The Taproot Podcast - The Psychology of Technology in Film Making with Andy Philpo

Episode Date: July 4, 2024

🎥🎬 In this captivating podcast, Joel and Andy Philpo dive deep into the world of cutting-edge filmmaking and concert technology! 🎉🎸 From virtual production and LED walls to AI-assisted creativity, they explore how these advancements are transforming the entertainment industry. 🌟💡 Andy shares his insights on the democratization of creative tools and the potential for indie projects to achieve stunning results. 🎨💻 They also discuss the importance of immersion in storytelling and how technology can enhance the audience's experience. 🎭🎫 Join them as they ponder the future of AR/VR concerts, escape rooms, and the ever-evolving landscape of interactive entertainment. 🎮🔍 Don't miss this engaging conversation on the intersection of art and technology! 🎨🔧 #FilmmakingTechnology #ConcertTech #VirtualProduction #LEDWalls #AICreativity #IndieFilmmaking #Immersion #Storytelling #AudienceExperience #ARVRConcerts #EscapeRooms #InteractiveEntertainment #ArtMeetsTech #EntertainmentIndustry #Podcast   Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.com/ Check out the youtube: https://youtube.com/@GetTherapyBirmingham Podcast Website: https://gettherapybirmingham.podbean.com/ Podcast Feed: https://feed.podbean.com/GetTherapyBirmingham/feed.xml Taproot Therapy Collective 2025 Shady Crest Drive | Hoover, Alabama 35216 Phone: [phone] Fax: [phone] Email: [e-mail]

How do I act so well? What I do is I pretend to be the person I'm portraying in the film or play. Yeah. You're confused. No. It's perfectly simple. Case in point, Lord of the Rings. Peter Jackson comes from New Zealand and says to me, Sir Ian, I want you to be Gandalf the wizard.

And I say to him, you are aware that I am not really a wizard. And he said, yes, I am aware of that. What I want you to do is to use your acting skills to portray the wizard for the duration of the film. So I said, okay. And then I said to myself, hmm, how would I do that? And this is what I did. I imagined what it would be like to be a wizard

and then I pretended and acted in that way on the day. And how did I know what to say? The words were written down for me in a script. How did I know where to stand? People told me. Alright.

This is the Taproot Therapy Collective podcast. I'm here with Andy Philpo, a big film guy and designer. We're going to talk about some new technology. But first, he's going to come on and apologize for the horrible accusations against him. And I don't want to get too much into that yet, but it is definitely the reason that Galaxy's Edge got shut down at Disney World. So I'll let you take it from there. Wow, thanks for that great intro, Joel. My bosses are going to be so glad that I agreed to come on the podcast now. Um, I, I remember, you know, Matthew, like our friend from college. And I remember, uh, like watching the, uh, what is it?

Jerry Seinfeld. Who's the actor that plays Kramer? What's like, what's that guy's name? Um, Michael Richards, Michael Richards. Yeah. Michael Richards was apologizing on Letterman via tele teleconference while Jerry Seinfeld was the guest and Jerry Seinfeld was just screaming at the crowd. Like, stop laughing. It's not funny. I mean, I've seen it happen a couple of times in my life but when

you're a stand-up comedian on a stage yelling at the audience stop laughing it's not funny like does something not go off in your brain being like oh this isn't this isn't working it's peak ironic comedy yeah unless you're eric andre like you're doing something wrong when you're yelling at the crowd to stop laughing i don't know so um we've talked a little bit about uh filmmaking before you know you're more kind of on the technical end of of stuff and um i was hoping that this would kind of turn into like a filmmaking uh series we had a couple guests uh chris rogers who um wrote halt and catch fire and paper girls and a couple shows that i like is going to come on we'll record that next week i don't know when it'll go out and i i don't want

to like say who they are because people definitely have the right to like not come on a show like this which is probably a waste of their time you know but um they sent a couple of different emails to people that are trying to see if we can make it work with scheduling and whatever of like little things. So I don't know, maybe we'll get a critical mass of some Hollywood people, but I thought it'd be fun to talk about the way that you're applying technology because it is so different.

And even though some of the things like you had talked a little bit about Disney's projects, but even though like what you're doing is like way more state-of-the-art i guess than even you know the blue screen 90s stuff it feels older world like it feels like the soundstage you know 70s type filmmaking that i like more than what we ever we've done for the past 15 years well the psychology of that i think is ripe for discussion and i'll turn that over to you yeah uh so yeah i no longer work at disney i've moved on to some other things but of course they're the big touchstone for like visual effects and production and things like that so now i do a

lot of like uh concert design live events things like that um but the the technology that you're talking about, the sort of what gets labeled in the industry is like, in camera VFX, right now is you're absolutely right. It's like a super old technology, because the oldest versions of it was like you hung up a big rear projection screen behind the like James Bond car. And then you rolled your like B roll of the California like countryside behind it and like that was how you got the effect of someone driving and so there's been a confluence of technologies in the last say 10 uh 10 years maybe uh that have made it possible to kind of like bring that sort of in-camera effect back to modern production paradigms

um and they are uh very specifically and it's and it's interesting because of the the relationship to the other like advancements in technology we've seen but uh the first one is um very like low uh pixel pitch led tile right so you can have lots of that like your tv is like super high res we can make that at like a wall-sized scale right like everyone's seen the documentary about the mandalorian with the big led wall i don't know that everyone has if you don't mind uh like telling us a little bit about what that technology looks like on a set because i think the hostility from film nerds a lot of people hear technology and they say, like, get that out of my movie.

Like, I don't want, you know, episode one of Star Wars. I want the original trilogy or whatever. And they think of people running around green screen where there's no reference point. And, you know, basically thousands of engineers making a movie instead of a filmmaker. But what we've gone back to is a little bit more like the old world,

old Hollywood. Yeah, so what that technology is, the touchstone that everyone thinks about with extended reality sets in camera VFX, these are the buzzwords that people use for it. But essentially what it is, it's a huge LED wall, like you would see at a concert. Does it curve? Is it like a dome, wall like you would see at like a concert curve like is it like a dome like an imax thing uh it it can be flat but the one specifically for mandalorian is a curved

uh led surface uh and then they do like a handful of tiles overhead to make like kind of a ceiling but those are those are typically just a flat plane that's kind of just capturing some of the sky effect um and then you're still getting the ambient lighting that changes the way that the camera you know light bounces off the actors and all that stuff that right and that's look like they're real yeah so and that's really the big difference right and that's the advantage over something like green screen, where, you know, you see somebody on a green screen set and you can tell almost immediately because the shadows on their faces. Everything looks gray. There's that under contrasted like.

