Builders Club

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0:20hello okay this works okay this works yeah cool we're Builder Club we are creative Studio based in East London yonas HEI from Switzerland and Julian simser from Germany and tonight we would like to talk about Robert rashkin an artist we met last year. And we were really fascinated about his work.

0:44So we ended up doing a documentary about him since we don't have time. Actually to show the whole film we'll now show you kind of like some little exerts of the film so first like a part of the beginning I believe so much is perception.

1:11But then perception is created and twisted so quickly really great artwork like the legs for the white Cube for ♪

1:42example or body which was shown in the Hayward ♪

1:59gallery ♪

2:06and the soal hat which was a piece he did for the MoMA in New York so the truth is this documentary about the artist and the artworks they're all made up. And we come up with this idea.

2:39And we casted the artist Robert and we scripted what it says in the documentary and we came up with all the ideas of the artworks in the documentary and did 3D animations of it. So it looks really real so why would we we do this so first of all we really like the idea of like creating being an artist and creating like crazy sculptures and showing them like in the Tate or in the Hayward gallery and yeah this was kind of like a great opportunity to do this and second we were really interested in how far we can go if we're able to trick people into believing in the world of Robert and so it was a lot about like reality and what it means in the age of the internet so are we able to change the perception of someone and in the end if it really matters if something is real or not so we started to create this whole world around Robert we created kind of like his backstory. And we started creating pictures with him and Cindy Sherman or him really young in the 80s oh wow that's him yeah wow yeah yeah and a lot of like posters for exhibitions and the actual artworks obviously and we also created a really nice website this is his website yeah and there like a lot of really famous people talking about him H Oris for example H okay yeah was really really nice for him so yes to give you an insight about the process of developing the artworks ideas of him.

4:24So we Tred to base the artworks around the personality of the art arst obviously and he's kind of a funny character so we really wanted to make them funny so this is some work in progress of the artwork development here it's like a T-Rex in the Guggenheim New York so it should be really engaging emotionally this is a Big Mac but after thinking about it more we thought it should be also a conveying a bit of a message so it should be funny at first sight but then conveys a deeper meaning on on on the second look a bit like the concept of a tragic cloon in a way and the best way to execute it we thought about using animatronics and Robotics as a main theme that the artist basis is work around so we did a lot of Animation tests that you can see here.

5:17This is a first main idea we had is the walking legs which are carrying around a heavy load in the gallery they're really in a deep struggle like humans are no matter where you are in life you are in a deep struggle and this is a test using a lot of liquids on a ball mounted on legs which didn't make it to the film.

5:38This is a silicon breast implant work in progress walking around in a squared world then we have animation test of Winnie pool legs walking around and we thought it's really funny because he moves much more hectic and excited than all of the other legs so we had to include him into our film.

6:04This is a test of the inflating body the idea was that the human thing blows up so much that it's wanting more and more until it explodes so we did a lot of Animation simulation and observed how things inflate and how to make that more interesting so we reiterated this inflating body a lot of times and combined different animation techniques to make this as spectacular and real as possible and here we still had some liquid inside of the body which we removed because we thought it's possibly too much it was a mess it was a big mess look at that. That's nasty okay.

6:49So this was another test with the leg and we thought it's no the head we thought it's interesting because there's a lot of discourse at the moment about Ai and how we produce artificial life.

7:01But it's not really working yet so that's exactly what our artist tries to do as well he creates these crazy heads this is a Batman head and here is an arrangement of test heads in the space which didn't make it to the film either. And this is an animation test of a head another one yeah but the biggest challenge was in a way to make it as real as possible and as plausible as possible so we didn't want to go too much over the top with what he does because we wanted the people to believe that this has been made actually.

7:36So this is a visualization test of a no this is actually a photograph of the gallery right the white Cube this is the photograph of the wild Cube and this is a 3D render of the wild Cube that we built yeah we spend a lot of time of this a lot of a lot of time on the on the texture of the floor and like all this kind of stuff so and while we were spending a lot of time of of doing all of this we also kind of were reading and watching a lot of like interviews with actual artist to figure out kind of what kind of questions we we should ask Robert in the film because like we had to kind of like tell the whole story of Robert through his answers and it had to be like a pretty good mixture between kind of like serious information about his backstory about his work and kind of like a lot of like funny parts to make it kind of entertaining and yeah we were really happy to have found sit hunt our actor a great actor because he kind of like brought the the right amount of craziness to the set so after we shot one day at Robert's studio and we shot one day in the morning at the coast which was freezing and went back to the studio for a couple of months editing and Fin analyzing everything.

8:59And then it was kind of done in a way yeah and then we premiered the film at resonate festival for Digital Arts in Belgrade gratefully shown to a huge audience in in in the cinema lecture theater of the festival and I was really worried that the reaction wasn't really like really loud I think mostly because people were confused if this like if they should believe or not and one guy came to me after the screening and said he really liked the film.

9:34And I asked him do you know the artist and he was like yeah I know him. And I was I knew he was lying though like he just wanted to be looked at as he would have known but yeah yeah I mean so and after to resonate we were like really curious kind of like how the internet would react to the whole film.

9:54So we were really happy that after a month like Google image sh search showed us this kind of like filled with Robert roskin and he became more and more real and one of the best things was that a lot of people starting to play along it's kind of like this guy saw his installation at the boros collection in Berlin this guy saw an installation at the document and Castle must have been really great I guess and it was really nice and some people obviously were really confused so a lot kind of like started researching about Robert and a lot of them were kind of like sure the artworks are not weren't real but the artist is real and so there was a lot of confusion going on which was perfect because it was exactly what we wanted and some really really figured it all out and found the actor and found the fake photos he must have done a Google image recognition search with a screenshot of the film.

10:50And then found out that is actually this guy in casting called total but we're really really happy happy we we we did all of this. And it was a really really great experience and great we had no idea if it would work or not we were like maybe people don't give a they all just realize it's 3D render like stupid idea yeah.

11:14So we're grateful it all worked out in a way. And we're happy to be here. And we're actually really grateful for it nice that to to support us from the beginning which is really great so yeah they posted it you know they got the ball rolling on this so thanks for having us and yeah all of these views of the world those that we perceive in our minds and those that we discover in the universe are probably just flavors of reality what we perceive as reality may be no more than a great illusion. But in the end does it ♪

11:56matter Jasper are we ready just m okay let's do ♪

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12:57thanks for having us ♪