S2E18 - Running VFX at a Major Studio and the Future of Visual Storytelling

From developing custom tools to create over 200 VFX shots on his own award-winning indie to supervising globally at major studios like DreamWorks and Sony Animation where he is now, hear Chris Browne's story and spot on advice for creativity that won't quit.

Learn more about Chris here: http://www.chrisbrownedigital.com/projects.html

Written, directed, and executive produced by Chauncey Zalkin. Intro/Outro sound engineered by Eric Aaron. Photography by Alonza Mitchell with Design Consulting by Paper + Screen.

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Transcript

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As you know, visual effects have gotten more jaw dropping every year.  It's hard to even imagine what the future holds with AI and the storytelling that we are going to produce how will AI affect our viewing experience,  gaming experience, the way we create and the way we see the world. While AI is terrifying in many ways with questions about  what it means to be human, it really is exciting when you contemplate how whatever you can conceive of in your mind that you can make it real in visual storytelling  or in immersive storytelling and that the ability to do this will become increasingly more accessible. Sort of like when we started  shooting video on our iPhones.

We will be able to imagine something beyond reality, beyond what we see, and we will be able to create a visual manifestation of that. That's really exciting and really great things can come of that.  A lot of bad things could come of that when it's used to hurt people or deceive people but if you're a creator, there are new tools that are coming out all the time that will be able to expand your imagination. The foundation of this podcast, actual people, has always been about real people. Real people, meaning not celebrities, not influencers, not people who are just incredibly good at self-promotion, but about the people who make imagination come to life.  Those  who live their lives creatively and derive deep satisfaction and pleasure and meaning from the life of the mind and whatever we can imagine, or  however it is, we connect with the world through this senses and push ideas just a few inches further, if not miles further. I love these kinds of people. I love creative people. I've always dreamed of a world where instead of money, creativity would be our currency.  a lot of people have written about the fact that creativity has been flattened over the past few decades.

With all this talk of diversity, ironically, there's more homogeny, there's less variety.   I want to unearth the people who dare to dream not of making as much money as possible but  can dream worlds, however that looks for them. 

When Chris Browne, the Global Visual Effects supervisor at Sony Pictures animation approached me, I was like, yes, I must be doing something right  if he found me. We're nearing the end of season two. This is episode 18. In season three, I will be doubling down on creatives  as well as analysts and experts on the human condition, the mind, and how we take care of ourselves.

If you've been listening to this podcast, you know that I'm in a master's program in mental health counseling at Northwestern, and so   I'm soaking  all of this new stuff in and I've put a lot of my writing on hold but I can feel things percolating under the surface. And I think what's wonderful about being alive is that dance that we can take between using our left brain and our right brain and moving back and forth between creativity and imagination and the spiritual, but also weaving that together with the more analytic.  And in this podcast  I like to do a lot of that. Looking at creativity and imagination and also embarking on  intellectual exploration of the world around us  all of it is really about making sense of the world. I'm just trying to figure out what is going on and I like to talk to people who use their thoughts and feelings and histories to create something. Okay, enough of that. I just wanna give you a quick update . If you're a parent like me, this is a really busy time. We're heading into summer. My kids are 11 years old and they're going into middle school after the summer and forget ai.   I'm way more terrified right now of sixth grade. I am not ready. I feel like sixth grade is too young for middle school, where it's been reported to me by older kids and parents that they're vaping, they're smoking weed and doing other stuff in the bathrooms.  I have kids    when there's a kissing scene on tv, they shut down the laptop 'cause they don't wanna look at it. , they don't like scary movies. . They're really gutsy kids, but they're definitely kids. I'm not really ready for it but what I do love  is that . One wants to be a director and the other wants to be an animator. The one day director has already shot her first neighborhood documentary for Mother's Day  without my knowing what she was doing, and it's pretty damn good.

And the other draws daily at her desk so toward the end of this interview, I got in a little advice for my future animator. And for all of your future animators and VFX artists, which is my favorite part of the entire interview.  Chris is not only the supervisor for VFX globally for Sony, but he has had a lot of attention and awards for an independent project of his that well, he'll tell you about it.  So without further ado, I bring you   Chris Browne.

Welcome to Actual People, a podcast hosted by me, Chauncey Zalkin, dedicated to meaningful conversations about the evolving landscape of our lives and the power of our own creativity and imagination to make magic. 