And typically, if you look very closely, you can see the little hint of the green like back reflectance on whatever side is facing the uh the chroma uh backdrop behind them whereas with the led wall your light is the reflectance of whatever the environment is which is much closer to real life and that's something that like you've talked about in especially in the like healing the modern soul uh the way that intuition kind of picks up whether or not something feels real based on those like micro perceptions uh we basically before we think about it we already know if it we like it or not or if it's real or not exactly and it's like there's there's like subtle things that like you don't look for unless you know to look for them but as a designer like that's your whole world is like trying to pick up on those things before the audience does and correcting for them but as a designer like that's your whole world is like trying to pick up on

those things before the audience does and correcting for them so that that technology of the led wall being able to create this environment and then the corollary one is the advances in real-time graphics the ability to create photo reel or a near photo reel real-time environments that you can generate on the fly that are tracking things like the camera movement in the physical world correlated to a camera in the virtual environment so that as you pan the camera across the performer the camera and the led wall is also moving and moving your scenery with it um and you can do those kinds of things in real time in a way that feels much closer to how it would look if you were shooting

on location somewhere as opposed to the green screen where it's like someone's got to place trackers and like physically move in post-production we're now capturing all of that in the camera as the shot is being done um and it's just such a huge jump in the the speed at which you can create those things and also the fidelity at which you're able to to create them well and there's almost like in the in the prequel trilogy that a lot of people didn't like there's almost the exact same scene at one point um in the sequel trilogy that I think people definitely liked the technique the way it looked at least you know more but there's like like Obi-Wan is in the bubble cockpit of a ship and there has to be like a laser blast goes by and then he has to

react to it but the way that they're making it in the prequel trilogy, which doesn't really work or something feels wrong is that the script has to say reacts to laser blast. So, you know, Elon McGregor has to go, Oh, and look up. And then an animator has to go back in at about the same time that he looks

up and make this blast. But there was no real connection between those things. Right. And when Oscar Isaac's in the X-Wing cockpit, you know, and the other one, he's sitting there on a screen with you know and the other one he's it's sitting there on a screen with the sound and the light in real time so you see him notice the laser blast go by

hit something explosion look up in a way that is not a manufactured surprise or you know there's an actual connection between the parts of the film which i i think is like what people criticize about um technology of like the early 2000s and you know 2010s was that there was this disconnect where things were being made you know weeks and months apart and and synthesized together in a way that didn't really work and yeah and it feels disjointed because the the performers don't know exactly what it is that they're reacting to um and the creators you know the technical artists that are putting that in and post are having to like work with this like pre-canned sort of reaction whereas

you can kind of like you know work with those things in real time uh in more of a modern virtual production environment another like great example of like things that you can do now that you couldn't do in that era is actually the Mandalorian armor that he wears. It's all that bright, super reflective foam. It'd be reflecting green screen. Yeah, you can only get away with that in the Mandalorian LED wall environment, but it's such a cool effect to be able to achieve and without having to go on location or like build an elaborate set because that's one of the things that was really impressive for that show was also the the budget on which they were able to achieve all of that

yeah would have been 10 or you know 20 times as expensive 10 years ago well and when you can do anything when you're trying to run through a giant set and have a JJ Abrams style, 20 minute introduction where they're dodging a hole in the ship while they're explaining how the world works. I mean, there's something about that that is compelling, but I kind of like how the writing for the set has forced writing to go back to almost like plays,

you know, you're having Yoda talk to Luke in the swamp for a long time, whereas there's no scene like that in the swamp for a long time whereas there's no scene like that in the prequel trilogy it's always just a huge whirlwind of a million things and yeah it's it you know you're it's uh to to dust off my theater history for a second it's a little bit like the uh the difference between the desire for like unity of place versus uh the like sweeping versus the sweeping opera set design where you'd have backdrop after backdrop that they would just

fly in of these really elaborately painted, massive scenic pieces versus having an entire play basically that takes place in one location over one contiguous span of time. And those are just different philosophies uh that have have fallen in and out of fashion over the years but it's like we're in another cycle of that right now as we as the technology available drives some of the creative of the the story that you want to tell and how you want to tell it and and i i don't like to say it that way, right? Like the tech should never be the tail

wagging the dog of the story. But sometimes in exploration, you find opportunities to tell a better story with the tools that you have available to you. Well, and that's my question. It's like a lot of people, if you say that you're in tech and theater, you know, movies, they hear technology and they think

of sam altman saying well we're not even going to have actors anymore we're just you know going to have generated video through generative ai you know or they think of the the endless blue screen you know they think of the the like you know just unending litany of effects in the Hobbit movie where there's like no soul, but it just goes on and on. And they think, okay, tech is bad, which I mean, technology, I think in movies is inevitable. It's how's, how's it used? Um, I mean, can you speak to that or what do you, somebody has a negative reaction to. So I'm always very, I probably have one of the more neutral opinions on like AI and its current incarnation relative to a lot of people out there. And so far as like my experience with it has been that it's another tool in the toolkit for a lot of like creatives to use if they want to uh especially as it is right now because it's not perfect and it doesn't in my opinion and and maybe never will uh be able to create stylistically the

same way that a human does you know because it is all sort of like trained on what we do and it's trained on the past yeah yeah so it'll never be able to intuit the future, at least in this current incarnation, right? Like there's a world 10, 20 years from now where maybe it does that. And I can't possibly know. But right now, I think something that it's interesting with, and this is actually something I'm interested to hear your take on is that like, because it's trained on the past,

because it's trained on this sort of like imprint of so much raw data that has been input by humanity since the trained on the past, because it's trained on this sort of like imprint of so much raw data that has been input by humanity since the dawn of the internet. It's like, does it kind of allow us to tap into our collective unconscious to, to borrow a term from Jung and, and show us things that maybe we wouldn't have arrived at, you know, from our own sort of iteration and development of an idea, right. I can go type in something I've thought about to a program like mid journey

or, or chat GBT and say, draw me a picture of what this might look like. And it might give me a dozen results that I never would have considered other than like asking the, you know, the AI to like sling some things at me. If my tunnel vision of my perception was only going down this one specific path. Now I've got an array of other ideas that I can at least consider and react to as a designer and say, does this speak to my vision?

