Can your passion projects push your brand forward?

We’ve had our eye on Chromosphere Studio for some time. They’ve consistently put out stellar work, with a keen eye toward the future of the industry. From new techniques to bold storytelling, these artists are building up their brand without taking their eyes off the prize. So how do you develop your career without losing focus on a passion project?

Kevin Dart and Theresa Latzko are amazing artists in their own right, but the team at Chromosphere Studio demonstrates how the whole can be even greater than the sum of its parts. Now that they’re powered with Unreal Engine-designed projects, they’ve been putting out some really incredible work. 

If you want to see what is possible when passion and purpose collide, look no further than Yuki-7. What began as an experimental video to explore new techniques has morphed into a wild and wonderful project. At the same time, this drive to create something new pushed Chromosphere to become a bigger and better version of itself, attracting new clients and opportunities. 

If you’ve been concerned about pursuing passion projects over client work, Chromosphere has the proof in the pudding for you. In fact, you’re going to want to grab a few bowls of pudding just to keep up. Now plug this into your head.

Animating the Unreal with Chromosphere

Show Notes

Artists

Kevin Dart
Theresa Latzko
Stéphane Coëdel
Keiko Murayama
Tommy Rodricks
Karen Dufilho
Elizabeth Ito

Studios

Chromosphere

Pieces

Yuki 7
Forms in Nature
Cosmos / Exponential Chess
Cosmos / Uruk Brought to Life
VOLTA-X
Playdate
Randy Cunningham Title Sequence
Seductive Espionage
Looks That Kill
Powerpuff Girls Reboot Title Sequence
JUNE
Knight Rider
Kamen Rider
The Batman (2022)
City of Ghosts
Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse (2018)
Arcane
Mall Stories 

Tools

Unreal Engine
Quill
Maya
Cinema 4D

Resources

Epic Games

Transcript

Ryan Summers(00:46):

Unreal engine, you know, that software that's been popping up in your feeds a ton lately, likely accompanied by some amazing visuals. And then you learn that it's all done in real time. And you have that mind blown emoji moment and realize the future has to be real time rendering, which begs the question. How can we as motion designers tap into that incredible power. That seems reserved only for video game designers, answer Yuki seven, a short film by Chronosphere studio that harnessed the power and tools of unreal engine for a project that feels more like a cartoon network show than a video game. The team at CHSE always pushing their boundaries, made the bold decision to learn a new software, to help them produce an animated series, right? And summer sits down with the folks at CHSE to find out how one can go from primarily using after effects in Maya to switching up your entire production pipeline to unreal engine. And how did using the unreal pipeline influence their process, stay tuned to find out. Scott Miller (01:59):

So I have taken tons of different school emotion courses from animation bootcamp to design bootcamp, illustration, motion, character, animation, bootcamp, advanced motion methods, you name it, I've taken it. School of motion has really helped me take my animation and design skills from bare bones, not knowing too much, really being fully self-taught teaching myself and learning from various scrap together, tutorials on the internet to really going and be able to make this into my career. And I'm in a position where I work in house at a company. And one of the things that I actually really look for when we're hiring other folks, is the ways that they've learned animation or design for whatever that role may be. And I'm really excited whenever I hear that a candidate has taken a course through school of motion, because I know that that they'll be able to really execute on whatever that is, that they've taken the course and before. So I'm always looking for that. Thank you, school of motion for not only the way that you've impacted the work that I'm able to do, but to really help those who I work with to be able to do really great work. Ryan Summers (03:03):

You know, sometimes you get really lucky to talk to people who you're inspired by or who you've wondered how they've achieved, what they've achieved. And if I was gonna put together my personal top 25 list, the works of Chronosphere would probably take up a good half of that list. When you start thinking about things like forms in nature, cosmos, Volta X, the play date, launch video, even Randy

Cunningham, ninth grade ninja for a long time at school motion, we've been tracking the work of CHSE. We've always been interested in what they've done. Sometimes we even try to figure out how the heck they actually achieve what they achieve. But now when we're in a world where things like unreal are starting to show up on the horizon, CHSE came out with a amazing series called Yuki seven, and we thought it'd be great to bring on Kevin dart and Theresa Lasko to talk about how did this happen? Where do we see the industry going and everything in between Kevin and there. Thank you so much for coming on. I can't wait to talk to you about all things, UQ seven. Kevin Dart (03:55):

Awesome. Yeah. Thanks for having us. Yeah. Thanks for having Ryan Summers (03:57):

Us. I'm sitting here for the audience, just to set context, I've been aware of Kevin and ER, quite a while I have a, a art book next to me called seductive espionage that I think was probably the beginning days of UQ seven, just as a thought or an idea, but now we actually have this amazing mini series that's on YouTube. Kevin, where, where did UQ seven even come from? I think you called it a, a legacy project for CHSE that maybe some people are just hearing about it for the first time, but can you give us just the, the history of UQ seven? Kevin Dart (04:25):

Yeah, I started the project, I think back around 2008 or so initially is just like sort of an outlet for all this stuff that I was really inspired by from like old spy movies to certain types of poster design and stuff. I, I, I really wanted to create, I, I, I think at the time I was designing a lot of pretend, movie posters for films that never existed. And I, I wanted there to be sort of like a whole world to that. Like I was interested in the idea of like, what if there was a whole kind of franchise that I started designing these things for. And then I sort of cast my wife, Elizabeth, as the central character, like sort of a, it it's a character that's based on a lot of her personality traits and, and, and the way she is and embodies a lot of what Yuki seven is about. Kevin Dart (05:14):

And I, I sort of put her in this world and elevated it to all these places and it sort of, it, it was really primarily like, like a visual experiment at the time. Like I was kind of thinking about story stuff and kind of thinking about character, but it was really like a, it, it was more like a art experiment that then kind of spiraled because I, I got really invested in the character, started thinking more about what, what could we do with this world? And so that led to a second book that we put out in 2011 called looks that kill in, in another trailer that we made. And I, I mean, we, we stopped putting out stuff for the project for a long time, but things kind of kept happening in the background. Like I was constantly, it, it was always like a topic of discussion when I would meet with studios and stuff, they would wanna know what were we doing with the project? Kevin Dart (06:02):

Like, did we have more plans for the character? And I, I pitched it a few times, like tried developing it at a few different studios, but I was kind of always really reluctant to bend what the project was to what any specific studio wanted to, to me, the, the DNA of the project depended so much on like all these specific influences and, and making sure that Yuki was really the, just the, the star of it. You know, sometimes we would meet with places and they'd be like, does this all make sense? Like maybe she

needs like these other people or like all the, just, just like suggestions for how to shift it away from what I thought was really important to express with the, with the project. So it was always kind of there simmering in the, in the back of my mind, like the, the character I never really left. Kevin Dart (06:50):