 What are you working on right now?

I'm  a   global visual effects supervisor  at Sony Pictures Animation.  I've got several shows that we're working on with Netflix   animated series  based on some pretty amazing Sony brand franchises, some on the feature film side, on the animated feature, some on live action, some  are video game based. So  it's pretty exciting to be here at this moment 'cause there's a lot going on. 

How many people do you manage? 

It fluctuates.  I've worked at Dreamworks  and  various studios. I've managed teams in the hundreds and sometimes, smaller internal teams, but also managed outsource studios that we're working with as well. And then outside of that I've got my independent film projects that I'm getting out there into the world and been promoting and doing lots of screenings at film festivals and talks at different conferences and conventions. Doing a lot of demonstrations at different studios as well on how the project was made.  

Wow. So let's start with that third one. 

 The film that I made  it's my own independent film, so I did pretty much all of the cinematography, camera work, editing, post, and about 200 visual effects shots myself.

So  there is a lot of interest on just the filmmaking process, how that was made, and then also the subject matter has been getting some interest as well. 

 You have a lot on your plate. Yes.  And still you find time to do independent work and that's pretty amazing. Are you a parent? Do you have kids? 

No, I do not. That makes question  

slightly easier,   I bet you would be doing this even if you did have kids.

Oh, absolutely. Yeah, 

how do you organize your time ?  

It's just all about chipping away at it, really. I  think, okay, if I want this project to be done in the next, I don't know, eight months or something, or however long.  I work my way backwards and say, okay, well that means I have to put out about X number of visual effects shots per day in order to hit that target so I know that if I'm not   chipping away at those each day, it's just gonna build up. So it's either gonna push the whole thing out or it's gonna pile up and I'm gonna have to do some crazy hours just to try and get it done. And I've just had a lot of experience working on other shows, planning artists and schedules and stuff like that so I have a pretty good grasp of how long things should take. But of course, there's always challenges and things that come up, and that's part of why I do these independent projects as well, is to really sort of challenge myself in terms of the technology and sort of the creative look and design and that kind of thing.

 If it's a matter of putting in, like if you only have time for one hour a day, just make sure you're consistent and you stick to that finding the best time to do that. If it's getting up an hour early and putting that hour in, great, or if you, if you work better in the evening, you know, put a, put an extra hour in before going to bed at night. I  carry a pretty high speed laptop around with me. So if I'm ever out and about but I have time to pop into a coffee shop and do some work there, I'll definitely take that opportunity. 

Do you have a routine every day? Do you use timers?

I used to  put this all out in a chart and make sure I do each section cross it off each time I fulfilled that. So at the end of the week I can see how effective I was, but  it became pretty habit forming  I don't really need to get so granular tracking it now because I.

I just know I'm, I'm going to do it. Like  if the TV is on, I have the computer running and I'll be working as that's happening.  In my living room, I'll have my laptop there if I want to just take a stroll over there and have a coffee or something, I'll do that. 

But you know what you're  describing though, is that when you go to that computer, you know what you're gonna do. You don't wander off onto YouTube.  You don't 

mm-hmm 

go down a rabbit hole looking at  one thing that you wanna do and how to accomplish it. Or research  a scene or, but that's the kind of stuff that I end up doing, where  I go deep down a  hole to trying to understand something that I wanna  Right, better grasp on or get a point of view on, how do you make sure that you stay on task?  When I edit a podcast, I know exactly what I'm doing, so I can do it but if I come and sit down and I'm not sure exactly what I want to get done of the 15 million things, I might end up getting nothing done so, 

right.  Yeah, no, I, I mean I certainly go down rabbit holes for sure  just by the nature of the work  you do have to do a lot of research when you're doing complicated VFX shots. 

I will absolutely go down rabbit holes, but it's very targeted. So I'm trying to find a specific technique or techniques to accomplish a certain task. So that's the rabbit holes I'll go down and then I'll just put that into practice. So  that's usually my approach. 

Okay. 

 So let's go back to the, your independent project itself.

Mm-hmm.  

Sure. Okay. Well,  it's, a film about robotics, ai, it's grounded very much in realism, so it's not like a Blade Runner type thing. It's more like. What you would see currently today with a company like Boston Dynamics, where you see their  robot videos on YouTube. It's centered around a robotics company, a dark  corrupt corporation that's uses these machines  to bring about a technological utopia but they're cutting corners as  corrupt corporations do.

