Pitch Studios

0:00Oh g'day I'm Christy I am the founder of pitch Studios as I mentioned and the newly launched pitch portal hailing all the way from Melbourne Australia the it's nice that team reckon I'm the most international guests I've had so big thank you for having me thank you pit studios is a design studio that creates new forms of digital experiences we specialise in visual communication within the 3d space from animation to interactive environments we we tend to like to work with new technologies to achieve interesting and often very experimental results this is myself and my partner Chris golden who works alongside me in sort of our creative space I guess you could say we have a pretty collective mentality when it comes to the work we do we like to keep things very collaborative we like to involve extended creative community on projects and we keep our team quite our core team quite small and agile so we have Taylor who is the head of pitch portal we have a few business development consultants and we have some interns and some other friends designers that we work with excitingly this year we launched a new arm of the studio which aims to take a deeper look into the way humans communicate and connect through digital culture which is usually presented through short films interactive experiences workshops and events and papers which are coming very soon so essentially we are a design studio and now a Creative Lab where we have the flexibility of being able to combine visual communication strategy research and critical thinking for brands and ourselves in a more alternative format and I guess as we've been going through the motions of working in these sort of new digital spaces using emerging technologies to prototype and test maintaining sort of an ever evolving online and social media presence I guess we kept coming back to the same question or conversation in this digital world the possibilities are endless but we don't really understand the implications of how we use these tools and how they might affect the way that we understand and communicate with each other.

2:33So the visual languages that we create I guess a lot of the work explores the way humans connect using the internet and technology how digital and physical or digital spaces are impacting our lives we tend to look at this intersection of art and commerce and digital culture and attitudes and I guess we also look deeper into online and digital communities so entire virtual gappiya which is a project that we created in collaboration with our friends at I am which was hosted at their annual event which is I am weekend in Barcelona and this resulted in a short film which we're going to take a look at now hello are you confused about the futures I'm seeking a fresh perspective that only travel good effect you may take your cap here at the archipelago's and explore five islands that will make you reimagine reality knowledge and technologies are distributed throughout the terrain exposing it unfolding understanding and you just utopia relaxed quiet as a mere perversity the online world entrenched on everything and private data transparent and right with the environment observe a thoughtful flow of sustainable conscious data shifting article crafted from perspective and potential everything is weighed nothing is a paradox the last island was founded through unity of modernity with the shifting and ever-evolving language that speaks to us all.

4:24Now that you've had a taste of your potential future press the big blue button now remember it's only a Lonely Planet if we let it be I guess it might be worth giving some context so virtual copy is a visual exploration of the I am weekend theme of 2019 the quantumness of archipelagos I I won't go too deeply into this but put simply the theme explores the idea that all of us as humans who use the Internet are connected and there were all citizens of the same place the earth much like an archipelago we exist in a series of islands and although each region and state has its own local nuances we should all share the same tool the internet inside the I am weekend theme they usually extend this topic into specific focuses such as decolonizing learning debriefing imaginations the ethics of design foresight and AI reloading the futures of the Internet and decelerating ecosystems it's a bit of a mouthful so if you'd like to read more please feel free to head to the I am weekend website and you'll be able to read more about it so for us from a thinking perspective we want to subvert this concept further by exploring a global phenomenon the gap year or I guess an exploratory adventure to find yourself during the coming-of-age process this was sort of the sea for a meta-narrative which framed I am weekend as the ultimate destination for a truth seeking sabbatical yes so basically they had this overarching theme.

6:13And we we plucked sort of elements from that and created our own narrative from there and from this seed the idea of producing a short film emerged we felt like it was the most simple format of storytelling for such a complex concept and I guess this theme touched a lot on the idea of a global pluralist mentality so we actively chose to team up with a series of creators from different sectors of the world which extended the collaboration further.

6:45So we had too much studio who were here tonight they're from the United Kingdom simcha Ackerman from the US Paulina's ins 'va from Russia lorna Pitt away who at the time was based the Netherlands pitch to use which is us from Australia and we had marina make our from Japan I guess wholeheartedly we do believe that collaboration is often the key to success and a creatively rewarding project.

