This video is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to anyone, living or dead, is coincidental. This video is a work of fiction. Any resemblance to anyone, living or dead, is coincidental. I'm sorry. Welcome back. In this part of the event, we will start the panel dedicated to art and industry, starting with the presentation of the creative-technical duo Entagma. Enjoy! So welcome to the extended animation symposium of the Ars Electronica and Linz. We are Manuel and Mo of Entagma and today we're gonna talk about proceduralism, the new normal or what we think might become the new normal. We'll go into detail what that is in a bit but first let's introduce ourselves. So who are these two guys? Well in essence you could say we are just two designers slash technical directors maybe who publish tutorials on proceduralism in Houdini and sometimes Blender on a bi-weekly basis on our website and tagma.com and as you can see down here let me just switch there you can see we changed quite a bit over the years since we are running this. And when you're running a website, I mean, it is about presenting ourselves online on the internet. So in my opinion, you don't want to have an ancient photo out there, for example, on your website. In the about section, I think you have to be somewhat recent, somewhat honest, because if the disconnect gets too strong, I think you're running into credibility issues. So what we did is recently we did new headshots of ours for the about section. I'm anxious. And they turned out to be of a certain kind of aesthetic. Your aesthetic. Your aesthetic. My aesthetic. All right, I'll take it as whatever you want. So you really want to show these pictures? Not directly. So what these pictures did is they let me down a weird internet bubble rabbit hole. So, Manu, I would like to play a little game with you and present you with... A live game. Doctor or model, the game. Okay. So what follows is, I've scraped from a few websites, headshots, images of doctors and models. Plastic surgeons, that is, and aesthetic dermatologists. Oh, great. I don't think anybody will understand why you did this. Oh, we will come to this. Oh, great. I don't think anybody will understand why you did this. Oh, we will come to this. Your task for now is to decide whether the person you're seeing is a model or a medical doctor. Or both. No spoilers here. Let's just start with this one here. That is a doctor. That is Ella Carey, represented by mega models. We've got more chances here. This guy. And another model. That is Christian Merkel, MD, aesthetic dermatologist with a focus on hair. And actually, I scraped this photo from a Playboy interview he did. Yeah, that fits. Very nice. All right, next chance for you. This guy here. He's a doctor. He is. That's Niklas Raab, MD, plastic surgeon with a focus on breast augmentation. And his Instagram feed is of another planet. It's very, very focused. Let's put it that way. Okay. Next chance for you. Hard one. A doctor. Absolutely. Oh's Patricia Ogilvie, MD, aesthetic dermatologist. Got another two for you. Really? This guy and this guy here. And that is the reason for this little game. So that is what Mo created out of our pictures. I didn't perceive it as such. It was you who told me we look like plastic surgeons there. And we do. And we absolutely do. So that is the two jokers that we are. Except from having fun with media and internet rabbit holes, we do something else. We focus on a very technical aspect, actually, and a very design-centered aspect and that is procedural design. And it is your task now to inform us more about that. So proceduralism, the new normal is the title of this talk today and probably we should first come up with some definitions because what does proceduralism actually mean? It is a term I think introduced in this field at least least by SideEffect Software, which is the makers of the software program we are mainly using. Um, so for us, it has a lot of meaning. It is a weird one because you could describe what we do as proceduralism. You could describe it as generative art and design as procedural design. I'll, I'll get to this in a second. Okay. So if you look up proceduralism online, you'll find the definition, a rigid adherence to established procedures, and that is absolutely not what we mean by proceduralism. So we want to just take over this term. What we actually do, what we are interested in, can be called algorithmic art. So art created by an algorithm instead of a person. The person creates the algorithm, implements the algorithm, the algorithm creates art. And I think we recently discussed where the word algorithm actually comes from. And I think it's quite interesting. Where does it come from? So there was this famous mathematician from, I think, Middle Eastern region. And he wrote this book where he just spelled out recipes for doing math. And his name was Al-Kharizmi. And that is the source? That is the source for algorithm, yeah. Okay. So algorithmic art is a term that describes what we are interested in. And then there is generative art. And that is a little different because here we are talking about an autonomous system that is creating art. So the system just decides instead of the person. It's a little different, but it's of course in some realm. And then there is generative design and here it is more exploring a design space. So you build a machine, the machine just offers you a lot of possibilities, variations, and you as a designer decide what to take. That is another use of generative techniques. And all of this can be made possible through proceduralism as we understand it. But before we talk about or before we define proceduralism, let me first define what an algorithm is. Let me read this to you. So an algorithm, we now know where it comes from, is a finite series of well-defined computer implementable instructions to solve a specific set of computable problems. So that means basically it's a recipe. It's a recipe that can be just followed by the computer. And to come up with these recipes or to just implement them, so make the computer do them, is the source, the basis for what we do. And that is how we define proceduralism and how we use it. So it's a method to create algorithmic art. And that is probably because of programming where a procedure is a function. So it is something that the computer does. If you give it an input, it returns an output. That is where the term comes from. So to illustrate a little further what the difference is between the traditional approach to computer generated art or design and the procedural approach, I recorded two videos. And in these two videos, I tried to create the same piece of art, but very differently regarding the approach. First, we have the traditional approach. And I decided I want to pack some hemispheres on the surface of this blob in a way that they are tightly packed without large gaps. And I just started directly in the scouting program and started to pack these spheres, and the fun thing is that my brain is actually capable of determining where the next sphere should go. So somehow magically I can just calculate where enough space on the surface is left to put another sphere. And now that I've finished with the large spheres, I decided to put small spheres in the gaps to really pack this surface with hemispheres completely. And again, that is something that my brain is doing. So everybody of us possesses a very, very powerful computer in his head, and this computer is actually doing the math here. This method is very nice because it's very direct. If you have an idea you just start up the program and you start implementing or creating what you have in mind. But let me interject, it's also hell for client feedback. That is exactly the point. So while this is very direct and you can directly start working, once you have a change, once you want to do something different, you can basically throw everything away and start over. So if I decide that I don't want to have spheres but cubes on the surface, there is no way to do that. Nevertheless, I quickly come up with this. So that is the output of my procedure, of my approach, of my design idea. And I'm satisfied with this. And while it was very direct and very easy to do, because I could just start with my hand, with my brain, I cannot change anything without restarting. And that is very different with a procedural approach. Here, I now have to think very differently about what I want to do because the result should be the same. It's just that the way to get there is very different. I now build a machine inside of SideFX Houdini that creates an output very similar to what we saw right now. Houdini is a program where you can connect little building blocks, little functions together to create algorithms. These are called nodes and you see some of them there. And by just wiring up these nodes you can build a little software program basically. And what I do here is I bring in the basic surface and then I tell Houdini to scatter spheres on the surface. And I use a certain heuristic that tells, that helps Houdini tell if these are intersecting and just to avoid these intersections. And then I derive this mask basically and I can tell that where the mask is black gaps are. And then I can use this information to tell Houdini to put little spheres just inside of these gaps. So exactly what I did before with the traditional approach but now procedurally. And after I created this little machine I end up with a result very similar to what we saw before. Now I smooth the surface just as I did in the Scottling program. And if I render this, you can see the output, the result, is quite similar. But this time, I have the big advantage that I easily can switch out each and every part. So if I want to pack these spheres on a different surface, I just switch out the surface and the machine just runs the algorithm again and comes up with a new output. And that, of course, is very flexible. And that is why we called our talk The New Normal, because because of this flexibility, people are running to proceduralism. people are running to proceduralism. It is just the go-to thing right now because instead of having a lot of people do the work, you can make the computer do the work. I think especially areas which are extremely work intensive, so where you have to create a massive amount of assets, as well as areas where you have to be very flexible and quick with client feedback. Absolutely. Advertising, visual effects, games. Yeah, they are currently drawn to this. Typical areas where this is used a lot. So let me show you some examples of work created procedurally. And if you talk about proceduralism, one person comes to your mind very, very quickly. And that is Simon Holmendahl. And I must point out that he goes for the same aesthetic in his portrait. That is true. And we have nothing to do with this. And we don't know if he is a doctor, a model, or the most talented TD we know. All of this. Who is this guy? We have to ask him. And he was friendly enough to allow us to show some of his work because I think it's quite iconic for procedural art or procedural design. So let me first show you one piece, a recent piece of his, and that is the titles for a design festival called Us by Night. It's a design festival that happens in Antwerp every year, I think. And it was actually the last festival that we attended before Corona hit. And now we are here at Ars Electronica, which is the first festival we attend after Corona. So yeah, fingers crossed that everything goes right. Hopefully. So here you see these titles. So let's just watch them together because I think they are a procedural masterpiece. They are a beauty. I'm sorry. Thank you. Thank you. ¶¶ But it's not only Simon doing procedural stuff, Manu and Mo, that is the two surgeons that you see here. We used to work at iXponsor, the Munich-based design studio. I briefly thought you went with or you wanted to go with, we used to work. Which is not true. We are working a lot. No, actually, we used to work at this studio and we created quite