The future of digital content creation

BIREN GHOSE: Hello, everyone, and welcome to this illustrious forum at the Autodesk University, that has for long been a conversation starter, a trendsetter, and one of the platforms I so love to engage with, because it brings me together with talented young minds, celebrating our world of computer graphics. The visual imagery industry has evolved profoundly over the years. Colorful palettes and cutting edge technology, the everyday mediums have together created an upward trajectory for our industry, that has now emanated into so many shiny vertical sectors.

From creating images, we find ourselves now creating experiences, and telling stories from the past and the future. This journey has been numinous. And we've been asking ourselves some questions throughout this journey. Who are we, what does it take to do what we do? What drives us? In my opinion, the pinnacle of creative technology lies at the crossroads of the heart and the art.

So gear up for this ride, bejeweled with emotional highs, and driven by a strong sense of belonging to our craft. After several engagements I attend, creating an outreach for Technicolor, I learn from interacting with young minds such as yourselves, in the way that we explore new ideas, new tools, and new technologies. This is what takes us to the next level.

All of us are constantly igniting that spark and trail blazing a new compelling, and even avant-garde future for storytelling, through the power of visual imagery. The last time we were together here at the Autodesk University, we spoke about reality in the virtual world. And within six months, we were forced to take our reality to virtual platforms, because of that minuscule virus that has been around us for these past 18 months. So what has essentially changed since we were here together?

We witnessed a pandemic, which has caused a revolution in how we work and where we work, and is accordingly resetting our future, a pandemic that forced billions into the boundaries of their homes. A revolution in media and entertainment, with the advent of streaming platforms, a new landscape of e-sports, online gaming, AR and VR, that has today become the mainstay of entertainment. An opportunity to take storytelling from the aberrant forms through a union of art and heart and tools and technology that makes the possibilities boundaryless.

Does it sound competitive and ambitious to you? Yes. And whenever things become desperately competitive, only great quality rises to the top and wins. What does all this look like in real life? Well, let me take you inside Technicolor's Creative Studios to show you exactly what that means.

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I hope you like that. You saw the combined strength of Technicolor's creative studios, which harnesses the collective experience and discoveries of each of our brands, that have become world leaders over time. They have continued to expand the realm of artists and their capabilities in visual effects and animation and games and XR. Straddling the scope from script to screen, design, direction, production, we want to push the boundaries of creativity and innovation, because that's what we do.

We continue to invent the next paradigms of storytelling. Our brands have always been inventive, and like Autodesk, continuously develop new code to advance the creative paradigm. I do want to mention here that across our global studios, Autodesk tools are very much part and parcel of our varied and bespoke workflows and pipelines. And there are several forums at which the magic that we create, using Autodesk products such as Maya, and 3ds Max and Shotgun, among others, have delighted audiences for several years.

I've always maintained that, at Technicolor, we have transcended our industry, from going beyond taking a shot, to making it. How do we do that. We are supercharging our visual storytelling powers, with a new strategic experience and creative production offering. Every project we work on has a story life that breathes a life of its own. And these could be stories of monsters and grotesque creatures.

However, they are still crafted with the love that artists bring to their work. Technicolor's Mr. X worked on the Oscar-nominated movie Love and Monsters. Here on your screen is a post-apocalyptic sci-fi comedy about giant mutants. For this project, we created a gallery of CG monsters, including the scary Queen Sand-Gobbler and the empathetic HellCrab. It always starts with a brief from the director of the movie, which, in this case, went beyond creating scary creatures and monsters that had a character of their own.

A lot of them are just horrified and confused about what happens to them. And these 13 unique creatures add texture after texture to each creature. And there are so many hidden details that the artists love creating on each of them. There are some close to 500 shots delivered by Technicolor's wonderful artists in Adelaide and in Bangalore, that took this highly imaginative story plot to new realities, with a creature that is 49 feet in length and 23 feet long, with fish tentacles and hundreds of legs, and moves about like a snake and a giant snail.

It just wants to be friendly, benign, and chilling. We always knew Albert Einstein was smart. So it was no surprise that when a project brief came to explain why smart meters have to keep Britain green, in the new campaign we did for Smart Energy, the brand, no one would have expected that in 2021, Albert Einstein could do this from his own bathtub, while scrolling through Instagram. We worked on a unique and groundbreaking visual effects pipeline, in order to create an avatar of Einstein that was truly convincing.

Our team, including facial shape experts, spent months researching and developing a robust tool set, so that we could convincingly portray the nuances of Einstein's personality. We used cutting edge 4D volumetric capture technology, which was then used to recreate the subtle facial performances and the intricate details in CG-AI that makes things so real. This bespoke pipeline was developed at the Mill to process and export facial data, so that our teams could meticulously groom each hair, each wrinkle, each detail of his eye, on the CGI model.

You don't believe me? Then I would like for you to hear this from Albert Einstein himself.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: Ahem, got to get to energy, group to nk, ked, relativity hates theory. Oh, hello. This is a first for me. Today, I won't be talking to you about relativity, but instead I will explain how I was created, in a complex 3D form. This is impressive.

JOHN GUERRASIO: Yes, hi, my name is John Guerrasio, and my-- Ooh, hello.

- No, because no more doubt.