I was gonna say, is this a documentary of meta?  

You know, I, I was doing a podcast and  there was a comment that  the plot line is becoming more relevant every day. At the time when I first wrote it, I was thinking of companies like  theranos, for example with Elizabeth Holmes and what it would be like to actually work in one of these places.  What makes this film different than a sci-fi movie,   aliens with Wayland Corp. Or Terminator with Skynet the company's off in the distance and we're dealing with the aftermath, but I wanted to write something where you're actually in the company, like in the guts of it, when people are making those decisions and what the staff who are opposing those or thinking this isn't right, what happens to those whistleblowers when this whole machine is  moving forward.  I really wanted  to get into the corporate aspect of it. 

You know, what it makes me think of, there was an HBO show,  they were creating a quantum computer. Devs.

Yes. Alex Garland's show, right? The, the creator of Ex Machina?

 It has Nick Offerman in it.  Yes. Alex Garland. 

Yeah. Yeah. That's great. That's a great show. Yeah. Very interesting.  

Yeah,  so is this gonna be a feature length film that you're just Yeah. 

So that's the plan. So Right. Currently it's a short film that, like I mentioned, it's, it's doing the festival rounds but the intent is to make it as a feature.  I have a feature film script for it.

 The short film is  a companion pitch piece for what the feature would turn out like. 

And you, did you write an entire screenplay first? Yes. 

Yeah. 

 Tell me about, let's talk about your process.  Is this your first time trying to create a full work by yourself ?

 

Well I've created other short films before and they're all usually very sci-fi,  I guess  my style would be sci-fi, but grounded in  gritty   present day realism. And I guess my process for, do you mean my process for writing ?

Yeah , Were you thinking mostly about the visual   and then connected the dots in the story? Or did you have the whole narrative structure or lesson or moral or something before you began ?

Yeah, that's a really good question. I was probably getting more into the visuals at first. I knew I wanted to  depict robots that we're currently seeing right now.  The initial idea was again, referring to other films that are out there, Blade Runner, Terminator. The technology is always like hundreds of years into the future, so I thought it'd be much more terrifying to have  a technology that we could actually see today, because that is something that could be coming for us right around the corner. 

The party that Elon Musk had with all the robots serving the food?  

Yes. Yeah. Yeah. 

 If those robots go off the rails, 

yeah. , so that kind of idea.

 One of the big questions is I look at all these different creative industries and I watch all these  industries  collapsing    Publishing, advertising,  media, massive amount of jobs being lost over the last couple years, and it just seems to be no end in sight.  All these very accomplished people losing their jobs and having to reinvent themselves and questioning their place in the field. Then there's all this consolidation ,  I don't know if this is the same in animation.  I'm wondering how are you feeling in this current era,  before Trump got elected, but especially  now, what do you think is gonna happen with creativity and people taking bigger risks and chances on interesting work that isn't safe or the status quo? 

Do you mean more like from a studio perspective ? 

Yeah, from a studio  📍 perspective  . 

There's still a lot of projects that are very much franchise based, but there's also a lot of franchises that haven't been doing that well, and I think it is time to start taking some risks. Instead of making one, $200 million movie and putting all your eggs in one basket, divide that up and make a handful of 30 or $50 million movies or even $10 million movies taking some risks assuming that one of them could be a hit. And then you have another possible franchise on your hand so there's some longevity there.  just thinking back to when  the Matrix came out, the first one, for the first time, it was so fresh and original and people were so excited about it and it took a lot of risks to get that made and  something  that's more recent squid games is so completely original look-wise style story so I think. I think there is definitely some opportunities there for some original content to be made, plus  the way things are being made now is becoming less expensive, so I think there is some possibility to take some risks, try some new things. 

 Are some  things that are  important to you right now in your work that you  want to attempt or that inspire you,  to advance your own career and vision or  things  in people that you hire that really spark your imagination? 