some adverts. And I just brought a not-so-fresh advert for Nike. I think it's the last one we worked on together. I think it's the last one we worked on together. Exactly. It's the last one we worked on together at iXponsor and I just show it again because it contains a lot of proceduralism in the entire spot. I'm sorry. Okay, that was that. So that is where at least we used proceduralism for client work and showed you some uses of proceduralism by Simon. And now we want to talk a little bit about Entagma because the basic idea of Entagma was that we wanted to do something about proceduralism. is that while it is very flexible and while it yields very complex and stunning results, it is quite hard to approach because it, of course, is based on programming and math. And programming and math is not necessarily something that designers and artists are very keen on doing. No, or even drawn to. Yes. keen on doing. Or even drawn to. Yes. So we thought what if we just come up with a library of procedural building blocks of little techniques explained in an easy way that you can use like Lego where you can just put together different techniques to come up with new procedural art and that was a basic idea for Entagma this YouTube channel and website a collection of recipes basically a bit like algorithms for algorithms recipes of recipes yeah sort of that's true and um we have we by now recorded more than 200 videos and we refer to them ourselves all the time because you forget it of course and And we just went through the library and looked for similarities and found that a lot of the things that we put up there are inspired by nature, by just looking at nature and finding algorithms online, reading papers about algorithms, describing models about nature. I think that's the beauty about proceduralism or generative art and design is that you have to, or you are quickly drawn into this rabbit hole of reading papers. And you find that some of the fun papers come from other disciplines than computer science or maths. For example, lots of stuff in biology and physics. Botany. Yeah. Botany. Yeah. physics. Botany. Yeah. And that's a very nice side effect of doing procedural design, because whenever you want to go with a procedural technique, you have to understand what's happening. So your target effect or the thing you want to create has certain rules and you have to understand these to be able to come up with an algorithm. I think basically proceduralism, generative design boils down to three areas. First, understanding the algorithm, the setup you want to build, then actually implementing it and then exploring the parameter space you just built. So exploring all the parameters you put into your setup and finding out which values give you valuable results. Yes. And that is what we did with these examples. So here are some examples from the nature-inspired realm that we have online at entangler.com. The very first one is something that bothered me for 20 years now, and that is called philotaxis. It's a Steckenfeld of yours for the German-speaking audience. Absolutely, because I love it so much. And it's usually something you do or you first get to know in math or art class in high school. Because if you look at certain flowers, but not only flowers, but pine cones or pineapples or whatever, you quickly encounter this intricate packing pattern. Like you can see here in this flower head, the seeds are packed in a very nice spirally pattern. And if you just look at two successive seeds, you see that the angle between them, counted from the center of this flower head, is always 137.5, roughly 137.5 degrees. And that is somehow astonishing. at least to me it was, because how do plants calculate? Do plants do math? And you find this in a lot of different plants. And actually, it turns out that if you use this angle to come up with a model of this distribution, it is sort of optimal. So it actually allows for a perfect packing because if you just go around the circle and always use this angle, you end up always in the gaps between the seeds. And that allows for an optimal packing. And I always found this to be fascinating and I just recently implemented a model that is quite flexible to model this and that is what you see here. So that is now my procedural version of this flower head. And you can see that you can alter the parameters, so you can use different shapes and the algorithm happily packs these spheres in a philotactic pattern on the surface, which to me at least is quite astonishing on one hand. On the other hand, it's just useful if you want to model plants, but, and that is a nice thing about proceduralism, it quickly goes beyond modeling photorealistic plants, as you can see here, because it's just a nice structure. And from there you can just follow very different design goals with the same algorithm. I mean, it's beautifully rendered as well. And I think it was very, very popular on Instagram. Yes. Instagram loved it, probably because it is a loop. Something very similar regarding complexity is space colonization. That is something that fascinated me for quite a while because it creates again very, very intricate structures, as you can see here. And I always wanted to do this. This is from Botany, actually. It was used in a paper to model shrubs. But I did not want to use it that way. I just found these networks to be beautiful. Yeah, they are. So that, again, is a very, very simple algorithm that I quickly want to outline and that we then implemented in Houdini and used it to create this graphics. Let me quickly show you the graphics again. This is a loop, although it was not that popular on Instagram. You can see that I have a lot of points that are sort of eaten away by these branches forming. So you can speak of these white points as food, so to speak, and then these branches just eat up the food, which is a beautiful idea. And it goes like this. So if you look at the top left, picture A, the black circles are the branches that already exist. So in each step, the algorithm tries to associate each of the nodes of these branches with food. And that is what happens in picture B. So it just tries to find the closest food particle and then just goes in the direction of these collections and places a new seed, a new branch particle basically, you see this in picture D, along the direction to the closest food particle. And if it finds more food particles, it just averages the direction. And then you have a step that is outlined in E, where you just look at these newly placed branch particles and see if a food particle is in a certain distance to them, just to make sure that the connections are not created over and over again. And with this very, very simple algorithm, you can create, if you have just have a distribution of food particles, you can create these very intricate branching structures. And I just love that when I first found it because it is so simple and yields very complex results. And here you see Hedini with this setup in action. And I'm just exploring the simulation here where you can see that I have this distribution of food particles, the blue dots. And then as soon as I turn the machine on, these intricate patterns form. And you can probably tell that this is something that can be used in a lot of different design ideas. And we already used this in one of the pictures that we created for Nike, I think. I think we used it quite often actually. And just to get this clear, when you're talking about nodes, that in this case in Houdini, it's just points, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. I modeled the nodes from the paper with points in Houdini. That is the way that I implemented this. Now one of my personal favorites, field-guided reaction diffusion. That is when all this nature-driven algorithms interest started. It sparked in me, at least, when I saw these patterns and just couldn't believe the beauty of it. Well, it took me a while to actually take this. So field-guided reaction diffusion is a play on another very well known algorithm called reaction diffusion and I think it can be called that as well yes sometimes called Turing patterns of course Alan Turing did research on it because what in computer science didn't Turing research so let's go over how this works. So I did this example in Photoshop. You implemented it in Photoshop? You can, and it's very simple to understand. So you're working with two values here, black and white, just representing two chemicals. And the first thing you want to do is find out the edges of those chemicals, which we do with an edge-finding algorithm and a threshold. So we end up with those regions around those areas and that's called reaction. And now you see me blur this thing and it's called diffusion. And if we just repeat the step, finding the edge, finding the outline and blurring that again. Then these structures emerge inside of Photoshop. Wow. And you can see them on zebra, on giraffe, on fishes. So they are very, very very common in nature but how do you art direct them you cannot the question that bugged me for years was how do you direct them and there was this one block which spoke about it but then again phraseology did not really tell you how to do it and the idea here is very similar to what we did previously is again do the high pass do the edge finding and then do the blurring and the funny step starts in the blurring what we did previously is again do the high pass, do the edge finding and then do the blurring. And the funny step starts in the blurring. What we've done previously is just a uniform blur so that's where these uniform patterns arise from. However when you're not blurring uniformly but into a direction in this case in Photoshop with the motion or directional blur as they call it or if you implement it in Houdini with a blur that you can actually drive by a vector field by drawing in lines you will see that those patterns become a direction and even can be used to form letters in the end in this case you can see me here going with the motion blur using that as a directional blur at the diffusion diffusion is directed exactly so instead of ink bleeding uniformly into paper we now bleed it at a 70 degree angle, mainly. And now you can see those structures just pointing roughly in that angle that I told them to. Now that is beautiful. And now if you are not using 70 degrees throughout the entire piece, but vary this angle, then you can actually do it. Exactly. If I vary this by a font, if I put an entanglement there and just use the outline as a direction of a blur, I can form type. Fantastic. That was just some examples that inspired us, that we finally understood and that we put in our online library of tools. But that is the algorithmic tools. And of course, you need tools to just create procedural systems. And I just want to quickly go over the tools that are available. It's getting more and more tools. I think so, yeah. But where it all started is libraries. So Open Framework is one example, and another one is called Cinder. And that is just C++ libraries. So it's libraries for C++ that just offer a lot of high-level functions for graphics and building algorithms and stuff. And they are quite old by now. And they were used for astonishing stuff. But if you want to use them, of course, your day-to-day work looks like this. You are looking at code inside of an IDE. And that is not for everybody. It is certainly not for me. And of course, you have to compile each time you want to try something out. So from there, there is the next step up, basically in the abstraction scheme of tool building in a visual way, there is processing. Probably everybody of you have heard about processing designed by numbers. And this looks like that. It's Java based. And in its simplest form, it's this editor where you can just write Java, which is interpreted and creates output immediately without compiling. So that is a lot more visual and people created stunning stuff with processing because it is Java, it runs pretty much everywhere. But again, it's looking at code and code is