Google Spotlight Stories is a new narrative format for presenting short films on mobile devices where the viewer gets to control where the camera looks in a 360 degree environment. Toonzone News was able to catch up with several creators with Google Spotlight Stories: Jan Pinkava, the director of “Windy Day” and creative director of Google Spotlight Stories; longtime Disney supervising animator and “Duet” director Glen Keane; “Duet” production designer Max Keane; and Google Spotlight Stories creative director and composer Scot Stafford.
GLEN KEANE: Jan is the guy that really corralled our team together.
JAN PINKAVA: We were lucky to be in the right place at the right time to start this thing back in the day.
TOONZONE NEWS: When was this?
JAN PINKAVA: Maybe three years ago now.
SCOT STAFFORD: When did they first approach you?
JAN PINKAVA: Right at the end of 2012. Maybe October 2012.
SCOT STAFFORD: That was only a few months…because I met you in December.
JAN PINKAVA: We were invited under the wing of Regina Dugan of ATAP, the Advanced Technology and Projects Group because of all this wonderful tech that’s in the phones now. Wonderful powerful stuff, the hardware. The idea was these machines now can push pixels on the screen amazingly fast and do stuff that’s as good as or about to be better than most generations of game consoles, so why don’t we do something with that technology that’s emotional? Not about texting and all that stuff and is actually about entertainment. That’s about touching audiences.
Q: When people think Google, they think anything other than entertainment. Has there been problems integrating or getting support or resources for this?
JAN PINKAVA: If anything, we’ve had problems with too many people wanting to work with us within Google. Everyone’s very excited about what we’re doing because it’s about using the mobile technology in a new way. I don’t know if you know where the focus of where Google is going, but it’s in mobile. The world is going mobile: everyone is doing everything they’re doing with the little machines in their pocket. That’s why it’s getting bigger. We need more space to do that stuff.
TZN: You talked about engaging people on an emotional level, how does an interactive environment play to that?
JAN PINKAVA: We wanted to figure out something that was unique to mobile devices. Why would you watch a movie or something on a phone? Those of us from the film industry who have seen people watching first run pictures on phones cringe a little bit because all that work that went into making a theatrical experience is being seen on this tiny, tiny phone. “What really fits in a phone?” is what we were asking ourselves. Why watch a show on a phone at all? Not just because it’s convenient, but because it fits, there’s a reason for it to be there. What came out is to make a movie that gives this camera to the audience. It’s this window to the world around you and it immediately took us into this immersion. There’s a story world all around you, and you’re watching what’s happening. The main thing was, we said how can we watch a story, a traditional story with a beginning, a middle, and end in that immersive environment. That was the interesting thing to figure out. A great storyteller like Glen coming into this and seeing what he could do in that space was fascinating to be a part of because that’s really bringing a wealth of storytelling experience and tradition and trying to figure out how it best plays when you’re inside the story.
Q: What’s been the reaction from the public?
GLEN KEANE: Now that it’s on all Androids, it’s opened up. The reaction is a very personal one because people find investment in the fact that they control the camera, which is what Jan continually encouraged us towards. I thought he was insane at the beginning. Because of his background knowing technology and also as a storyteller, he created an environment — a sandbox to play in — but he played in it first with Windy Day, which was really important. He and Scot had created a really fun way of telling a story, and then Max and I came in, and we had a story that was much more controlled by what you drew.
JAN PINKAVA: What YOU drew.
GLEN KEANE: What I drew, yeah, and I felt that his rules don’t work in this world because if somebody chooses to turn away, they’re going to miss the composition and the story. In “Windy Day,” the world was going on all over the place. At first, I was really wanting to control that. The steering wheel. Jan was continually encouraging, “No, you have got to give the control to the audiences’ hands,” and the result of that has been that when people get to the end of it, they feel like they arrived there because they chose to. It’s a very different experience in watching a film in seeing it play out to the end. You know that you’re going to see that every time, but when you make those choices, there’s some kind of investment. It’s very personal.
