Yonk

0:00 [Applause]

0:07 hello hi hello I'm a bit nervous but let's do this hi yes we are young thank you so much for having us here it's literally a dream come true to be at nice of Tuesday so we're like over the moon to be here it's probably best that we do introductions first even though Matt did a really really good job.

0:27 But I'm Vicky young and this is Neil's Vander and together we are the 3D animation studio called yon based in the ha in the Netherlands so how did we get here by bus no I'm joking I had to do it it's so silly we're going to do so many silly things so just be prepared for that but how did we get here how do we get to speak to all to you lovely people tonight and tell you a little bit about our story well it started when me and Neils were in art school together.

0:54 This is us looking a little bit younger and fresher back in those days I was studying in fine artart and Neil was studying in graphic design we fell in love which is a bit of a sofy story.

1:04 But it happened it's true we're in love very convincing very convincing we are in love and we graduated we did the whole shebang we got jobs you know casual graduation life.

1:19 But we always knew we wanted to work together we wanted our own Studio One day but the issue was is that we had these two very different disciplines we had graphic design from Neals and Fine Arts from myself but we wanted to find skills in both of these that we could use but also learned something new and exciting and we landed on 3D so let's go and learn 3D right no CU when you open a 3D program it usually looks like this there's a lot of buttons it's gray why is it gray it's so sad but it's it's just there's a lot of stuff to see and we wanted something that was way more fun and way more intuitive that could just basically let us go into 3D straight away.

2:01 So we discovered something called VR sculpting his Live Discovery videos it's definitely not as last week filming this and basically what it allows you to do is it allows you to spray out kind of virtual clay almost like substance and basically sculpts yeah in Virtual Realties says what it does on the tin but what the best thing about this was is that we we essentially could start making work really quickly really intuitively and just go make 3D work right and become a 3D Studio but but as all in all Studios at some point you need a name right.

2:41 So what happens when you combine Victoria young and Neil's Vander ♪

2:57 do two two 3 ♪

3:04 just stop [Applause]

3:29 around stopid yeah.

3:59 So everything you saw in that video was sculpted using VR and it's kind of the only thing that we use we don't even know how to sculpt with traditional sculpting and we quickly figure out that the tool like allows for a lot of mistakes it allows for a lot of like imperfections and so we started creating a lot of work just bing out. And we quickly realized we could create our style really quickly which is kind of like a representation of us as people like we just make for the sake of making we don't overthink we just get enthus we just we instantly want to start creating and in a sense you could call us playful problem solvers because we had the thing the the the daunting 3D but we found like a more fun approach to yeah kind of a work around and that's kind of been like the red line throughout the the young career because we also use this approach for a lot of other ways when we run into yeah sticky technical difficulties so a good example of this is our first ever job we did for its nice coincidence yeah there you are the lovely team over here asks us to do the 2021 Next Generation campaign which was a lovely little 3D animation we wanted to make so we started by basically creating this like plasticine normore garden and our idea that was something was going to fall into the garden and disrupt the piece of the garden like the Next Generation disrupts the creative scene right.

5:24 So we had this lovely Garden but we had our first problem which was we weren't the best at animation.

5:31 This is about as much as we could do at the time sorry it's nice so we needed something that could kind of create a dynamic element within our work something that can distract from our pretty shitty animation.

5:46 So we looked around and we didn't have to look too far because that same VR headset that we use every day to sculpt we actually figured out that we could attach a virtual camera onto that controll and create a handicam so great we have a bit of dynamic Movement we don't have to do too much animation.

6:04 But the second problem came around really quick because we made all these characters and we really needed them to like have some sort of emotion like maybe speak even but we realized that we actually sculpted them except for our shovel all with their mouths closed so they can't speak and instead of trying to rip the mouths open we decided that we' just Embrace this. And we'd just make them hurt and moan and it goes something like this apologies for nightmares ♪

6:58 tonight [Applause]

7:03 it's so silly I'm super glad we got away with that. Actually. That's perfect but what if like these characters does need to to speak it comes Nike with their Nike move challenge and essentially the es was like we have all these Proms and there's going to be this video all these kids are going to be dancing to them so you have like an ice cream a pigeon G's crater that came up with some great stuff and can you make some cool animations like yeah super fun but one of them was an octopus and as we all know.

7:32 That's kind of like animations animator's worst nightmare because they have eight legs you know. And we actually tried to sculpt it with six but we didn't get away with it on top of that.

7:41 There were also it would be cool if you could speak and we're like this is going to be really hardcore but really fun like let's try let's let's tackle this. And we instantly thought about our phones because you can do these mimojis these days and just TR your face it's super expressive and we thought but that would be super handy for us can we not use this to apply to our own characters and it turns out you can so this is me on the left side being super expressive controlling our 3D characters on the other side and what's really great about.