not for everybody. So people started to think about how can we make this more approachable and came up with the idea of visual coding and V4, it's a VJ system, sort of, or art system, um, came up with the idea, uh, to use notes. So to use little boxes that stand for programmatic functions and that can be wired together to write a visual program. And to be honest, this looks not a lot more accessible than before, but that is probably due to the way the nodes are represented. There are other things like Grasshopper, which is a plugin for Rhino, so that is used in manufacturing and computer-aided design, where you have nodes that look a lot more friendly and they depict the algorithm. And lately, this whole concept of proceduralism with nodes took over, like with this screenshot from Cinema 4D that was mainly used in this traditional way. Now they added something they call the scene graph, which is just a procedural node system that can be used in this traditional way. Now they added something they call the scene graph, which is just a procedural node system that can be used to do exactly what we showed you so far, implementing algorithms coming up with your operators inside of Cinema 4D. Another very popular example is, of course, the blueprints inside of Unreal Engine that are just a procedural system that can be used visually to build up behaviors inside of your game engine. And last but not least, recently, even Blender, the free 3D software, added a procedural system that they call Geometry Nodes. And I like this one in particular because it is free and inside of Blender. I did some tutorials on that one. So that is just a very, very quick overview over the tools that are out there to create these procedural effects. We might have omitted or forgot some, but that's the main tools. Yes, we forgot one. And that is our beloved Houdini. And Houdini is, in my opinion, the best tool to do procedural design. And that is because it is on one hand, very visual, easy to access, sort of, and then very deep. So you can do a lot of stuff that is outside of Houdini only. The easy to access part is debatable, I think, depending from where you come from and how you approach it. No, absolutely. And that is why we created this graphics here. That is a feeling encoded in yellow type that both of us had when we opened Houdini for the first time my origin story of Houdini is this guy telling me to move my ass and learn Houdini finally and I installed it three times and only the third time I didn't de-install it after like two or three days same with me same with me i tried it out very early on i think around the 2000s yeah and i was like wow this looks complicated and then i just but now we cannot do without it and um yeah houdini is sometimes a little scary regarding interface and i think in parts it is overcomplicated. Things could be easier, but nevertheless, it's the easiest way to build up complex procedural systems without programming, without developing everything on your own in an IDE like Xcode or Visual C++. So we love Houdini, and we encourage you, if you got interested into proceduralism by this little talk of us, that you check it out. There is a free version called Apprentice that everybody can just download and start using. And if you are not okay with this, there is even a very, very cheap version called Indie that even can be used for commercial projects. So that is not a hurdle. And if you don't know how to use that, maybe check out Antagma. There are tutorials out there. Let's put it that way. There are tutorials out there. There is too. So I think we reached the end. Thank you very much for listening. This was just a little, little high level overview, 50,000 feet overview of proceduralism as we understand it with Antagma. And let's dive in and create more abstract generative art. To go with your very high-level overview of 50,000 feet analogy, it's, in my opinion, this beautiful desert with an oasis here and there. In my opinion, this beautiful desert with an oasis here and there. And I think it takes bravery to jump out of the airplane with your parachute from 50,000 feet to find that oasis. But if you do, it's an exciting ride. So yeah, give it a try. Thanks so much for attending, listening to this talk. And again, we're Antagma, Antagma.com. Like, comment, subscribe, and see you next time. Welcome back. And here with us on our studio, we have the pleasure of receiving Manuel and Moritz from Germany to Austria. Hello. Thank you very much for coming. Thank you very much for your whole presentation. It's a very, very interesting presentation about proceduralism. And I have some questions for you. And I would like to more talk about this idea of proceduralism and some things that come with the concept itself. So, first of all, one of the most common complaints when it comes to learning procedural design with software like Houdini, for example, is the learning curve. Of course, you are going to say, no, it's easy. No, it's a little bit tricky. No, we won't. Thank you. Thank you for the honesty. So you have an awesome YouTube channel now. Of course, you've been doing this with Vimeo before, YouTube. And I would like you to talk a little bit about how complicated it is to maintain a YouTube channel and share this type of knowledge, which, by the way, awesome. Thank you from the bottom of my heart for doing that. Thank you. Please. Yeah, thanks for the kind words. Maintaining a YouTube channel is a twofold thing. It's a pleasure and a pain in both ways, I think. Because on the one hand, you have the same workload that you have with just pushing out content. So you have the content creation side which oftentimes and even when we started out we underestimated what it is. But the other main point that comes with running a channel on YouTube or on any social media is the interaction with your viewership. And we are not particularly brilliant at that, I would say, but we're trying to do our best, but it takes effort. And the really tough thing when it comes to interacting with your audience, in my opinion, is that the human brain kind of plays tricks on you. Because what happens is you get lots of comments. And 95%, even more, I'd say, 95, 99% of the comments we get are actually the sweetest, most encouraging, positive comments. We couldn't wish for more. But there's this 1%, which is just like, you don't want to say prick, but it's difficult. Yeah, I know. just like you don't want to say prick but it's difficult yeah i know um and your brain um just doesn't tell you well there were 99 comments which were really positive and this one that was like okay forget it your brain focuses on that one comment and it sometimes is hard to keep your enthusiasm and your drive going with that so i think that's the main challenge when running any social media channel. Yes, I totally understand, but that's the thing. You already built a huge community, I would say. I'm not sure if it's huge. I don't want to talk about the numbers. I think it is huge regarding how many people are using Houdini, but it is tiny regarding everything else. You can't compare it to the big tech channels. No, no, of course. It's something very specific, and you have high quality and very well-explained videos, and you try to approach things. I think this is something valuable. How do you see this thing for the future? Do you intend to do this on a regular basis, And how do you see this thing for the future? So do you intend to do this on a regular basis, keep doing this on a regular basis? Or I don't want to ask you to predict future. I know it's very complicated, but I just want to know what you think. If you have the intention to push forward, I don't know, in other directions, other than YouTube, other than, you know. I can't comment on any social media channels we're planning on playing, but just from our point of view, we just want to continue with the regular schedule that we have. I mean, we have been, sometimes we've been better at it, sometimes we've been worse at it, but our plan is to just push out one video per week, and I think we can still manage, and we are currently on the best trajectory to manage. I mean, there are some changes, because we introduced a new format lately that is called NerdRant. Had it been more entertainment, less tutorial. Which is awesome. Us two rambling about topics, and it is a lot of fun. I'm wondering about who finds that entertaining, actually. Yeah, me too, but probably, I don't know. When I have any knowledge, minimal knowledge about computer graphics or the software itself, it's really interesting to see your point of view about some tools or some approaches. I think it's awesome. Okay, thank you very much. I'm trying to encourage you, please don't stop. No, we won't, we won't, because it is a lot of fun and we are doing this and we are of course continuing the tutorials, we are of course continuing in the professional stream, the paid stream, the premium stream, but we are even thinking about more like maybe introduction of courses, like structured content that has a learning path. Because that is something we get asked a lot, like where should I start? And I would like to dive into Houdini, but I have no clue where to start. And our tutorials are just, I don't know, one topic at a time and of course you can learn Houdini by just watching them but there is no directed path through the tutorials and that is something we are thinking about maybe just offering something a little bit more structured thinking about it Which brings me to the next question. So you have a lot of content by now, more than 200 videos. Yeah. And it's all about education. It's all about trying to transfer knowledge, try to get this thing out of you and to help people, which is awesome. And what skills do you think the computer graphics professional of the future needs to develop to be considered fit and prepared to the industry? This question is very broad, but you can talk about whatever you want. So you want a whited answer, right? Bad answers only, I think. So, of course, it's hard to predict the future. And of course, I can only give a very personal take on this question. And it usually, in my opinion, depends on the talents and interests of each person that you're asking. So you have students that are very artistically minded, very good when it comes to manually creating artwork. But that is not kind of the group we focus on. So we are a bit more focused on technical people that like to create these generative machines that then produce artwork. So I can answer only that side of things, I think, with some sort of expertise, if you want to call it. Maybe not even that. So I think what still is required is an understanding of expertise, if you want to call it. Maybe not even that. So I think what still is required is an understanding of concept and a willingness to dig into concepts and a willingness to solve logic riddles just from a very high point of view. That's the prerequisite that you have. And then from a technology standpoint, it is difficult on the one hand because technology changes and shifts. And I mean, your motto here is tectonic shifts. And we're seeing those tectonic shifts also in technology with generative artwork, with AI-driven artwork. So I think a skill set is being able to learn, being able to focus on new problems and acquiring problem solving skills and acquiring research skills to solve those problems just from a very high level standpoint. With that, I think, at least when we're talking this niche that we are sitting in here, comes a certain level of understanding in maths or physics and definitely a certain basic level of computer science. or physics and definitely a certain basic level of computer science. You don't need to study computer science but just your computer science 101 intro, what is a control structure, what are variables, what are lists, is helpful and desirable. And overall the willingness to look at new tools I think will be massively helpful in the future and not being stuck to one certain tool or one certain tool set. Is more concept