SCOT STAFFORD: I think that people feel that they are seeing the movie at their pace. They are seeing the story unfold at their pace. They are hearing the music at their pace, which speaks to how personal it is.
TOONZONE NEWS: Glen, you were there at the beginning of the Disney Renaissance, how did your experience at the boom of one period of animation play into this new one?
GLEN KEANE: I’ve seen animation go through this cycle. When I started in animation, I was being told character animation is dead, you’re only going to have it happen on Saturday morning TV, don’t even bother learning that form of animation. But then there was this renaissance and it was being reborn to this whole new experience in musicals. And then CG came in and it felt like the hand drawn was done, yet that was something that I really loved. I loved to draw and communicate through drawing. My son Max, who was our production designer, is from the new generation and I’m from the old generation, so when we stepped up there to Google and took a look at this technology, the challenge was, “How can we take something that feels very traditional in terms of drawing and bring it into this new technology?” Maybe you want to talk about our first time up there scanning in the drawings.
MAX KEANE: Jan was coming up and Glen was working on this idea, and all he had was just some animation that he was working on. I was taking his drawings and I was scanning them into the computer. I scanned them in at a really high resolution, and when I brought it in and looked at it, the normal pencil line, which was thin, was now taking up the whole screen. This is really refreshing to see all these subtleties and variations in this line tone that is lost when you do something digitally. It becomes, usually, solid black pixelated line. We realized how important that literally handmade quality is to Glen’s drawing, so we tried to play around with it and give it the impression like it’s illuminating itself. It’s like a glowing line, but it still retains that graphic, dusty quality to it. I guess in terms of bringing the two worlds together, the phone is really pushing technology, but we don’t want to forget the tradition and the importance of the craft.
JAN PINKAVA: The demands of that craft, the quality of the line that you’re talking about…we were very keen to preserve that and make sure the technology was up to it to try and bring that level of detail and resolution of quality to this little phone screen. That’s quite a lot of work, and Rachid’s team, which is behind all this, really made that possible. You’re in the world of image processing and compression and decompression, creating techniques to preserve the quality of that line. You should also be aware that Scot Stafford is currently the world authority on the audio and music aspect of what we’re doing, which is quite extraordinary because visually, we’re dealing with the squishiness of the timing. To do that musically is astonishing.
Q: We talked briefly about the confines of the phone screen aren’t as limiting as they may seem.
SCOT STAFFORD: Something that Glen said was that it’s the moment you realize that it wasn’t the smallest screen you ever worked on, it was actually the biggest.
Q: How did that apply to the music and choosing music that would fit?
SCOT STAFFORD: The audio equivalent of the screen is the audio capacity of a phone. The problem we learned on episode one is that people weren’t putting on headphones, so they were hearing the results of a very tinny 1/6th inch speaker. They would literally miss out on entire orchestral sections that weren’t audible. So I saw it as my challenge to reward people who did put on headphones. It would be tempting to say, “They’re not going to hear anything, I can just write something that almost doesn’t matter,” but no, for that person who decided to commit and immerse themselves in that story, let’s give them something really special.
Because of Jan, I would add that if somebody decides not to follow the main story, but to look around, let’s not penalize them for that. Let’s not make it seem like there’s this loop of music that’s just endlessly repeating, waiting for you to finally make the right decision to follow the story, let’s actually reward that. Let’s have entire pieces of music that you won’t hear unless you look around. Let’s have entire pieces of music where if you looked up during “Duet” you are rewarded with sort of a music box lullaby that a lot of people would miss. It’s about rewarding people for not doing what you want them to do. Usually, the way you use loops in music is you start with a very small unit that keeps repeating. The idea that I have to credit Jan with is to create long sections of music that only expose themselves for however long you happen to be at that certain point in the story.
The next roundtable was with technical project lead Rachid El Guerrab; Best Animated Short Oscar winner and “Pearl” director Patrick Osborne; and “Rain or Shine” director Felix Massie.