Like, I, I was always kind of thinking about it and I would see things randomly and think like, ah, that, that would be cool to do this kind of thing with Yuki or kinda, kinda just get more inspiration about what I wanted to do with the project. So, yeah, I mean, eventually, sometime around, I think it was like around 2018, we were getting really interested in experimenting with Quill, which is a, a VR program for, for drawing and sketching stuff. And I, I just started thinking, like, I wonder if this could be a cool way to sort of update Yuki. I, I mean, so something else about the, the project was that it was also sort of the beginning of a, of a long collaboration I had with Stefan KK. Who's a partner in crime. He's like the after effects wizard of, of the world. Kevin Dart (07:37):

Like his, his involvement was always really central to what we were doing with the project, because a lot of the, the early iterations of Yuki also depended on these, these little animated trailers we were making, which was basically just me painting images, and then giving them to Stefan, to mm-hmm <affirmative> animate and do all this incredible after effects magic with, to, to kind of bring them to life. And so we used that collaboration to make these little trailers early on, and that, that was sort of the beginning of our whole career and motion graphics and motion design and animation, and all this stuff was what we did in those first trailers, cuz it kind of helped develop our early pipeline for creating 2d animation using primarily Photoshop and after effects. So it was, it was a really great way for us to kind of find our, our voices in, in animation and find some things we were interested in. Kevin Dart (08:25):

But another, another core component of that collaboration is that we're always looking for how do we for, for like ways to evolve that, that style and, and to kind of push ourselves beyond what we were doing on our, on our previous projects. And so as, as we had kind of collaborated over the years, we had done things like we'd started to work in 3d. Like the first 3d project we did was this power puff girls special at cartoon network mm-hmm <affirmative>, which was, that was kind of our first attempt at doing stylized 3d, and then mixing it with 2d backgrounds and processing it all to, to have a cool hybrid kinda look to it. And then from there, you know, we did the first big animated project we did Atmasphere was June, which was the, the lift short we did in, in 2016. And so we were kind of like thinking about how, how can we keep pushing this stylized 3d kind of look. Kevin Dart (09:16):

And I, as, as we were starting to get introduced to Quill, I just thought this could be really interesting. Like maybe we could kind of draw this whole world in, in VR and it could have this really interesting aesthetic to it. So, so that, those kind of like where the experiment started was I, I think I asked our, our character designer KCO at the time, could you just try drawing Yuki in, in Quill and see how, see how it, how it looks? And so, but something that's always bothered me about 3d is like when, when things seem too clean and too perfect mm-hmm <affirmative> and what I, what I really loved about Quill was like, this is a way to, to really just mess it up to like really make it look cool and, and sketchy, which was, which was always really important to the style of UQ seven. Kevin Dart (10:01):

Like I didn't want it to seem too clean or too perfect. And I thought this would be a cool way to capture that in 3d and try something new. So, so that was what we did first. We, we, we had Kaku draw Yuki and 3d. We had our, our lead animator, Tommy Rodricks tried doing some experimental animation in Quill. And then we, we started trying this back and forth thing where we were exporting models from Quill and taking them into Maya to see what it looked like in there to see if we could light them. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and something, something we kinda started running into fairly quickly. And the, this is also talking about 2018 version of Quill. So, you know, I know a lot of things have evolved, but at, at the time we were finding that it, that the translation between Quill and any other program, wasn't very smooth that the models would kind of show up in Maya and they would be very, just heavy. Kevin Dart (10:53):

You know, there's a lot of geometry there and it wasn't very conducive to like, if we wanted to take that model and then rig it. So we could do the animation in Maya that there there's kinda like too much stuff there. And like it needed a lot of cleanup. So we, we went back and forth on a little bit and eventually kind of tried this pipeline where we built a base model in Maya, then brought it into Quill to, to sketch on top of it, to just kind of mess it up and add some cool details to it and then bring it back to Maya to, to texture it all and then rig it. So then you would get like, like this model that had a lot of cool extra bits on it that were not typical for a CG model, but it still like controllable. Kevin Dart (11:32):

Like it's not like so much extra detail and stuff that you can't manage it and rig it and everything. So it was kinda where we landed with that. Like we had these, these models that were more naturalistic and, and sketchy than what we would normally get for from our 3d process. And then from there we wanted to see, okay, well, like what what's, what's kinda the next iteration of like what we did on, on projects. Like June where we, we, we, we have this 3d animation, we render out all these passes and then give it to, to Stefan and kind of let him just experiment with it. So we, we built this scene of like a, of a street in Hong Kong and had Yuki on her motorcycle and she was just kinda zipping down the street and it, it looked like just kind of like whatever, in, in Maya, you know, it was like for, for as long as we've been working in 3d, like the result we get out of 3d is never much to, to look at it all, really like all the, all the magic and all the lighting magic and, and processing effects happens afterwards. Kevin Dart (12:35):

So you can't really get a sense of what it's gonna be when you're looking at Anaya. So, so we went through that whole process. We rented all these passes and, and gave them the Stephan. And I just told them, like, I, I want this to feel like, like if our, if our old versions of Yuki were like sixties, spy films, like Cinemascope kind of feeling, I want this to be more like, this is like night writer or like, <laugh>, it's like, like a, like, like common writer, like it's, it's like, like, like, like a seventies, eighties sci-fi show and like, just, just go crazy. Like, what can you do to, to, to bring all that out? So he, he took all those passes outta 3d and he started playing with adding all of these. We, we call them like raster line patterns where you there's all these lines that appear in, in the highlights and in the shadows, and then mixing that with half tones and playing with off study the light from the model. Kevin Dart (13:27):

So like where you get these highlights that are kind of floating off of the model, all, all the chromatic aberration, pretty, pretty much the whole suite of effects he could like kind of throw at it that felt right

for that kind of vibe and era. It ended up with this, this test that was our, our, our first example of kind of what we were going for, which was Yuki she's she's zooming down this, this road in Hong Kong and all this stuff is kind of going on. There's like bullets flying at her and all these neon signs behind her. And we were just like, okay, that that's, it just seemed really cool to us. We were like, this, this seems like a, a cool direction to go. And that, that was kind of what started the whole process. It was really like this, this visual experiment that kind of what one thing led to another. Kevin Dart (14:10):

