Universal Everything

0:00 [Applause]

0:05 so we're a collective of designers producers animators and sound designers all working remotely we are a Matt Pike the founders based up in Sheffield and then most of us are UK or New York based but what we try and do is really explore this idea of character design and like what what can we what can we do that feels alive and minimize it down to its most a kind of simple or abstract or weird form and still feel like it's got a life and a personality and people can respond to it in a kind of positive or an emotional way my background's actually animation.

0:57 And interactive so I've worked as an animation producer for a long time. And I've worked across stop motion and puppetry through to 2D and hand-drawn and now more 3D side of things.

1:11 But I think what really engages me is this idea of who who our audience is I've worked at BBC for a long time.

1:20 And I think that kind of ingrained in my head about always starting with who your audience is and think about what they might enjoy or what they might respond to so I've been with yui for for three years. And I always loved their work and you know Matt's a really nice guy and we just kind of clipped so what I'm going to talk about today is a little bit on this idea of digital life forms which is a theme of the show that we've we've currently got on in London at 180 and I think what we're really interested in is is taking an idea that maybe starts off this big and then reducing it and simplifying it and trying to distill it into its kind of it's it's a kind of overall nature without getting too complicated so we don't some of our work is is is is doesn't really have much of a beginning middle and end and quite a lot of our work is loops so that obviously works really well for Webb and repeatable things like exhibitions but also this idea of animation that can change over time is something that we're really interested into so what is a life form you know what is a minimal version of a life form so what makes something abstracted still feel alive and like it's got a soul we're really interested in exploring the humanity in in everything and to try and bring life and character to anything like objects or shapes or data and we really also like working with new Creative Technologies to to find that little sweet spot I'm going to show a few examples of this.

3:09 And then I can show you a bit about the the show as well.

3:15 So this is a this Project's been I think quite a few years old now we actually made this as a lenticular print which we gave away with the books that we've had published but it's again it's this idea of of minimal fun characters ♪

3:38 the generative characters so although they're all of a family they're very much being developed and moving and kind of clearing themselves Tetris style in in real time and communion.

3:52 This is a immersive piece that you can see at the show the idea here is we're taking procedurally generated dancing life forms and creating a kind of digital Rave out of microorganisms so the idea with this space is some I heard a visitor come in once and they said oh it's like stained glass windows and a rave and I was like I'm having that.

4:16 That's really good that's that's how it feels and that's how we wanted it to feel so good so the idea is that these these characters they're all minimal characters and they have joints or they might have legs but they probably might not have a head they haven't got a face or eyes but they still feel alive because of the way they move and if you've ever looked at like Plankton through a microscope you can see all these teeny little things and you're like oh my gosh they're like they are literally little tiny creatures that you can't don't realize are there.

4:49 But they're all dancing to the same Rhythm and they evolve over time which is also something we're really interested in this idea of evolving and becoming more complex as Evolution happens we're also really interested in in turning objects into characters so this is something taken from a project we made for Hyundai who have big department store in Seoul called super consumers and this.

5:15 Actually made me want to work with Matt because it's basically taking pillows and chairs and turning them into cool characters so we took all the all the stuff you could buy in the shop and turned them into characters and and the great thing about working in Korea is you can go really wacky and they like it whereas a lot of clients might be like what the hell is that you know we're like yeah let's make a chair that sachets and and like the pillow guy and you know.

5:47 But it does you can it you can take anything and turn it into a character it's all about how they move and and it can make you laugh and smile that's that means we've succeeded this is a slightly different experiment that we did called machine learning so the idea here is that we work with a choreographer and used his dance moves to essentially create a a choreography a dance performance which we then mirrored in the animation and abstracted his forms so the the his duet his play his co-player is basically a mirror of his own performance data and then we animated him back into the film.

6:32 So it becomes a a duet this this for us is like again no face no arms and legs but you can still tell it feels human because it's based on on authentic Human Performance and that's really interesting for us so life forms the show we've we've been going back 20 years.

6:58 So this was really amazing to be able to put a show together which allows us to explore some of our older work.