Q: Spotlight Stories had to create new ways of scanning in hand drawn artwork to retain the textures of Glen’s artwork.
RACHID EL GUERRAB: Right. It’s not actually scanning but mostly the compression. If you take any image format or video format, a lot of that detail goes away, and that was a big challenge for us. We wanted to feel like the size of the screen that you’re looking at, HD resolution, would look like Glenn is drawing at that resolution. That was our main test. Does it look exactly if he draws one page, is it one to one? Especially because it’s graphite, it’s got lots of details and whatnot which doesn’t compress well. It was a lot of work to get done. Besides the fact that his drawings are actually bigger than one screen. They have to fit if you’re looking around, so it’s higher resolution. More drawings than just one page have to be compressed, look good, and still stream and play well as you’re watching the show, which is nonlinear.
Q: Was there any new tech you guys created to manage this?
RACHID EL GUERRAB: Yes. It was back to the drawing board on how do you compress something like this, although actually we used mostly non-image techniques to do this.
Q: Such as?
RACHID EL GUERRAB: A lot of it was back to Huffman encoding. A different way of figuring out the compression tree. More or less as if you’re dealing with bits that you want to conserve instead of gradients. All the block compression algorithms are based on approximating a little bit here, a little bit there, so what we did was create a hierarchy of compression techniques, we call it. These are hand drawn things, so a lot of the stuff outside is black. Per frame, we just gathered where are the interesting parts that move, and we compress them almost lossless. We did a pass where we can take out some of the noise and almost lossless afterwards. Then we accelerated the show and everything for the mobile phones and that was it. As I said, the interesting bit was you can compress really well, but then you hurt streaming because none of these things are in memory at one time, so you have to be able to load and decompress as you go. The old tech with bit compressions were actually a lot easier to decompress than any image compressing pushed all the way.
Q: Was this your first time working in a non-pre-rendered setting?
PATRICK OSBORNE: I had an internship at EA 14 years ago on Tiger Woods Golf, so this is the second time. There is something different about it. Both of us are animators, and both of us are 3D-ish, so I think there are things you get spoiled with when you can just fix it in comp really easily that you’re not able to do when it’s a real-time thing. But the fun of it is trying to find the visual equivalent of that. Something that feels the same and maybe doesn’t look exactly the same, but feels right. It still runs and looks beautiful and not like a game. We don’t want to give game cues that make you feel like you’re going to be pressing buttons and that this is going to be interactive. There is a little bit of a shift in thinking, but it’s exciting. I’ve always thought the techniques that I like doing in 3D animation would run pretty nice real-time. I’m not into full on detailed realistic worlds, I like the impressionistic side of 3D, so “Paperman” and “Feast” were like that. I want this to look that way too.
FELIX MASSIE: First time for me as well. I haven’t actually done a CG thing before, I’ve always done 2D. I’d say the biggest thing to overcome is that you can’t have cuts. You can have some tricks to move people from A to B, but you actually have to follow them around and draw someone around to do it. When we first started, we were like filling every single bit of the square. The more you think about it, the more you realize that you have to have less of it to draw someone around, because then you can have quite conventional filmic things to pull someone aboard. Like I’ve got a pigeon on a bench and it flies forward and that draws you into somewhere. You follow things. It doesn’t feel as instantaneous as a game. It’s not like chaos or anything. It feels quite elegant in the way that you can draw it all together. It’s nice.
PATRICK OSBORNE: You do get used to, “I can fix that with a composite trick I know.” Also mine is written to a song, and you can’t really play with the timing of the choruses and verses too much. They sound weird if you start to stretch and pull on the lyrics of something, so that’s an interesting challenge. We just started it. It’s in the finished writing pre-vis layout stage of getting ready to animate, so there’s a lot to learn in those 3D processes too, I think, because it’s just not there yet.
Q: What do you think about the limitations of the screen and that it’s an unlimited limitation? How do you adapt to that limitation?