 In terms of people that I hire, I'm a little bit different than some studios, I like working with people who have a wide variety of skills. I don't like to say generalists, but I like to say multispecialists, so  if I can find people, and I've hired a few recently that have a very creative and technical mind that even though the work may not be exactly what we're looking for, I know they have the skills to innovate and explore and try certain things, but also work within a system that can build something that is applicable to a production that may have hundreds of shots that go for many, many seasons. I have to factor in not just the creative part, but the producibility part  the production part of it.  What inspires me is  really just trying to push the boundaries  of quality and what can be done.  There are certain looks that are pretty exciting, but also a lot of people are chasing after them,   I like coming up with, and also working with artists on very original looking concepts. And designs and just approaches to production as well. So I, I get really excited about something that is really trying to push the limits of what can be done. That, that's another thing that's a big part of what my job is that I enjoy is  when, um, let's say an executive producer, showrunner has these very ambitious, ideas, goals that they wanna do with their project. Many scenarios they're told that can't be done or budget and this and that, but I, I really like working with them, with trying to find innovative ways to achieve it, to see if it actually is possible or maybe done in certain ways that they can't consider. For instance, I'll just refer to my own film. it's rare that an independent film from one person would have 200 VFX shots in it. The reason why that was manageable was because like working on productions that have had hundreds of artists, I know that there's certain tasks that take a long time for artists to do. So what I'll do is I'll either write code myself or I'll work with a pipeline team to develop tools that can very quickly get them through many, many different shots automating a lot of the manual tasks. So the funny thing is, is that when I approached my own film, I knew as one person  I can't get bogged down on doing certain things that are quite difficult.

If I can build them into an easily adaptable tool, then I can roll that into production. So I have a couple examples for you if you're interested. 

I do want  especially if you're outside of the industry. Yeah. How does that 

Okay. So in the, in the film there are swarms of these nanobot robots. There's hundreds of them, maybe even a thousand, and they swarm in these clusters and then they can form into shapes and then break apart and then form into another shape like birds, like a flock of birds, kind of like birds, but with way more control, like what you might see in some of those drone shows.

But they could also like swarm through like a small hole and then disperse out. So  normally approaching that is a very complicated visual effect Simulation. But all of this high level technical work to achieve that was baked down into a tool that I can literally just change the timing or I could draw a curve.

The swarm would follow the curve. I can take a shape of  a spinning Taurus and plug that into the tool. Now the swarm will fly over to that and form into that. So I was able to essentially create a whole bunch of shots controlling these swarms. The timing, the shapes, even just  the randomness with a very simple set of tools that I can plug in. So what was typically a very complicated effect, putting all of that work ahead of time to build this system so now I can crank through many, many shots very easily and be able to direct them all. So, 

oh my God. When you say tools, what do you mean? Are you programming code  



Yeah. So basically it's within the software. So this particular software that I was doing this with is Houdini. Within the software, you have the ability to create tools so you can program code in the software for it to do certain things that you want it to essentially so  that's just  a small example.  

Okay. so you were talking about the showrunner and working with your producer.  Talk to me about  all the people that you  work with, all the people that touch your work and how you  collaborate?  

I collaborate with the showrunner and the art director and production designer. The showrunner has their vision. They're the creative driving force, and they work closely with the art director who will do concept art and designs. They will also work with a either supervising producer or supervising director who does all the storyboarding for all of these sequences. And  myself, I'm more the computer graphic CG person who will work with these people on how to achieve visually what they're  drafting out in these designs  so that is a big part of what I would bring to the table. So they would gimme some designs. I'd work with a team of artists,  people who do modeling,  they do sculpting, surfacing, the  painted texturing of it, and also rigging how the characters move and animate.  I  work with those artists and then present that to the showrunner and the art director to see if it's achieving their vision. Of course, I'll put a lot of my own creative... 

That's what I was gonna say. I'm thinking about a director and an actor. The actor will bring some of what they feel is right for the role. Also visually and technically  it's additive. 

Absolutely. Yeah.  We have a really nice screening room here at Sony, and we'll be sitting in there with all of the creative heads and we'll be reviewing something and I'll be able to throw in a lot of ideas  a lot of  time that would be relating to cinematography as well lighting and camera effects the shot,  depth of field focus  all kinds of different things to really push  also visual effects . I'm not involved with the audio and I don't work with the actors. 

So where is the energy in animation going right now? 

 I would say that it's really opening up to exploring different looks and styles, I think for a very long time there was the Pixar look and Dreamworks kind of had this for a while , but  when the first spider verse came out, it was so  original and visually different that the success from that opened the door to try a lot of different styles and techniques and now we're seeing that with films like Wild Robot. the Puss and Boots movie, and then of course The Mitchells vs. the Machines  there is a lot of interest to try different looks and styles, which I'm super excited about. 