than tools itself? Is more principles than one specific tool to do things? I think so and I think we will get into that discussion more when we touch on the topic of AI in our sector. Talking about education, do you think the way students learn, this is pretty much obvious, this changes a lot in the last few years. We have YouTube, we have a lot of types of different content. This is very different from when I started because I had to pay books and books. I'm from Brazil, so things are even more complicated, I guess. Do you think the way students learn or acquire this kind of skills needs to change because of the skill set that you mentioned? So it's a little bit complicated to have people who really like these types of subjects to do art. You have to learn computer science to do art. It's a little bit tricky. I think that's a question for you because you changed careers recently. Yeah, that's true. But I totally agree with Moritz regarding computer science. I think if you want to be successful in the technological realm, and art is driven by technology a lot today and will be even more in the future, then of course you have to look into the technical side of things, and it is not sufficient to just concentrate on the art in this niche. But regarding education, I'm the contrary. I think the traditional way of teaching is the right way. We've seen in the pandemic a sudden change in education. Everything was online. We used digital tools, cooperation tools. And while there are advantages to this, I have now three semesters experience with online teaching and I must say while there are certain advantages overall nothing can replace the social collaboration between people and I think learning is a collaborative process. So I'm a very big fan of the traditional way of learning in the classroom using paper-based material with other people. And I'm looking very forward to being able to meet again at the university to actually teach people while looking them in their eyes. It was, funny enough, it was actually like that. When I met some of my students last year during some project days, as an exception, I was actually astonished that they have a back of their head because I only knew them from Zoom. So, no, I really think... They're 3D entities and then suddenly 3D entities. Exactly. So that they're actually 3D. No, I think all of this online media, like YouTube channels like ours, and the possibility to just research stuff online and have access to information, it's all nice. But it is nothing compared to just collaborating with a group of interesting people. One last question, I promise. We talked about a little bit AI and I think this is a very, very interesting topic. I would like to know what you think about talking about generative design and all those things that you are so into. Do you think AI will change in some way the way we create art? Nope, that was a lie. I could debate that. I could debate your no. Yeah, I know this is a very tricky question. This is a very complicated question to answer. Again, it's about predicting the future and we are both terrible at it. Otherwise, we would be billionaires. So I would say yes and no. Let's go for the no first. Art, since art has appeared on this earth, I think has been subject to change in how it's created. Yes, slow change from cave paintings to oil to acrylic painting to printing presses through film, video, synthesizers to the computer with its varied techniques, yeah, with its variational techniques. And it's been constant in another way, that you have to think about concept, about a motif, about the story you want to tell. So I think those elements won't change. What I think will change is the day-to-day work. And of course, people are, as with every tectonic shifts that comes in technology, are afraid to lose their jobs. For example, the example I always talk about is the cameraman in the early 1910s, 1920s, when electrically cranked cameras appeared. So cameraman thought they'd lose their job because no one was required that had a steady hand in turning the crank. Turns out they just didn't lose their job. Their job transformed into a cinematographer who's there to paint with light, to build a visual image. So actually, their job, in my opinion, has become more interesting. And I hope to see that with AI as well, in the point that you as an artist develop from being that artist that keeps pushing pixels around to more of a creative director or art director form that tells a robot, a machine, what to create. So I'm more optimist than I used to be maybe two, three years ago. But I'm interested to hear your view on that as well. No, I'm with you in this point, but I think it really depends on the sophistication of the machines. At the moment, I totally agree. We have AI more as a complementary system, but as soon as AI starts to really create unique stuff, I mean, at the moment with deep learning it's not really unique what you see from AI But if that evolves and if we start to see really unique contributions from machines to the art realm Then it gets interesting and then maybe art will transform somehow of course Nobody can predict this but I expect to see stuff that is not just an evolution as you mentioned with cave paintings to oil paintings but maybe we'll see something completely different from advanced AI I'm not sure if it's just men collaborating with machines or just telling machines what to do that is where we are right now who knows if this will change. And then maybe we have very different inspiration. I can even imagine people shying away completely from technology because of that and starting to create analog art doing something completely different. I mean, you already can see that now with the guys doing analog photography instead of digital photography. Again, I think all the points you mentioned are nothing new and are what we've seen since centuries or millennia, actually. I think it will be a transformation. I don't, maybe in 10 years we will laugh at me sitting here and stating this, but I don't think that AI will be as much as a revolution as we come to think in the past years. It will be an evolution. It will be a massive, quick, fast evolution. I'm not sure if it's going to be that all overturning revolution. I think it'll massively change things, but in an evolutionary way. But again, maybe in five years we'll laugh about me staying here. Yeah, it's a very complicated exercise to foresee the future and try to guess but thank you very much for once again being Hagenberg with us and now we are going to do a very short break and after that we will have Tendril with us. It's a design-driven animation, VFX, and digital innovation studio that creates stories, visual stories, across medium. Thank you. Hi everyone, we're super happy to be speaking with you today. We're huge fans of Ars Electronica. Thank you so much for inviting us to participate. Hopefully we'll all be able to make it to Austria next year for the full experience. I'm Marianne, I'm one of the EPs here at Tundral and I've been lucky to call this place home for the past five years. And I'm Evao, also an EP here at Tendril and today we're here to talk about the art of negotiating a creative collaboration. This is a key element of Tendril's DNA and very likely what draws the like-minded and highly collaborative artists and clients our way. Hopefully we can give you some insights on how we foster this culture within Tendril and how our clients are encouraged to participate too. A quick backstory for those who don't know Tendril. We're a design driven, VFX and digital innovation studio. Our mission is to create beautiful and thoughtful visuals across all mediums. We believe that smart and gorgeous stories should inspire new ways of looking at the world. We are also a team of 48-ish creatives, artists and producers who hail from all over the world. We also have a large network of trusted freelancers and collaborators who we call upon to inject their unique vision to our projects. Now, we use a variety of tools to get us from the spark of an idea to brief to finished product. Whether that's whiteboarding on Miro, quick 3D sketches in ZBrush, or jumping right into C4D, Houdini, and Unreal to hash out the key story beats. It all comes down to using whichever tool will achieve the desired creative end. To add to this, as a very diverse group of folks, there are no shortages of perspectives. And it is one of the most important elements of Tendril. It gives us the ability to creatively code switch in all the right ways. The amazing Christian Hoffman crafted these avatars for our staff at Tendril. Aren't they super cute? They really do capture everyone's unique personalities. But let's have a few of our wonderful artists tell you themselves. Hello, my name is Rodrigo. My name is Rimbaud. I'm Rafael Eifler. Joey Rutkowski. Yes, I'm Kim. Benjamin Litold. I'm Leo. My name is Rodrigo. My name is Rimbaud. I'm Rafael Eifler. Joey Rutkowski. Yes, I'm Kim. Benjamin Litot. I'm Leo. My name is Jill. Tyrell Scott. I'm Hafa. Chris Borg. My name is Leo and I'm a director. I'm a producer. I'm a designer. Joker. Lead animator. And I'm an artist. My favorite part on the creative process at Dendro is that everyone is free to bring any idea. Lots of freedom and fun collaboration. And generally I like most finding visual languages for a project. Endless exploration. Throwing spaghetti at the wall. Spaghetti on the wall. Joining forces with everyone. It's such a cultural diversity. To get ideas from everyone. Everyone is involved, whether you're a producer, creative director, designer. Not only the ones at the studio, but with the client as well. 100% collaboration. It all starts with listening and asking questions. Observation, attention and listening. You need to have very strong empathy. Empathy and getting under the hood and really trying to understand. And then find that common thread. We put everything on our cauldron and we mix up everything. Making those connections. Add some spice. It's a pleasure, it's awesome. Not only are you working with super talented artists, but you're working with super talented artists that you genuinely love. It feels like I'm working with a lot of my friends. Really the journey should always be celebrated, if possible even more than the conclusion. Basically just creating the coolest thing possible. Top quality work all the time. Hi, Alex here. Super excited to be here. I'm one of the creative directors and co-founders of the studio. Thanks so much for having me. If you're familiar with some of the work Microsoft has been creating for the last five or six years, I'd say so there is a chance you may have come across some of our own work in the mix. That was the first time, obviously, which I always like to remember, which happened around 2016 July 2016 when we got a call from Nando Costa and at the time he was he was helping the team at the HoloLens division develop HoloLens so he invited us down to the campus and so we flew down to Redmond. We met with a bunch of like super smart, inspiring individuals, which was quite fascinating, to be honest. And at the end of that sort of like very first stint that we had with Microsoft, we walked away extremely impressed. I guess to all of us at Tangeroo it became quite obvious that Microsoft was kind of entering like a new area of design. And soon after we finished the work with the guys at the Hololens division, we rolled right into Fluent Design. This page here shows just the five different components that comprises Fluent Design. For some of you guys who might not be familiar with what Fluent Design is, in a nutshell, it's just an awesome set of design principles. It's what Microsoft has been using to guide the development of their future products. As you can see here Fluent Design is basically divided into five different like distinct components so you see light, depth, motion, scale and material. It's interesting too because I think this is a collection of some of the work that came in around the two-year mark after Fluent Design had been announced. And you can start