PATRICK OSBORNE: Things from film that you know help framing devices. Using compositional elements to actually frame the shots because you don’t have a film frame is a technique that still works. That’s an old technique.
FELIX MASSIE: To do it automatically like it’s quite suggestible. If there’s a tree on one side and another tree on the other, we’ll look in the middle of the trees.
PATRICK OSBORNE: There’s a little bit of that. The window does move and you can’t be too precious about that, particularly framing. I’m trying to use other parts of the scene to make sure that composition still works somehow. It’s a challenge, and it’s tough to direct it. It’s tough for the art directors and production designers to get used to that. They’re used to “this is my page, and I’m drawing in this frame.” Well, it’s all over now. No one’s invented an amazing virtual reality world. That would be kind of cool.
RACHID EL GUERRAB: I know in “Duet,” for example, the frame is small because you may think the characters are going all around you, but they’re actually just right off the frame. The moment we have the, let’s call it the “lost moment.” People will go, okay, there’s a boy and a girl and they meet and okay, I’m going to follow the boy…wait, what happened to the girl? So they would go follow her. But if you let them go at their normal speed, the girl would already be over way over somewhere else, so we would always keep them right off the frame. It makes sense to people who play with space continuously. Nobody ever notices. It’s nice to be able to still know that you have a fixed frame.
Q: How much easier or harder is making a Spotlight Story as opposed to a more traditional film?
PATRICK OSBORNE: It could be a lot harder, but luckily, the team was pretty flexible. It’s very hard to write and storyboard for me because I’m used to the traditional story and edit tools. Final Cut and Photoshop aren’t really conducive to this because they have a frame. So you’re storyboarding within a frame already, and you have to just say, “Trust me, it’s going to work on the outside of this if you don’t look at what this is.” Luckily Jan and Rachid have been working with us enough to get that that is a thing, and to go with you and let you do a little bit of that “trust me” thing. If you didn’t have that and if you had to prove everything constantly, it would take forever. That would make it pretty challenging. As far as the actual production itself, it’s not that different from 3D. With 3D, you build the world, you build the characters, you animate them. It’s like that but it’s a little bit of a bigger stage. The actual production is not too dissimilar than 3D animation.
FELIX MASSIE: There’s a funny bit in Team America World Police a character would walk over and pick up a cup and drink it, and the people who were doing the puppets were like, “Whoa, you can’t pick things up like that.” It’s a bit like that. Sometimes you’ll have something happen in the film where something happens elsewhere and the characters are like “whoa” reacting to it. You can’t have that because you need the viewer to look somewhere, then the event happens, and then they look back, or have a reason that the event happens out of shot. Stuff like that is a weird thing to get your head around sometimes, but actually, it’s quite a nice challenge because you can’t take anything for granted. You have to be, “this is how this happens,” and then hopefully that means the end product is something that feels really tight and is a nice flowing movement where you feel naturally drawn to other areas of the film.
RACHID EL GUERRAB: There’s a thing that Jan says a lot about. There’s a piece of “Windy Day” where it would’ve been like 3, 4 seconds, which was like a chase sequence in the short film. So cut there to this, this, this and that. That took a couple months at least for actually working because to get somebody to follow a chase sequence and not lose it and still be interested all the way around is a big project. You have to plan all your cuts and change sets while you’re not looking and all sorts of weirdness you could’ve done with cuts.
TZN: Patrick, you played with perspective in “Feast.” Did that help you with this at all?
PATRICK OSBORNE: Yeah, I think a lot of storytelling really comes out in the point of view, and really strong films are grounded in a point of view not only literally in a first person camera, but in an opinion. They come from the perspective of a particular character and “Feast” was a lot of that, trying to set it in the world of the dog. For me, the point of view of the character changes meaning a little bit when you have the audience involved, but “Pearl” is the point of view of an automobile, essentially. Seeing the life of its owners and the people living in the car, but I think learning to focus on that and how that pulls an audience in and what that lets you do to add meaning to the story is super important, and that’s the one thing I kind of want to always try to do.