Or is this totally off base? And either of those responses is very useful for the like creative process why i think that's it i mean i think that like its ability to create something like a pinterest board or to give you eight designs for a set and then let you pick the one that you were wanting you know to brainstorm is probably is probably good because i mean your dreams are trained on the past right like jung talks about how dream is something it's a way of thinking about the past that lets us anticipate the future based on what's happened before we're thinking about what might happen um so you know like a lot of times like

ai is you know especially the visual stuff it is dreaming it's like free associating with patterns um which is what makes some of its weirdness that it has like an over, because there's so many pictures of dogs on the internet. Some of the early versions were like over-trained to spot faces of dogs. So they would like put dog faces inside of like, you know, beard pattern or just places where it might see a pattern. So, I mean, to me, that's so interesting because you're getting into this stuff that I think is neat about, you know, psychosis and, you know, the, the kind of deep brain, but I want to, to, to put a pin on that as a,

as a short point. Like, I think that a lot of the newer brain science that is interesting to me and clarifies things that never understood about the old pattern is that there's so much it's the brain isn't really processing. Like that's not really the key to understanding cognition. There's so much processing happening. So are all the time. Consciousness is more of a filter. It's more of what am I ignoring to focus on this, you know? And that things like the sensory gating theory of schizophrenia, a lot of these newer theories are saying like, well, when these problems with cognition happen, it's not that something

is being created that didn't used to be there. It's that there's something not being filtered out that should be and and um and so those ais are essentially filters they're going through a ton of what has been done by somebody else before which what makes it inherently not original you know right and then they're looking at how can we combine these in a way that reflects what you're asking me to do which is a great way to brainstorm um doug reshkoff said that you know he wrote these novels and then he improved the novels because he asked an ai hey what does a character do in all of these situations and everywhere where it said to do what he had done he said that's not a good that's not that's not good like and that it

ended up he but he never would have spotted those 30% of the tropes that were kind of lazy in his writing. If it wasn't a computer saying, well, why don't they do this? And that's what he had come up with. So I think like that also so much of filmmaking is like juxtaposing weird genres,

you know, like a lot of the really influential stuff is like getting two really weird ideas and then putting them together to make a new thing, a space Western or something. Right. and so i could see it being helpful for something like that because you've got it knows what this is it knows what that is you combine it and then it's giving you interesting ideas about how to make a set or how to how to do something like that maybe yeah something i've found that it's really good at is that kind of like stylistic transposition you know where it's like you have, you know, something that you feed into

it, an image of some kind, and you say, show me this in these different like styles, right? Or show me this in Star Wars, you know, or Transformers or Ghostbusters, or like, whatever, whatever the paradigm may be, but it's like, because it knows all of those things, it knows all the pop culture references, it can do this sort of interesting you know there's there's a real bunny hole there but like uh you can modulate a bunch of settings and then get a certain amount of like your input versus the the ai you know kind of a trace over of your given like image or or thought and then have it like spit back out some like well this is what it could look like you know well and for like vfx i could see it being a good polisher that when you

get the broad strokes of the effect that you're going for it goes in and it cleans up the light rays or it cleans up the molten property of the water or the magic spell reflecting you know light around it doesn't require you know a team of 100 engineers to go through and visually change each thing but you still would need the human element of having the vision which i think ai can't do yeah absolutely distinguish between its own noise you know yeah and and i definitely where it is now it's not something that i would ever consider is like using for a totally finished product with no human intervention it's like it's not it's definitely not there yet but it's it's just very interesting

to me the way that all of these technologies have kind of like come together it's all sort of based on the same circuitry you know the the real-time graphics for in-camera vfx that is gpu based right and then so is all of the AI stuff. And so these very specific high-powered circuits that can do all this fast compute are the things that are driving kind of the moment of how we approach creating things rapidly at scale for entertainment.

And that's true across like film and across the concert production, which, you know, sometimes it's sort of a microcosm of film, because you're shooting this like live experience for camera, but every show that's happened in the last 20 years has had a big LED wall behind the talent. Anyways, you're also kind of filming that and that becomes your backdrop, in some ways, and there's been a lot more like real time work that's gone into integrating that that wasn't there even five years ago. I think it's kind of like how if you look at automotive features that are pretty mainstream that trickle into the consumer space,

a lot of that stuff, especially like around fuel efficiency or safety is like invented in formula one as like just state ofof-the-art technology. And then it trickles down. Eventually it gets cheaper. But when you look at, you know, the concert technology,

sound and visual technology, and also filmmaking technology, so much of it follows video games, like over history, that video games kind of pioneer a thing. And that, you know, what you're talking about,

which is like a soundstage where you're not just recording a track and adjusting levels. You're saying here are spatial objects of sound that you're going to move around or here are spatial objects of a video visual effect that, you know, if it's the Jedi Knight walks over here, then the camera knows to move the background, you know,

on the video wall behind them. Or if Taylor Swift moves over here, it knows that it's going to magnify this to create you know enhance this depth of field or something but those are the same technology and those essentially came from video game engines you know like the dolby atmos and there's i don't know what the other competing technology is but these spatial um things like instead of just having a sound the thing that the high-end audiophiles are putting in their home theater systems right now it's not just like it's a really good recording of a thing it knows where your speakers are in the room it knows where you

are in the room and it's moving the object around as you watch the blu-ray to say a bird flies overhead but it's happening dynamically and that those are that's all video game stuff that you you have sound points and keys and and target objects and all that stuff yeah the the dolby audio is a is a great example because that's a fairly new thing that's been rolled out i think a lot of you know most theaters that you go into now will have it if they have revamped their stuff in the last five years or so but yeah that they literally have a drawing of the array of speakers in the theater itself. And then there's someone that does a track that moves the audio around that, essentially that grid. And then whatever speakers are closest to it are the ones that are going to have it loudest.

