars, it's almost like being at the World Cup and the Super Bowl at the exact same time, and I kind of have a feeling that next year Yu+Co That's where is going to be with their work for Ahsoka on Disney Plus the new Star Wars show. If you take a look at it, it kind of feels a little bit like Game of Thrones meets some of the FUI from a movie like Prometheus. And if you're a 3D animator you're probably wondering, ryan, what's all the fuss? Nothing in this is all that difficult to make. But you and Co's work on Ahsoka is exactly the kind of title sequence I love. It's the one that rewards repeat viewing and maybe even challenges the viewers to skip the Skip Titles button. Skipping, skipping, skipping.

Brian Eloe:

He's gonna do that. Don't do that, please don't. He never skips it.

Ryan Summers:

It really encourages the audience to investigate the work and look at it closer and watch it at a deeper level. For me, every time those main unantitles come up, I wonder should I be learning how to translate that language to see if there's something that I don't know about and I find myself going online to see is there an Easter egg that I totally missed? Now, as a motion designer, that kind of feels like the biggest reward, because so much of our work is totally ephemeral. So often it takes longer to actually make the work that we do as motion designers than it exists actually out in the real world. That can be really frustrating, but I really think the work that you encode in here, especially because it's associated with Star Wars, is gonna last for a long time. Speaking of Star Wars caught something on the behind-the-magic visual effects real for Mandalorian season 3. That really started making me wonder what's next for motion design. I know, I know sometimes the show feels like people are just running out poison hands and filming them, but if you watch this real, what really strikes me is that it's an incredible mix of live-action practical effects that were done on the day and CG visual effects, and I know that doesn't really sound like it's all that new, but there are a couple of moments in the real that really made me wonder how soon will we be playing with this technology and motion design as more and more tools start popping up on the horizon that let me do things like scan real-world objects and bring them immediately into places like real-time engines, like unreal, and then combine it with motion capture from Something as simple as an iPhone. All these big budget visual effects tools are sitting right, just out of reach for us as motion designers, and one of the things I cannot wait to play with are these gigantic volume LED sets that let you take real-time worlds and Shoot them with actual cameras to combine them with real actors. When you watch something like Mandalorian or Ahsoka, you start thinking maybe those are gonna be the toys we get to start playing with really soon.

Ryan Summers:

Sticking with the Star Wars theme, some that's been really been inspiring us lately is the work of Justin Harder. He goes by Claus Studios on Twitter. He recently posted his take on Ahsoka and going through the rest of his work as we clicked on that, it really amazed us how he can take something like an illustration with bold colors and chaotic energy and translate Exactly that same kind of style into something like his 50 years of hip-hop designs for audible. You'll see their kinetic type that's anchored by dark black values but punctuated with this really awesome typography that almost mirrors the energy of his brushwork, and then this crazy color palette that's become Justin's hallmark now. I think that's cool about Justin, and one of the reasons why we call him whenever we can hear it spilt is that he also takes that energy and Reigns it in for things that require tight design and photography. You've got to take a look at his work for things like Whataburger or Cheerios to see the range that this artist has, and that's Justin Harder Claus Studios over on Twitter, and if you get a chance, you've got to check out his take on some of the familiar villains from Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles. His bebop and rocksteady blew our minds.

Ryan Summers:

Something that we've been waiting an eternity for to blow our minds is tune shading in Redshift for Cinema 4D, and up until now it's been kind of a pipe dream. But we happen to be stumbling through our Instagram and ran across the account of Anthony Palermo, an awesome 3d artist, who just happened to make a really cool Gundam robot render and honestly it looks like it could be ripped straight from an anime, but it turns out the Redshift Toon shader from You And Me Academy just dropped and everywhere we look we're starting to see more and more awesome tune shade renderings from Theodore Daley's awesome anime inspired car renderings that look like they could be ripped from the pages of Initial D, to Jeremy Cox's monochromatic Pentax camera renders feels like there's a wide range of capabilities. Now this YMA shader is made by you and me Academy and if you go to their YouTube channel, there's a specific Spider-verse Style tutorial called the tutorial. That's worth checking out because it's a thing that I love the most. So far about the shader. Now, there's been lots of ways to be able to have the lit side of a model one color and the shadow side of a model another color, and pretty much every render engine. But what this one does that's really cool is it really gives you a lot of flexibility for that terminator line, that line that demarks the difference between those two sides. Most of time it's just a hard crisp line, but with the YMA shader you can really address it in unique ways To dial up a style that's all your own. What I love is that you can apply a half tone, pattern, cross hatch All different kinds of ways to break up that line to make something that's uniquely yours. It will have a fast, art directable, flexible tune shader built right into redshift. It's something that can open up a lot of different possibilities, not just for our 3d team but also for our designers.

Ryan Summers:

You know, one of the best ways to get inspiration, whether you're a designer or an animator, is to keep a lookout for new demo reels, and recently we ran into the demo reel of Julia Seamus and I have to tell you it's got some of the most squishy, stretchy, spinny animation We've ever seen. Julia's reel really shows off the power of cell animation, the ability to take something that feels totally personal but at the same time has so much energy. And as much as we love things like after effects and cinema 4d, it's just so hard to capture something like that that comes straight from the human hand. And what's so cool about Julia's reel is that, even though there's tons of personal work, you can see that same style applied to clients like simpsons, scope and star trek. And even cooler than that is the way Julia uses 2d cell animation to create animated type. Now, we love using after fact to be able to animate type. But there's something so special about how bouncy and squishy and just Full of humanity that Julia's animated type contains. The thing that's crazy is she works for places like buck and bns and scowler and all those studios that in your head you can almost immediately see what that animation would look like.

Ryan Summers:

But the one that really stuck with us was a piece that you should definitely check out. It was called let's go for sit go and it was done at scowler and there's just this campfire scene that when you watch Julia's reel you can see, a style and a voice. In terms of the look, everything has this just nice flat, shaded color kind of feel that all of a sudden the campfire scene pops up on a reel and it feels like a totally different piece. It has a totally different illustrative quality. There's more details, the gradients are way more intricate and there's a different sense of depth and dimension. You know we have a saying here it's built that Sometimes we get really friend jealous of someone, and it's a great word to describe that feeling when you love something so much that you wish you could do it. And that's the way we felt the entire time when we watched Julie is real over and over and over.

Ryan Summers:

Continuing with the 2d animation tip, I've got two really awesome quick kits for you. The first one is from Daniel Duce, an Argentinian animator with a piece called the he up than a terro. Now I've only found the 30 second version of this, but it's this awesome indie animated web series and it kind of gives me Genndy Tartakovsky clone wars vibes, those early Star Wars shorts, mixed with the very very first couple of Gorillaz music videos. Remember those first ones, the one for Clint Eastwood, where everything was kind of thick, almost looked like a comic book style rendering. This has that same vibe and what I love about it is that you get these really rough illustration lines in a lot of the close-ups of the animation and he mixes in a lot of impact frames whenever there's an explosion or a hit, but just has this really really personal drawing style that feels influenced by, but really different than, most modern anime.

Ryan Summers:

There's a couple things you really got to check out when you flip through it that we watched Multiple times and we're taking notes. One is that there's this lightning sword really close to the end that Swoops around and has these crazy lines of action and follow through that. The first time you see it, it stands on, it doesn't look like it should work, but when you go back and watch it over and over, there's a lot of lessons to learn from there. The other thing is there's this really dope dropkick action where, whoever the hero is, this space hero kicks this giant grill in the face and it almost does this slow motion effect that feels like you can only get in 2d animation, where it's fast and then an impact everything slows down and then you can see him do this great push-off and everything speeds back up.