I feel movies get a little lost when they scatter that point of view. It works in TV when you can tell stories episodically, but I think in a film, especially a short, you need to be with one character and really understand them and be with them the whole time. It’s always a challenge. It’s fascinating to me. That’s the fun. The fun of discovering a story is realizing it’s sort of working but not for this reason and then saying, “If I really cemented it in this character, now it’s going to work.” And you lose this other stuff. I had to do a Pulp Fiction thing where the story can happen in any order depending on where you look, and when you really set it in the point of view of the character, that starts to fight that. There’s stuff there that can worry about that.
The final roundtable session was with Google Spotlight Stories executive producer Karen Dufilho-Rosen; Emmy Award Winning artist and director of “On Ice” Shannon Tindle; and Pixar veteran and “On Ice” art director Lou Romano.
TOONZONE NEWS: Lou, how did learning from Pixar’s school of animation help you on this project?
LOU ROMANO: This was a lot more streamlined in terms of the process. The process was the same, but because we were so small, things happened much faster. When you’re working on a big feature, a lot of creative decisions get taken much longer, but with this, Shannon designed the characters, got them modeled pretty quickly, and got to get into an environment pretty early. Just seeing our 2D artwork in the space was helpful, because we realized this ice rink is too small, so we doubled it in size to make it similar except when it came to shading and lighting. With this, the shading, surfacing, and lighting, there were a lot more cheats than you would have at Pixar, where they’re actually using real or CGI virtual lights to light up scenes. There was more cheating going on to get certain effects we wanted.
SHANNON TINDLE: We’re using a mixture. We have CG for the characters, but we have hand drawn effects in some of the shots. Some of Lou’s paintings, we have a dry ice effect. It’s just Lou’s painting. But to build on the streamlined comment, the creative buck stopped with me, so when I designed the characters, it was exactly this. I finished designing the characters, I looked up at my producer and looked at Lou, and I said, “So I think our guys want to approve it,” and it gets done. And they’re like, “Cool, let’s send it to modeling.” And it gets modeled. It wasn’t layered.
LOU ROMANO: There weren’t so many steps to have to get through to get something approved. That’s the other thing on a Pixar film, in my experience: everything that they’ll do is generated by what they can write in house and what they can generate on the computer. With this, like Shannon said, it’s 2D fire effects and fireworks and CG characters. It’s like cheats for things like atmosphere that are really expensive to render in virtual space.
SHANNON TINDLE: And they don’t like rendering it on a phone’s GPU in real time. It doesn’t look like what you want it to look like.
Q: Is this the first Spotlight Stories you’re making?
SHANNON TINDLE: It’s the first one we’ve worked on together.
Q: What’s been the process in terms of what you learned about making these? They’re not quite standard movies, but they’re not quite standard animation.
KAREN DUFILHO-ROSEN: I’m executive producer of the group, so this is my fifth one. I think each director approaches things a little differently. Comes at it with their own point of view. Their own history, be it Pixar or wherever, and that’s the whole point of what we want to do. It’s important who we extend this early days invitation to because it needs to be people who can execute their point of view. That’s why we’re really excited to work with Shannon because he has one, and we knew that he could do it. So I don’t know how to answer that question you asked.
Q: I was thinking more specifics, but in overall, that’s what I meant.
KAREN DUFILHO-ROSEN: Just to get into the boring part, we’ve made a few of these. We felt like we found some new, interesting filmmaking territory in that it’s immersive, it’s 360, it’s somewhere on the spectrum of VR, but you don’t have to have goggles on. All you need is a phone and wi-fi. So we can access a lot of people, but we can’t just make them one offs. We need to scale. So we developed some tools, shot them over the fence at filmmakers who knew what they’re doing and said, “Go for it, we will not get in the way of what you’re doing creatively at all. You are constrained a bit by these tools.” So what Shannon heard was, “Go for it.”
SHANNON TINDLE: I did hear that. We can get fully rigged characters on this with facial animation. I was like yeah, awesome, great. I want a bunch of them. I put helmets on a bunch of characters.