to see some of the Fluent Design influences in the way they started to think and develop their products. And it's not also, I think, important to notice that it's not just about software, but it's about hardware as well. So there's a clear sort of intent in converging software and hardware into a concise ecosystem. And on this page here, we have some stills and clips that are from our very first batch of films that we created for Microsoft. By looking at them, hopefully you can see some of the Fluent Design DNA. The work for Microsoft has been extremely inspiring and naturally as a result of that we've been pouring a lot, a lot, a ton of energy into the R&D process. So what we've done here, starting on this page, we've made a very small selection of samples of our R&D process. We wish we had a bit more time for this presentation so we could really try and pull the curtain into how we operate, how we function in terms of the R&D by showing more, But unfortunately, for the purpose of this short presentation, we're going to have to keep it short and sweet. In terms of software that we've been using, all the stuff that you see here has been created using Houdini and Cinema 4D and rendered using Redshift. So yeah, so following me along here in the next few pages, as I was saying, you see a lot of R&D material. It's for sure my favorite stage of the entire designing process. It's where we really have a chance to play with some unique ideas or concepts and it's truly fascinating, right? Some of these stills that you see here or clips, the majority of them are not even like respecting or following any storyboards. The R&D phase, it's really meant to be like a place where you're trying just like to convey feelings, right? We're really focused on tapping to like, you know, the soul of what we want to communicate. So therefore, we try to be as little as possible rational. Obviously, like rationality has a place and usually comes during the production phase, right? Where everything needs to be aligned. But at this stage, at the R&D phase, it's not about that. It's about experimenting. It's about trying to capture and create feelings, producing that kind of result. Right? Another important thing as well that i think it's worth mentioning about the r&d phase is that we always um try to remind ourselves of what is it like what world was like back then when we were just like a child right like we were possessed with that kind of like natural conviction that everything that, you know, we could imagine could come to life. So it's interesting because we were like that in the past. And you don't have to lose that kind of special thing because it's quite special. So we're always trying to remind ourselves that we need to bring to the table that very same child mentality and inspiration is is definitely key um over the course of the years we've come to the conclusion that the reality is that we you know we can't really force the clients to do what we think is the right thing to do, but we can inspire them. So it's really interesting for us to look back into this five or six years of work that we've created for Microsoft. And the truth is that we could have never imagined that Microsoft would be at the cutting edge of motion design in 2021. Of course, a lot of credit needs to be to be given to Nando and all the other amazing people at Microsoft. So moving on let's talk a little bit about characters. On this page here, you see some funky, cool little characters that we got to develop for Microsoft. The next few pages, yes, this one. We were invited to basically reimagine the concept around avatars using an abstract design language. The entire process was extremely, extremely challenging because you couldn't just look fun or beautiful. It's easier to create abstract stuff and make it move and look intricate and beautiful, but the primary goal was to really make sure that despite the use of an abstract design language, that the avatars were essentially still able to display some very specific human qualities and also like be able to express feelings of all kinds. Along the way you can see here on this page like there's a nice kind of like uh range of of style frames and 3d sketch that we produced there were lots of learnings that emerged uh from uh from this creative challenge right um one of them that i wanted to point it out was finding a very delicate balance for uh the complexity of the face composition and because as we're like developing these guys we kept asking ourselves as to how much too much to make someone recognize the face and how far we could go with the abstract shapes until basically everything starts like breaking down and all of a sudden that sort of like face interpretation is pretty much gone uh so the next page i really love these uh next two pages like just seeing these guys in motion like it's just some little little clips loopable clips i really love them um and one thing here that it's uh really fascinating is really fascinating is just about the eyes, right? Because maybe this is pretty obvious to some of you guys, but it wasn't to us until we really tried and experimented with it. But the eyes turned out that the eyes are the easiest element to register and recognize. Adding the eyes in our designs or to any kind of abstract composition was always really encouraging the brain to try it and interpret as a face. And shortly after we finished the avatar work, Microsoft called us again and they had another challenge for us. They basically wanted us to conceptualize, design, and execute a complete refresh of their existing library of emoticons. From the brief that we got from them, it became pretty pretty clear that this project would be the biggest deliver we have ever done at the studio. It was something that was quite scary at first because it basically included every single smile from the library and I'm talking here about like 1,800 of them. So you can imagine. At the same time, we took on the challenge, we felt inspired and more than just that, we really felt that we had an opportunity to create something unique. We wanted our emojis to celebrate the beautiful differences and imperfections in human expressions, which is why here on this page you can see that the silhouettes of the emojis aren't 100% rounded, but instead what we came to call the imperfect circle. We wanted to create something quite unique, as I said before, full of life and distinctively different from other existing emoji palettes. The end result for us was basically something that you can see here again that it's quite eclectic, colorful, celebration of joy and a heartfelt embrace of visual communication basically. I wish you could talk to you guys today about our creative process on ESPN. This is a project we delivered at the tail end of 2020. But when we first started talking to them about another project, this was in fall of 2019. It was kind of our first contact, so they didn't know anything about us. We spent a lot of time having good conversations, sharing our work, showing them our process, walking them through the steps and how we approach things. We explain the collaborative way we approach projects with a lot of research and a lot of R&D. And that vantage point we like to sit at and look at a brief from the top down to see the best way forward. I think it was really appealing to them and there was really nice energy between our teams but as it turns out in the end they decided the project they came to us with wasn't totally the right one which was disappointing but what are you going to do and they mentioned they would keep us in mind for the future so we crossed our fingers and hoped that they would call flash forward to a year later and they did end up reaching out again but this time it was with a single bid project that fit more within our wheelhouse uh it was a brand film like how fantastic it's totally our our, our visual language. So we had put out that pure signal and they came looking for what we had to offer. Right out of the gate, they were super honest about what they what worked and where they wanted to improve based on collaborations with other studios. And and then they said, now tell us what we can do to be a good client to you. What a dream. So that gave us an opening to build what we call a working agreement. Basically, a set of criteria that held us all accountable to each other. Through a series of three to four conversations, we nailed it all down. And kind of the cornerstones of this working agreement centered around communication, feedback, and collaboration. For communication, you know, what are the acceptable ways we are going to communicate together? We're going to be honest and respectful and clear with our wants and needs and aim to have problems solved together with feedback. The age-old question, how much feedback do you want? When should we give it? When don't we give it? Is it timely? Is it consolidated so we can stay on schedule? Those were some of our parameters. And for collaboration, just I think we both agreed after feeling each other out that there was trust that was built there. We wanted an open door to jam with their internal team. They know their brand best. We would be remiss if we didn't take advantage of that to help us with shortcuts to get from point A to B later, to know what works and doesn't work for their viewership. So we invited them fully into our design process. If we tie this back to the topic of this talk, a working agreement is what we strive to create each time we get a brief or come, you know, have a creative collaboration with another artist. It's an opportunity to build an environment where we can influence them in a positive way and enough for them to buy into our way of working. What was even better with ESPN is that everyone held the line regardless of stress levels or technical difficulties or, you know, the timeline getting shorter and shorter or more asks coming toward us. It was all good. We all kind of committed to this working agreement and we stuck with it. So once we had the working agreement in place, they came back with a huge 134-page brief. They took the time to create one-pagers for a bunch of our work and critiqued it in the best way. In each example they let us know what worked, what was relevant, what didn't work in relation to this project, all in the name to show us what they needed to get out of the film that we would eventually create. So in a nutshell, the ask was to create a one-minute brand film for the college football playoffs using the ideas and feelings of football but not rely on the tried and true football tropes. Well, have a football but don't have it look like a football. Use cleats but maybe don't use cleats. Maybe have them be abstract. Those kinds of things which is perfect for a studio full of not so sporty types. But in reality the brand film was somewhat irrelevant for them. What they really needed was a broadcast toolkit, something we don't do at all. We tell visual stories. But what they needed was a broadcast toolkit. And they needed one that could push creative boundaries for a sport that doesn't usually lean that way. They felt the best way to achieve this would be by focusing on the brand film. And from that, pull up the elements that could be reused and repurposed for I think it was like over a thousand executable pieces over the course of five years. And this would be in play for five years. So it needed to stand the test of time. And they also needed visual cohesion, which is why circling back they asked for a brand film and came to us so the question is how do we do it how do we design to fill all of the buckets have enough elements for this massive toolkit and also tell a story. We racked our brains a little bit, and then we revisited that massive deck and found the common thread that everyone, or, well, their team gravitated to was our abstract work. The Houdini work. The, you know, the flowing procedural stuff that we do. A linear storyboard might not fit the bill. So we decided to go with a non-linear R&D based approach, something we had talked to them