And then it falls off. And I know very little about the underpinning technology of that other than to say that it's like incredible and what's the same it's the sound version of what you're doing though where you're having it kind of think of things as a dynamic field and then track them around reference points of what the audience sees and where the where the characters are going or whether right where the action is happening um but it is it is wild you know because i when you think of i guess culture you know throughout time like it's like people used to go and they would take like a trip to a giant cathedral they would take a trip to like go see like the best oil paintings in the world that

were on display because that was like the height of human experience of like and now you think about that and it's it's kind of i guess movies and concerts you know you've heard the taylor swift song a hundred times but it's the the goal of the engineer to give you this and and the crew to give you this and the designers to give you this experience that is more than the track you know it's not just getting to see taylor as a tiny dot at the end of the football stadium you're communing with her through this audio visual ritual that people like you create well and it and it comes down to kind of one sort of like driving term for all of this stuff right and it's the buzzword that everyone wants to use for whatever experience they're creating which is immersion right it's is it immersive do you feel immersed in it surrounded

by it do you feel like you're inhabiting this experience that all of these people are working to create um and everything is like in service of that primary you know that prime mover is like are we immersed in what we're doing and what sensory perception uh helps that immersion right so that's the decisions that we're trying to make and use our intuition on as designers is like will this serve the immersive experience that we're trying to create or in some cases break people's immersion right like you have people throughout history that have sought to like in like flip that paradigm like i think about brecht as someone who wants to like always remind people that you're watching a play rather than a mercy and that he wants to like do these big gestures that break you out of it. But very much the,

the mode right now is like, we want people as in the experience as possible, whether it's a concert, a TV show, a movie, or, you know, walking through a theme park,

right? Like we don't want to just go walk through the, the, the world and ride the ride and see the familiar like characters we want to feel like we're a part of the contiguous universe and so even in like how like i think galaxy's edge is a is a great example of that where it's like it wants to put people in the story of the theme park and like have you be a part of the narrative board while you're there well i think uh too like the i've seen i've been to concerts before where there was some technical

feat that was incredibly impressive and probably expensive but it didn't do anything to connect me to the art it didn't do anything it almost like was a distraction from what was the point whereas i've been to other places where i felt like i experienced the music in this way um that i could never could again and never could have any other way because of the experience that was designed and you know the immersion for lack of a better word um and now that you know artists don't make any money because of spotify and things, there's been this push to make concerts, you know, artists have to sell, do these huge tours. And so you see this huge concert industry that is different than it was 20 years ago. It's not going to the Dave Matthews concert and, you know, twirling your tweed skirt on the grass and then, you know, going like there right there there's this it's almost like everything has to be a flaming lips concert now you know uh a lot of that uh experiential stuff from like edm the edm world is now like in tiny singer songwriter concerts you know as soon as they're big enough to have a tour can you say something about like

when the technology is working you know how does the designer like work with the artist to plan an experience and then when when that fails when that works you know what what what makes that what makes that a system yeah i think um so a lot of times uh especially in in the world that i'm in right now right like we have um uh there will be like a creative director uh that's working very closely with uh the artist or um sometimes that's us but sometimes there's you know an outside party who's part of the team part of the uh the mission of like making the experience but it always kind of wants to start with what the artist wants like what they're dreaming of for their tour so they tell you this is the point of the album or this is what i'm saying in a way that maybe they don't say explicitly on the album yeah um or the they'll

give us whatever kind of like inspiration resources assets that they've already been like percolating on because oftentimes you know there is an album that's like the reason for the tour or there is a you know a driving force behind you know sometimes it's like oh this band has been around for 30 years we're going to do a 30th like anniversary tour so then it's like well we want this to be a retrospective or conversely we want to be looking forward you know instead of looking back and so there's a lot of times like that's where it all starts is with what the what is the experience that the artist is trying to create. And then we're looking at, OK, how do we execute that? What can we add to that vision?

And then, you know, on the backside side of it is like what are the practical components that you need to achieve that um and it can be wildly different for um depending on the show and the day uh but it's a lot of times like this iterative iterative process where it's like we we get the initial uh brief right and then we go into the minds and we extract uh some ideas from the like raw materials that we have available to us and then we come back and we say okay this is our approach to the vision do you feel like this is working do you feel like this serves um the uh the overall idea that you're trying to connect to your audience through. And that process can take several passes.

We get feedback, we go back, we come back. And throughout that whole thing... What do you do when you have somebody that's just impossible? They want you to do... They think they can do your job better than you or they don't understand the... So as an individual i feel like individual designers me personally i feel like it's my goal not to let anything that i've done get precious right if

there's um my goal is to serve the show and and the the artist that's trying to put the show on so if something i'm doing is like not resonating with them, it's not in service of their vision, then like I'm okay letting a lot of things go. If I'm really like excited about the idea, maybe I'll put it in my back pocket for later. But I think that it's more important to do the show that they want to do and let them drive it.

And the only time I think that we try to like push back is if there's a true like practical like we cannot get the trust we cannot get the like lights we cannot get the physical product that we need to make this happen for reason of availability or budget or whatever um those are the moments where it's like you know we might have to have a dialogue about it um but broadly speaking i think you know i would rather champion my ideas but not defend them to the death yeah um well and it does seem like you know the designer or something used to just kind of be you know more independent artists but the kind of work that you're doing almost seems like it's more kind of religious or shamanic and

that you're trying to connect people to this greater experience you know and just the nuts and bolts of how you you know get the sound to 80 people or whatever i mean it's definitely the nuts and bolts too but i think it's important to sort of hold both of those things in concert with each other, right? Like to be the conduit through which the nuts and bolts become the broader experience. And the great thing about it being this hugely, massively collaborative effort between a lot of creative people and a lot of like technical, you know, engineering types. And being a collaborative art form as live entertainment and film theater all are, is that there's space for everyone

to like inhabit both of those roles. You know, like I always like to think that like a good creative idea can come from anywhere in the production team. It doesn't have to come from you know me the designer it can come from the audio engineer or the the screens programmer or anybody in that process and i think that the more that we kind of all work together toward that vision the better product you're going to end up having because everyone believes in it you have to believe in the world

that you're creating for the audience because otherwise they're never going to believe it. Yeah. Yeah. And I think that was the complaint about from the filmmakers and actors and also the audiences of that kind of low point and technology being misapplied as people said that they didn't believe it. You know, there's that I was kind of surprised that they even put it on there. there was like that clip on the behind the scenes of the hobbit you know blu-ray or something where um there he you know ian mckellen's saying that he just broke down crying and was like this is not why oh yeah because he was trying to talk to 18 dwarfs on sticks and he just couldn't get into the pictures and it's like him and a bunch of green boxes on a green set, but he's in full gay makeup, and it's such a jarring juxtaposition. And it's like, if your job as an actor is to believe in the world and inhabit it fully, and you're surrounded by nothing that even resembles what it is

you're trying to portray, then how could you get into character? How could you how could you get into character like how could you you know well and it's not like the process of filmmaking um or you know the process of like doing a concert the nuts and bolts of that haven't ever been at odds with the art i mean just you go to basic cinematography like if you shoot a conversation wide the actors can just talk and it's natural if you're trying to shot reverse shot in a very tight way, you're having to make them say every single line at the camera and then stop and then set up for 15 minutes or an hour and then come back and say the next line of a conversation and then their ability to keep that in flow of conversation. And that's old school, you know, filmmaking. So it's not,