And we were like, okay, well this, like, what are we gonna do with this now? Like, maybe we should like actually come up with a story or something and make a, make something outta this. And then yeah, that, that just led to we, we kind of wrote up this outline and like started storyboarding and EV eventually it became this kind of side project that was always simmering for like, it was like two years or something at the studio. Like it, it turned into, I think initially it was like a three minute test we were gonna do that was all taking place in Hong Kong. There was all this one chase sequence, like this elaborate chase sequence, basically. And then that turned into like a, a whole other episode. And then before we knew it, we had these, these two episodes, we were just tinkering with on the side of all these projects we were doing, like at some point we extrapolated the schedule and we were like, at the speed we're going, this will be done in like eight to 10 years or something. Kevin Dart (15:02):

<Laugh> it just like, we, we couldn't prioritize it. You know, there there's just so much stuff going on in the studio and this, it was just, it was a big project and doing that kinda work. It just, it takes a lot of time and a lot of people, and we, we could never find any moment in our schedule where we could have like a full production team working on it. It was always like, what one person at the time, like maybe one animator going or one compositor or, or one model or doing something and just trying to piece it together as we were going. And it, it, it pretty much stayed that way until the, until the pandemic started. And then a few months into the pandemic, we just kind of found ourselves with like work starting to slow down quite a bit for just various reasons and just kind of a lot of time on our hands. Kevin Dart (15:51):

And we thought, well, let's, <laugh>, let's just, maybe we can just dive all in on this thing and just keep going and actually turn this into a production. And, and we were fortunate enough to have, have, have the time and the ability to, to make that happen. And so just to continue this whole tangent, that's like giving you a full picture of this thing we had at some point brought on an amazing executive producer named Karen Dulo, who was previously in charge of the, the Google spotlight stories that we had also done a lot over the years. And, and she had also kind of found herself in this interesting place after the spotlight stories finished. She was, she was really looking around for like, what's the, she, she, she's always just like us kind of like really restless and wanting to know, like, what's what, what's the new stuff happening. Kevin Dart (16:39):

Like I don't, I don't wanna do like the same stuff. Every everybody else is doing. Like, what's, what's happening out there. And at some point we were catching up and she was asking about what we were doing at the studio. And I, I, I showed her this project and I was like, we're just, this is just something we've been tinkering with for a while. And like, you know, it's just, it's just fun for us. This, this is like a fun outlet. We can kind do anything we want. There's, there's no strings attached. It's just really fun.

And she, she just kind of fell in love with it. She was like, okay, I wanna be involved in that. And so she kind of came on board and started helping us in, in a whole lot of ways, both with like, kind of thinking about the, the overall storyline and, and really step because we, we were always, I mean, we, we, we care about the project really deeply, but she, she took a whole different kind of productory eye to it and was like, where, where are we actually going with this? Kevin Dart (17:28):

Like, what do you want this to be? And she can really kind of take that step back and, and help us think about like, act actually strategizing and kind of coming up with a plan for this thing and taking it seriously on a whole different level. So she was already helping us out with that. And then at some point I I'm kind of blanking the exact timelines of things, but she, she, she had started working with unreal and started thinking and, and, and the folks at epic and thought, what, what maybe have you guys ever considered doing anything with this in real time? And I, I was honestly so skeptical cuz I was like, this whole look is, is built on this, this premise of using, using 3d and after effects like that, that's, that's the combination of tools we need to, to make this happen. Kevin Dart (18:16):

And I, I just imagine there'd be some amount of sacrifice if we, if we moved into a, into a real time pipeline and I was just like, ah, yeah, I, I couldn't wrap my head around it. And at some point I asked Theresa to take a look at unreal and I was like, can you just sort of give me your, your therea report? Like, like <laugh>, this is a really good time to just sort of wrap Theresa into the whole conversation. So, so we, we started working with Theresa at the studio back in 2016 on June. We were recommended to her by a friend because we, I think at the time we needed rigging help. That that was how we got introduced to there. We, we needed rigging help and someone we were working with had suggested, we talked to there and at the time she was living in, in Germany and we just wrapped her into the project. And yeah, I don't know, Theresa, if you wanna talk about how you got started at the studio and how that first stuff went. Theresa Latzko (19:09):

Yeah, sure. Yeah. I was working out of Germany at that point and they needed some CG generalist help initially. Mm-Hmm <affirmative>. And so I came on and it was, I think our first big CG project ever, and maybe the first, really big project just as a company and all the pipelines weren't really established at that point. So I came in and I initially was very confused <laugh> how exactly things were being done, especially because we are going for a very specific look and over the course of several weeks realized. Okay. So I think the thing here is to ask a lot of questions and digs permit a lot because ultimately it's the final look that matters on these projects. I think that's always been like a thing at the studio that's kind of unique as the way that the final projects end up looking is just very determined by the 2d art direction. Right. And it's something we are really trying to nail. And so I got involved with modeling and rigging and I kind of wrapped my head around it and as it was a big and kind of messy production, so it just kind of kept escalating where they asked, oh, can you maybe do this thing too? Can you maybe do this thing too? <Laugh> and I just ended up taking over a lot of different tasks and it seemed to work out pretty. Okay. Ryan Summers (20:29):

Yeah. It's always, it's always been amazing to me cuz I think there CHSE is one of a, a select select few that no matter what you work on, no matter what you put out, I, I feel CHMI sphere's voice and vision

and like obsessions first before anything else, like it feels like there's just a continuum of, you know, Kevin and your teams just kind of like exploration and experiments. It feels like you're using the work you do as experiments to get to the next stage or the next step, never at the detriment to like the client, but I notice a CHPH spot or a commercial or a piece immediately before I even think of anything else. So it's, it's interesting seeing like Theresa, I can't imagine having to be faced with, you know, like Stefan has, I don't know how long Kevin decades plus of experimentation and toolkits and ways of kind of creating all these different stylistic effects in after effects. Ryan Summers (21:18):

And then all of those things, all of a sudden have to almost be like translated to a whole nother language to figure out how to make it work and unreal. Like I, I, I imagine that that was also besides the, the rigging of this stuff and making it feel like it has like a stop motion feel in the animation style, just trying to be able to convert whatever he's doing in his brain, in after effects. That feels very singular, feels like there's one person that can achieve this. I mean, I know personally I've spent a lot of time watching V X and looking at the breakdowns and trying to be like, what is what's actually being done there? Like I've never used radio fast blur and after effects as a design tool up until I saw that. But there, like how do you, how do you start approaching and Kevin, like, how do you approach you to that, that like, you know, very specific kind of like, it's almost like a chef with very specific ingredients and specific recipes that now have to be translated to a whole nother way of doing things. Theresa Latzko (22:02):