Ryan Summers:

I love the economic use of held frames and a lot of the shots here and then they're mixed in so that it doesn't get boring a lot of dynamic facial animation or kind of special effects, as Everything else holds. It's one of those things that you find yourself the first time watch like yeah, this is cool. But the more often you watch it over and over and makes you almost want to break down Each individual shot to see what kinds of things you could borrow in your own work. They've your watch to loop over and over and over without realizing how many times you've seen it. So the point where you start to wonder where was the starting and where was the ending.

Ryan Summers:

That's how I feel about Jeremy Pires' recent 2d animation of an orange and yellow kind of humanoid figure Running, colliding, pushing, swirling and rebuilding themselves from each other. It's a really awesome look at how you can mix timing with really rough drawings but solid anatomy to give a unique signature. It has an almost a cure-like vibe to it in the sense that the characters Smoosh into each other, run apart, twirl and rebuild themselves. There's so many little details in here that don't feel like stereotypical motion design that it really shows how hypnotic Well-made 2d animation can be, even when it's only 15 seconds long. You know, if I'm gonna name drop a classic Akira here like here, probably should also name drop something like Studio Ghibli.

Ryan Summers:

And that's the first thing we thought of when we saw this Ikea slice of life ad come across our feet over Twitter. The first thing that hit me was what studio did this? Because it's got this Relaxing, lo-fi, girl chill vibe that you don't really ascribe to Advertising work. The backgrounds in this piece are amazing. They look hand-painted, they have a warm glow. The character animation is really laid back. It's just a slice of life animation. It's not something you normally see. But it's got this really smart attention to detail that shows that Ikea is aiming for a really Specific audience.

Ryan Summers:

Now, that kind of restraint isn't normally what you go to when you try to find an animation studio. You normally go to a studio for their specific voice rather than the voice of the audience. So I had to dive in and do some homework to find out who really did this job. I mean, start researching. You see, some of the usual suspects. When I dove just a little bit deeper to find out who actually did the work, I saw a name I never recognized. Have you ever heard of the team Club Camping? Because I certainly hadn't, but now I want to know everything about them.

Ryan Summers:

If you go to your site, you'll see the murderers row of clients. They've worked with Adidas, Disney, Porsche. But the moment you watch the real, the magic really starts to come through, because I had a really hard time telling where the client work stopped and the personal work started. And if you go to the real, the depth that they went into for creating original opening titles for it is pretty amazing. It's almost like a short film itself. None of Club Campings work looks like typical motion design and it doesn't even look like typical character animation either. Spend a few moments on club campaign site watching some other work and it really starts to challenge the conventional knowledge of what our work can look like.

Ryan Summers:

And after I watched their work on the IKEA slice of life campaign it started making me wonder what the influence of anime has been on motion design, getting really excited by the recent rush of anime influence spots that have been hitting the airwaves lately. The Megan Rapino commercial for Let It Rip, the spot by Psyop and Wiz design, has tons of hallmarks of anime influence. It almost feels like the Thundercats opening title sequence that was animated by TMS way back in the day. It even sneaks in a little Akira bike slide homage in there. Then there's also the fairly recent Chibani commercial called Dear Alice by The Line that has backgrounds that look like they are ripped from Studio Ghibli films. The production for that movie had six background artists alone creating artwork that feels so lush they can be sold as art prints for something like Totoro or spirit it away. They even were able to have the entire piece scored by Joe Hisaishi, the composer that scored most of Studio Ghibli's films.

Ryan Summers:

The studio The Line is no stranger to playing with anime tropes. They actually created an entire series dedicated to Acura Type S. It's Chiaki's Journey journey. It feels like it's ripped from the pages of a show, like Initial D. You've got to watch the initial 10 second opening for that series because I think there's a lot of lessons there that we can learn.