these aren't terribly new problems, but I think, you know, just like anything technology is kind of a n non-specific amplifier. It makes, you know. Yeah, that's a super good point that like the nature of the actor's work is definitely to be able to like embody those states in any circumstance. But I think that, yeah, the technology, in the same way that it's like a force amplifier for creative work right a productivity amplifier it can also amplify all of those like jarring things um for the actor and i think too that it comes down to like experience like ian mckellar in particular i think about like his long and

storied history of being a conventional theatrical actor so so that experience of just living on the in a play where you're doing the dialogue for two hours sometimes yeah and yeah in real time in that wide shot scenario right so there is no stop down there is no uh resetting the shot it's like you get one run at it and that's what the audience is going to remember so you i could see especially for someone like that being in that circumstance uh with the green screen would just be extremely jarring because of his own experiences. Whereas someone that's like newer to the game, just coming up in it, it's like,

Oh yeah, this is just part of the game. Somebody who's an ADD TikTok streamer that was, you know, like they, they're going to be able to adapt to that world better. I wonder if it is like the, the jump from,

you know, famously like a lot of actors could not jump into talkies when when sound was added to movies they couldn't make the cut because they're they couldn't project or their voice didn't fit the character type that they could play in silent film or something like that um you know maybe not as dramatic but i wonder if there's not something here that you have the the way that film is made and presented changing so quickly that certain um legacy types of acting style can't keep up or maybe this changes acting style that people who came up and all they know is the led wall are gonna have you know be a noticeably different movement of acting you know when you look back on it 50 years from now right yeah i think yeah it's

i think that's one thing that like a lot of times i'll say like the future of what we do is impossible to predict but i think that the cycles are predictable and i think we didn't see the the move from silent film to talkies uh created a um like a struggle of evolution and then from uh but also from like uh theatrical uh actors to film actors but then also the other direction like whenever there's like a resurgence in broadway interest and someone from movies uh tries to go be a broadway performer and uh if they don't have the right like sound amplification like those people have a lot of like difficulty projecting for a crowd uh in a in a space because they're used to projecting for a boom mic directly over

their head um and i wonder uh if i wonder like how bad it would be to put Eddie Redmayne in a play, because even with the wonders of, you know, THX advanced audio, every movie that I've ever seen Eddie Redmayne in is him going. Right. Yeah. It's someone who's very quiet. Like they're going to have trouble in a theatrical space,

even with the mics and the amplification that we have, because it's just it's a different paradigm um and it all comes back to like what people are used to i'm curious too because like a lot of this stuff is cheaper to make than it's ever been because of technology like you're describing at disney or you know just some of these concerts would not have been possible i mean you just could not have concerts on that scale, you know, even 10 years ago, some of them, what they're able to do now. But I wonder if that changes the way that content is kind of produced and who has access to it and who you distribute versus who you don't, you know, like, it seems like like things like electronic music tend to stay in the festival circuit, like you have to go camp out and you know maybe you know take mushrooms or something if you're going to go listen to a certain kind of band whereas you know the live nations are not doing those as much as it's a different investor pool it's a different business

model than the taylor swift concert you know or the drake tour yeah i think excuse me i think that there has definitely been a democratization of the tools for creativity um the fact that you can you know there are free and open source alternatives for just about any like creative platform that's out there so if you're willing to like take the time to learn those and become dexterous in them in the same way that the like mainstream tools are um you can create like there's there's very little uh barrier between what someone can create working you know in their house on a gaming laptop and what someone can create in a multi-million dollar studio other than time and like number of people that are like all throwing their work at it at once and i think that um i think that's a very exciting thing because it allows for so many more people to do interesting things and take bigger risks than like the the large budgeted studios are willing to make

you know you can you know if you have an idea for something and access to youtube like you can teach yourself how to do it um with more ease um than i think there ever has been and increasingly some of those open source tools are like working their way into the mainstream anyway because as more people like put their efforts behind developing those programs uh their viability just kind of comes on the same level as the the professional tool sets um so then it comes back to like what are you used to using or what can you teach yourself how to adapt to um so i think it's a super exciting time in that way for those more like indie projects um and i guess i'm thinking more in like animation and like short form like video that's where you see a lot of those like

indie ideas like take shape but the production value on some of the stuff that's like out there is astounding for it being like you guys just how was it uh that uh godzilla minus one or godzilla that recent. I remember looking at the effects of that versus the giant U S big budget, you know, 480 million plus marketing deal. And it was just like, this one looks better,

you know, and they spent a million dollars. How did they do that? Yeah. And I love that one because of the stylistic, like sort of throwbacks to the, the early Godzilla movies too. Just like,

it seems like filmically it feels, and it's one of the things that like, I can't articulate it even though I'm watching it, but like, it feels like an old school Godzilla movie. Um, but done in like a very sort of modern quality production, uh,

value kind of way. Um, and it's, and I think that's you know i'm excited for more things like that to happen as as this technology continues to i hope uh spread and become uh more available to more people that are interested in like getting into this world yeah it's fascinating the and do you have any idea where it goes from here do you see you know the the next version of this being that you could you know unroll the the dot light tarp in your apartment and have you know somehow the ability to do what we're now doing in studios you know uh for a couple hundred bucks on on the gaming laptop or you know where where does this go uh i'm gonna go back to

my it's impossible to predict uh answer first and then i'll qualify that um because i do think that as the technology continues to advance and expand uh i think i think all it will take is for one person to like find the right combination of pieces and parts and do that and then show everyone how it was done. And then I think you'll see an explosion of everybody trying to do it. Because that's what happened with in-camera VFX is that virtual production became a buzzword as soon as one show did really well using that production paradigm um and then all of a sudden everyone's trying to do it right and there's this huge like glut of shows that are all using led volumes as their backdrop um and and some do it really well uh and some don't do it as well and And, um, and that's kind of the nature of like seeing what works and what doesn't.

