Butt Studio

0:00 [Applause]

0:12 I yeah thanks Matt I'm butt studio also my real actual name is is Harry but but Studio isn't really a studio it's more of like an identity crisis other than the occasional wonderful intern it's actually just it's actually just been me the whole time I remember like graduating University and all these people were kind of going off and doing their own thing and they were like setting up like blah blah blah studio and it was just them.

0:46 And I always thought like I couldn't ever really do that because my name is literally hairy but then obviously it's like the very reason I did do it. And it stuck so anyway to summarize it the name is not only a lie but it's also a really stupid joke yeah you can see my work behind me here please like please make the most of this because the quality kind of really goes downhill from there.

1:18 That's kind of the theme. And we'll get into that but just to finish the introduction I'm an animation director and what that kind of means is stepping away from making stuff and more focusing on like controlling the aesthetic and writing the story and coming up with the concept I started as a graphic designer really interested in animation.

1:40 So I've always been kind of doing like digital and 3D I've always been like drawn to fairy tales this is a music video I made for Tame Impala where it's like a fairy tale two dragonflies fall in love Nature's always been like an important part of the of my work trying to like recreate that in 3D and bring it in and also like landscape painting I use 3D software which is super strict and doesn't really like you playing with perspective too much.

2:13 So I'm always kind of looking at landscape paintings and trying to change the way I use the software to make this I'm currently really into storytelling and getting into writing lots of narratives often trying to reframe The Familiar into like a cosmic sci-fi sort of fairy tale and that kind of leads me into today's main content I'm going to present the world premiere of this short film I've been working on it's like the very first ever screening I notice you're very lucky to be here for this moment but it's also going to be the last ever screening because the theme of this talk is what is it's the lessons you learn from making something you personally consider a failure so I'm just going to play it it's only a minute long it's unfinished so be gentle it's about a frog ♪

4:00 but Mercy ♪

4:05 see please ♪

4:22 I feel like she preface it by being like I mean that's too late to preface it but people say it's not maybe like objectively bad I just feel like it didn't like I it feels like a failure to me the intention was to kind of step away from shorter commercial forms of Animation I've been doing quite a lot of and focus on making something more of a narrative basically just kind of for myself but writing a narrative was never really part of my formal education or part of my regular practice so in the past year I've got in this habit of every time every day when I wake up just writing a complete story start to end no matter how short it is yeah sort of trying to get into it every morning and to avoid getting bogged down in the pre-production stages I just picked one of these stories that I wrote in like five minutes and just ran with it.

5:13 This is when I thought it would be more romantic to handwrite it it's I just do it in a Google talk now it's much easier and to basically summarize my feelings about the film. Now it.

5:24 Basically just doesn't like really make sense right I wrote the story in a few minutes and didn't really probe it and the problems with the narrative is like one of two things that I wanted to highlight as lessons that I've learned tonight so yeah the first is about how I approach narrative and also the second is about the quality of Animation within my work yeah and when I finished it these two things were like what I was getting like hyper focused on. And I just kind of dug into why those things I couldn't really stop like hating and it was like a really useful process yeah.

6:03 So this first lesson is about narrative I've come to realize when I think about narrative I kind of think of things in this like a single beautiful Visual and trying to build a story around it rather than like an evolving situation or a series of events which FUNimation clearly is a problem it's like a time-based media right you kind of need a flowing sequence of linked scenes and I have I was kind of thinking about why I think like this.

6:27 And I kind of have this Theory and it relates to me being this sort of tiny little child here me and my sisters who grew up on a farm in the middle of nowhere and when I wasn't in school I was just like in my back Garden Playing Lord of the Rings with a stick just really deep in my own head and I spent a lot of time growing up really slowly and yeah.

6:47 I think it had an impact on my creative practice there are times it's been helpful like there was this.

6:56 This is a campaign for Nike kids and I had to get in the head of a kid like running around and playing and creating all this work to fill in what they're imagining so I basically just went straight back to me being a kid one of the examples is I was really bad at football when I was growing up. And so I would kick a ball around and imagine these tiny aliens that were watching me and they'd never seen football before.

7:22 So they thought I was like the most amazing football player in the world.

7:28 And so they became part of the campaign you can see them on the floor down there in my head when I was a kid they were more like the Toy Story aliens but it was Nike so it kind of to be like quite cool they're down there yeah and you can kind of see them amongst all the other like colorful explosions that I would see when I was like running around in my own head so it can be useful and just like a second one before I go against it of how it was as useful is for this campaign for a running shoe by a company called All Birds they made a shoe out of foam that was grown entirely from plants and so when the brief came through I was like okay okay obviously there's this like single visual of a plant growing and turning into transparent Bubbles and then it like solidifies into foam and then I became so obsessed and I was just like make an intro to that.