Yeah. Stuff just kind of he uses every tool in the book mm-hmm <affirmative> and he definitely uses stem in ways that they aren't intended. That's why he's so good at what he does. And yeah, translating. That was just the biggest undertaking out of that whole project. And we kind of knew that and we knew we were gonna have to spend, you know, a lot of time getting that right. And like Kevin said, there was initial some skepticism because that was our first time working with unreal. That was my first time even learning unreal mm-hmm <affirmative> on this project and we really didn't know how far are we even gonna get, like what's possible in this engine. And I think ultimately our approach kind of had to mirror Stefon a little bit where we just kind of use every tool in the book and we break them and use them in ways that aren't intended to sort of recreate the style. Ryan Summers (22:50):

That's amazing. So, so not only is this your first time really like for the studio kind of approach a project to this scale with these tools, but it's also, I can't believe you just said that this is your first time or your first project in unreal. That blows me away. Then you're able to, maybe it requires that maybe, maybe getting a look like this that no one's ever seen before requires someone who's never who isn't used to, like just in quotes, the way things are done in a tool that's completely amazing to me. Like, did you find anything within like trying to figure out unraveling Stefan does this compositing and then trying to translate that into unreal? Did you find anything that you could give back to Stefan as a toolkit that he hadn't had before? Or was there anything that actually became like a, an efficiency or a, an additional thing you could do because of the unreal tool set versus always banging your head against the wall, trying to just figure out how he did it. Kevin Dart (23:37):

I mean, Theresa and Stefan, I mean, they're, they're very different people, but the, so, so, so much what we do Atmasphere is just all about finding these types of people like, like Stefan and there who are just

like people at they're they're, they're both artists. And I mean, EV everyone of the studio is like this. They're all people who can, who can just sort of plunge into an area that they haven't done before with sort of a, a vague goal in mind and just experiment and come up with really amazing things, really amazing solutions to things that just haven't been thought of before mm-hmm <affirmative> and, and, and like, like Theresa was mentioning, like after, after we started working with her on June, we kind of kept coming back to her again and again and again, and that that's because we realized she is, she's one of these types of people, like, like Stefan is, and like, all these people at our, at our studio are who are just up for challenges. You, you know, like, like in, in my Korean animation, there's definitely different types of people you meet. And some people, they, they, they wanna know exactly what to do and, and, and how to do it and, and just kind of execute on that. And I think even Theresa wishes, a lot of times that I would give her more information on stuff, Theresa Latzko (24:53):

But sometimes a little bit maybe, Kevin Dart (24:55):

But the thing is, she's absolutely just brilliant at, at figuring things out. And, and, and she's also so open and she, she she's really great at expressing when she knows there's gonna be a problem with something. So, like, I, I was saying when we very, when I very first brought up this idea of working in unreal to her, she, she did, she, she wrote up like a, like a whole little report for me, like, there's that the results of there's initial investigations into unreal or something. And she was basically just calling out all the things she thought could be potential pitfalls about working in, in unreal, what the challenges would be. But I think also there was an overall consensus from her that, that we might be able to do something cool in it. And I was like, wow, this is like, if Theresa thinks there's a possibility, like, <laugh>, we're, this is, we can definitely do this. Kevin Dart (25:46):

Like, and, and also just the fact that I think as soon as I, I get the idea in my head that there's something we could do that hasn't been done before. I'm like, well, we have to do that now. Right. Like, cause that's, that's like all we do. Like we, that, that that's what gets me the most excited. And I, I also just about our whole 3d process in general. Like we have so much faith in the way our artists work. Like, like I, I was mentioning, you know, when we first started this experiment with Yuki, like the very first test when we were gonna be using after effects, we, we had no idea what this all was gonna add up to. Like, I, I didn't know what, what, what's gonna be the result of using these kind of sketchy broken models, and then trying like all these different after effects, techniques on them. Kevin Dart (26:29):

Like, like, I, I, I never know until at, at, at that point until I see the final render from, from Steph what the result is gonna be like, we don't, we, we, we don't ever paint like finished style frames where it's like that this is the exact look we're, we're going for you. You know? Like, like, like, like so many studios will, will spend so much time doing 2d development, trying to show exactly what the result of all this technical process is gonna be like, like once all the, all the, all the shaders are applied, and's all the composite is done. This is exactly what it's gonna be like. And it's just not how we approach stuff, because it's not fun to us. It's kind of like, if you, if, if you read the ending of the book before you read the mm-hmm, <affirmative> the, the entire book I'm like, cause that, that that's what gets me excited every day is, is like being surprised by what everybody is gonna do. Kevin Dart (27:21):

And so it's, it's like this amazing little adventure we're following the entire time we're doing the project where it's like, what's it, what's it gonna end up like, like it's so, so to me, it's so tantalizing. And then, and then sometimes, you know, the first time you see what it might look like, you're like, ah, crap like that, this didn't, this doesn't actually look that crazy. The dice did not roll and you made it right. Exactly. But then we, we never, we, we never stop there. It's like, well, here's, we, we always kind of break it down. It's like, well, here, like there is something promising here. Like it's, mm-hmm, <affirmative> we, we never reach result where it's like, okay, just, just throw it all out. You know, this is, this is useless. Like once we, once we start going down a path, we get really determined to find something that will work. Kevin Dart (28:05):

And, and so it's, it's kind of like this chase the entire time. Like until we, I, I, I, I think we, we did an entire phase of this project in unreal where pretty much until the last few days we didn't have renders that felt like that this is really what we want it to look like. And then we started the whole other phase of the project where we kind of treat the, went and redid everything again, because we thought like, we can do, we can do better if we, if we try this again. And, and, and again, you know, we're still building on this thing chasing like all, all these things where we're like, I think we could do this part better in, in that part. And that that's just like how we kind of operate as, as, as a group of people. And I mean, a lot of that is driven by, by me and just like, kind of how I try to push everybody to, to finding these unique solutions to things. Kevin Dart (28:56):

But getting back to what you mentioned there, there was a lot of collaboration between there and Stefan is, especially in the second phase of our, of our project and unreal. They would have several meetings together where Stefan would kind of walk through like, like, like he would bring up one of his projects and after effects and kind of go through all the layers to explain this is how it actually got the effect. I mean, he, he has every imaginable tool at, at his fingertips working in, in after effects. And Theresa's like, it's basically like she's working with, you know, like a 10th of that ability in unreal, because you're, you're trying to reproduce all these things in, in real time, in, in the engine. Theresa Latzko (29:37):