Ryan Summers:

If Some of us love anime. They really combine some things that I think we do well in motion design, using very graphic, really bold and stark uses of color and silhouette, but it combines it with the dynamicism of anime camera moves and effects. It's really something to study, to see where you might be able to borrow something to add just that little bit of energy that Sometimes our work could be missing without feeling like it's completely cribbing or stealing from anime tropes. So that's food, furniture, shoes and cars done in an anime style. Take a look at all these pieces because maybe now it's time to put some anime references into your next pitch.

Ryan Summers:

Now, if we're talking anime and old-school 2d animation, maybe wonder yourself what's the best place to start learning cell animation, and there's lots of great tools out there, so you might already have Adobe animate, comes with the creative cloud, and if you have an iPad, there's Procreate, which very soon will be having a new app called Procreate Dreams. You're just for 2d animation and we can't wait to get our hands on it. Here. It's spilled, but right now the biggest thing that's been on our radar is Blender, with their amazing grease pencil tool, which you've all heard. It's free right Now. I know everybody likes to joke about it, but with a couple of essential add-ons, blender can be a really inexpensive, powerful tool that we're looking at it right now to see what could we be using it for, and cell animation is definitely one of those things.

Ryan Summers:

But if you've ever tried to recommend the interface to somebody who is a 2d artist or even somebody who's familiar with something like Cinema 4D interface can be pretty intimidating. Not everything works the same way you would expect, and there are a lot of commands and a lot of tools to build up that all-important muscle memory. Recently, we ran across someone on LinkedIn named Maciej Gliwa, a developer who's been working on an add-on that looks to be exactly what we need For new people trying to learn how to do cell animation in Blender. This tool is called Vision GP, and he's developed a couple of other add-ons in the past called GP tools that have gotten rave reviews before, but what's great about this is that if you watch the links to his demos, the interface seems to melt away and there's probably only a handful of buttons, and it just creates a beautiful place to focus on drawing.

Ryan Summers:

Now it makes it a lot easier, but why would you want to work inside a 3d app? Well, there's a lot of things you can do. You're working in a true 3d environment, so you can kind of work in the best of both worlds 2d and 3d. We're really excited and I kind of wonder what else it can mean for grease pencil. Does it mean that you might have a very efficient storyboarding tool as well as cell animation? Who knows? We got to wait till this thing actually comes out, but much is talking about in the next month or two that it might actually be available. So what are you waiting for? You might as well go ahead and download Blender and start learning grease pencil for all of its strengths as it is now and then, when it comes out, take Vision GP for a road test.

Ryan Summers:

It's quite an amazing time to be working in motion design, because we're really able to take advantage of all the investment in new technology from industries like visual effects and feature film and TV animation. Now, using a new tool to do something that you're already familiar with, it's actually not all that scary and, to be honest, sometimes it can be really exciting. But when you're trying to do something completely foreign to you, it can really feel like trying to learn an alien language from the ground up. One of those things that's excited us for a long time but it's been pretty scary is this new technology of shooting on volume stages. At Spilt we do lots of different kinds of jobs, sometimes motion design, sometimes animation, sometimes live action, and a lot of times we like to combine all of it.

Ryan Summers:

But when we do, we use fairly traditional methods. We're used to shooting on set, art, directing something. We have to create a crazy backdrop we call it a green screen but for the most part that's technology that we've understood for a long time. Remember back when I was talking about Mandalorian. We've been fascinated by those volume stages that let you shoot on an LED volume with a ceiling and a wrap around screen, all powered by something like Unreal. We've actually even had a couple of clients ask us what do we know about these volume stages?

Ryan Summers:

And, to be honest, we really thought that, for a motion design studio, it might really be out of our reach to try to use a tool like this. That was until we saw Vashe Netomansky's video about his 20 minute behind the scenes of his very first virtual production project, and he's always someone who's experimenting with new technology, whether it's a plugin for his editing suite or a different way to approach live action. I'd really encourage you to take some time and watch Vashe's breakdown. He shows all the exciting parts and some of the things that are actually bottlenecks for indie productions trying to use a volume. All that said, is there a place for motion designers to actually start using these tools as well? Now, it's one thing to sit down and watch someone you respect talking about their experience. Another thing to get your hands on the technology yourself, and here it's built.