But, uh, I, I would hope to see more of the, the like indie projects using that kind of tech in the future because of the wide availability. And it may not be like roll out the dot matrix in your apartment but it may be you can rent this super high resolution led tile from the like local you know rental house and you know uh book a studio space for a week and go in and shoot your whole thing in that like one week of filming and then that becomes like the breakout way of doing you you know, the next cool thing. Do any of this go into like live action plays like Broadway type stuff? It seems like sometimes they resist technology and plays more than even in like, you know, music. music? I've seen a couple of and I can't think of specifics right now. But I have seen a couple

shows that use LED backdrop as opposed to like a painted or practical set. I've seen more projection use in in theatrical production. But again, that technology has been around longer and you can kind of get away with some like stylistic choices in projection that you can't necessarily with like the led um something about the way the led contributes to the light of a given environment makes it so that if it's not almost a character in the show itself, um, and I think can make it kind of hard to, uh, juxtapose with the action, uh,

in a, in a theatrical environment and the projection being just a little bit softer. Um, but with led, you don't have to fight your lighting. Doesn't have to fight your back wall. Whereas with projection,

you always have to be super careful about whether or not you're accidentally washing yeah that content um so there's pros and cons to either one i think we will i think we'll probably see more led i think something that it could be very useful for is like uh what what we call like set extension um where it's like you've built. You project the set around the audience or something? Well, more so like you've built your practical set on stage, right, in your traditional proscenium set. But then behind that, your last piece is an LED wall that's able to change. If it's like you've got the buildings of a fishing village or

something right and that's and that's where your play takes place and then it's like you draw the rest of the fishing village and the like ocean and the sunset and the backdrop and then because it's a real-time video piece it's like now you've got the whole village kind of realized and you can do progression through time of day or change the lighting or bring in a thunderstorm or like all of these things that you can do as long as you've got like a content guy that's able to like create those effects um and then you get the real lighting of that on your your practical physical village um it's and i'm drawing from a couple of things i have seen recently. So the artist, The Weeknd, one of his more recent stadium set designs was this big cityscape, practical set,

illuminated windows on these buildings that were like platforms and things. And then behind that was the rest of the city. And they would just transform that cityscape using, you know, CG effects and things on the LED wall and then change the lighting and sort of like that would evoke the same stylistic choices on the practical elements. So it felt like this like city was moving through these fast changes. That's cool. Yeah. I mean, again, I'm thinking of the witcher one had this dynamic weather that didn't was, it wasn't really cued to anything in a script. It would just naturally blow across the world as you were exploring.

And this was this like amazing thing that you would never experience the same combination of like light, light direction, weather, wind, humidity, and all of it was controlled separately and sort of mixed together. And now that stuff is,

is trickling into, into film. Yeah, totally. And, and it's like, you got to find the right application for it. Um,

certainly cause it could become so distracting to the action of the story that it's like, now it's not serving that creative anymore, but as like a, as a subtle sort of inclusion, i think it has a lot of potential yeah then when the smart home thing was going on i remember like they were like well if you spent two hundred dollars more on light bulbs you can have like a lightning storm embrace your kitchen then i was like well okay that's kind of neat but i don't really i don't think i want that

i'm very broke and a social worker in alabama but you could see you know if you're doing like a role playing you know dnd or something that there a lot of that stuff being cheaper and easier for the individual to program from their phone makes absolutely exciting opportunities and they've actually there's a i just saw this this is not related at all to what I do or anything, but there's a product that's a set of like, you know, polyhedral dice that are connected to an app that has hooks into one of the like common home automation platforms. If this, then that it, and so it's like you can set conditions where it's like, Oh,

if I roll a natural 20 if that's and that is going to go hit all of the lights in my oh wow dragons room and like change the color like do a strobe or whatever you program and so it's like there is kind of like uh and and in that way right it serves that immersion because now it's like this thing has happened for this character and now the world changes as a result of it and it's like you feel that because the world around you has changed your perception has changed because you've got this tie into this technology that can you know change the environment of the lighting or make a sound effect in the room from like speakers or something like triggered on an action in real time, as opposed to being a pre-programmed sort of like a cute element.

Yeah. And you, you, as you make the environment more automated or more able to just react to things organically and you're thinking about it less as part of your process, it just becomes something that enhances that, you know, I think James Cameron was kind of ahead of the curve when he was talking about avatar because he basically was doing this but with technology that wasn't here yet um i mean you granted you needed 200 million dollars to do that back then but that was sort of why avatar worked in a way that a lot of those things did not work um oh absolutely well well that's interesting stuff um do you what do you think about like um you know because the

world that you're building for the artist already is sort of you know a digital space you know to you take to the concert do you see things like ar vr concerts where you buy a ticket and put on a hololens and you know walk around and see the live concert you know becoming something that are are the direction things go in or is that um it's so there have been some like executions of that um that i've seen uh that are like fun um it's something that i kind of daydream about uh a lot of the time is like you know the glasses are like almost there they're so close uh they're not there yet um but it is a time it's like, you know, the glasses are like almost there. They're so close. They're not there yet. But it is a very, it's like you can look at it through your phone.

And so often people have their phones out anyway at a concert. So there's definitely potential there that like you scan a QR code and you get an app. And that app is basically running a separate, you know, composite plate across your phone that's like tracking spatially and can show you like this added layer of performance um and i think that like that has a ton of interesting potential um in maybe the next 10 years 10 15 um but i'm all i'm always like open to being surprised and be like oh someone already did it and i just didn't know about it like that happens to me all the time um i think that creating that sort of um i don't know it's like they talk about you know uh for a while there was like the third screen was kind of the,

um, a conceptual thing in video games and, and some TV as well. Right. But you'd have like an app that would like call on the show. And that's what you'd look at on your phone while you're watching it. Uh, sort of killed that,

uh, right. Yeah. Died a very sudden death and, uh, and completely predictable one. I don't know. Yeah. Uh, and very sudden death and, and completely predictable one. I don't know. Yeah. And then everyone kind of backed away from it. But I think there is going to be at least

continued like experimentation in like, how do we bring that? Because that is another component of the like in camera VFX paradigm is like you'll have the led wall set extension but then you may also have like a foreground uh that is the ar component where it's like you're generating things not only behind the performance but also in front of it or interacting through it those seem to be really involved right because now you've got to track where the the virtual object is in space relative to your performers who are real relative to the background. And so that can get very complicated, very fast and requires a lot of...

