Ben Ditto

0:12Hi everyone hi and thank you for the introduction and thank you to the last speaker I'm can you all do me a favor and just say hello thanks I'm gonna pick you on my Instagram story and tag all of you yeah thank you for coming and being here.

0:28This is me I'm just gonna talk about days Beauty which is one thing I've been working in the industry for 10 years 10 11 years.

0:35But this is a really significant thing that I've been working on for the last year. And something I'm really super proud of and I've you know.

0:43I think it'd just be nice to talk you through the process and the thinking behind it in some of the individual projects so I was brought in to work on Days Beauty it had been being discussed at days for a few years I think a couple of years. And I made friends with the lady called Isobel friend she's an incredible makeup artist and she introduced me to bunny Kenny who's the editorial director there.

1:06And we kind of worked together as a team with Jefferson and the sort of a team that grew to develop day's beauty so I was there from the kind of when I started working on it it was an idea for a platform and the idea was kind of the future of identity and changing the narrative of beauty from a prescriptive version of what we think Beauty should be into being about identity and a personal description of what Beauty should be so that's the kind of ethos of days Beauty and the guys had this kind of launch idea of kind of Art Deco meets sci-fi meets Prague meets Art Nouveau that was the kind of did I say our new vote twice Art Nouveau Prague sci-fi so this is a kind of very early mood board and we also very early on when as a team to meet this guy who's called Carl Smith he works at Ravensbourne College and he's like a consciousness researcher so very early on we had this kind of aesthetic focus. But also we started talking about the philosophy of consciousness and like you know what does it mean to have an identity and that like that might sound abstract but we're kind of playing around with it all the I'm ourselves now in a way that we wouldn't have done ten years ago so like we are changing our identity in the way that we communicate that to each other is written it's really revolutionary and mind-blowing but I don't think that we necessarily think about the philosophy of that that much.

2:22But we spoke to him and he worked with us on a few articles and just I think there were many people we spoke to but he's a really really interesting guy and very inspirational to me with all of this stuff the logo I mean I'll talk about logos and all of that stuff this is I do love the work that we did with that my intention with this was for it to be kind of uncomfortable and new and different and I think we achieved that it's it's also I sort of felt like it'd be nice to make something that always exists as a texture so the final thing is this it's if you see the reflection the reflection that you see is a world that we built we built this 360 degree CGI world. And that's what's always reflected in the chrome and those letters on the Left I think we just spent like months and months working on something that you haven't seen before it's a bit weird it's a bit Prague and Art Nouveau and sci-fi and yeah kind of reflected how we perceive Beauty like it's a bit uncomfortable and personal and this mark on the right to face is looking at each other and they're not pretty so there you go these are so this is the world that we built so we designed this world with an artist called John M&E and the logo in the middle is a piece of scripts so it's just coded to reflect the world the world is something that we designed in CGI and when you long arrived on the launch site they work with the kind of accelerometer in your phone so you could look around the world. And we hid little hidden messages in the stars and then the rocks and basically it's like a lipstick crash-landed on an alien planet and there's two little explorers looking at it and you know it's like quite an obvious sci-fi trope but it was it felt right for us to launch like that.

4:05And this is how it you know. I mean I did do the kind of standard art direction stuff so I worked with Holly Ben well it dazed and who did the website and you know we talked about fonts and colors and all of that stuff and that you know. That's important as well. And now it's just you know it's a fully functioning popular website and Instagram and you can see the mark and the logo in operation there.

4:31But they always reflect that world wherever they are and then we made this as a sting we made this is like a little kind of teaser thing it's meant to be foundation or you knows what yeah that's that's the logo we just did this this kind of spinning render there were lots of these things that came out when we launched the main feature that we launched with was this we is the mayor had this idea of 3d scanning a bunch of beauty icons and then we commissioned ten different artists CGI artists to turn them into characters and her.

5:09And I and Bonnie and various other people all work together to develop these characters so this is princess Gollum who's kind of Instagram widow celebrity and we turned her into this I'll be no vampire ♪

5:30so it was very much reinforcing that narrative of it being about personal identity and pushing what Beauty means this is a slick word seize another Instagram and although she's a model a great model and this is her turned into a character by Rick Ferran ♪

6:18[Applause]

6:24so this was this is interesting with because working with days I guess most of the people we were working with it only worked mostly worked on photoshoots and films and this is like a do thing. So it's not a film.