Yeah. To that. I think it's actually not the, of the tools that are available. It's more about due to the limitation stuff. It being a real time engine, what information you can actually extract, right. Because that's where traditionally, when we work in just Maya renders, we have a lot of information and that's the part where stuff is always very creative with these passes, right. We kind of don't do this traditional pipeline where we output a bunch of passes and every pass gets applied the way it's sort of intended to mm-hmm <affirmative> he just kind of takes the 20 passes he gets and then just does the most wild stuff with him. <Laugh> yeah. And so we kind of ended up doing, or trying to do the same wild stuff with maybe four or five passes. That's just being the amount of different lighting information we could actually extract from unreal. Ryan Summers (30:33):

I think this is a good time to just mention to listeners that there there's a wealth of information that CHMI spheres offered almost to the point of like, like, I can see Kevin where your experience of putting together art books and behind the scenes comes through, because the case studies that you put together are astounding. Like, like we are all lucky to have the material that you put out, but I, I go

specifically, there's a part in the Yuki seven case study. It just goes back and forth between then after effects test from Stefan to the unreal test of Yuki jumping across a, a boat from one boat to the other. And as amazing as Stefan's looks, it really looks like it's like the end result of like all the experimentation that went into something like Persol and all the other pieces that you've done. Ryan Summers (31:13):

It has all the kind of like cinema cinemagraphic like tricks. Like there's the chromatic aberration, and you know, all the stuff that you, you love of like design focused animation, that still feels almost like it's, it's been shot by a camera somehow in the real world. But then when you see the unreal version of it, that's where, to me, it comes alive because it feels like the actual language of Yuki seven. Is there all of the, like the reduction, the simplicity, the kind of like bold, really like really bold graphic stuff. Like I'm looking at the waves and in, in Stefans, it's amazing, but it looks like, you know, traditional hand drawn animation. Then I start seeing all these just like sharp edges. And even in the water, the water zipping by doesn't have motion blur on it. They're just graphic shapes that feels like Yuki seven to me now, after having watched all these, all of a sudden, and it feels like the two of you theres Stefan working together unlocked this thing that still feels like Chronosphere, but it feels like a new evolution or a new expression of like really design focused animation. Ryan Summers (32:04):

That to me, like that blew me away, seeing that back and forth where it's like, you captured what he was trying to do, but it also looks like there's something added on top of it. Kevin Dart (32:12):

Yeah. I mean, Stefan made a comment at some point where he was just, so I, I think he got a, a look at, at what Theresa was actually dealing with on her end, like how little information she had to work with compared to what he has. And he was like, I, I don't know how she, how she does it. Like, she that's awesome. Like she, like, I, I, I tell her what I'm doing. And then she is able to completely re-engineer that, like, he, he said he could see some, some look in her eyes where he could see, she was like rearranging everything and figuring out how to, how to get something like that, but using completely different methods that she has to use in, in a, in unreal to make that happen. And, and, and yeah, all, all this stuff in there, like the, the way Theresa built the, the water shaders for, for the ocean mm-hmm <affirmative>, that was all a procedural thing. Theresa came up with to get those shapes on the water, to get them to, to have the, the language of, of UQ seven, but all being generated procedurally, which is incredible to me. Yeah. I mean, you, you, you can talk Theresa more about like, how, how you did all of that. Theresa Latzko (33:17):

Yeah. I feel like part of it is just that we kind of give ourselves permission to keep the mistakes too. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> like, for example, just with the models, look, we often had a discussions where Yuki would be like, you know, jumping around a lot and like her arms would be poking through something and I'd be like, oh, did you see her arm as like poking through there? And Kevin would be like, oh, it's fine. That's, you know, part of the look <laugh>. And so there were a lot of, I think there was a lot of freedom on that end. And when we did our first pass, we kind of got, as far as we got, as Kevin was mentioning with the lighting and the water, and it kind of emulated a lot of what Stefan was doing, but I feel like there was just a sort of visua

Theresa Latzko (34:08):

Mm-Hmm <affirmative>. And so I was really stoked that we kind of got to reapproach it a second time and iterate on that. And I also really pushed for solving a lot of things in this project as much procedural procedurally as possible. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> I don't know if that's like entirely clear, but everything you see on the finish short is really just like directly from, from the engine. Yeah. I think there were various points when we were discussing, oh, maybe this is easier if we just go and output, you know, mm-hmm, <affirmative> one pass for this thing separately and like solve it and after effects, after the fact, and I think we ultimately, each time decided, no we're gonna not do that. We're gonna challenge ourselves and see if we can really do this in real time. And yeah, re-engineer this look to be happening just fully on top of the picture in real time in the engine. Ryan Summers (35:03):

I mean, it, it, it definitely is apparent and it, I, I think it almost can become almost a calling card for, for epic and for unreal in terms of how flexible the engine actually is. You know, we see unreal five and we saw the Nite demos and lumen and all these different things where it's like, yes, that's great. But so many of the examples look like what you'd expect out of a high end, you know, video game engine. Oh yeah. I, I go back to that. Same if you're listening, if, and you're looking at the Chrone site, just below the reference I made for it's in UQ seven part six, the look there's a spot where, and I almost feel like you could have like, blown up the asterisk even bigger, but it it's highlighting the real time, post processing adjustments, where as someone who's done some comping and, and tried to figure out how to get this, the fact that you're able to adjust as much as you're able to in real time, like, like things like trying to like soften the Terminator line for a shadow, but still maintain like the graphic shape that, that it's kind of representing. Ryan Summers (35:56):

That's really difficult to do in after effects where you're just like basically adjusting blurs and you have layer and layer and layer of shadow, and it's time consuming to the point where it actually makes you not want to even try to experiment, but as I'm watching this, I'm like, oh, I'm jealous of the capability of what it shows here of where you're softening certain things, but you're still keeping the shape. Other edges are still staying hard. You're playing with like the, the actual kind of the halftone patterns and the raster kind of like lines and change it. Like all of that stuff is just like, it, it kind of breaks my brain as an after effects, you know, C compositor to see that that stuff is actually that available to be tweaked and kind of like adjusted, like, like I wanna give you a standing innovation for it, cuz I think in just that one video, I think it would challenge a lot of people's kind of preconceptions of what you can do in unreal in, in a non photo, realistic style. Theresa Latzko (36:42):

Yeah. It's definitely lends itself to a specific style. We did do some amount of fighting against that. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> yeah. There's certain parts of the tools like predetermined color grading mm-hmm <affirmative> and we actually spend a good amount of time trying to figure out how to turn that off. I spent a lot of time taking us sort of back to the, what I think is always the first step for us, which is the original texture colors, the artist painted mm-hmm <affirmative> and yeah. What you're seeing in the post processing when we're adjusting the shadow, that's all possible because we're not actually adjusting the shadow really that the engine casts anymore, we are actually just rebuilding the lighting from scratch on top of the flat texture. Ryan Summers (37:25):