ALBERT EINSTEIN: Poof.

BIREN GHOSE: You just saw 2 and 1/2 minutes of the making of an iconic film, that's only a 40 second spot for smart meters. Brands don't come to us because they want another TV series or a film or an ad advertising spot. They come to us because they want to take their audiences into another world that betters what they've experienced before. This gives us the ability for artistic and technical exploration that our VFX and animation crews find rewarding. And it's this passion and inspiration that helps to create the extraordinary.

I cannot put into words what that extraordinary feeling is, but perhaps this next clip will explain that a bit better.

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- Don't threaten us.

- Tony the Tiger, everybody.

BIREN GHOSE: Does this look like an ordinary day to you? Well, wait until you're hit by a fashion storm. This is a snippet from Burberry's festive campaign, a campaign that follows Megaforce's magical formula of larger than life grandeur, grounded in the reality of human experience, and in this case, friendship in the face of adversity. This ad has won more awards than I can remember.

- Well, not too much sauce, please.

- All right, sure.

- That's the way.

- Here you go.

- Thank you. Ta.

- Are you sure you want to take it away? It's about to pour it down.

- It's fine. It's fine. No worries. Bye.

- All right, take care, bye bye.

- Good.

- (SINGING) Mm-mm, Mm-mmm. Mm-mm. Mm-mmm. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Singing in the rain, just singing in the rain. What a glorious feeling, I'm happy again. Up in the clouds, dark up above. The sun in my heart and I'm ready for love. Ready for love, I'm ready for love. Ready for love, I'm ready for love. Yeah, do do do do, do de doody-do do. Do do do. Do de doody-do. Do do do, do de doody-do do.

Left this on a cloud chase, everyone from the play, man, come on with the rain. Now I've got a smile on my face. I walk down the lane with a happy refrain, just singing, singing in the rain. Ready for love. I'm ready for love. Ready for love, I'm ready for love. Singing in the rain.

BIREN GHOSE: So as you can see, we are constantly working towards defining and then redefining the future of entertainment. And I believe that the future can be built by looking at it and working towards it. We have multiple touch points when it comes to film, TV, games, brands, and spaces that are breaking news across any and every screen in the world.

And this is what the future looks like, the gaming industry. The thing about the gaming industry is that you don't stay in the game for long enough without the talent and skills to push the boundaries of interactive content further than anyone else has imagined before. Creatively and technologically speaking, I don't think there's a team that beats the Technicolor Games team when it comes to delivering high-end content and immersive experiences, with art, with animation, with cinematics.

We work with the best partners in the gaming industry. Just in this year, I think we've delivered more than 2,000 minutes of animation, or 17,000 assets. I believe we worked on about 75 recent game releases. You think that's too futuristic to be true? Let me take you on a magical games ride. Game on guys.

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BIREN GHOSE: I aim this journey at the heart, art and technology. We collaborate with partners that resonate with our passion and our vision for the future of imagery. Content creation is a team sport. And since I'm a Formula One fan, let me tell you, that if we are the drivers and engineers in the sport, Autodesk is our partner that provides us the transmission system.

In our profession, every project needs to be hackers in order to find new innovative solutions. And Autodesk empowers us with the tools to make and break and make the new templates. Every year these tools get better. But the drivers, our artists and our technicians, have to get better, to use these tools.

And we collaborate closely with Autodesk in this process. We are one of the few people that get beta versions of tools that they're going to come out with in the next year. And they're very much part of developing the cutting edge and bespoke software that drives our industry. At Autodesk, I believe the mission is to build software tools to enable people to experience their ideas.

And we are perhaps one of those global networks that help to prolifically illustrate what digital prototyping software can really do in creating and designing visualization and simulation, in the new digital of today. What are the awards, you know, that are given for a great film, for a great television show, for an advertising commercial? And which of these do you think that we haven't won?

Don't guess wrong, because here it comes. Technicolor Creative Studios constellation of brands, together with our partners, our clients, we take the award seasons by storm. We work tirelessly behind the scenes on groundbreaking projects and our triumph across the most coveted awards speaks to our prowess. Here are some of the posters from the amazing work that is a product of the art and the heart and the technology that I've been talking about.

These are some of our award-winning titles that we're so proud to have worked on, together with our amazing partners and clients. And always, we are always proud to showcase them. The Super Bowl, for example, is kind of the Mecca for advertising, where you see 30 or 35 commercials that spend more money than any other advertising release platform in the world. And I'm happy to tell you that, of the approximately 35 or so Super Bowl spots that were made in this year, our brands NPC Advertising and the Mill were responsible for almost one third of all those ads.

Imagine that USA Today did an audience poll and found that 4 of the top 10 ads that the audience thought was amazing came from our work. And I'm happy to tell you that our Bangalore team at Technicolor India contributed to almost all of them. And while success is important to us, how we achieve it is paramount.

Are we getting better at visualization every day? Do our characters have a character of their own? Are the experiences we create extraordinary, but are believable? Do they give hope to our audience for a better and brighter future?

What the heart knows is what the art tells. I want to celebrate the future. I want to celebrate the partnership that we have with Autodesk. All of you who are listening in to this Autodesk University broadcast, be safe. Enjoy the experiences of the future. And thank you very much. I'll be happy to take some questions.