I noticed that there's  more acceptance of a hand drawn kind of look too, it seems.

Yeah. Yeah. It's almost like,  a hand drawn painterly look or sort of a hybrid. So it's sort of this mishmash of the two. I think the, the latest Ninja Turtles movie did a really nice job of it too. I like it when it suits the story. For instance, Mitchells vs. the Machines, the inspiration of the look was what a high schooler would have in her notebook, how they always do doodles and sketches.

I think it was very much, yeah. reminiscent of that and Spiderverse had a comic book kind of style to it. Yeah, the multiverse, 

The one with the multiverse. Yeah. So they made two of them hold on the theater.  Yes. Um, and then I have 11-year-old kids. Oh, there you go.

Okay. So 

I have a lot. 

Oh, perfect.  The Ninja Turtles one was very much grounded in  teenagers,  those kind of doodle sketches as well.  I thought that was really cool. But I'm also very interested in live action VFX, especially with my independent work as well. 

How did you become an animator? What's your journey to becoming an animator. 

This is very common, but when I was eight or nine, my family got a home video camera  for filming Christmas or family vacations and that kind of thing. My brothers and I   fell in love with it and kept playing with it and creating stop motion, little claymation short films.  We'd have our friends come over, we'd make these weird sci-fi movies where we'd build model spaceships and blow 'em up with firecrackers. And there was always like creatures involved somehow. I just absolutely fell in love with the whole process. My parents really pushed me to get a proper education that you can rely on. So I went to business school, but  any time off that I had or any break, I would be working on  animations or visual effects. I started doing independent films  with my classmates  in business school. And I just kept thinking like, wouldn't it be great if I can just do this all the time? Like it was such a bummer if I had to go to accounting class or something, or business communications. So after I graduated, I  took all of these  projects and  I applied for a school, an animation school, it was an 18 month program, but they said that based on my portfolio, I actually only had to go for six months. So I went there for six months  and then I  what was the 

pro, what was the program? 

The Vancouver Institute of Media Arts. While I was there, I made an animated short that went on to be in a whole bunch of film festivals that won some awards. Then I started working in live action visual effects for a while, and eventually started my own VFX company. It was boutique studio. We had about 40 artists. We were in business for nine years and we worked on a whole bunch of different kinds of projects, like live action, visual effects work, but we took on just about anything, television commercials, animated productions. That's  my origin story, so to speak. 

One thing I  like about animation is  you can create things that don't exist . Mm-hmm.   You're helping people imagine that this is the world they live in     the very naturalistic. Very human, everyday things that you put into that scene is what makes it feel even more real. Something very simple that people do in everyday life helps bring it to life and feel more real.

Mm-hmm.   I'm really interested in the future and  I can't help but think that you must also be interested in that. So if you could create a utopian future of where we're gonna go, we get rid of all the bad things that are going on right now, are there some things that you think like, if we could just live the way we're supposed to live and have the technological advancements that help society  or  things that are really cool  that spark your imagination 

I don't want to get into the politics of Elon Musk  but I think what he was doing with Neuralink was very interesting working with the brain and how we work and how we 

think.  



What do you think the future of AI is  threat or benefit 

it is unbelievable what is  achievable with ai. So I would say the benefit is empowering artists or people who have not spent a long time honing their skills to pump out lots of different interesting creative concepts but  when you're working on a professional production, you need to be able to direct it. You need to be able to work with a director, or if you're directing it yourself, you have to be able to put in the nuance of the acting and the camera choices, and the design and if you're leaving that up to an ai, it's really just pulling from anywhere in the world and it's not as directable as what you might need on a professional production.  I can definitely see AI being a part of the conception process. It is definitely  being looked into from a production standpoint but will it take over? No, there's, there's, I do not see that happening. We want to work with artists and art directors because  it's very much a collaborative type  process  but I definitely see AI being a part of  that. Where it will fit in is  yet to be determined. 

Okay.  So let's talk about new forms of storytelling using CGI.  Where are we going right now?  