about a year previous. And in the end, we decided to invite the ESPN team directly into the whiteboard. It isn't something we typically do and we reserve that for you know true collaborators and we really trusted them and felt that they would bring a lot to the project. It proved to be a decision that enhanced the overall success of the project and really I don't think we would have gotten to where we got to without their invaluable input. I don't think we would have gotten to where we got to without their invaluable input. On this frame, you'll see a whole bunch of little squares. And this is our mirror board, our design ideation piece for ESPN. And if you look closely, there are two sections. There's a top line and then there's a bottom line of a bunch of squares. The top portion are the tendril frames. And the bottom portion are the ESPN team frames from the point at which we invited them in. We initially did some research and started things out. And they asked to join the boards, so we let them. And from that point on, we just ripped off each other in the most beautiful way.'d see a frame have a thought about how it might speak to their audience more succinctly so they'd iterate and then we would iterate and it went back and forth and back and forth like this for months like through the whole process after our initial research phase from design to to look at frames to animation to light and then comp, and kind of beyond. It was amazing. On this slide, you'll see some of the R&D we came up with. This was pretty early in the process, and there are definitely bits that worked better than others. And definitely, definitely, definitely some things that did not resonate with the client. But, you know, they let us go down the road. The trust was there. So, you know, it was cool for us to continue to explore. And they always kept an open mind. They gave us the creative space to find the actual narrative that we ended up at. And in turn, we read the room to make sure we were being good partners and really listened if something didn't work for them. You know, it just, we had to be aware of each other at all times. And in this way, we were able to avoid the butting of heads that can sometimes happen with clients. And everyone loves avoiding that. And these last few slides show the progression of the film and how it eventually came together. We tried to build a lot of systems based on the physics of football. The design language evolved and we were able to show the physicality and explosiveness without the literal imagery that they really wanted to avoid. So I mean, I think overall, internally for us and for the ESPN team, we all walked away feeling like it was a massive success but then it went out into the world and I think all of us were kind of nervous about how it would be received there was nothing to worry about people loved it which brings us back to the beginning and how we set up the project because we we set it up the way we did, because we trusted each other and continued to keep our joint creative wants and needs in mind, the process was super pleasurable and it follows that others would be able to see that through the film. So I think that's it for me. I'll hand it over to Avel and Chris now. Thanks. So there's another really exciting R&D project that we started exploring back in May. It was kind of a response or a delight at the moment that digital art surged to the forefront of culture earlier this year, in the form of NFTs, this topic obviously has so many facets to it and many conversations have been had and will be had around it. the crazy bananas, economical aspects, but beyond that also more importantly, the cultural aspect of it, which is fantastic. It's still early days and it's very experimental. So quite exciting in many ways. So a lot of our friends and collaborators were and are striving into this new world as digital artists and creators. And as Tendril, we wanted to celebrate that moment with them. That the tokenized digital art has been validated in some form or another. Further to that, we also wanted to see if the viewing experience of these digital art pieces can be pushed forward and improved upon. So we embarked on this journey back in May of discovery that has taken us to truly interesting places, I have to admit. We started to create a world where digital art can be experienced in native space and form, from two-dimensional art pieces to 3D sculptures and videos, and eventually, hopefully, interactive installations. As you might know, the universe has a funny way of responding if you put a signal out. Currently, Tendril is collaborating with SushiSwap to create an epic viewing experience for their new Shoyu NFT platform. And here's a small sneak peek at the developments so far. Enjoy. Terima kasih telah menonton Thank you. Welcome back and now with us at the studio we have Ivel Jagelin from Tendru and also from Tendru, but on the other side of the planet we have... Sorry... The names. Chris Quarry. Thank you very, very much. And Marianne Linusma. Você pode colocar isso no meu número nervoso. E também temos Xande Torres. Bem-vindo. Muito obrigado pela incrível apresentação. E agora temos algumas perguntas para você. some questions for you. And I would like to start talking about something very interesting, at least to me, on your works or many of the works that they involve certain level of abstraction. So the question is how to explain and negotiate this kind of thing to the client, to sell this type of very abstract concept to the client and how they usually receive this this kind of ideas who wants to take this one chris do you want to start yeah i could start um it it's a really great question and it's a tension that's kind of always there, to be a balance between those abstract visuals that for us are very sensory. It's almost like we think of them almost, they get to the emotional core of what we're trying to achieve with the film. So there's always the logical component and the communication component, but then there's also the emotional sensory side of things and we're really attracted to that and we're really in particular interested in how to articulate that visually in a purely visual way and And so we tend to lean in there, but how we negotiate that with clients is a really good question. Did you wanna add anything? Yeah, I would say from the very beginning, we start the conversation and we prime our clients and our partners for this kind of thinking. So it's not a shock to the system. And I think we set up a really kind of safe space for the artists too. So they feel comfortable sharing things that maybe the client wasn't expecting. And our CDs are great at also framing it for our clients to expand their view of what something could be. Just adding to what you two just said, that initial sort of jumping off point when we get the client for the first time on a call, time on a call it's so crucial um to the success of everything that we do because we're putting on a table you know openly like all the important questions right we walk in like without any answers you know to be honest it really is an interview process of what do they want to convey what kind of feelings they want us to put some attention, right? What matters to them? It's really important. And that's the recipe that we end up in the end creating and taking back to the team. And that's our jumping off point, right? It's not, I think, nowadays, with the advances in technology, it's not complicated to create abstraction, you know, design abstractions, like it's fairly easy, you can repurpose systems, you can use things that you've done in the past. But there is a bit of a danger there, once you start like just repurposing stuff you start losing the sort of important element which is what chris and mayor were saying like the feelings right need to make sure that we're constantly you know um giving the client the answers that that they need right um and also to sort of pick up on a few points that Mair mentioned and what Shanda is also talking about and Chris saying, there is a huge amount that goes into building a trusting relationship with the clients that we work with. In that, Mair mentioned the word partner, we're not sort of client-vendor relationship when we're doing projects with them. We are partners in this adventure together. So, you know, there is a lot of that fostering that goes on through sort of listening to them, talking to them, and really digging deep on finding out what their motivations are and how the emotional landscape looks like for let's say whether it's a particular brand or a product so i i think this is the part of empathize that you talk about on your presentation which is awesome i guess um i would like to talk a little bit about the talents you work with, the people around the world who works with you. I would like to know how do you, it's not a hiring, I put some observations, hiring, you don't want hire, it's like more attracting people to work with you. So how does pink work? So you find someone doing something interesting and you bring this person to the group or how does it work? It's more a traditional way. So we need someone with a skill set and then we bring others. I would do your piece of mind on this topic a little bit. Sure. Should I maybe I can start off with, you know, a few things. So yes, there's definitely, you know, we always keep an eye out for anything interesting that's happening in the industry or, you know, in the community. community, a network of people that we work with. And a lot of people, you know, we share a lot of stories and they recommend certain things or they like certain things and, you know, they share interesting stories that are happening. And so we always keep an eye out and we reach out to people that we think are interesting. And, you know, then there's also an integral part of it is we don't just drop them into projects, but there are several conversations that happen before we engage an artist, let's say, or we decide to kind of bring them into a project because at the end of the day, they should be brought in to do the right kind of work that they feel an empathy for and passion for and not forced to do something they're uncomfortable with. So yeah, and we have a talent manager who's always very busy, but then, you know, along with Chris and Shande and Patrick, you know, they're constantly having conversations with people they think are interesting. Is there anything to add to the topic? No? I think you captured it really well. I mean, at the end of the day, it's all about these very personal relationships that we make with people that we meet along the way and often it's through instagram and things like that these days that we do meet people but we really um right away try to make an effort to make contact and get to know and we miss being able to meet it It's nice that, you know, like what you're doing with ours, Electronica, we miss these kinds of events because they bring this small community of artists in our industry together physically. And it's such an important thing for us to do every, you know, once a year or twice a year. And I just have one thing to add to what Evel was saying. It's as much as we romance the artists that we feel would be a good fit, a lot of times it's seeing how they work within the team. Because it's more you can be a great artist, but maybe it's not a great energy fit. Maybe, you know, the connection between people isn't so smooth. So that's what we're also, we also look for and is sometimes more important in our teams. Ease. Makes sense. On your presentation, you talk about R&D versus storyboard and this kind of thing. So, augmentation is something extremely important for design but I would like you to talk a little bit about this problem of having very tight deadlines and at the same time doing R&D. This is a very interesting subject because at least on the Brazilian industry we have this problem. Sometimes we have projects and the part of projects that they gave us is kind of small but very complicated and we don't have time to do a lot of