Alice Bloomfield

0:00 [Applause]

0:09 oh thanks guys so yeah I'm Alice Bloomfield I'm a london-based illustrator animator and director and in the past I've been so lucky to work with clients such as Gucci Netflix the tape modern and Rihanna's lere line Savage Fenty which was really really cool and yeah I guess I'm pretty well known for having quite a distinct style when I was younger I used to love drawing models from fashion magazines I Lov like the beauty the Glamour and almost how unattainable it all felt as well.

0:41 And I was definitely also living by care from my own drawings just drawing all the beautiful bits of clothing that I really wanted but couldn't have and yeah also I'm like very drawn to anything like slightly sleazy like creepy so I kind of combined both of these things by having these models in like beautiful opulent settings thingss but always with like a little kind of like undercurrent of something like a little bit scary so yeah that's kind of what I'm always aiming for whenever I make anything but today I'm going to talk to you about a really special music video project that I did for the Alternet and the Alternet is this building in Tottenham Court Road like it's pretty crazy it's got these four interior walls which are made of screens and a massive ceiling screen as well. So it's this really cool space for showing 360 video and the biggest screen in there is 15 M high so is absolutely massive as well.

1:31 But it's pretty hard to get a real sense of the space just from this little picture so I've put together some clips from the project that I did which will give you a better sense of the project and of the space that the project was for so yeah here we ♪

2:22 make feel just can and I was always waiting for I I was always waiting for us I just W I was always Wai for us I was for us.

2:47 So I'm going to go ahead and tell you how I got the project in the first place how I kind of came with my ideas and then how I got into the workflow and finished it all.

2:56 So I'm signed to Black Dog Films as a director and they were the ones who gave me this brief for this project and they sent it out to all their directors and asked everyone to put their best ideas forward and then the client would choose their favorite to go into production and become the video and at the time the building hadn't even been built yet so there wasn't really much to go off.

3:15 But we got this little like map of all the screens and how it would kind of fit together to to give us an idea of the space and there were pretty open to ideas all they really said to us was that they wanted something to use the space in quite a creative like fun way I remember them saying the last thing they wanted was for the same video to be playing on each screen they wanted something kind of like that would use the space to the full capacity and be quite like creative and outside the box so my first idea off the bat was that I wanted something just full of like nature like nice little flowers just like a really like nice calm Vibe obviously Tottenham Court Road is like the middle of London it's really gray like trafficky noisy so I wanted to make something to completely counterbalance that and almost have this just room of like calm and peace and you could just go in and like breathe and be surrounded by nature and I also had some ways which I wanted to use the screens in so firstly quite straightforward but I wanted to have these 360 surround like images of nature so that you feel really immersed in the landscape in this world that I created secondly I wanted to use the side screens to show the main characters reactions to things so you would see what she sees on this big like main screen and on the side screens you would see her reaction.

4:32 And this was just so you felt like you were really on the journey with this main character like you see what she sees you feel what she see feel what she feels and yeah it kind of like helps the narrative as well.

4:44 And then thirdly I wanted to use the screens in almost a like yeah like a really like aesthetic way and just have these little floral motifs on the side and yeah there's nothing too deep about this.

4:56 This is just so it like looks nice which I think is is fine I think things can just look nice sometimes not everything's got to be like a deep concept for the pitch I also did some storyboards this is not my favorite part of the project as you may be able to tell that was like a little bit Rough and Ready I've put the final image below like alongside it so you can kind of see how much better it does get I'm a very process-driven artist so I love just making things as I go along like finding new things out on the job just like messing around with it so having plan everything out at the very beginning just takes all the joy out of that for me.

5:33 So yeah it's always a little bit rough but I always say if the client likes the storyboard they're going to love the final thing because it only gets better so yeah after all of that I sent all that off to the client and they ended up choosing my project to be the one to be made which was absolutely amazing this was the first pitch that I ever won. So it was kind of a crazy one to be thrown in with but yeah. So so exciting and then it was on to the real work.

6:02 So I'm a frame byf frame animator which means that I animate every single frame out like individually and I do 12 frames a second that's 12 individual drawings per second of Animation so obviously that's quite a lot as you can imagine and yeah for this project I was in my room for three months straight just like animating away kind of crazily and yeah it was quite hard obviously it was for these massive screens and I really had no concept of how it would translate from my computer screen to like these huge like 15 M High screens I kept sitting with my face like right up next to the Monitor and just trying to imagine what it would be like really big yeah I did feel kind of in the dark for a lot of it but luckily the Alternet team had a solution for this which was VR so they actually had built this replica of the building in virtual reality so I was able to put my animations up on the virtual reality screens and kind of see how it would like all look and yeah I've got a little example here of how it looked so you can see it's just like really helpful for kind of see how everything fits together and kind of understanding the scale a little bit as well and yeah it was really helpful but it also brought up up like brought some like issues to light that we hadn't really thought about and that you just wouldn't have thought about if you hadn't worked on a big stre before which obviously I had not the first issue was that you couldn't have anything too big on these screens so as a director I love having like really long wide shots or like really zoomed in close shots just cuz it's like really dramatic and I love the drama but on these screens when you're standing there in person it's just so big that you. Actually can't see the whole thing like in one view so if anything was too Zoom zoomed in on it you.

7:52 Actually just couldn't really tell what it was it was almost like quite abstract so yeah a lot of things were zoomed out a little bit and similarly you couldn't have anything moving too fast across the screens or else you. Actually get quite motion sick and also there are five screens to be looking at so if something happens really fast on a screen over there that you're going to miss it so everything was like slowed down a little bit all the actions were very like soft and subtle which also kind of helped with my idea of having like a calm nice environment so it all worked out.

8:22 And then thirdly because you're kind these screens are so tall you're kind of craning your neck looking up at them quite a lot. So if anything was too high like you would literally just break your neck like it's too much.

8:32 So I kind of moved everything right down the screens which felt a little bit counterintuitive but I also used this to my advantage and I ended up doing a lot of the shots from a below angle so that when you're looking up at this below angle on the big screen it kind of enhances it and makes it a bit more exaggerated which is really cool but yeah the biggest of all the issues was definitely the most stressful one and it happened right at the end of the project so everything was all done I had my three three months inside working away.

9:01 And we had one last meeting with the outernet team and yeah I remember them saying they were like yeah it's all good like everything's fine but we've had a few last minute checks and I think we're going to need a higher frame rate you've been using 12 frames a second but I think we're going to need at least 24 frames a second yeah and I was just sat in this meeting going like more and more red I was like I don't I was like what do you mean like I've just spent 3 months in my room working and now you want twice as many frames which is twice as much work work like I was freaking out but luckily it did not come to that we found a solution which was to use AI so we actually found an AI company to generate a new frame in between every existing frame like thank God and it wasn't perfect there are some bits which were a little bit like weird so you can kind of see the eyelashes they like a little bit blurry and a dandelion bit is like a little bit messed up.

9:54 So I did redraw some bits myself but luckily it was not like all those frames all over it again and yeah after that it was all done overall it took about 2 and a half years from like start planning to like finish but that was also kind of cuz the building hadn't been built yet so we had to like wait for that obviously but yeah one of my favorite projects definitely definitely one of the most unique ones and I feel really thankful to have been chosen to work on such a unique space and if you want to go see it it is still on totam Court Road I think it plays like roughly once every one to two hours so yeah go check it out thanks guys