LED volume stages  giant screens that are LED walls, essentially like very high level video screens,  the background behind the actors aren't green screen, they are actually projecting  whatever's in the background, and very often it's a  game engine that's an approach that's being used and it's really great for integration  as opposed to trying to match it after the fact 

 They feel like they're in that environment and the director and the cinematographer can see that environment when they're framing their shots. It's a totally different workflow because you're front loading all of your CGI environments  before you go into camera



yeah. Is there anything that you wanna share about your own personal evolutions that you have gone through  that have shifted your viewpoint? 

I would say the interest from my independent project has just been incredibly validating. I went to Comic-Con. I was invited to speak on two panels about the production and just the entrance from the audience afterwards, like rushing the stage to either get a poster or ask questions about where they can see more that was incredibly validating. And also just the fact that I was able to create this project myself, and there's been so many advancements and tools that have come out since then. That would make it even easier for the next time. And also bringing those skills to my day job at Sony as well. 

What are some of your favorite things about working at Sony?

They're incredibly supportive of people's creative visions. They are very much willing to try new things. They really champion artists who work there for being artists. If people are doing their own work outside of the studio, they will do an artist showcase and they will  serve wine and snacks and make a big evening out of it where people can showcase their own personal artwork at the studio, which is so awesome. It  makes for a great night and everyone can get to know each other and they get to know the artist and what they do in their spare time.  I'm helping oversee  a fairly new division at the company so  I really wanted to show that I was very focused on what I was hired for but they had seen a lot of trade magazines writing about my film it had been in different entertainment magazines where I've been interviewed about the process of making it and that sort of caught wind at some of the people at Sony. So they approached me and they said, Chris, like, you're doing a terrible job promoting yourself at the studio. We had no idea you were a filmmaker. So they invited me to actually screen the film at Sony on the main campus. 

Awesome.  

They made this amazing event out of it a big massive theater on the campus. Many factions of Sony was invited.  Sony Pictures Entertainment , were you nervous?  Were you No, I was absolutely freaking out  completely. They called me to a meeting to discuss this screening. So again, I was pretty new at the studio at the time. And what's typical is you go to  one of the boardrooms to have your meeting, and sometimes there's a previous meeting that's running over so you kind of just wait for that to end and then enter.  So I show up to the boardroom and I see a whole bunch of people sitting at the table. I'm like, oh, this must be.  Some other meeting that I'm just gonna have to wait for it to end. So I'm sort of standing out in the lobby in front of the boardroom and someone opens the door and they're like, Chris, are you gonna come in?

Like, we're here for your meeting? And I'm like, everyone's here for my screening. And so I go in and they say, oh, this is the projectionist.  Just let 'em know what format you wanna screen the film in.  this is going to be the mc, so they're gonna be asking you questions. So let us know if you have anything you wanna discuss specifically here. This person's gonna be taking care of the catering, like what food would you want served afterwards? And it was unbelievable. Oh, this person's in the PR and marketing. We want to put up some posters and flyers. And do you have a headshot  do you have promotional images from the film.

Like they, we had a whole, they weren't, they weren't throwing you a bone to just make you feel good.  No it was like a legit event. Legit talk a lot.  I was completely thrilled about it. So since then, I've had a lot of meetings and, and people interested in how I made the film from different factions of Sony that I would not have met otherwise.

 📍 Why do you think that it got so much attention? And how did you get so much media attention in the trades?  

Initially I started pushing for it, but then other people caught on. I think it's predominantly for two reasons. One,  I made it myself, and there again, there's 200 VFX shots,  I've screened it at studios where the vice president of visual effects for major studios have told me that the VFX in my film alone would  have the value of about $2 million if they had done it in house to that same quality.

 

The LEO awards are like the Oscars in Canada and I was up against a major studio backed production that had a team of 40 VFX artists and three different studios working on it and to my shock, I actually won. I thought there was no hope. I saw the production and it was mind blowing, so I didn't even show up, to be honest. I couldn't believe I had won. So like it was getting some momentum that way just from like the production standpoint. But I also think the other reason why it's getting interest is because it's kind of hitting the zeitgeist a little bit. If you look at tech companies a long time ago, like when Steve Jobs started Apple from his garage or   founders of Microsoft, you always see them as these young, ambitious people starting up  they're  living the American dream and  we just have this nostalgia for that.

But you look at how tech companies are seen now. They're manipulative. They steal our data. We don't trust them.  

Yeah. They're the bad guy. They used to be  the underdog 

 Yeah

and subversive and changing the status quo.