6:33And it's not a photo shoot it's this kind of new workflow and we had to establish that like it's a working process like how do you Commission it and how do you work with people and who does what and the thing that enabled all of this is technology so the technology to do this stuff is now accessible like unity and unreal and see cinema 4d and stuff like that. And some Adobe software it guys and but it may it makes this stuff much I think it sort of fits with the narrative of what we're doing in that to be a famous fashion designer or a famous you have to spend a lot of money but to be a famous beauty star now you don't have to spend anything at all which I think is fascinating like you can be a massive celebrity on Instagram just doing stuff with facetune and whatever. And I love that.

7:13So this is kind of part of that narrative we then we were in Berlin Mina's Amer and we met this this kind of kid came up to us with her not kids sebastian he's like a grown man came up to us with a laptop and said look at this. And it was this it developed a neural network that they trained on beauty images and it just draws beauty images forever it's called the generative adversarial Network and he said let's do something together.

7:36So this is what we developed a much more kind of fleshed-out version of it.

7:39This is the neural network.

7:41And it's drawing what it thinks of Beauty selfies based on data that we trained it with so it will just keep doing that for infinity forever and none of that imagery exists it's all kind of drawing it from it this brain that we developed and I kind of fell in love with all of this stuff while we were doing day's beauty because you know I've always been into technology in code but it's a this really amazing point in history where again python script and github and stuff like that are very accessible to anyone so it has opened up creativity within coding so we then took this. And we shot kylie jenner with sat daniel-san walled in in America and we used the makeup looks generated by the network to do her makeup and her hair and we did this whole editorial based on that and again like the logo is kind of deliberately uncomfortable and you know ♪

8:42so yeah it was it was a way of introducing the world to this stuff like artificial intelligence and what identity means and how we're going to be generating content in the future you know I don't want to scare anyone but the machines are coming for sure so based on this stuff that I showed you before we abstracted some of that and work with an ir specialist and developed an Instagram filter which came out last week so all of the looks on that are generated by AI as well. And that's princess Carla Vanessa mayor yeah and then.

9:22This is we did a print magazine because I was quite keen for us to do that because I think it's still you need printers other form of legitimacy still which I think is quite annoying because actually a lot of the Moving Image stuff we were doing was really engaging but there's something with photographers still where the first thing they'll ask if you try to Commission them is is it for print or online and I think that's just the way it is you know I I don't I can't there is a good reason for that if you shoot for print it will still be in that printed magazine in ten years.

9:47And that's absolutely true so we did this print version of the mag and then on the Left that's Travis Scott and Kate Moss that we turned into centers with she was at Travis Brothers and Dario this guy called CAV economist he's this amazing CGI artist kylie general on the right.

10:07And then yeah we we had some more kind of straightforward photo shoots like Casper Saosin and Gretel Ieva this is a beauty shoot I just did like I pulled together a shoot that was just just makeup and lighting because having done all the CGI stuff I wanted us to show like we can just do straightforward Beauty things as well and that was about falling into black holes that was a thing we did without weighing that one on the bottom left is the cake that's Kate Moss looking wistfully in the distance as a scent or and that's Genesis P orange on the top left and and yeah they're all kind of my colleague Emmanuel O'Brien helped with the typography on all of this stuff he was like you know.

10:44I have a studio people that I work with and you know none of this stuff is anyone on their own it's all like really collaborative which is cool and we also kind of everything we Commission.

10:55Now we try to make sure there's some moving image elements so this is the our wedding shoot from print and we sort of had some moving parts for online and we did this story called VR salon where we imagine the future where all of us are wearing like Google glass but not and like you can tell me what your haircut should look like and I'll see what you want me to see and I think that's all coming very soon.

11:14But this is like a speculative fiction kind of thing I think it's like it's speculative fiction.

11:19But it's fun and engaging and you know pop culture as well but again it's sort of introducing these ideas that are quite kind of philosophical and I really like pop culture way.

11:28And it's a mayor of this really amazing manifesto so the the print issue that we did we called it a manifesto for the future of beauty and that's like that is what we believe you know it is it was not very long ago that a beauty shoot was literally about lipstick and mascara and foundation and a model and now like we think that that has radically changed you know day's beauty has been the part of that and but that's the beginning of the story you know.

11:54I think the interesting thing is like where does that stuff go next and I think our view is that it's about like okay we know about all of this stuff now what's the real craft in CGI and augmentation and hey RNA I like how does that become indistinguishable from the human touch and all of that stuff is really interesting so there you go Thanks [Applause]