research. We have to jump in and solve problems in a very fast way and I would like to know how you deal with that, because there's a lot of people involved in processes, but still a challenge, right? That's such a good question. And then again, it just is what Yvel was saying about building trust, right? Everything starts there. Client, they come in with a sort of initial idea as to how long it's going to take to produce you know a piece of content that they need right um and when we start talking to them it's about saying like hey oh is this what are these the things that you want that's great now let's then like start like sharing our process right and when it comes to that, you know, initially say a client comes with a six weeks timeline and it happens quite often, to be honest. But then as we start like just getting into the nitty gritties and just sharing ideas and thoughts, then we're like, hey, you know what? This is going to take 10 weeks, but those initial additional four weeks are extremely important because that's where we dedicate the R&D phase, right? Is when, as I was saying before on the video, we try as much as we can to free ourselves from any sort of storyboarding sort of concept and dedicate those two three four weeks to really just um throw spaghetti on the wall and see what kind of interesting sort of avenues are there that we haven't really had a chance to to see it before but it can only happen if you if you like willing to put the effort and the time to get there. So it is a negotiation. You need to, little by little, hold the client's hand and walk them through your process and give them the why. Why is this important? And to add to that, the whole R&D approach, an R&D process that we like to try and build in, sometimes it's not appropriate for every project that we take on. Because, you know, if from the beginning with the client, it's not desired that we explore certain things or we explore an identity or visual abstraction, then, you know, sometimes it's not worth it, you know, to kind of go into it. But it's really about kind of having an agreement with the client beforehand, that a certain R&D process might be required or could be good or beneficial. And it's about them trusting us with the process um and allowing for extra time you know um because quite often when uh you know people come with deadlines sometimes it's for events uh but other times it's kind of arbitrary right uh because they just made that date up and they think it's appropriate um and you know it of our duty, the EPs and the creative directors and the director as well, when they're explaining the vision, also explain how the creation process works and what's appropriate amount of time and budget as well. Oh, yeah. Yeah. And the other thing too, is that to to be fair and fully transparent is that four years ago, or maybe five, we had a completely different understanding of what it means to create this bridge. It's about trusting each other. Clients would often come in with a set amount of weeks, and we would just say say yes because we're moved by fear right we want it was important to us to please and it still is but nowadays we know what it takes to create you know content that really taps into the sort of like emotional side of things as opposed to just be like beautiful renders using whatever kind of tools you have available um in order to really craft like beautiful meaningful stories it takes time and that's the process that we basically like try to walk each client through explaining to them why what it took to build say like a microsoft film or you know an auto store film or whatever you know you want to you want to use as a reference but uh it's a process you know it's about building trust you know inspiring the client and i feel that's the other thing too during that process of like conversation you know the client might be like completely set on a certain amount of time but if you inspire them then you start like moving the needle towards your direction right and you gain that extra time that it in the end is so valuable like to create these beautiful um emotional films interesting so uh one last question i would like to know if the pandemic affected the work of the studio and on what extent if that happened, you are willing to work on that way for future projects, if you want to change something or if something already changed because of the pandemic? I'll start off. I would say, you know, we were set up for remote work, being a small studio and having trusted collaborators all around and also having our half of our studio in Brazil. So it wasn't that much of a mind shift. What I would say though, is we discovered a lot of tools right at the very top that allowed for this collaboration to be more seamless. So Miro was a huge thing. I think Alex talked about it and everyone kind of gravitated to it. We were able to work real time. We were able to like really throw the spaghetti at the wall and everyone could see the spaghetti just like you can see it in in real life um and then i think we became more succinct in how we talked to each other and how we ran dailies how we talked to our clients in fact i think by by removing a lot of the external factors, we became more focused on the nucleus of what tendril is and where we wanted to go and what we wanted to create. So that's my perspective from an EP standpoint, you know, bringing in a job and watching it kind of blossom. And the timelines, you know, I found people were more kind with their timelines in some cases and sometimes they weren't. But I think more often than not, we were able to move the needle because of the pandemic. So for us it worked. Yeah, I'd agree completely there. Because I mean, I don't know if, because a few months before the pandemic, the lockdown kind of happened, we were already setting up an infrastructure to allow for remote working, primarily motivated by the fact that we were actually moving our studio of 10 years to a new building, which was being renovated and the renovations weren't going to be ready in time. And we were kind of setting that up anyway. But now obviously, lockdown happened, everyone moved to working from home and we were like, oh, okay, so I guess this trial infrastructure will just make it full and official now and um but beyond that um i'd say you know there hasn't really been a negative impact in terms of workflow and efficiency of work and so on but on the other hand um i think everyone misses the communal aspect. Everyone misses sort of hanging out and the happy hours that happen you know regularly and just also being able to walk past someone's workstation and being able to sort of tap someone on the shoulder and say ask what you're up to. Yeah. That's the hardest part for us. Like you just nailed it. Alex was saying that inspiration is so critical, like in our collaborative, when we're in a space together, we're constantly feeding off each other's energy. You may have come in and not had, you know maybe having a bad day but then you're around people that give you something or you may be stuck on a problem and you can bounce things off of people right there near you and that uh that kind of mutual energy we're really missing that a lot we're trying to find ways i think the pandemic for us has been trying to find ways to digitally recreate that or a fit in like stop gaps and ways of simulating it but nothing quite is the same we've realized we we really learn to appreciate our time together i think everybody has you know yeah i think people who doesn't like social contact very much, so for example like me, I was never this social, you know, that I can't complain about people anymore. So I promised myself to never do that again. So I think it's a very interesting way to see this change in ourselves, I would say. interessante uh jeito de ver sim esse esse nosso eu diria uh eu gostaria de agradecer muito por uh esse tempo com nós obrigado pessoal por todas as respostas toda a honestidade e de novo a incrível apresentação o trabalho é realmente realmente incrível e agora And once again, the incredible presentation, the work is really, really amazing. And now I would like to say that we are going to do a very short break. And after this short break, we are going to start a panel discussion with our last two guests. Stay tuned. See you soon. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Diolch yn fawr. Thank you. Thank you. you you you you you Thank you. Diolch yn fawr iawn am wylio'r fideo. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Vågstavnskog Thank you. Welcome back. And now we are going to start our panel discussion with Tendril and Entagma. And from Tendril, we have here Ivel. And in Canada, we have Christopher and Marianne. Thank you very much once again for joining us. And from Entagma, we have Christopher and Marianne. Thank you very much once again for joining us. And from Intagma, we have Manuel and Moritz. Thank you once again. And the topic, which is free to talk. You can talk as much as you can. You can go in any direction. The topic is tectonic shift. And you can go in any possible directions like talking about technologies talking about trends talking about not only about technology itself but also workflows possible workflows and things that have changing changing and happening right now. So it's up to you. Okay. So please, who wants to start? You guys already touched, I think, in your Q&A on one of the shifts that happened, which is work from home, COVID, work in a heterogeneous environment, pipeline, let's call it that way. I think the other one that we touched on was AI, new technologies, emerging technologies. What else could we think of that could qualify as a tectonic shift or shift? Is there really a tectonic shift happening? Is it that strong or is it more of an evolution? I don't know. It's a good question. I mean, I'm of the opinion that it is actually just an evolution. And, you know, the thing that's happened over the last year and a half was maybe a bit of a catalyst on bringing on the evolutionary kind of changes. Cause I think it would have happened anyway. Maybe instead of it happening over three years or four years, it's now happened over half a year or eight months. Yeah, that's very true. That's a good one. And another one that we've been talking behind the scenes, which I think qualifies as a massive shift as well as NFTs. Yes. Should we touch on those or should we just rather avoid that? What's your opinion? I think it's a good trend. Did someone say NFTs? Yes. Should we touch on those or should we just rather avoid them? What's your opinion? Did someone say NFTs? Yeah. So that's your policy? No, I mean, from what you're saying, it's many things that have kind of coincided it feels like there's a convergence of a lot of different things at this moment in time that have uh i mean we're certainly i think alex kind of mentioned it it's so he mentioned how easy it is to create now uh the tools are so developed and evolved i mean we've been doing this long enough that we remember when it was a lot less accessible. And now the tools, the hardware, the connective tissue between people is so much stronger. It just feels like things evolve, have converged and are evolving, but continue to evolve at an increasingly rapid rate and everything's really fast. It's hard to keep up sometimes. Do you feel that as well? I feel that since I've been in this industry and I've not been in that industry too long with 10 15 years it's always been like that um maybe what we've seen within the last one year one and a half years is many shifts converging um some of which previously just happened sequentially in a way but lots of stuff that i've seen were could qualified as such as well be um shying away from industry specific custom hardware tools which were really inaccessible such as Flames, Inferno, Suites, back to desktop software, back to desktop Windows or Macintosh software, emergence of GPU rendering engines versus CPU rendering engines, the emergence of cloud rendering. I think all of that had its shift, it's just like