7:05 And then create new work for it there's four new artworks in the show including one interactive and a generative artwork. And we've kind of designed we did the design as well. And we we wanted everything to feel characterful and alive so like the logo and the signage and the space is all minimal cute I think characters so I'll show you a quick film of that.

7:33 And then I can show you some behind the scenes stuff ♪

7:39 [Applause]

7:49 foreign ♪

8:13 look at it before it closes but that's that's a little taster in terms of programming the event we took the core themes that we're interested in exploring and then try to curate them into little groups so in terms of the user Journey or the user experience through the space you felt like you were moving through our work not only in a retrospective or chronological way. But also more kind of thematic way we also work with Simon Pike Matt's brother who does all the sound design for his films and he created the the sound design for the whole Space so if you have been hopefully you noticed it feels quite there's no clashing it's all quite purposefully designed for multiple artworks to work in one space but this is this is where we started so we work with Abe Rogers design here an amazing architecture and Design Studio and they've they've helped us kind of design the show and build the habitats that these creatures live in under the core themes of future humans and future nature which are the themes that we keep coming back to but this is this is one of the first initial sketches so with Matt we kind of figured out we wanted to get away from everything being on rectangles and screens and it's kind of boring so we we went for a projection based approach and created these little habitats where we could have back projected films and house the characters in in a little house so they had somewhere to live rather than putting some stuffs on the wall but rather than putting them on the wall.

9:46 And it feels more 3D and immersive because of that then yosuke the designer he sketched up some ideas for the space I thought it was quite useful to see this because what we ended up with is not that far removed from what the very first sketches showed so this is you can see a sketch of infinity there which is our generative character parade on the right. And we we've back projected onto a drum shape for that. And then.

10:15 This is what it.

10:17 Actually turned out like so it worked thankfully these characters are all created in unity and then we we designed the presets essentially and then the the app creates characters in real time for like as long as you want it to run so no two characters are quite the same here's some earlier shots of we wanted all the characters to feel super scaled and like bigger than the humans in the room again getting away from the constraints of a TV screen and then this one actually ended up in the show so back projected walking City character and then painted canvas in the in this habitat to make it feel housed in some way talking about user experience the we start.

11:10 This is actually a different space than we ended up in but this was starting to think about the flow of how you move through the space like you would a story so what's up beginning middle and end you know where do you want people to feel relaxed or where do you want them to feel uplifted or like over stimulated so we've we moved a lot of the films and artworks around and we spread out the interactive so that we didn't have any queuing or bottlenecks because the space is a bit.

11:38 There are lots of walls we ended up taking out quite a few of the walls to make it look more open plan and that that makes it feel like a much more relaxing and kind of open space that you might want to hang out in a bit longer than feeling like you're in a queue being pushed along which I personally hate when I go to exhibitions I don't if I want to hang out I I should feel like I'm welcome to hang out there.

12:01 But this is just a little peek at some of the architectural designs and then we loved this idea we knew it was going to play out in the winter so we created a sun room to to bring some warmth into the cold car park space in the bottom of this 180 building and so into the sun is there a interactive piece which works for two to well one to four players and you're basically growing plants with your body in a desert landscape so it's just me demoing it was a walk past but we can have four players interacting and creating these these fun character plants but then also you're a layer in the music.

12:43 So the more people the more the music kind of harmonizes and you're creating music with your body as well. So that again is a Unity build interactive using a body tracking sensor and then I'm probably going to run out of time.

13:00 So I whiz through this last one this is this is my favorite one this is a kind of fantasy fashion show again starting with a kind of Chris Perrier amazing animators comes up with all this stuff but starting off with a kind of design language and then having a generative process that that creates basically thousands of these robots and then we we were like right let's just choose the ones we like and turn them into catwalk models and use motion capture data for that.

13:32 And this is what we ended up with and I love this because it's very overtly female and curvy and proud of it. And we've got like really big tall ones and we've got little ones we've got shiny ones but they're all like all on the catwalk very happy to be in our show thank you