KAREN DUFILHO-ROSEN: You did us a solid by doing that.
SHANNON TINDLE: So I just needed what I needed. I pitched a big show and I think that what I saw in my head the day that I pitched it for approval would be the proof of concept. In my head, it was always that big. I think to everybody else, they’re like wait a second, really, you want explosions happening here and then you want 20 characters in choreographed movement. I said yeah, Ice Capades show. I thought the implication was a lot of characters.
KAREN DUFILHO-ROSEN: In a way it’s like, it’s your show, if you think you can do that, knock yourself out.
SHANNON TINDLE: I’d say how about this? Actually, you start making it. You just jump into it.
KAREN DUFILHO-ROSEN: We respond to that.
SHANNON TINDLE: The thing that I’ve said constantly, I said it to the team at both ATAP and Evil Eye, nobody ever said no. It was so refreshing when people just go, we love that idea, let’s figure out how to do it. Tom, the producer on the short, said you never hear problems with these guys. They just come with solutions, so they would say, this is a challenging thing, but we have three or four different ideas to solve it. We set a target where I said, “Hey Lou, let’s create a piece of artwork, and that will be the target to hand everybody,” so they can just have it, and I can always point back to that. So we did a three character set up. I drew up the characters, Lou painted the whole thing with effects, lighting, and everything in it, and I would just continue to point back to that whether we were writing a shader or lighting it or animating it. “Like that, make it like that.” It was like Rudy and the Bear, the stage and the background with the guitar player on it.
KAREN DUFILHO-ROSEN: The “we” they are referring to isn’t necessarily Google, but it was the production company they worked with, Evil Eye Pictures. They put a small team together there, and then they just went for it. That’s the way that we, Google, need to scale. It’s by these partnerships with directors and production companies, and in this instance, we did a little bit of matchmaking. You went to Nexus and we met Felix there, and Aardman was a unique situation also. I feel like we’re building this expertise out there in the world so we have these ambassadors who now understand the tools, but also the conceptual thinking when you’re building a show in 360 that’s immersive on mobile.
LOU ROMANO: And “On Ice” was the first.
KAREN DUFILHO-ROSEN: That’s right, it was our guinea pig project, and you learn a lot of things practically along with that.
TOONZONE NEWS: Did you intentionally pick directors from all different areas of expertise? Did you look for a 2D guy, a 3D guy, etc?
KAREN DUFILHO-ROSEN: Well we knew the tool kit is for people who understand graphics and filmmaking and CG. You need to have a baseline understanding of that and understanding of animation as well. That narrowed it. That’s kind of the world that Jan and I are from anyway, so we knew who we specifically wanted to go out to talk to, but again, it needs to be storytellers and filmmakers because our goal is a narrative format. Linear storytelling. I think that’s what’ll set it apart from other VR endeavors that are out there on other platforms.
Q: Where do you envision this five years from now? Is there going to be Spotlight Stories Awards?
KAREN DUFILHO-ROSEN: It’s really hard to see five years.
SHANNON TINDLE: Glenn Keane’s “Duet,” the flat version of his film, made the short list for the Oscars last year. But a lot of people saw the intended version, the virtual version of it, and that’s what’ll keep people asking me, “Is it an app?” It’s an app that plays a film. It’s a story that happens around you. So I don’t see it any differently. I just have to think about what happens beyond the screen, so I’m telling the story. We did thumbnail boards. I got into pre-vis pretty quickly so that I can get it on devices. We hear people say all the time “on device, on device, on device,” so if it doesn’t play here, it doesn’t matter. Get it on device, man!
KAREN DUFILHO-ROSEN: The airplane view for me on the horizon if I squint into it is that it’s all about the format. Jan talked a lot about that, about really pushing at that. What does that look like? TBD. We’ve made these baby steps, right? It’s somewhere between that interactive narrative and linear storytelling. I think that’s the tip of it, and underneath that is what will artists and filmmakers bring to that. We all have sneaky goal that when you are watching something, as we all do on our mobile devices now, you have the urge to move around and see what else is in the story. Because when I watch a movie trailer that’s just flat, I want to look left and right now. It makes me crazy that I can’t look left and right, so that’s our sneaky goal.
