Noah Harris

0:12Hello when I leave this evening I realized I'd completely missed the point of keynote which is that it's gone notes so you're going to mainly hear ruffling and swearing from me I think I am here to talk about the recent Adam a pity on an gorillas but I thought I'd start with a little bit of an intro about me and how I like to work I am a graphic designer kind of accidentally became a director and I guess I kind of sort of sit in the middle of there somehow and I really like working with physical objects and I know.

0:46That's a ridiculous thing to say because you can't have a non-physical object what I mean is tangible things that I can put in front of the camera and manipulate and moving the way that I want it like this.

0:55So these are real they're not CG they're not 2d they're real up to it.

0:58So I thought I could probably explain a bit more about me just through one kind of object so this is that object and this object serves me up pretty well.

1:08So I made this for Donald Trump you keep stirring this downstairs bathroom hora Largo and I would say that it pretty much satisfies all his needs now I like to kind of blur the boundaries between analog and digital I'm not either.

1:29But I even though I don't how to use keynote in fact I a melodic now. This is obviously a very physical thing.

1:36But the process you go through with this is quite digital so animate and 3d 3d print it.

1:41Now I didn't have a fight over three for me 3d print in it.

1:48So I'll just Nick something off the internet I've got no idea if that's the 3d printer could be could be like an incinerator from a morgue however it is called so dick so I had to put it in my presentation because I'm massively puerile and then spray a gold which has kind of become a defining feature of my career which is why me and Trump go on.

2:11So well. And sometimes a little bit of pink as well.

2:14And then just to kind of finish explaining about me you then take it and you put it inside a woman's head around a demented rave baby and animate it.

2:24So that's me. And that's what I do so Aeon I'll say the film first and then I'll explain a bit the process behind there and and what it's all about we got the power to be loving each other no matter what happens we got the power to do that ♪

3:22which you win questions ♪

4:21we have the power to do that ♪

4:59so they go so that's an advert for Ian I'm a convert apologize for that.

5:13But it's quite unique upper I think and it's one that you. Actually quite enjoyed watching now the idea behind that was essentially this pretty straightforward Burning Man for Tori's powered by the Sun and that's how what I put in my treatment my pitch to the agency that's why I wanted to to make a film. But in my head I kind of put these things together that it's a little bit more difficult to put into words I suppose but I think you get what I mean I wanted a what a lovely day passage Clippy cinemas show ♪

6:14I decided on it. So that was the film to me Mad Max crazy Japanese and rape now the last clip represents a very important and inspirational time in my life really. And I think that it feeds into a lot the work that I do I was 17 in 1991 so I kind of left college and I just went raving in fields for a couple years and took way too many pills and probably stood around in field store could you hear him talking about bongs talking about bongs in fields right he's like the real super hands brilliant anyway.

7:07So there's your advice right if you want a successful career in advertising talk about bongs in a field so I'm just going to tell you quickly through a little bit the protest of this so one of the things I wanted to say was that the these jobs have a crazy short timeframe sometimes and you always question why they have a crazy short timeframe why don't these massive companies these days who seems kind of know that they've got ads coming up and give you months to do it.

7:30But they don't so this whole next bit of the process is about three weeks from pitching the job to go in and shooting and everything is happening concurrently so there's a lot going on so one of the obvious things I suppose the storyboards right. Now I've only put a couple of friends in here.

7:46But I think what's really important about a storyboard and actually a very difficult thing to do is to try and encapsulate the feeling of that sort or the feeling of that character summer and I think that starts up pretty well this guy is shaking his ass and he's pretty happy about it right.

8:00This is when the gorillas arrive and everyone stops and it's kind of like the scenes part it's like the the saloon door moment you know.

8:07And I really get that from that frame you know if you've got a really good storyboard eyes I didn't draw these I cannot draw if you've got a really good story about ice and you're really going to the films really going to start taking shape on paper you know obviously alongside that there's a lot of design to go on in a job like this so my production designer Drogo Miche will put something together we'll talk a lot and you'll put something together in sketchup so a lot of stuff we talked about and looked at words obviously Burning Man where it's all laid out to look a certain way from the sky but also kind of a lot of that hippie crap like stone circles and Gaston baby and all that stuff and how it's all kind of laid out in this very I think I was quite religious isn't it you know in the way that it's kind of all going towards a center point so we start with something like this which is kind of very soulless but very kind of structural and then I'll put some real knock something together in Photoshop and go back to him and go well how about if we put a massive fan of Kino lights behind him and make some balloons that have make some octopuses out of balloons and put a big halo over his head and make it a bit Japanese and then we'll start kind of factoring that into the process and then we start to get somewhere a bit more light the final things we've got this giant lucky cat we've got the octopus on either side these are solar panels all around it there's the solar batteries in there which is what the ants fall if anyone got that.