And that's still all in real time. Theresa Latzko (37:26):

Yeah. Ryan Summers (37:27):

That's amazing. Theresa Latzko (37:29):

I mean, it's like real time is sort of relative when you're doing rendered movies out of unreal, right. Because you're not looking for it to run at like game real time. So it doesn't have to run at like a clean 60 frames per second, always. Right. Because you get to render it slower than that, but you still, you know, can adjust things and see things in real time. This also playing into what Kevin was mentioned earlier, where we were pretty used to working in Maya where like, as we were working the scenes we were working in didn't actually look like much. And it all just like came together later when we handed it all off. And this I think was a pretty different experience. Ryan Summers (38:06):

You know? What's so interesting, Bob, all of this for, for both of you is that I, you know, I spend a lot of time listening to cinematographers and try to glean like, like how can you steal ideas or concepts or just, you know, things that they're talking about in live action for animation or for animation, for motion design. And I, I was just listening to the director in the DP, from the Batman talking about how, you know, like they're constantly fighting digital, giving you everything completely pure, super high frame rates and trying to find a way to like add that hand, hand drawn edge or that, that kind of crafted feeling to it. Not, not just for like, like AR sake, but because like, as an audience, if you see something perfect in pristine and everything's on ones and it's playing at, you know, 24 frames a second and all the simulations look perfect, everything feels like almost like an object that you have distance from. Ryan Summers (38:52):

Like it's almost like something you have to view from far away. Whereas when you have something like what I've always appreciated, Kevin, what you've done with CHSE is that there's just a warmth and there's, there's, there's a, a level that you can just enter into because you can still feel the human hand in everything. Right. And I feel like even with real time, even with unreal, with everything you've discovered Theresa competing or, or working with Stefan, like that feels like the same thing. Like, like on the Batman, they literally were shooting digitally processing an out to film. And then rescanning the film back into digital just to see what like the chemical emulsion would do on the film. And I feel like that's not all that dissimilar to what you're kind of talking about here, that you have these kind of hand drawn ways of painting a texture specifically a way then you have to fight with the tools and you have to bring it back. And there's almost just this like washing of technology to get this thing that nobody else you, you couldn't get any other way, but it still feels human. It still feels warm. It still has this like DIY feeling to it all. When you, when you look at it at the end product. Kevin Dart (39:46):

Yeah. I mean the tools that Theresa built for allowing us to have that control or are, are just so essential to it all, I mean, unreal is incredible. It's like, it's like this technological Marvel. It can, it can do so much stuff for you. And it can just, by default, when you open it up, you can throw something in there and, and put out like super realistic, cool looking renders of it. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> but so much what we do is like, ju just going back to the way we draw and the way we paint our 2d designs, we're never looking for things that directly emulate reality. We're always looking to make very conscious stylistic choices about the, the colors we use. Like, like what color is the light gonna be? What color are the shadows gonna be? And like, it's not based on any kind of physical reality, which, which is the opposite of how every 3d tool works. Kevin Dart (40:36):

Like every 3d tool is, is built in a way to, to give you something that, that feels realistic because that's what most people are trying to, to do with it, to get something out of it that feels realistic. And it's all tuned perfectly to, to do that for you. But when you like, like when you look at our color scripts and look at how the, how we've designed the color to, to move throughout it, it's all very, just based on emotion and, and feeling and, and not like, what, what would this place actually realistically look and, and feel like, which is the same thing they're, they're doing in movies with, with cinematography and, and the way they, they place lights and the way they, they grade the film and the way they shoot is all very much treating it as, as a, as a 2d thing, because that, that's ultimately what you're, you're getting out of. Kevin Dart (41:21):

All these things is, is a, is a 2d image. And, and that all of those decisions you, you make about the, about the color and the light are gonna change what feeling that 2d image gives to somebody ultimately. So if you, if the engine is making certain decisions for you and changing the way the image looks, you're not gonna get the feeling that, that you were after. Right. So Theresa had to very specifically build in all of those controls for us. What kind of one by one, like, you know, she, she started with like a certain suite of controls that, that, that we had available to us. And we were just kind of always asking for even more like, well, can we, can we change that thing? Like, like, I, I, I know something we were really focused on for a while was the, was the contrast of the shadows that were being cast onto the water. Kevin Dart (42:11):

Like we were having a hard time getting the shadows to pop out and, and getting the ability to, to just darken those shadows was, was so huge for us. Like, it, it, it's all these little things where you just, you, you just know instinctually as the person making the film. When, when you look at it, you're like, so something just isn't working about this, like, like things like a cash shadow just feels so important for, for capturing the, the mood of, of a scene. And like, you know, you have this image in your head of like, they're, they're racing along the water in, in the suns kind of beating down and, and casting these dramatic shadows. You really, it, it all kind of helps to emphasize the speed and the overall feeling of the scene. And none of that has anything to do with, you know, physical reality or the way that 3d engines work. It's all just based on feeling. And so, yeah, you, you, you do kind of fight against a lot of that, but I mean, also the awesome thing about unreal is that with a bit of investigation and, and prodding and stuff, there was, she, she mentioned at some point, like, it's usually about just finding some checkbox somewhere. Ryan Summers (43:15):

<Laugh> like, you, you spend time control Kevin Dart (43:17):

For this one checkbox when you find it, you can finally make that, that change that you're wanting to make. Ryan Summers (43:24):

Mm-Hmm <affirmative> can I, can I ask you a specific nerdy question about that, Theresa? Sure. I feel like in a lot of real time work the shadows themselves cash shadows, they're, they're always, they always seem to be very, like, desaturated really like black without any kind of like, like very dense black shadows. Right. But I feel like in, in Yuki seven, the shadows almost always feel like there's like a little bit of cool, like purple or like blue and, and that they're transparent, like, oh yeah. Did you have to work extra hard to get that? Cuz I even feel like when I'm working in tools like cinema 40 D or Maya with like GPU runners that like to Kevin's point are, are dialed in for photo realism, I feel like I'm always fighting that. Like I'm always trying to like art direct the things that it does not. It assumes I don't want to be art directed. Did you have to do a lot of work to get that? Theresa Latzko (44:10):

That makes me really happy that you're asking the specific question, because this is one of my biggest grapes with how any kind of CG looks and the stylized ones often too, is this weird desaturated gray film that is over everything. And I think I've just spent a lot of my career fighting this exact color. Ryan Summers (44:32):

Right. Theresa Latzko (44:33):