8:15 And then make an outro to that. And then.

8:17 That's the campaign and for 15 seconds that's fine but essentially when you're writing a narrative you kind of need to be surrounded by humans and like complicated situations and people reacting to other people I was just kind of on my own in my own head with in nature growing up. And that's kind of how my brain maybe still is but now I kind of identified that as basically something that I can like Chase and improve on. And it was worth like digging into yeah and just linking it back to the film I essentially just wanted to make this scene just this like opening shot I had it really clear in my head and then.

8:56 I just invented like the rest of the shots to to fill it out and when I look back at the mood board I was like oh yeah they're all paintings they're all just like single images I should have maybe just done an illustration the second lesson's in motion. And it's definitely the thing I'm most self-conscious about when showing work. And I kind of will come to explaining that but to again start on a positive thing.

9:24 This is a project where I felt loads of pride in the animation work it's a series it's a series of AD meditation sound healing episodes for itv's new digital channel called woo each of the four episodes are kind of aimed to induce this really specific headspace that's driven by neurological Research into what kind of motion induces each like specific headspace this one for example was all about leaving the viewer charged with energy and the science behind it was apparently like some kind of looking at some kind of build and release like charges you with energy so I had this idea to create this sort of central smooth flowing object but without moving the camera because I felt that that would like really break the focus.

10:17 So I landed on this sort of undulating vars in like shifting colors and yeah to talk about the other sort of animated elements there's these there's these you can kind of see these black Sparks that are being shut out at the top and it was important to me that the viewer could kind of find their own way into this quite like rigid like on off motion. So if I had this one very subtle like constant motion you could just pick up on that.

10:47 And then like ease your way into it and the other kind of final thing are these are these bowls at the top that are like spinning around in a predictable way so you could kind of have one foot in reality you liked being confronted by these insane organic shapes just appearing out of nowhere you could be like oh as soon as these balls are going to turn I'm going to see something.

11:07 And then you kind of like get into the flow these episodes are like 10 minutes long so you can't give a lot to look at right I don't know I could talk about all of them for for ages but basically I was like it's just a piece where the animation I was like super proud of and it is a reminder of like how how happy you can feel about your work when when I feel like I've done a good job with the animation so now looking back at the front film The Animation is an amazing look at her head this is getting really like really like laser focused on it.

11:47 And I just began to reflect on why and basically to kind of finish this part of it kind of picks up on what Trevor Jackson was saying about like he was saying about this saturation of visual stuff and where he kind of felt I guess apathy was what he was saying I kind of feel like an intense desire to like stand out when you're being bombarded with stuff you kind of want to make sure that the work you're making is sort of better which is horribly toxic but it's kind of been haunting me and there's basically in 3D loads of work it's like very saturated there's a lot of incredibly beautiful work but sometimes the animation just because of the lengthy process of it is maybe just sometimes a bit of an afterthought for example like beautiful shiny object in like a stunning environment landscape and then yeah just because it's such a slow process sometimes the animation just is like very simple and so I've told myself the only way to stand out is to make sort of beautiful 3D which I feel like now I I'm comfortable like doing that.

12:57 And then and then making the animation like insanely beautiful and perfect and like all the principles of motion are used and all this kind of things.

13:06 So there's like a lot of pressure being loaded onto animation and anyway I sort of look back at this film. And I work out why I hate it. And now I know that in the future I can just like assign more time to that part of the project and yeah it's good to be self-aware I guess yeah in conclusion it was a bit of a risk coming to like a wonderful event like this and having all of your attention and showing my worst piece of work.

13:39 But I feel like it's important to see some failures right amongst all the like amazing Polished Work we've seen tonight and other nicely Tuesdays talks I also feel like really comfortable talking about my failures because I'm stepping away from the like butt Studio thing it's been a really wonderful Journey that I might carry on with at some point but I'm always chasing the path where I'm like learning and growing the most and right.

14:02 Now that looks like a full-time job partnering with this with this other company and yeah it's been it's been making all the mistakes that I've made so far that have taken me to where. I am now.

14:14 Now I've got this other thing I can make even bigger mistakes with even bigger budgets at risk my new employer is actually here tonight so that was a joke anyway the takeaway is I hope that next time you've made something you hate you learn to love it for teaching you something about yourself thanks [Applause]