9:28So the batteries that store solar energy and then there's loads of toys in the middle and also along this whole process is trying to work out what the those toys are and where they're going to come from because you only got three weeks certainly got build stuff right.

9:42So you build a massive lucky cat out fibreglass and then you clearly spray it gold because that's what I do with everything there's obviously a lot of other stuff in here you've got build on the platforms in the set you've got build a fish tank together the speakers at the fish tank seal and there's so much stuff in but I just thought I'd put the cat and there was a kind of simple idea of the build and then you got a workout where you're going to shoot it so obviously the ideal would be to go and shoot it in Nevada in the desert right you can't afford that.

10:10So then you kind of go to Spaghetti Westerns and you think and we see it.

10:16And then you look at the logistics of getting a thousand Tories and massive crew and everyone out to analyse earrings in the desert and where they're going to stay and how it's all going to work so you end up in a limestone quarry outside Barcelona which you know some it was actually great it's absolutely massive so that.

10:33There is our film set I've got a massive try this kind of vines is huge you know it's got these amazing big kind of strata and levels and layers and they kind of suggest canyons and you know you put a camera in the right place and you know you've got a desert you've got you've got Nevada it was a working to craze going probably not a bit of onset and what we a place to hang out for 3:9 all night is where is what we were shooting for weird place anyway animatic so then storyboard build all that stuff and then with a job like this and jobs that involve a lot of animation or something then I'll build the whole film in 3d so that well the topic like this is very ambitious they want something that was two and a half minutes long I was like oh I'm going to make a boom this to it off minutes long you've only got three notes to shoot so so so I'll put something together like this. And I've just got a little bit of it here I'm not going to show you the whole thing but you see how it kind of ties into what the body between the small my dreams don't know changes the face the matter once or entirely possible if I am you win so that helps me my editor my DP my art director helps everyone kind of get the idea of what's going on in my head which quite often is not the easiest thing to kind of get but it all sells client so the client when they see that and they sit down and they go that's what it's going to look like and they're really happy obviously then you go and shoot and everything goes tits up and things don't work and toys break and you can't get a shot see one and it's really windy and the smoke won't stay and all that kind of and it changes from that.

12:45But it gets everyone in a kind of a place of feeling comfortable of where you're going to go when they're spending however much money they're spending so obviously when you're making a film cast of the big thing. Now in this film the cost is toys right.

12:56So we have to find all these toys we're going to China we're going to pan we're going to Vietnam we're going to Taiwan all these places where we get all these toys in bulk because you needed lots of them and there was a visual style I wanted to achieve honor to achieve sort of slightly Japanese we would feel but I also wanted ties that people hadn't necessarily seen before it and want obvious toys I didn't want obvious brands we're going to sue us when the film came out.

13:21But I also wanted to create characters right we've been to rave or parties or whatever there's always certain characters right those guys are going to be like the moshpit round the gorillas right.

13:45So they were like though they were like just stop that it's really going for it. And then. I really wanted this kind of graceful old couple waltzing through the middle of them right you know you ever been to a pie and there's always some old guy there. And it's kind of cool just hanging out doing this thing you've got no idea was there and he's probably got no idea was there.

14:00But that's why I wanted these to be and this is like the hardest thing to find this is why I put the eBay page on here because we wear my older items trying everywhere to find the perfect I have this reference I really wanted my confining eventually we found this we found this we built a little turntable for it with a motor so it can be run off for solar energy and then they walked through the middle of the the other guide now this guy there's always a guy like this at PI right it was probably me [Applause]

14:39so with this this we rewired a lot of these toys to MIDI sing them up so MIDI is where you send an audio signal to fire off for a sample if you make a musical something like that but you can also use it just just to send an electrical signal to anything.

14:52So these are guys you can write them up to the run in sequence [Applause]

15:02events good but anyways do that successfully any test stick to them.

15:13And then you get on set and he previous is Matthew Busby Berkeley dance routine with twenty five of them doesn't work doesn't make the film cut it straight out of here D really annoying but they again and then obviously I'd spray spray something gold you know just to keep that up. And some other colors as well.

15:32And now obviously the film is a big time of guerrillas and only to feature the guerrillas you know invade in the film in the middle and then becoming the kind of center of the party right. So again eBay you bought these kid robot toys or PB no one gives you anything you know you have to buy ridiculously expensive collectible kid robot toys which we then proceeded to hack apart and doctor and put motors in them. And I wanted to turn Murdoch into Clint Eastwood specifically out the good the bad the ugly and I cannot give you a reason why other than that it was in the desert and I wanted them to kind of arrive like a sort of saloon door kind of cowboy style put gunshot in there later on it was not a big kind of plan thing.