7:10So we did encourage our artists to explore the theme I guess what the theme meant to them personally and how it relates to their own practice we we use that Instagram platform to push a call out for 3d creators situated globally and I guess this helped add to the pluralist ideology further the platform was also used to amplify the entire collaboration and support our friends and I am so we did the call-out and once the artist was selected we also hosted a series of live Q&A sessions by our Instagram stories we wanted to allow the or that the pitch audience to understand each of our collaborators perspectives and also gain some insight further into their own practices and how this relates to them personally so the project kicked off we before we officially briefed our artists on the project we sort of took a small step back and dive deeper into this meta narrative and we kind of came to the conclusion that each artist could represent their own islands of the archipelago it would be their own personal digital utopia and so after a series of video briefing sessions with the artists the beauty of the internet we invited them to present their concepts back to us in a treatment deck which include included mood board references their rationale and and how they might visualize this this artwork. And so this is an example of two much's treatment the initial treatment deck that they shared with us. And I guess I might explain a little bit from a visual perspective what they were aiming to do so with with their concept they they liked this idea of the digital and and humans and sort of nature or coexisting in harmony there is about this sort of this idea of a new Internet that's built around people in nature that's sort of decentralized in a way. And this this system is open and it has this movement of data and everything is very transparent and and you can see that we have like the transparent materials which represent the transparency of data and we talked also about this idea of infrastructure and and how this was this new age of sustainability and conscious consumption of data so you can see the white structures sort of represent the infrastructure and then you have the the bottom layer of the landscape which sort of represents the nature in this context and I guess when they were presenting back there these treatments it was also worth noting that we needed to understand fully how this was going to animate so you know this came along with a lot of animation references and notes as well.

9:58And this was again this was quite different to the final result that you would have seen in the video but this is just showing some progress and this is another series of images that too much should share with us which was a lot of testing and prototyping and and going through the the progress of getting to the final destination I guess and you'll also notice that there's sort of this light traveling through the the cables if you will the transparent cables and that sort of represented the movement of data and so I guess from there ourselves and the I am team went through all of these treatments to kind of understand if this was the right direction. And if this you know worked in their chosen topic but we didn't want to keep this project process too rigid we did encourage everyone to kind of get a bit weird and not let the narrative be too restrictive as I guess the concept is super abstract to the everyday person and yeah that's again it was also really exciting for us as a studio as we were able to create an intro and outro sequences and it was a chance for us to kind of imagine how we might visualize our idea of a sun-soaked tropical island and so I guess we went in a more of a traditional or typical approach for Annis Island aesthetic however we sort of subverted the landscape further with using sort of surrealist colors and interns and materials and and that's kind of something that we like to do a lot. So it was a fun fun process for us once sort of the 3d process has been had begun the pitch team you know we didn't really want to focus too heavily on aesthetics with the artists we did want to like leave them to their own devices so we and we wanted them to have their own agency so we kind of left them to their devices and carried on in the background we started thinking further about the descriptor that we had written and how we were going to bring sort of the voice-over and the sound design to life. And this is just a very quick look at the scripts that we had written we also engaged one of our friends from Melbourne Jennifer Lovelace who is a producer in DJ and she was able to take our weird and wonderful narrative and turn it into this sort of ambient sound skate with a computer-generated voice so far we we also originally had some sort of like nokia ringtone esque type sounds but we decided to stray away from that.

12:24This is feeling a bit kitsch we took notes from the ambient music Holy Grail which has William Burzynski's disintegration Loops and we've layered sort of these sound effects on top of sounds from sort of the digital world you'll also notice if you watch it again there are whale sounds in there. And we decided to stay to the accent of the voiceover being Australian cuz we're Australian and once we've received all of the scenes back from the artists it was then off to our editor marina so you cut everything together and add the subtitles this is just a screenshot from her workflow I guess in the end we sort of ended up with few timing and pacing issues with the voice-over but I mean in the end we figured it out we we made some revisions and virtual gappiya was was complete we decided to have two versions of the film one with English subtitles but generally we felt the one with subtitles was more effective due to the sort of the post effects that we applied to the sound and this is a Paulina's one of polina's scenes that she created virtual gappiya was screened at I am weekend and marcelina as I mentioned and it was picked up by Press I know it's nice that.

13:37And some of our friends at the future laboratory after the success of the film that was published online we also screen this at semi-permanent which is a creative conference in Sydney and that. Actually came back here in London as part of art night curated by her visions where it was screened at the Google arts and culture HQ which you can see that yes so I mean that was basically it I guess I wanted to go into more of the the process behind the scenes we were very excited with the results and we did really feel that this project had a life of its own it really involved the perspectives of so many young artists and creatives from all over the world. And it really did feel like a living and breathing entity which was very exciting for us in the process and so what now we we may or may not have another collaboration with I am coming up on the horizon which will look to combine both the pitch Studios sort of creative production and the portal kind of thinking so stay tuned and follow us on Instagram if you want thank you [Applause]