8:08 This is that it allows us to make really complex animations like really really quickly and most importantly it's way more fun right because I'm just puppeteering in a sense so here he is chitchatting away we were like super happy with it this what it looked like in the end you might notice there's no sound because they actually removed his voice in the end but it didn't matter because we were super happy because we figured out something new we really like this puppeteering right it's really fun so can we not explore it more and then we thought about our old connect I don't know if people still remember the connect but it was like kind of a filled piece of hardware for Microsoft Microsoft for their XBox in fact this is the first time they announced it which is like one of my favorite YouTube clips of all time as you can see when I start making movements to my avatar it instantly mimics me on screen you ever wonder what the bottom of an avatar shoe looks like what bam there it is yeah.

9:08 So we bang like we were like that's so cool we have to use this. And we used it for my old bus Lisa anabis from studio dumbar yeah and it's super accurate and it's perfect and I can't even tell which one is the real Lisa anymore of course no we want to do this right we want to we want to crawl on the floor and I want fi to scream at me like be more like a like a goblin or you know something like that it would be way more fun and so we thought is that not possible for us.

9:38 And it turns out. There is so this is me in a in a very tight suit H it's it's a r Coco suit and what's really really great about this type of technology is that it's becoming more widely available for like smaller Studios like me and FY like AI is also going to be taking this over at some point what's even better about is that I can can hold a banana and act like I'm a night at the studio during normal working hours or I could even become a little flower if I really wanted to so it's this is a daily yeah daily occurrence for us yeah silly stuff so what we realized about all of these processes is that even though we're using high-tech it's actually pretty analog we're using our hands for V our sculpting or our bodies for puppeteering and this is something that we've wanted to explore further this kind of relationship between analog and digital and we decided to make some of our own tools to kind of like revisit this kind of analog so we started off by creating a poster for an event in Berlin we created some pretty fun like little logos that you know you you understand you this kind of thing they wrap it around the character and then we thought why not why don't we go back to like crayon and pen and try and like wrap the whole sculpture in crayon unpan so this is Neil's making some little crayon Doodles and we scan those in in and we devised a tool that essentially allows us to wrap those squiggles across kind of a sculpture and what you get is this kind of mix up between a weird like analog kind of drawn thing.

11:09 And then analog via sculpting but also digital so kind of strange stuff and then we thought about stop motion I mean that's kind of like the next step right like analog animation can we recreate some of this using our virtual techniques or digital techniques and so we got to work. And it was lot of work because we had to sculpt every single frame of motion.

11:32 This is a puff of smoke that we sculpted and then we devised our own tool to cycle through that motion.

11:40 Basically allowing it to like change frame per second we could do all sorts of stuff with it and what's really nice about that is that we could blend it with our more traditional 3D animation and create a kind of again weird thing between analog and kind of you know normal 3D it's like very strange it's very fun but we're excited excited about these things yeah. So so in essence at Young we're constantly trying to develop ourselves we're always trying out new things we never sit still like we're always trying to evolve in a sense and recently we thought how can we represent that in an identity we don't really have like a we have a bit of logo but I mean we don't we're not so attached to it so let's see if we can explore that and have that represent us who we are as a studio then you start making a logo and then you're like am I still going to like this in like a year from now is it still going to be able to is it still me in a in like in a year no and then you're like I will give this like maybe six months or something this one I absolutely hate I don't even know why like we have all these we made all these logos and then we figured like but it doesn't matter like we should is there not a way that we can make all these logos become one and create some kind of system that allows us to add new ones in there every time you think like this is us.

12:53 Now we're we're at this this point in our life you know. And then.

12:59 So we started developing our own tool once again and we started sculpting all these logos at first all these steps in between to kind of use the same stop motion technique that fi just talked about and make one logo of all.

13:09 And then you get something that looks like this. And it's kind of more representative it's still very much a working process it's just like we thought it would be fun to show these types of things.

13:20 But yeah it's very exciting for us then we were also like logo is not just an identity we need like a tie face all the cool brands have that as well.

13:29 And we made like this this type and then we were like well again how are we going to make it like just as varable you know as we are as young so we like okay let's do this make a 3D variable type face tool again because we like to make things very difficult for ourselves so this tool basically allows us to edit every single letter according to our needs so we can just yeah you can see the you can squeeze it make it a bit thicker and you can also so animate between all these different states essentially creating like an everchanging di phase and then we thought okay we have the logo we have the type face in process and we make characters right. So why not make a variable mascar so is it a plane is it a bell pepper is it a dog who knows it could be anything which is what we're really excited about.

14:22 So the reason we're showing you all of this silly stuff all of the kind of work in progress we're calling ourselves play for problem solvers is because we really truly believe that is the essence of Y we have a lot of fun as you can tell but we come up with playful solutions for all of our problems to make all of our wildest and weirdest ideas come true thank you so [Applause]