16:13So we clearly printed him a hat which I then got them to put the bullet Nick in at the top like that like a real geek so get my hat and other similar is quite interesting because the client said the EON have a strict no pets and no pants policy now this guy's obviously got tits and pants right I don't feel a used words it I think it's bad breath and underwear now a bad lesson underwear so we had to put the poncho anyway which made us which I thought was quite funny clean your toy so then mechanisms all these toys have got mechanism so this is the very crude first go at how nervous allowing to be good until we had our exam and everything won top of instead Tony stuff it Baltimore iris jig and this is how he ended up that little bit Russell Hobbs this is before the motor went on.

17:14So we cut his arm off move these drones who can clean the drums we did that to all of those and they were running just running off solar energy like everything else so I've got a few behind the scenes stuff here which are just kind of rail free because it's quite interesting but it's not that interesting obviously we have thousands of toys turn up in this quarry and someone's got a kind of sort through it all and make sure it all kind of works and put some of them together which was a surprise to everyone when they turned up in a box these guys were really pissed off after like they were 40 40 of these toys but they had to put together made me chuckle this guy's wiring up this beautiful little princess so we can run her in sequence below that load of other ones this is guys from asylum who are special effects company who did quite a work with us on this like making the gorilla stories anime.

18:12And we were and all the toys for us later Handley squid can't be a Hamlisch squid can you we have problems with these there right which I didn't foresee which is that a bath has round corners right. So squid kind of goes around it whereas a fish tank has square corners so they just collapse into the corner so you have to then tie them with braid to the top of the tank and put them in and then they will get tangled up so you've got about three seconds of shot that you can get out of it learning curve you know.

18:38So this is building the structure in the quarry and and although this fighter might look pretty dull to you there's something really nice about the just musician of that cat and that rock behind it and a beautiful band in the foreground as well of a seaman this is my art director Kate starting to lay toys out and what we had to do you know we never put any of this stuff together till we got out this way it's get these toys in it we had an idea of what we wanted to go where we have to start laying along I know that some work this works and you know before it got dark when we need to start shooting and there's me telling people what to do as we do to point point Nick so so this is a really cool rig this is this is where asylums special effects company come into their own so these little guys these little crappy handy guys they just hand triggered right just squeezing that powered at all.

19:27But I loved them. And I put them on the front page of my pitch to their agency to the client and I'm absolutely loving I wanted them in a film I couldn't find them anywhere.

19:38And then weirdly from bloating like grins meals on that a lot cop was like 40 in its off cost I don't know a how we found them or be way had them barely wear goggle and then asylum build this rig so that there's a motor running underneath and it'll make them all clap at the same time.

19:53So I could get this beautiful sink running out of these guys which is to me is kind of an integral part the rhythm of the film you know.

20:00This is a motion controlled camera rig there's a time-lapse or in the film at that if you remember where the Sun Goes Down so and that's real it's not posed it's we shot that over eight hours so this track this rig moves the camera in how I want it to me that goes down the track it pans and it tilts up don't past all the batteries as the Sun Goes Down obviously it was cloudy the first day when we set it up.

20:23So we shot it. And it was unusable so we had to set up again and do it again the second day a great expense but it's really nice doing that stuff in camry you know there's a real physical kind of feel to the shadows and how they move and all the light would be very difficult to create and pose and they've just proof of my obsession with artists as you've seen from the rest of this presentation.

20:41That's me looking at the first lady's ass thrilling I'm not really before I get that last move on I'll move on. That's setting up that big first drone shot at the star and I'll get really nice since you don't believe that's a quarry do you it feels really canyoning you know it's a great place it really makes me chuckle right. And I for this to make you laugh as well but probably blank number one how many people are there standing in this photo right I knew what was suited we see in that.

21:11Now I'm the director right. And I could not tell you what 70% of those people are doing there. But then look at this.

21:21That's the same shot and the same people at night brilliant huh it's amazing amount of people involved in these shoes that's just a kind of cool Blade Runner we sort of a set this is the guy with the MIDI scene in fact this is probably the moment where he was running all those cars that didn't work that wasn't Berkeley mr. Broken I'm sorry I'm everyone in told on me bomb another concert now.

21:49This is sort of I Turk because it kind of encapsulate the entire waviness of the event this is just a really cool sort when the Sun comes out and there was a kind of bit of a sort of early morning rave feeling to the end of the thing.

22:05Anyway you know it's kind of everyone was a bit kind of bowled over by so just to encapsulate the end of it you know not not not wishing to belittle any of these processes but there little bit less exciting to show edit post-production sons on a mix client happy at the pub go to sleep and I've got one more female want to show you.

22:22So this is a short film that we just finished a blink it's a KO direction I believe the guy could Andy Biddle and the reason I thought it tied in here was that I use this as part of my pitch to win the EON job personal work really feeds into kind of commercial work in a really important way. And it's incredibly encapsulate so I was saying about physical objects before every single thing in here is found in a copy sell every single object so here you go ♪

25:00[Applause]