Ryan Summers:

We really like to get messy, so when we saw on Instagram that the American Society of Cinematographers was putting on a masterclass on shooting in volumes, we knew we had to send someone out into the field to figure out is this something for us? And there was no better person than to send Senior Creative Director Brian Eloe out to LA to do some research. They're teaching people how to use volumes and we have a client who actually has a volume and we need to learn how to use it, we need to learn what's possible with it. So, like, with that stage, like, what was this trip like for you? Like, were you stoked, were you nervous, were you excited, were you scared? Like, what do you do when you walk up to the doors of I'm assuming in my head this giant Jurassic Park-sized doorway of the ASC? What's that like for you.

Brian Eloe:

I think you hit on at least three of the emotions for sure. Like I was nervous, of course, because I feel, like you know, asc is there specifically a group of cinematographers who they're kind of the creme de la creme, right, they do the big Hollywood features. So you know, I mean I work with a lot of really talented cinematographers who generally come from like music, video or short form, but these are the ones who are making like the features that are, you know, setting culture right. So there's there's a level of like you go in with reverence and you go in with sort of a hat and hand humility that you want to make sure you're, I mean I mean I hate to say it like try not to say something dumb, right? So like the first thing is just to kind of like go and get a feel for things.

Brian Eloe:

And the class started at ARI. So, like you know, it's a, a storied facility and you know ARI has been part of movie making and cinematography for ever and ever. So first thing is you start on the campus of that and they've built a like a test volume so they can go in and basically, when you go calibrate your camera package, you test the lenses to make sure they're not. They're not going to more ray and they're not going to do that. So so the first thing that happened was like, how do we break this thing? What? What can we do? That makes it mess up because they want us to see like, here's the problems. You're going to have to solve this.

Brian Eloe:

And so it was really fascinating just in terms of like. Right there, there's already nuggets of like. What happens with anamorphic lenses? What happens with certain kinds of spherical lenses? What happens if your subject is too close to the wall? How do you correct for those problems? And so that was a big thing. Right, there is like I knew it was going through the lens of what would cinematographers do. And so, generally, as a director, that's like my arm and arm partner, right, I mean, that's the person who's most responsible for the technical aspect of our production.

Ryan Summers:

That's exciting to me because I feel like you and I have gone through this right Like we've talked to people we've we're trying to find jobs that we can maybe work in the volume with, mostly because we're excited, but also because we know like it's going to come down the line sooner or later. I'm excited to hear more about that because it's always been sold up me and us as like a wonder drug. Like green screens, you don't have to do good things anymore If you just know a little unreal, just walk in and it's ready to go. And you know that that's not true. But there's also like coming from a like a motion design shop that does animation and live action.

Ryan Summers:

You have a limited amount of like experience, right Like. You touch everything, but you also know you don't know everything about almost anything. So what is it a wonder drug? Is it like something that you're like if you just have a scene file and unreal, you can load it in and you move a camera and it matches everything, because it feels like it's sold like that, and we know that that that can't be the case, right? Yes, that is not the case.

Brian Eloe:

I mean, look, it is a magnificent tool and it is a tool like anything else and so like it has its applications and it's things that that that it will do well, but I think the biggest outcome of that was seeing all the things that can kind of potentially go wrong, if there. If there was one thing that I would say that was like hammered over and over again, it is how critical prep is. You don't just load it on real file and then throw people up on it Like you have to go in and you test your camera angles. I mean, the way it works is, of course there's a frustrum right, and that's the thing. That sort of freezes or updates the video that your camera is seeing.