And really what it boils down to is I think you called it washing away. The technology mm-hmm <affirmative> is kind of what we end up doing a lot of the time. Right. And here it's the same thing is instead of taking a lit image and processing that we just start with the actual, pretty vibrant texture colors mm-hmm <affirmative> and we re extract the lighting information mm-hmm <affirmative> and instead of applying, however, it is applied normally in CG lighting, we're kind of applying it the way you wouldn't Photoshop. Right. Where we like multiply it on top of the image. Oh yeah. And if we keep some of the original texture brightness, and if we also just dial any colors that we want into, into those light and dark areas, it's actually that's specific blue purple that you're mentioning. That's got a lot of, a lot to do with Stefan specifically saying, oh, this is the color I always put into all my shadows because it just looks good <laugh>. And so this was a very specific artistic decision is putting this exact color right there. I think this might have been one of the parts we tweaked the longest is Stephan would often come on and we would just have a sort of tweaking session in real time in the engine where we'd be like, okay, is this color like into the shadows here? Do we like this? And I think this, we spent like some of the longest time on dialing and this exact shade and lightness of the shadows. Ryan Summers (46:06):

I mean, it's brilliant. I think it does. It adds with all the there's obvious things that feel like a signature, right? Like the horizontal kind of lines or half tones or big bold kind of shadow shapes. But I think it's a more subtle part of like the signature look to it. It makes me happy to know that you are able to reach

into the, you know, like into the readable blacks essentially, and like lift those and change those and push those. It makes me excited actually just personally for, for what's possible, you know, with unreal, which, which I kind of think leads to another question of you've done so much work as a team to push, you know, your aesthetic that is not the standard kind of like realtime learning style into it. Do you ever have an opportunity to have a dialogue back with epic to say like, Hey, we made this beautiful piece of art that is not attempting to be photo real. It'd be really cool if like in the future, instead of having to like hand code, not code, but hand build and extract this stuff that we had some capabilities to like dial the tools into like a different set of preferences. It's almost like a, like having a lookup table, but for style like beings like, oh no, I wanna play in this, this space that unreal offers. Do you, do you ever get to go back to 'em and be like, look what we made? Can you make it easier to make this next time? Theresa Latzko (47:11):

<Laugh> they are definitely been very receptive to our feedback. Awesome. I think it's a cool idea what you're saying. I think so far, one thing that I was personally very happy about is what I mentioned earlier, this default tone mapping, unreal does on top of everything. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> is something that at previous iterations of the engine, you just couldn't turn off. It always would give you something that's a little bit more desaturated and gritty looking mm-hmm <affirmative> sort of the FBS first person shooter style, right? For lack of a better term. And they, I think weren't the only people to mention this. I think a lot of more indie productions that are going for my stylist looks, have probably complained about that, but you can actually turn it off now. And that means you finally get to like, you know, get true texture colors, which as I mentioned is like a very important starting point for us. But yeah, overall they've been very respectful and receptive to our feedback and excited about what we're doing. Kevin Dart (48:09):

Yeah. They, they, they've been really amazing and we've like, we've even done presentations for them kind of walking through all of there's amazing work and <laugh> they they're, they're really excited by it. And, and also going the other way, they've been super gracious and open with us is whenever, whenever we have questions about things or are wondering how to do something, they're, they're, they've been really helpful with all of that. And I, I was also gonna mention just thinking about the stuff Theresa built and how it applies to the next project. We're we we've done an unreal, which is mm-hmm, <affirmative> a film with, with my wife, Elizabeth, who created city of ghosts. And she's also, she came up with this idea to do a film about malls and specifically about this one food court restaurant, where ju just like in city of ghosts, it's all based on interviews with real people. Kevin Dart (49:00):

But unlike with city of ghosts where we used photo backgrounds and a totally different pipeline, this was, this one was built entirely and unreal. So something interesting about it is that it, it all takes place in this one mall set that we built and the mall itself was made to look, I mean, we kept using city of ghost as kind of a reference point for the look, but the mall overall is, is taking a lot more advantage of, of what unreal is naturally designed to do, which is creating more, more photoreal feeling kind of backgrounds. But because Theresa, we, we already had this experience in the shaders and everything that Theresa had built for Yuki. We were able to take that and, and, and do a hybrid kind of look like what we did with city of ghosts. So like on city of ghost, we would take these, these photo plate backgrounds and then paint on top of them and tweak colors and add these little painted elements. Kevin Dart (49:50):

Like we were always replacing signs and painting over certain elements, just because, I mean, there, there, there were a lot of reasons, like sometimes it, it was necessary to in, in order to, to remove like copyrighted things from the background, or we also kind of came with this with this general idea where we thought whenever things were further away from the camera, we wanted them to get more abstracted and, and more graphic and more simplified. And so we, we were able to use the, basically the, the whole Yuki seven lighting suite that Theresa built in combination with the, the more standard materials and stuff that unreal provides so that you, you can get things that are like pretty realistic, like metallic surfaces, for instance, but then have like a, a really stylized character or a really stylized prop standing next to them. Kevin Dart (50:40):

And there, there, there was some point in the project where Theresa was just starting to bring some of her, her, her UQ, seven lighting materials online and the project and, and, and the before and after difference was so crazy because cause we, for a long time, we had the characters in there just using all the default unreal materials. And then as soon as she clicked on her materials, they, they got so, so much brighter and more vibrant and, and fun to look at because when, when, when you see the project, the, it it's really cool cuz the, the, the background has a, a semi realistic look to it, but then there's all these really candy colored characters that pop out and, and are walking around and on top of this space. And, and it's all really just be because of like what Theresa was talking about, like bringing back those original colors from the, from the textures for that, that the designers really specifically chose that they wanted to be in there. Kevin Dart (51:31):

And then just having, having, having that mixture of stuff and being able to do it inside of unreal instead of with the whole kind of complicated process we used on city of ghosts, which also, you know, was all very amazing and everything, but it's really cool. It's like a, it's like a whole new evolution of that kind of look that we've managed to do. And so, yeah, we're, and we're, we're still working with unreal and still trying to push all this stuff. Like there's still so much more, I, I feel like we have to, to learn about it. And, and now we're getting into unreal five and looking at what's available there and we're starting to do our, our rigging natively and unreal mm-hmm <affirmative>, which is opening up a whole new world of possibilities for us. We're just really excited about like the, the whole future of this and kind of continuing to push and, and learn more about it. Kevin Dart (52:19):