Well, they're tracking a lot of them with digital kind of chips and body tags anyway, where the light to hit and the laser effect to come on. I mean, they're already doing it. Or where the shotgun mic is going to point for some things. Yeah, yeah. We definitely have like, you know know performer trackers for spotlights and things like that and it's like if you can feed all of that data into one uh homogenized system which those those platforms do exist um but it comes down to like you have to have very tight calibration and you have to have like very strong process. Shake your Taylor Swift in a figure eight until the compass points North again. Yeah. You know,

there's, there's a little bit of that, right? It's like, you gotta like grab the tracker and you've got to like walk it around the stage and be sure. And it's like, if that data drops for any reason,

then suddenly things will go a wire because you're getting position values that are like nulls. So it's like you can do those things they're not totally um or at least in my experience uh you have to have a more controlled environment they're not so like shoot from the hip yet that you can just like deploy it and it'll just work it's like there's a lot of fine tuning but it is one of those things that's like constantly improving and developing um again i think we'll see more of the easier it gets to like deploy those things well which maybe you know synthesizes things like movies and

concerts and and plays as they're using the same technology, you know? I mean, I think that the 360 camera thing came and went too early. Like it kind of, they shot their shot. Everyone wanted to do an, you know, Silicon Valley has to pretend like one thing's going to catch on, you know,

in the next year in order to keep their stock up. And then, you know, maybe one of 10 of those things lasts, but that was kind of the promise of those 360 cameras that as long as you had the ball with the 360 camera, anywhere you went, somebody could interact with, like it was a completely virtual space as long as they had VR. And none of it was quite there, but we maybe go back to that place in a professional situation.

I don't know that it ever catches on for, I don't really ever want to know what's happening, you know, behind the podcaster that I'm watching, you know, like sometimes, you know, the 19 by 10 aspect ratio is just all you need for things like a movie so that's a i think that's a very salient point right is again sometimes the technology becomes the tail wagging the dog when it's like this does not serve the experience especially when the technology is propping up the shareholder value of you know some exactly thing thing. Yeah. Yeah. I don't know. Do you see, you see any like red herrings, false paths, places where people are pretending or kind of connect to pan out that are not really, you know, real or you don't feel like, or, or, I never really think about like betting on something to fail because usually that's a recipe for disaster in an environment where like people are constantly investing more and more into everything and pushing things like further and further. Um, because like, for instance, the, the AR like things like would be something that some people might say is a gimmick and is doomed to fail. But I think a better way to look at it is it's not ready yet for primetime.

But I don't think there's anything that without enough time and attention to it, that's not going to find a niche somewhere in the in the market um that someone's not going to be able to do something cool and amazing with it like i think that just everything is sort of brimming with potential in this moment um and maybe that's kind of a rose-colored view of it i'm sure there's people out there that would uh uh turn up their nose at that idea and say like no there's lots of things they're gimmicks and um and they're probably not gonna pan out but off the top of my head i can't think of anything that i've reacted to lately that i wasn't like oh this is really cool um and has potential um yeah i mean as far as like visual effects and polish i mean i think all of that stuff it's inevitable it's how do you do it in a way that works well? I mean, the stuff that scares me, not just now, but in any era,

is when you're getting rid of the writer. Like, so many of the problems that Hollywood has had, it just comes back to, like, write a script that's good before you do the movie. And when there's just, you know, eight hours of whirlwind and hurricane and, you know, Optimus, and then nothing happens. And that's the kind of filmmaking that I don't like that.

I feel like it's bad for culture. You know, it's like Marvel movies and a lot of stuff, they get flack, but I was just kind of like, yeah, but somebody made a plan, like not just for the movie that they were making and spending $200

million on, but for five movies in a row, like, you know, like, yeah, maybe this is not, you know,

Leonardo da Vinci or something, but I've just been begging the industry to just write a script before they hit record, you know? And for some reason we couldn't do that for 15 years. Like, yeah, I think that the taking the long view on any of these like concepts is

definitely the way to identify what probably has some staying power versus what's going to need to go through a lot of evolution before it gets that same. And the, the, the thing that's always going to bring people back more than anything else is not the production, you know, quality or the cool tech or the VFX,

like that'll attract some people, right. That are like in it for that but that at the end of the day it's that good story that immersive like experience that you can connect to and resonate with uh that is what people want to spend their money to go be a part of well and i think that's why the script is not um the story in a way that a lot of people make it i mean i like writing and i talk more about kind of like plot structure and things but i mean something like blade runner the first one the the set is telling you the story i mean you're walking

through it and you're seeing there's three layers of set built on top of each other and the world was this and they had this idealistic future and then it didn't work out and now it's being retrofitted because the dream fell apart and harrison ford's not walking around telling you you know like well in the 50s of the future we thought big fins on cars and we were optimistic but then the 70s happened in the space 70s and like no one's doing any of that it's that you're being told that by a set which is why design is important and part of storytelling in a way that i think we forget yeah absolutely yeah and environmental storytelling as it were maybe escape rooms too maybe that's the the next frontier. So, Oh, I, uh,

uh, Hmm. You've got some ideas there. Well, so escape rooms, I think. So for a while, of course I lived in Orlando, uh,

which maybe had like a glut of escape rooms, uh, in the like pre pandemic moment, like 20, 20, like 16 to 2019. I feel like there was a new social distance by locking yourself in a room with 12 people yeah so that maybe uh hampered the the growth of the escape room

industry a little bit but it didn't slow down much to be completely honest because i went back recently and um it still felt like there's an escape room on every corner. But they are. They're getting them and turning them into axe throwing. It really does feel like the local business boom bus cycle is just like somebody spinning a dial. Now it's frozen yogurt. Now it's cupcakes that are weird flavors. Now it's axes like yeah pulling words out of a hat and being like okay this is the new experiential uh installation that we're gonna do vango projection

experiences uh oh yeah that's that's a little bit bigger than the small business but you know the like i don't know is yogurt by the pounds still a thing? I think all of ours closed. Oh, yeah. We've got one here near my house now. It goes decent on high foot traffic days. Tastes good. But escape rooms, I think, actually have the opportunity to implement a lot of very cool technologies that don't scale well but create a very like interesting immersive experience on like a on that micro level on which they operate where it's like you can have you know arduinos and raspberry pies like these small microcontroller elements that are like smart like devices that suddenly become keys or clues or like things that you can like interact with and touch and hold uh and that's

a completely different kind of like experiential art that uses technology in a completely different way than like the macro scale of a 10 000 person concert now it's like you're making an experience for 12 people and it's much more intimate and like the things that you can do there are so cool um and and fun to like execute and i get really into the tech of it even though i think that there's been like maybe too many people trying to do it all at once um but that you know fast like the things you can do with like a maglock and an infrared chip are pretty spectacular on that like 12 person you know in a room kind of scale well i think that that is uh kind of why the failure of disney's like star cruiser galactic star cruiser hotel

thing i mean the people made a lot of noise about the price but what i kept seeing i mean i didn't go to anything like that but what i kept seeing was that it was like that you could see sort of like cyberpunk all of these things that had been started in development as really cool concepts that can immerse you and then sort of not executed and abandoned. So you saw half of, you know, a hundred good ideas and none of it really was telling you the story that they were trying to tell you. Yeah.