Brian Eloe:

Everything else is they turn off the sampling, it turns off all of the, the render, intensive pieces of it, and so going and testing all of that before you ever get started is critical, and so I think that's the part that sort of is makes it less of a wonder drug. Is that if you don't do that? And there were some things that happened in the AC course where the instructors came with materials that they didn't send the studio ahead of time and there were problems. So there were problems with the frustrum and the tracking and and it's like. So there's a lot of little little nuances that I think make it sort of the you have to, you have to have your stuff button up we keep on hearing all these things about.

Ryan Summers:

You know, obviously you watch the Mandalorian or behind the scenes on the Batman and they're like, oh, this is so great because we're taking everything you never do in post production and we're just doing it at the beginning, and then what you see is what you get. To me it's like there's a reason why there's a good, healthy, long amount of post production, because you don't know what you want, or something changes and you discover something. Is this something that you think actually applies to studios, like built and motion designers who are interested in it? Like, is this something that's like a nice, shiny object, that it's like, oh, once every three years, you're going to get to go on one of these. Or is it something that you think that, like, motion designers should be interested in? Shops should be like exploring further.

Brian Eloe:

OK. So I absolutely think shops should be interested in exploring it further. Right now I would say it's perhaps not as applicable to us or it's going to be more difficult to sort of deploy. But I feel like this is that classic thing where it's a technology that we're all aware of but still relatively fledgling in its life, and so they're continuing to improve on real and making it easier to work with. They're working on there's a plug-in, this part of it called Lumen, which allows for live lighting to happen in the sort of environment. So I feel like being curious about those things and working on those things now means that in a couple years it could be something that's a lot more of the norm.

Brian Eloe:

There's a tremendous amount of expense to build a volume and there's a tremendous amount of expense to use the volume. So that's the thing that makes it a little tough for smaller motion shops is that selling that through into production and getting a client to sort of buy the day rate of that, I think, is still a little off. But then again there's more volumes being built and so then you're not going to be on a Mandalorian-sized stage, you're not going to be on the full three-quarter arc, you're going to be on a smaller version of it and I feel like that is becoming more accessible and it's really important as a studio a motion design studio that's about solving problems and telling stories to know that this tool is there and to understand it well enough to be able to go and do it.

Ryan Summers:

It's kind of crazy to me the rate at which it's moving because there's so many moving parts. Do we have anything in-house right now, a type of job that people listening could start imagining how they could also use it? Is there anything we're looking at that? Hey, instead of going and doing a green screen or trying to do a three-day shoot and capture magic hour, try this. What's the scale that's within reach for us right now?

Brian Eloe:

I mean, we have one and it's like the thinking is very traditional they want to go on location, they want to shoot with celebrities, they have multiple setups that they want to do, and so those are all things that in a traditional production environment. Locations are expensive, they're tricky because you don't know exactly what you're going to get. Are your angles right? There is a certain amount of set build, there's a cost associated with renting the location, and then that's just the one setup and then, hopefully, you've got a location that affords you.

Brian Eloe:

I turn the camera and I pop up a green screen and I can get the other angles. So in this particular thing, it's like they have a very specific vision for the room and location that they want to do. It's a wall of TVs, it has a lot of interactive lighting, which is brilliant for what a volume does, and then they want to basically propel this person to a concert setting and so being able to just flip the screen and put up green without having to put up a frame, it's like boom, it's a flip of a switch, basically, and so yeah, that until it's up.

Ryan Summers:

And then, of course, there's the whole car process aspect of it, which is like driving right If I never had to do another process shot, like have a camera in a car and shoot so I can see some out the window. Did you guys go over that at all or show it at all at the actual masterclass? Because to me just that as a capability would have me interested.

Brian Eloe:

We went to several places. First of all, we started at Airy and then we went to work Kinaflow as their facility, and they brought in what's called Magic Box, and so Magic Box is basically a semi trailer that comes with three screens, an overhead lights, a control center, so it's basically they can bring the volume to you. Inside there is a gigantic turntable and ramps that let you roll a car up onto it, and so basically, you can position the car as you like. And then it's a matter of if you can either load unreal scenes or you can use camera array, running footage, right. So, like you, the traditional, you send out a car, a camera car that has multiple cameras and captures all the different angles from the different things to create the sense of actual movement and driving. And it's like and same thing.