SHANNON TINDLE: I still use a pen and pencil in my sketch book, but going from traditional animation to this. I’d draw on a Cintiq and then I’d wipe off erasures that weren’t there. You do it now when you watch these things so many times.
KAREN DUFILHO-ROSEN: You so know there’s something off stage.
SHANNON TINDLE: It’s exciting. It made me want to tell bigger stories in it.
KAREN DUFILHO-ROSEN: Episodic stuff?
SHANNON TINDLE: Yes, I’ve pitched that idea. I want to do it so bad. Because you can handle different genres like horror, for example. If you feel that there might be something behind you, you can actually look around to see if something’s behind you. You can build a different tension that way. It’s really interesting to me as a filmmaker. The word “film” is antiquated already, most people don’t even shoot on film anymore, but it’s a word that means something. And I think, it doesn’t matter, I watch a film, I want you to see this beginning, middle, and end.
KAREN DUFILHO-ROSEN: I think genre is another thing. You’re dead on with that. What is really some other broad comedy look like? Something experiential. Those are all goals. Not five year goals, next year goals.
SHANNON TINDLE: What’s cool is it seems to be driven by artists who choose to do it. That’s what’s great about it.
KAREN DUFILHO-ROSEN: Who’ll respond to it. Like you did.
Q: Speaking of next year goals, iPhones?
KAREN DUFILHO-ROSEN: Absoultely. Queued up. Just TBD. Soon. And YouTube. Our player’s installed in YouTube, so that’ll be a major game changer. We’re still working it out, but it’s there already. It being there and then working is…
SHANNON TINDLE: The number one moneymaker on YouTube last year was a lady who reviews Disney toys. I want to do a Spotlight Story on what weirdness is happening off camera. What’s going on over there while she’s reviewing Disney toys and making 4 million dollars a year?
KAREN DUFILHO-ROSEN: I don’t understand that.
SHANNON TINDLE: They’re hungry for content.
KAREN DUFILHO-ROSEN: I think short content is so interesting right now. Because I have kids and they don’t distinguish short, long, this/that. It’s funny and good because they say so, so it’s such an exciting time for people who are curious and ready to go for it.
TOONZONE NEWS: What interested and influenced you when you first became animators?
SHANNON TINDLE: That’s a big question. I had so many different influences. I’ve always been a huge film fan, so David Lean is a big favorite of mine. Oliver Twist, Great Expectations, two kind of forgotten films of his I think are perfect films. I love traditional illustrations. J.C. Leyendecker, Heinrich Kley. Huge comic book fan, so John Buscema, Jack Kirby, Mike Mignola. I draw from everything. Music. So my short is heavily driven by music, so I kind of look for inspiration everywhere. When I got started, I was always a comic book fan, and I found out about CalArts. Lots of high quality stuff, I guess, is what I’m influenced by. People doing their best work.
LOU ROMANO: For me it was film, especially. Plenty of cartoons growing up, but it was really live action films that got me interested. I did a lot of musical theatre growing up, and that exposure got me interested in all the craft that goes into making a show, which is very similar to movie making and animation where you’ve got all these different disciplines going into making something. Later on, once I got to school, I started discovering things like UPA, which has been a big influence. And some of the Disney films from the 50’s. A lot of Ward Kimball work. Space films. Those are just some.
SHANNON TINDLE: People have been making CG feature films now for a little over 20 years, and I want to see more experimentation in CG than what I’ve actually seen. If you even look at mainstream stuff: 2D animation, mainstream, Disney, UPA — each of these studios was influencing the other, especially in the 50’s and 60’s. They were influenced by the contemporary work of their period and they were doing things driven by that. I would just like to see people play with that more.