I, um, uh, by the time star cruiser was open, I think I had already moved on. Um, and of course never got a chance to go because so much of when it was open was like through pandemic era and then we were like busy

and that wasn't something that I was like uh I couldn't get away from or find like a block of time when I was like this is the chance to go do this and then all of a sudden it's closing and I was like well I guess I missed my shot um But conceptually, right, like they were totally keyed into the idea of immersion. They were really going to like put you in it for maybe to a fault. Like, I don't know. It's hard to say that like, you know, maybe the ambition was like more than technically possible to execute but i think there are a lot of really good ideas that went into it that we'll probably see again that's why i mentioned escape rooms with movies and concerts is i kind of wonder if eventually you don't see these experience

technologies coherent to something like that i mean is that's not really a hotel it's not really a theme park it's not really a movie you know It's not really a movie. It's not really a concert, but it is kind of being dropped into a completely virtual space that is also somewhat analog. Right. It's absolutely telling you a story and you are the driver of the narrative in that case because you are the character and your goal is to escape. It's a straightforward motivation but like there are so many cool twists and turns that it can take as you like go on that that process so let's do it let's make westworld um that that ended well right oh

yeah yeah yeah there's nothing that could possibly go wrong because and we've got all the pieces now because we've got ai we've got you know humanoid robots we've got uh cool interactive tech that we can give to people and ways to record their every like thought and motion as they uh make their way through the story so like let's just put them all together and watch the you get iconic scenes where uh yule brinner uh says unfortunately i'm a large language model and my database only goes back to 2023. Right. Yeah.

My safety programming doesn't allow me to engage in this conversation any further. Please try, you know, reframing. I'm sorry, Hal. You need to subscribe to chat GPT-4 for $20 a month. You have run out of interactions with this robot for today please uh please upgrade your subscription well uh i appreciate you getting together do you want

to um tell us about any you want to pitch anything or tell us about the company that you work with or the opportunities that they offer uh anything we don't get to you feel like is is a important thing to hit on oh uh no i was mostly just here to chat today right like uh it's um it's just great to be on and great to like talk about some of this stuff and i'm always super interested in kind of the the psychology underpinning um how we make these decisions and and how we create experiences for each other. So it's like, it's cool to come on and sort of do the reverse, right. Where we talk about the technology of how we do it.

And I hope that this can kind of like inform, you know, as you're going forward in the series, like, you know, how you think about the other aspects of this that aren't the tech that are the creative and are the like writing and thoughts that go into um yeah experiences and it's it's hard to get like the technology the psychology and the technology of filmmaking is is interesting um you know it's easy to talk about the kind of like psychology of like the artist the process of like writing or something but some parts of filmmaking are so hard to get into like um always like roger deakins has a podcast the cinematographer and he like talks a lot with his

wife on there but there's like not anything that would ever let you learn his process because it's so intuitive that he's just like yeah sometimes you want to use a really wide lens but other times you do this but you know like when i see a color i can tell you you know within like a teeny tiny fraction of a possibility exactly the chemical composition that kodak used to pull that color out how many stops it is of whatever but it's just like he's so incredibly technical um right very naturalistically that there's not really he's never he's just not the cinematographer that is going to be like oh and you use the 16 millimeter and you push it forward slowly you feel like you're flying and that creates a dream like like he just doesn't think that way you know right it's it's very much something that's like baked into how he sees the world

yeah reactions to the world around you and the stimulus and it's like that's what you you know it's your own intuition that you use to drive you and create it you just hope that it resonates with other he never mentions it like he doesn't bring it up but the guests that he's had on have said things like that like when they redid fargo he told them that their film stock had degraded because the color of the sweatshirt was like the wrong kind of brown and they were like no we've double checked it and he was like no it's wrong and they're like you haven't seen this for 25 years and he's like it's just not right and then they saw that like one chemical had been messed up you can see the difference in like 1 16th of a stop of light you like you can tell if there's a shutter leak you know because one of the blades of your you know

ultra primes is not right you know yeah i wonder if, if people that have that sort of like almost extra sensory ability, I wonder if they have like some mild form of like synesthesia where they're like, not just seeing it, but like. Something is filtered out. Yeah. Because it has to bother them.

You know, you don't, we don't dedicate resources to things that don't cause us anxiety. And so, you know, that's, I think that's so much of under the creative processes. You've seen the same thing so many times. You don't cause us anxiety and so you know that's i think that's so much of under the creative process is you've seen the same thing so many times you don't like it you feel anxious about

it and then you innovate and yeah same way he's being bothered by that you know the film grain is not perfect you know yeah you see you just see it but then it's like you're not seeing that it's wrong it's like you're feeling that it's wrong. Yeah. It's very interesting way. Well, I really appreciate you coming on today. It's great to talk to you. Um, we have to, you're like any,

a lot of people that have a topic that's so broad, maybe we can do it again with, um, something else. And, you know, technology will probably be totally different in a couple of years, but anywhere people can go,

if they want to check out anything that you, even if it's just something you recommend that, um, you know, resources for people interested in, in jumping off points from anything we talked about today. Oh, yeah,

I would totally, if you're interested in this kind of like world and like, and the kinds of things that are possible, like as a creator, you may, you probably already know about it, but I would highly recommend downloading like blender as a 3d like creative tool i would check out something like unreal engine which is uh free for um small

create like small creators people with revenue under like a million dollars uh can just download the engine and tool around with it and have a lot of like cool templates and stuff and it's like there's and an unreal engine is a video game engine but it's also you know they have this entire workflow for creatives for doing like film and live production and things like that and you can see it um yeah they i think they have like case studies and things on their website the epic games of like different cool things that they've been a part of um so that's where i would start if you're interested in like the future of where live real time environment design is going in,

in concert to film for sure. Well, cool. Yeah. Thank you so much. And if you, if there's like, I can look and put a link to some of that stuff in the show notes.

Yeah. But yeah, I appreciate you coming on and Andy Philpo. Thank you so much. Hey, thanks Joe.