Brian Eloe:

Like you can roll through, we're driving in the desert, we're now driving in the mountains, we're now is just depending on where you get your scenes from. Like, all of this has interactive lighting. From the LED screens you get beautiful reflections that feel like the running footage, you're in the running footage. So, yeah, they covered that very much. And then sort of the next day was where we went to orbital studios where we had a large LED background and then they have kind of a half arc as well. This is smaller LED volume, so it was more of the backdrop versus the overhead ceiling.

Ryan Summers:

So they didn't have ceilings or floors, but I guess that's one of the important things to talk about too is like these things everybody just says volume, right, but like these things come in a lot of different flavors, right. It's just like cameras or 3D packages that like there's different ones, there's different use cases, I'm sure there's like different gotchas with them, like things you can't do or things you have to prep for. To me, that was one of the cool things about this masterclass is that you're getting experience Yep, a wide range of it, not just dropped into a studio and you know, play with a camera for an hour and then walk away.

Brian Eloe:

Totally yeah. So I mean that's the just definitions, right, like lingo, get the feel for it. Like a volume technically is an LED backdrop. That's where it starts, and then you can have arcs, you can have ceilings, you can have floors, yeah. So there's definitely multiple flavors of things that sort of get added to this and sort of up the level of like what you do with it. And then the other thing is, you know, a very specific gotcha.

Brian Eloe:

One of the things that they kind of covered ad nauseam is just like you really cannot just light with the LED volume.

Brian Eloe:

You can use it to bring ambience, but they're LED panels and so they're lacking certain spectrum. And so from a cinematographer standpoint like I found that's truly fascinating of like their RGB and so they look bad on skin Right. So for a particular, for a producer's standpoint who think, well, we'll just light with the wall, like you really do need to bring in movie lights, you need to bring in something that actually helps with skin tones. And one of the key things that Dave Klein is employed is bringing in tungsten. That used to be kind of a don't bring in tungsten lights with these LED things he's like, but it fills in the spectrum that's missing and that's what helps sort of sell skin, and he's like when we do things that need that, it's like that's what the tungsten stuff does, and so that's the reason to take a class like this is to kind of learn some of those little nuances that make all the differences in like selling the composite.

Ryan Summers:

Who did you run into and like what projects are they associated with?

Brian Eloe:

Dave Klein was the sort of day one guy and again Mandalorian, but he also, you know, he's the Kevin Smith guy, so he shot all rats and clerks and chasing Amy. Then day two features Rob Legato, who is kind of the fundamental VFX guy, right, and he's a second second unit director. I mean he's done things like Apollo 13 avatar. I mean he was part of Jurassic Park to a degree, I mean. So again, he's done the Lion King that Favreau directed. So again, just in terms of like his resume it's just endless.

Brian Eloe:

I think one of the things that I really got out of his thing was just how, how intimately involved the VFX supervisor, at least in his world, is involved in previsualization of these films. He has to figure out how these shots are being made, right In terms of the VFX. So he goes in and he's flying camera wheels or working with somebody to kind of like help build the previs and how the shots work. So again, just that kind of like knowledge base. That here's a guy who's like roll up his you know he's not, he's not in an office somewhere, you know, with his cup of coffee, waving a pen, like no, he's, he's got his kid wearing a motion cap suit to be the, the Navi and Navi avatar, avatar to get a sense for how that works, right.

Brian Eloe:

And then he was like, sadly, she, you know, didn't win the role. We gave it to the real actress. And then sitting right next to him is Dean Cundy, who shot the thing Crazy Jurassic Park. He's the actual cinematographer on Apollo 13. And so, yeah, I mean again, you're just like, hey, I'm in the room with these. You know these people that, oh, all the entire Back to Future series too. So, like you know again, all of these films that I would say got me excited about this career, like you know these things that you watch. That's like why you know I have such a VFX heavy. Or you know, sci-fi, or even just the storytelling through this medium that requires the sort of addition of the effects that's here we are rubbing elbows with this person.