Now  they're influencing politics and stealing our information so it's a total flip. So not only is AI and robotics a big topic right now, that's a given, but  it's the dark, conspiracy tech company angle that this film has  that's getting people's interests. So there's a lot of people excited to talk about that. 

I love this stuff.  That's why I'm asking you about your fantasy of the world of tomorrow, because I'm always imagining this  I write science fictiony stuff and I have built entire worlds and then I run into a roadblock like we have too many people on earth. Where are we gonna put all the people?  

It gets scary

right?   How do I solve these problems? A lot of fiction is about solving some sort of problem or going on a journey to figure out how to fix something that is broken. Mm-hmm. And I often run into walls where, where I can't fix it.  It's almost like you have the power of the world in your hand when you're creating these worlds.

Mm-hmm.  It's a microcosm, you're playing something out and so if, if it's effective, I mean, what's better than that? Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah. People can see it through. Sometimes a lot of movies, they fall apart somewhere so when it really makes sense, it feels so satisfying 'cause  we wanna have more control over the 

  absolutely. And when it feels so like grounded in something that  can affect your life,  then it makes you much more invested in it as well. Right. That's when we watch horror movies too to figure out how we're gonna protect ourselves in a bad situation.

You're  acting it out with your adrenaline and your bodily torture. Oh, totally. Yeah. But  also  it's escapism. It's a thrill ride. It's fun.  It's all of that, 

You're also alive at the end. I'm thinking when I play Zelda, I, I die, but then I can just reload.

Yeah.  In real life when you die, that's it.  Um, this has been really great  so I guess the last question would be if you are a young person. I have an 11-year-old daughter,  she might change her mind a million times, but she wants to be an animator when she grows up. Mm-hmm. And what she does is she just sits there and draws manga characters  she just traces them over and over again. At first. It was  rudimentary, but I've  noticed she's gotten better and better and she draws things freehand now and she does it all, all the time, like every day. Oh wow. She sits down and she draws,  and I finally got her one of those apple pens for her to do it on her iPad. 'cause she was doing it with paper and she takes a, she does all these different things using procreate. Procreate is pretty cool. But What would you say to kids about becoming an animator or going into VFX. 

Exactly what your daughter's doing. Just keep drawing, keep exploring and use reference. See what's out there, see what you can mimic. But see what your own ideas  can bring to the table. If you have books on anatomy that shows how muscles and bodies are connected and flow and stuff like that. Flipping through those and how to draw perspective is very helpful. So I think that's what she's kind of doing naturally. She's like, I've figured out how to make light hit the hair, or, oh, well then, yeah, the lighting is a whole other aspect too, so just exploring and keep trying and looking at reference. My family was hypercritical  of art, I remember, and they would never say anything was good.  There was always a critique or something so you felt like you had to always work harder to try and earn some sort of approval. I think if they're saying everything that they're doing is great, it's probably not productive, but being encouraging just so they keep pushing themselves  to achieve that. I, yeah, I don't tell her everything is great. I'm like, I don't understand that,,  but I'm watching her actually get better and better and put in her own point of view.

Over the years, I've realized it's so much more about grit than it is talent. Talent  is almost counterproductive I would say. And I'll give you an  example.  When I was in animation school,  I  really wanted to succeed.  I was  looking around to see who  I could learn from, who I could sit beside and we can grow together. I remember there was one particular student who was incredibly talented.  I don't know where he got it from, but everything he did was just like amazing.  He just knew how to do it and  the professor loved him  he was a really good friend, but he was kind of a slacker dude.   Sometimes he'd be sleeping in class and sometimes he wouldn't do his work but when he did, it was incredible. And then there was an other guy  he was the oldest person in the class.  He had a couple kids. We were all  early twenties.  He  was much older, further along in life, but he worked extremely hard  and he was also really smart too.  But,   if someone were to just come in and say who would succeed? You'd see this person who has to put zero effort in, but  the person with the talent didn't stick to it because I'm just gonna make some assumptions. Maybe either it wasn't for them or they just didn't wanna put in  the effort to take it to that next level where this guy , he was not the top of the class, but he just kept going every day. Just would not stop. And he would contact people in the industry, what do you think of my work? It'd get trashed. He'd send it back a little bit better, okay, a little bit better try this. And then they'd see this person who keeps working and getting a little bit better, a little bit better, and they're like, oh my God, this guy works so hard. Let's give him a shot. They gave him a shot at a big studio, and  he was struggling, really struggling, and so they put him on the graveyard shift, but  he just kept at it and got better and better and better, a little bit better. Then he became a supervisor. Then  he went to one of the biggest studios in the world and started working on huge projects and now he started his own company   and or, and he's actually involved with multiple companies, so he is killing it. I really think that hard work is the most important thing, to be honest.