LOU ROMANO: Yeah, it’s relatively young. When you think of how long 2D has been around and how much time there was to experiment and all the different periods of art that it grew along with in tandem, in a lot of ways they will always have the leg up just because they were around longer.
SHANNON TINDLE: Even Winsor McCay playing with character animation, you get into. Who’s the artist who developed the look for Toccata and Fugue in Fantasia?
LOU ROMANO: Oskar Fischinger.
SHANNON TINDLE: Yeah, Fischinger. You look at his work, and we’re talking the 1940’s.
LOU ROMANO: Late 30’s.
SHANNON TINDLE: And so he was already not much of a gap there, but playing with abstraction and that form. We see some of it, it’s just how you see more, it becomes cheaper to create CG films, you can see something become broader and more stylized. Because even what we’re doing is inspired by other animation and illustration. I’d like to try something that’s a little more, it’s one of the things I pitched, I wanted to have real time changes with focal length, so more live action stuff happening but with graphic images too. Let’s do that one next.
Q: Don’t ATAP projects have a timeline?
KAREN DUFILHO-ROSEN: They do. Two years, and we’re beyond that timeline.
SHANNON TINDLE: The articles that I’ve been reading. If it’s been going two years, a little bit more…
KAREN DUFILHO-ROSEN: I say if we make the rules, we break the rules.
Q: Has there ever been any discussion in Google that two and half years have passed?
KAREN DUFILHO-ROSEN: More like hey, interesting, this is working. We’re shipping stuff, we’re making stuff, so in this sort of skunkworks innovative kind of safe zone, talk about a bubble, it’s been great. The point is you probably have to do some kind of transition, but I think they really like us.
SHANNON TINDLE: We haven’t really talked about ATAP as a place. My first week or second week, Regina Dugan, who runs it is just amazing, and I sent her this kind of love letter about ATAP during my first two weeks there. We’re in a group, it’s all kind of open space, and right next to us…I can talk about it now because…Project Jacquard and Project Soli, we were seeing them make wearables that just look like actual clothes.
KAREN DUFILHO-ROSEN: Instead of calling them wearables, they call them clothes.
SHANNON TINDLE: Look at the I/O presentation for it. It’s like James Bond stuff happening over here. Then, I don’t even know what the project is, but we have a doctor and a Navy SEAL and you’re meeting all these people, and you’re working around people that you’d never interact with if you’re just kind of focused on a film and it was so inspiring to me. There’s a lot of really cool stuff in there, and it was just so cool for me to be exposed to that stuff, and then I wanted to go, like, hey, can I play over here a little bit and try this out? What’s the augmented reality project? The Tango Project.
KAREN DUFILHO-ROSEN: That’s an example of a project that graduated outside of ATAP.
SHANNON TINDLE: I can’t say enough things about ATAP just because it’s this insane group that there seems to be no limitation. They’re shooting after things that people are saying are 15-25 years off, and ahh, let’s try to do them now, and they mean it. Instead of me working with a group of folks like that and interact with them–this was at the ATAP Christmas party, and I asked one of the guys there what have you been working on. “Before ATAP I was writing algorithms to help stop the spread of ebola, what are you working on?” “I got this skater and this stupid bear…” Then what’s cool is he goes, “You’re doing the bear thing?!” Yeah! And they’re the best in the world at it. Oh that guy, he’s actually the best that does that.
KAREN DUFILHO-ROSEN: It’s amazing in all the groups it’s the same thing. You’re protected, but you’re also pushed. So you’re there to do your best work and then go. But you work against a clock, you work against all those forcing functions, and if you’re that curious and if you want to succeed, and then how amazing it is that Google provides that. Who does that? That’s what you need to really incubate something. So you feel like you have solid foundation underneath you. That’s a practical thing, that’s a financial thing, that’s a support thing. It’s all those, so it’s amazing.
The post SDCC2015: Interviews With The Team Behind Google Spotlight Stories appeared first on Toon Zone News.