Ryan Summers:

Like they're there as peers trying to break this stuff, trying to figure this stuff out and figure out how to use it, like totally yeah.

Brian Eloe:

Yeah, I mean. I mean the last thing I would say too, about especially the luminaries, of rubbing elbows with them, is like the number one thing, which it's like we all know it but at the same time like to hear them talking about it. Like you would think, oh, these people love visual effects. They're they're kind of gear nerds, right, and they're gonna, they're always going to look for ways to bring that stuff in. But again, they just kept saying it's about the story, it's not about the tool, right? So this is just a tool and like it's not always the right thing to do this. And I mean it was interesting.

Brian Eloe:

Somebody asked Dean at one point, like hey, if you could go back in time in your movies and shoot something else on a volume, would you? And he was like, well, I'm not really sure. He's like maybe, maybe some of the car process with you know, michael J Fox, and back to the future, he's like because that was tricky, trying to shoot in the car and get the reflections and that sort of world he's like. But the truth of the matter is like I'm trying to tell a story and I'm trying to like lead. You know, lead, the camera, have that lead people places, and so I found that fascinating, because I feel like you know again, when you're associated with these movies that have such a heavy visual effects component, to think that again, for them it's still just about the story, and how do I tell this story?

Ryan Summers:

I mean again, that's another reason to have these conversations and being these groups, because I think we get so stuck in using the hammers that we have available to us. It's got to work Like X-Particles does this. I just am missing the right settings and I got to keep on banging away at it, versus like maybe I could just pour some honey into a cup with a nice lens on my DSLR and it's going to do everything I need it to do. And I can comp it in Hearing people who have done things like that and they aren't just like starstruck by new technology, like yeah, it's cool when I need it, but I got to know what it can do in the first place. We'll make that decision. It's like a sobering reminder.

Brian Eloe:

Yeah, and it's funny you say that, because I feel like the crazy thing that the story that Dean told he's like, and he's like I'll hand you this previs and I'm like I didn't have any input in the previous. So who's making the movie here? And then I get this thing and it's like, and they have these camera moves that are like flying up and over and they're just, you know, impractical for doing it. It's like I can't go. I couldn't get a camera in that corner to capture that Like. So like just don't have any like cinematography grammar.

Brian Eloe:

And where's the close up Like? Where's the texture, where's the? You get enamored with the big fancy camera move and you lose sight of like we're still telling a story here. We still need these moments that give us reaction, that give us reflection of what the character is feeling, what's the character seeing, what are the things that I'm trying to like tell the viewer this is an important part of the story and he's like that's the thing that, like when new tools come out, people get enamored with that part of it. You know, we still need to have a cinematography grammar that everybody can, you know, latch their wagons to.

Ryan Summers:

Well, there you go. There's another episode of Seize the Play, and you got to see how some things make us scared but also excited. We cannot wait to get on one of those volumes and really start digging into Unreal, but this is the creative conversation that you're involved with as well. What are you scared of? Just got too excited. And what's your pick for the title sequence? Emmy, make sure to hit us up at speakpipecom.

Ryan Summers:

Slash seize the play. You can look for that link down in the show notes and tell us what's on your mind. What do you think of the speed round around the entire spilt studio? Was it too long? Was not enough? Let us know and get ready for the next episode. We're going to be talking all about imposter syndrome and the fear of the blank page and also what it's like to direct at spilt. Until then, what are you waiting for? Get out there and seize the play. Seize the play is a spilt studio podcast. If you have an idea of someone you'd like us to talk to you or a topic you'd like to hear more about, drop us a line at play at spiltcom. That's S P, I L L T dot com. And if you like what you hear, subscribe.

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