That is a great story. Hard work. Hard work like grit.  If someone criticizes your work going  I'm gonna prove you wrong. I'm going to like do that much better next. Like, what do you think of this now? And if they still criticize, just like that,  that ability, yeah. To not get tired or bored, just keep  the energy going, you'll get there. I, I think like if you keep working at something, you'll get there. 

 There's a book,  mindset Carol Dweck,  she wrote this book  maybe in early 2000 tens about grit and resilience. And I  think that  at  the time and going forward that's like a huge shift when I was a kid growing up I remember my mother telling me there was a girl down the street, she did ballet. And my mother told me she's not talented and this girl worked so hard and I remember being like, oh my God, why is she doing it if she's not talented? I don't know what she ended up doing, but she kept going after all the other kids stopped doing ballet, and I remember thinking, if I'm not talented at something, I better know quickly so I stopped doing it and it really negatively influenced me. Yeah.  Because I was interested in visual art and I did kind of quit  I didn't get into Parsons. they said, you're really creative and so imaginative, but your skills are not there and we cannot let you in. And I ended up going to the new school and I studied cultural studies, but my idea was to do a  more academic cerebral course and mix it with  visual art.

And when they told me that, I was like, oh, I guess I'm not good. And that was it. And I never really pursued visual art because of that. I just think if I'd been born or in a different era, I would've thought about it differently. I mean, I'm happy with, I am a writer and I feel like that's what I'm good at and I keep going back to it, but I love the visual world so much 'cause it illustrates the things that I thinking and it's a good marriage but we quit so much more easily, I think, in the past than people do now.  yeah,  I think there is the mentality of that's just not for them  yeah., I remember hearing a lot of that. Even in movies,  they'd be like, you're just no good at this. My other daughter  her teacher told me  maybe she can't grow up to be a director, but she's not gonna be an actress.

 They're doing a production of Finding Nemo and it was a bunch of kids singing and, I mean, this is absolutely not true about my kid, but I just thought  I had created a print in high school  in AP Art and my art teacher hung it behind a pot at the final show and I just burst into tears and I was so upset and I really thought that said a lot about my ability as an artist. and   I said, you know, you're gonna do this to my daughter what was done to me and and teacher, she's so young. So I've been having to fight against that at home and say, you really have to ignore him.

 I don't know the scenario, but let's say that may have been true at that time, but that doesn't label you or someone  as someone who can't be great if they stick to it.  In a lot of movies  you see someone come in and they're the just this prodigy genius and it's like super unrealistic and usually those people  they burn out.  The movie Whiplash, for example. Is my, I just thought as soon as you said that, I thought of that movie. That movie was absolutely brilliant. 'cause it shows the hard work, the effort, and the result at the end whereas movies like, you know, and this is, I'm not a huge superhero movie fan because to me it's like by some toxic explosion or  some alien thing they just get all their superpowers all of a sudden, and then they're amazing at everything. It's not like an Olympic athlete who has to train their whole lives and have their ups and downs. It's like, boom. They're the best like that.

And I think it's. It's a wish fulfillment thing. I think it came from   kids fantasizing they can be a superhero but  I always feel like if you stick with something long enough and you're aggressive about it and you don't give up, I think you'll get there and it'll probably just take 10 times longer than you think it will. 

Yeah.  Also the quality of your work will have those layers of all that effort and that learning and that rejection becomes part of your character  people who get things really easily, you have  the trope of the flame out cheerleader in high school or the quarterback in high school who then is like, you know, selling cars because Yeah.  When they peaked in high school,  they peaked  in high school. Right, right. You know, so anyway. That, that's great. I think this has been  an amazing interview.  And I can't wait to see your film. Can I see the whole thing online somewhere?  It is still in the film festivals, but I will be releasing it fairly soon.   I'll make sure you get a  link.  Great. 

Thank you so much. 

Likewise.  keep  in touch.