I mean, it's, it's really like early days for us. I mean, this is basically like, like the first iteration of the UQ seven trailer that, that Stefan and I did so long ago, which is like, it it's painful to look back on now, you know, like, like 15 years later, like look at what we were doing with our very first experiments in, in this whole new way of working with Photoshop and after effects. And now it's like that these are our very first experiments in, in a whole other new pipeline. And we're just, it's exciting because you get in those early days, you get to discover so many new things and the progress is so rapid and it kind of feels like we're in that now, like just really quickly learning and, and building upon what we're, what, what we're doing. And yeah, just, just having a lot of fun, which is, which is really what we're ultimately chasing is just having fun, making art. Ryan Summers (53:09):

Well, I, I, I'm, I'm super excited to see mall stories because I think from from welcome to my life to, to city of ghosts, and now, now hopefully this like being able to see, you know, I, I, I went to the academy museum recently and I, I in LA and I, I kind of skipped the first three floors just to get to the studio ly Miyazaki exhibit, mostly because it's so rare in animation, unlike filmmaking, to be able to see like a studio or a filmmaker's vision, like in front of you over half an hour, see like 20, 25, 30 years of their experiments and their obsessions and their explorations play out in front of you, right? Like that's so rare in animation that one person or a team gets to just have an idea and develop it and see how, what works and what doesn't work and make the next thing. Ryan Summers (53:49):

And the next thing, and whether that's in terms of technology or style or subject matter, see that play out. And I, I, I really do point to, to what you're doing at CHSE and what Elizabeth is doing and what you're doing, Kevin with your team as one of the only other places where you can go and actually feel that, and actually see that as an, as an artist and as a fan or as a, a person who just loves what is possible in animation. I think a lot of people with things like into the spider verse and arcane are finally being woken up a little bit to like the full range that's possible in animation, like animation, isn't just like defined as like everything's on ones or it's photoreal or whatever. Like, it, there's so much more in terms of like visual language and subject matter and ways of telling a story that I think you're you and your team and Elizabeth and everyone that are leading that very much. Ryan Summers (54:33):

So, and now seeing it with unreal where it feels like from the outside, I dunno if it feels this way inside from the outside, it feels like you're building up momentum and speed and things are coming up faster, and they're looking more, more like your initial idea that's in your head potentially. I can't say thanks enough for, for you. And Theresa's time just to kind of like open up the door a little bit, but all this is super exciting. We have to have Elizabeth on when, when mall's stories kind of comes out. Cause I'd love to talk to, to her too, about her journey, but this is awesome. Thank you so much for taking us through all this. Kevin Dart (55:01):

Yeah, for sure. Yeah. And, and just, yeah, one closing thought Elizabeth had said something when we were doing malls story, she had this insight where she said, it's, it's just so rare an animation to get, to develop an idea without having to know where you're going with it. Mm-Hmm <affirmative> and that's exactly what these opportunities are providing to us currently. I mean, normally at, at any studio, like if you're developing a movie or developing a TV show, any, any kind of idea, it's like, you have to know exactly what's the series arc for this story. Or like, mm-hmm, <affirmative>, you know what, what's, what's the marketing plan for this movie? What are the audiences we're targeting? What's our, what's our demographic, all this stuff. And like, it's all so constricting when like the way that actually feels natural to develop things as an artist is just to have a, a gut feeling that you can follow and see where it takes you. Kevin Dart (55:53):

And it's really the only way to, to tackle this kind of stuff like working in whole new mediums, like, like unreal is to just follow your instinct and, and being able to do it with people who are so just smart and talented and creative, like, like Theresa and every, everybody on our team is, is just so, so much fun. I mean, it feels like being in school again and just learning things. Yeah. And, and having fun. And I, I know

Elizabeth really values that kind of creative environment and yeah, we're working really hard to keep fostering that kind of thing on our project. Ryan Summers (56:26):

I mean, it, it's so frustrating to me, with everyone I've ever in my own personal experience and all the other people I respect and admire when they enter into that system where it really does feel like there is a gauntlet that has to be like run through of just departments, full of people with their arms, cross telling, prove me why we should do this at every like incremental step to where, when you wonder why animation doesn't have the kind of like experimentation and the kind of like full range of thought and range of perspectives that other mediums have, like music or even feature filmmaking a lot of times it's because you just, you need to have a safe environment where people aren't questioning every single pencil line to be able to get to the place where people like you are at now. So thank you. Thank you for pushing through and doing these personal projects and these experiments and putting together teams of people that have that same kind of spirit of collaboration and, you know, like not knowing what the goal is when you get started. It's, it's much appreciated from this end. Kevin Dart (57:18):

Yeah, definitely. It, it's definitely a labor of love. And, and also like, like you mentioned that the case studies, I mean, we have so much fun putting those together and I'm always really happy when I hear anybody's been able to take a look at it and gotten something valuable out of it. Cuz we just love sharing our, our process to us. It's all about the process. You know, like the, the thing we end up putting out is it's just the end result of this incredibly fun journey we have that we just value so much. And so that the case studies are where we, to me, I feel like the, the case studies are the true product of CHPH. It's not actually the, the films that we put out or anything it's, it's all of that work. And all of that knowledge we build up and all of that collaboration, which I'm trying to document through these case studies. So, and anyone who, who wants to, to, to go to our website and peruse those, we definitely is a lot of time and a lot of passion that goes into, into making them. Ryan Summers (58:15):

Yeah. I mean that, I always feel like projects like these, the product itself or the, the film itself is the souvenir, but the actual process that going through it, the journey is like the real thing is the, the actual thing. Yeah. Like it's nice to have the finished movie, but the amount of like energy and the amount of like inspiration you can get from scene, what it was like is like 10 times more important, more vital. So we could talk for another hour and Theresa, I could get super nerdy about how you achieved all these things and how you, how you pushed unreal to its limits and beyond. But I feel like it's probably time to wrap it up. Thank you so much for all the time. I will definitely be calling back to see whenever the next thing comes out to have you all on again. But thank you so much. I think our audience is really, really gonna appreciate this. Kevin Dart (58:57):

Awesome. Thank you. Yeah. Thanks for having us. Yeah. It was really fun. EJ Hassenfratz (59:02):

The team at unreal admitted that CHSE used some of the tools in ways. They never thought that they could be used. It's super exciting to see how motion designers and studios are pushing the boundaries of the software. And it's also impressive to see how open the folks at unreal are to listening to feedback

from motion designers and animators to help inform the updates they make. It's because of the input from motion designers like Jonathan Winbush that features like crypto Matt have been added. So the more we all use unreal, the more insights the team at epic will have to add more of those types of features that will hopefully help open the door for even more artists to dive in to the world of real time, a future where you can say the phrase, Hey, remember when we used to render things seems even closer to reality. Thanks for listening.

‍

‍