recently, I think you're right in claiming that the pandemic has been a catalyst for this. So many things being accelerated is unique. Yeah, but beyond actually just stating kind of the status of things that it's gone faster and so on. I feel like it's more important than ever to actually formulate or at least understand for yourself what this acceleration means, and how you can use the tools, and, you know, what's the meaning behind what you create because creation without purpose is you know I mean that's kind of what automatons do right and we as humans you know I feel like it's it's much more important to define what our purpose is. That is something that I feel strongly that it probably um is the entire field in my opinion is creeping out of this niche nerd corner that it used to be because i attended arts electronica in the year 1998 info war and back then if it just was created with the computer it was just great because it came out of the computer so it was uh just the medium itself was just interesting and fascinating and today you're totally right um the tools are far more sophisticated and um they are more approachable so you're right it's more about the content we have viewers so it's interesting because the you know the people seeing the art that we create experiencing you know these innovative technologies they're gonna drive also where we go and what works and what they accept and what they don't accept so the whole uncanny valley thing I totally agree uh i i think we're gonna jump it and i think we're gonna we're gonna get there um and i think our viewership um will lead us in some ways with how they react to things and what they learn to accept right totally avatars and the gaming industry and you're right we can. We don't exist within a bubble. There's what we think is interesting. There's our world and then the bigger, the real world. It's very easy for us to feel that way and get into a little bit of like a tunnel vision in our little realm of, you know, 3D, the niche of 3D and motion. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, NFTs, The niche of 3D and motion. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, NFT is not to get into that. It started with nerds like us. But now, it's expanding. And people will really start to look at it as an investment or a way to see art and experience things. So it's the layman we have to keep our eyes on, because they're going to tell us where to go next. I mean that's that's always already catching your breath but let me interject before. I found it interesting that you're mentioning the audience and you're absolutely right. It's something that we tend to absolutely disregard, painfully neglect. So my question is, you've also been touching on the perspective of data-driven art, data-driven artwork, and even data visualization. Do you think within the audience, within the broad audience, this is gonna go mainstream? Do you think it's something that needs to go mainstream? Do you think it's something that's needed to explain the complexities of our daily lives, of the changing daily lives? That's a really cool question. When you, that ultimate data visualization in general is, when you think about the origins of graphing and just visualizing data, it is meant to make all of this all these inputs more intelligible and accessible to us like things like the success of devices like the apple watch we're seeing a lot of biometric awareness i guess we worked on a project earlier this year for a company that's developing a super advanced neural scanning device. Basically, it's like a brain sensing device. And their vision for that technology is that it will be something, it's not for being designed for use in just research and in a hospital medical context, but their vision is to give people awareness of their mental state in a more data driven way so that that feedback can be used by the individual to influence their habits and behaviors. And so I don't know if that's kind of a tangent, but it's really interesting to imagine making all this like massive amount of data we get and have access to now more easy to make sense of. I guess. What do you think is needed as a designer or as people in this industry? I mean, I think I speak for all of us when I say that we come from more of what's qualified as a more traditional design discipline such as the animation film maybe to the animation to lead what do you think is required of us of the industry to adapt to that or do you think we are already at a good position? Because we are. We are, we are, we don't need to change. I actually don't think we're fine at all. Please, fire away. No, because I do think, you know, the design sort of field, right, like us as designers or, you know, associates of designers, right, we do tend to kind of pursue things in a very sort of uh focused vision um and there is onus in kind of pursuing that because only then you can achieve some sort of success or some kind of iteration level there but um marianne is right that's like um we don't have um a broad view uh when we're practicing our art um so i you know i don't have a broad view when we're practicing our art. So I don't know, in a practical sense, I guess we do need to be sort of consciously stepping out and looking at the broader world and seeing what's going on and then taking whatever input or influences information that comes in and putting it back into our practice. And I think that does need to be sort of a regular occurrence as opposed to just trucking on that is very true but at least all the people working in the field that I know tend to do exactly the opposite yes they just bury themselves in basements with computers and never go out and don't see people work until early hours in the morning. So you are right. That's very true. So in that sense, I think, you know, we are a little bit screwed in that sense if we continue in this path. But it's kind of like breaking a habit. But sort of maybe technology actually really helps because as we mentioned before stuff gets easier and with stuff getting easier you have to spend less time thinking about stuff you have more time thinking about what you actually want to create and probably you can go outside meet people talk to people and think about what you actually want to communicate instead of just always dealing with problems inside of your 3D package. The downside of this is that once this shift is finished, then time is probably going to be a little more. I would accuse you of a very optimistic view on society. Of course. But I don't know. The thing is, there's always this, what's it called, like push and pull between what technology enables and what that kind of replaces in human activities. And I often find that like, I don't ever thinkegma or Tendril will ever not be needed. I don't think so. Because whilst certain things are automated, certain things are done automatically or procedurally, with the help of AI and technology, there will be so much more other things that we can concentrate our energies on. That is a very important point because there are of course pessimists saying the machines will take over and they will replace us all. But I think I have a very strong argument against this point of view and that is even if machines will be capable of doing art and will replace us and will do design, I think that humans do not want to listen to art created by machines. Because art is about communication, it's about social life, it's about us as a society talking to each other. And if the partner that I'm talking to is a machine, probably I'm a big part of the things it wants to tell me. So I'm quite optimistic that even if the machines take over, at least we do not listen to their origins. I don't know. There's a loop on this conversation. So every time we go and we talk about technology, we talk about future, we talk about trends, we always go back to the beginning. Always go back. falamos sobre o futuro, falamos sobre tendências, mas sempre voltamos para o futuro. Então, isso não é uma questão, é apenas uma observação. É incrível a quantidade de coisas que falamos em apenas 5, 10 minutos, é distorcedor também. Eu não me preocup as a professor, as a researcher, as an artist, but there's a lot of people who fears artificial intelligence, you know, and how to absorb this thing and that's the thing, which skills do we need to adapt? Adaptation itself is a skill, I do believe that. But which type of skills do we need to not at least feel obsolete? You know, because the problem is we are never going to use it. I truly believe that. It's not about the technology, it's not about the tools that we use, it's about our view, it's about the way we see things and the capacity and the background and our experience things and the capacity and the background our experience that have value and the machine cannot do that but that's the thing which skills to cope with that to deal with this changes I would say right now is a different skill set that painters needed when they invented photography is a different skill set from 100 to 100 years ago probably not if you're phrasing it like that i feel it's like a trap you're setting up so let me let me just blissfully walk into it and just give you the most the broadest of answers. I think two skills are essential here, which I also witnessed in you guys talking Q&A session. One is, I don't know where it comes from, maybe it comes from, I don't know, it's fearlessness. Let's say not being afraid of changes that will happen inevitably in your life and the willingness to adapt to either stay curious or through some motivation stay motivated enough to actually occupy yourself with the change that that's just my view i mean yeah manuel uh for sure is is correct and you mentioned it earlier when you talked about how this industry in general that we're in it's already at it's always been a rapidly evolving convergent cross-disciplinary kind of field so most people who are in this field or are interested in it are very, they embrace change and are interested in the constant process of learning and discovery that's inherent to what it is. It's an industry built on the fusion of all these different technological streams and creative streams. Yeah. And listening and adapting. And I think it's a young industry you know so keeping yourself fresh with youth and open ideas yeah um and and the ability to the desire to constantly learn and to and to be aware that in three years everything will be different and you'll have to learn it all again or something else new completely. And that it's exciting and not fearful. And that it's exciting. Yeah. Yeah. It's not terrifying. Yeah. I think another one is empathy to foster a sense of empathy for your community and the people, not just for your community and the people, not just for your family and friends, but also just the wider community for humanity. And really sort of make a point to empathize and try and see from the other point of view and to get in there beyond just the learning. I would absolutely agree. And maybe i would add into it um the skill set pot a sense of agency for your own fate which is sometimes depending on your psychological predisposition a bit hard to convince yourself off but i think it's needed convince yourself of but i think it's needed okay um i think i think that do you want to add something to this uh chronic shape topic or trends or uh even now that we have this nice conclusion and have this warm feeling of just agreeing? Really? You don't want to talk about NFTs? We cannot sleep it out. No, if you want to, we have a few minutes. I think that's another few hours. Yeah, I think so too. So once again, I would like to thank you very much for this whole discussion to share with us your thoughts and it's been a very very great experience for me and for us to have you here in Hagenberg it's an honor for us thank you very very much and I would like to thank you very much for your audience. And now we will have a break. And tomorrow we will continue with our Expanded Animation Symposium. Bye-bye. Thank you. Thank you.