Welcome to TV8's 2007 High School Football Coaches show. My name is Mike Martin. Joining me is Chris Wright. Chris, we're gonna have a great season again this year. Yes, I'm really looking forward to it. It's hard to believe that summer's almost at an end, and I drove by North High School the other day, and I saw the guys practicing. And the track all ripped up. The track all ripped up, but we're ready to roll. Now, what we're gonna do this year is during the breaks between the coaches, we're gonna show the home schedules of the different schools we're gonna be covering. Lutheran, North and South. And then, in our final segment, Chris, we've got something that we do every year. Yeah, we always try to make some predictions and things like that. Last year we didn't do so well, but we'll see if we do any better this year. Maybe our fans don't remember either. We also have a bit of a change at South with their coaching staff, and a bit of a change, not a bit of a change, a big change in the Fox River Valley Conference, which is no longer the Fox River Valley. Yeah, unfortunately, the conference disbanded, or actually you could just say now we're gonna call it the Fox River Valley Classic Conference is what it's basically called. And four new teams have entered, Ashwabanan, Bayport, Depeer and Pulaski. For the football season, basically what they did is they are only gonna play eight games, so you won't play everybody the same, which leads us to another situation where North and South aren't playing a conference game, but they're gonna open the season on August 24th, Friday night, yet South High playing each other. Now, the four schools that enter the conference are good athletic schools, but a couple of them are really gonna be pretty tough in football. Bayport and Ashwabanan are traditional powerhouses, and I mean, you're talking Ashwabanan, that's one of some state championships, and it doesn't get any easier for the Cheboygan schools, but they strap on the helmets the same way as they do in Cheboygan, so let's see how it rolls. All right, we're gonna step out and when we come back, Crystal have coach Al Holzheimer from Cheboygan Lutheran Corps. Welcome back, I'm with coach Holzheimer from Kohler, Cheboygan Lutheran, tough year last year, coach. Yeah, it was, we obviously didn't do as well as we wanted to, but I think we learned a lot with having the Kohler kids there, that was a learning experience in itself there. I think we were a pretty young team, even though we had 10 seniors, a lot of them played for the first time, so yeah, there was a lot of growing, a lot of kids, a lot of sophomores played on varsity, and so I hope that that continues to help us this year. Yeah, can you rebound after a year like that? I think so, I mean, our numbers are pretty steady from this year, from last year to this year. You know, we've had a pretty enthusiastic attitude through camp. You know, with that we looked at some changes that we have to do as a football program. I've got it more experienced staff this year. First time in three years I have a defensive coordinator, so I'm not calling both offense and defense, so that's helped tremendously. I think we're better prepared when we come to practices now with me just focusing on one side of the ball. Also have a head JV coach that's new to our program, but he's had a lot of experience at other places, and so the kids are really enthused about that, and we've started to separate our practices now, so that's another change we do a lot of our technique time together as a group, but then we separate a little sooner than we have been in the past, and we're doing a lot of half-line stuff just to get good on good, and our older kids against older kids, but I think those are all things we're gonna pay off. We have more kids in our weight room this summer than we've ever had, so just a lot of changes like that that I think we'll rebound well from last year. I'm very positive. I know I mentioned in the beginning, Kohler, Sheboygan Lutheran, how is that working out with Kohler? You know, the people there have been great, even throughout the last year. You know, I'm talking about parents, their administration, their athletic director. They just like having football back in Kohler, and so they've treated us really well. I'm really pleased of how things turned out. This year we're continuing it again, and we've also added a few other sports at our school that we're gonna, or for the both schools that we're gonna combine, so it's just a neat relationship between the two schools. I know when we went out there last year, you could just feel the atmosphere of the Kohler people because they had football for such a long time. It was nice to see them have that. Yeah, and I was, you know, I'd go out in the community and talk to some people, and they were really excited about that. People I didn't even know at all, and just come up to you, hey, thanks for doing that, and I'd give them the credit for coming out and wanting to be a part of what we're doing, and it's a win-win for the kids. I mean, that's the bottom line. Those kids get to play a sport today, or otherwise, they won't get to play, and it helps us out, too. Let's talk a little bit about this year's strength for your football team this season. Well, you know, last year, with having some struggles, we kind of find out who your leaders are through that, and a lot of those guys are coming over as seniors this year, and so that's one strength. I mean, our upperclassmen have been involved in the summer workouts. You know, they're showing the kids how to do things right, so that's a big plus for us. We have all of our receivers back from last year, Harrison Dale and Dominic Frini. You know, just Dominic's really quick. I mean, he's a track guy that's done really well there, so I feel really, really good about that. Any other players that you might stand out we'll see on Friday nights? Right now, we have kind of a position battle quarterback with Kurt Ducco and Kurt Stilo. Both of them are working hard through camp here and trying to separate themselves. It's kind of new to Kurt's been our JV quarterback the last couple of years, and Kurt Ducco has, and Kurt Stilo is his first shot at it, and we're trying to do a little option stuff with him, and he's a short, quick kid, though, and we'll see what happens there. Ryan Johansson, he played slot receiver for us last year, and he lifted himself to fullback this year. I mean, he was a really strong kid, and so we're looking forward to seeing what he can do there. With the tailbacks, we have Mike Cannable, Harrison Dale's also taken some reps there, too, and Mike's one of the kids from Kohler, and he's a state tennis champion, and he really moves on his feet really well, and he's a pretty tough kid, too, so I look forward to seeing him out there. You mentioned a new defensive coordinator. Any new wrinkles at Lutheran? Pretty much a 44 defense. Our corners are going to be pretty much man-to-man on an island with them, and Dominic and Harrison and David Radloff are the kind of guys who are going to rotate in a corner, and so we're coaching them up to get them going. Sounds good. I think you guys play in one of the toughest small conferences in the league, or excuse me, in the whole state. I think when you talk about Random Lake and Cedar Grove and Ozaki and some of the things that these teams have played, can it continue this year for the league? Yeah, it is. I know some of the coaches, their numbers are down, but there's just good quality coaches in our conference, too. Those kids are used to winning through their other levels and other programs. Howard's Grove, they're one of the best JV teams, so if those guys carry that over, they're going to continue to be tough. But yeah, with Alcott Lake joining back there, that's kind of a nice fill the schedule up a little bit, too. I look forward to a good conference season. Well, I think we got you a couple of times this season, coach, so thanks so much for coming in, and best of luck to you. When I return, I'll have Coach Brickson from Sheboygan North. Welcome back, everybody. I'm here with Coach Brickson from Sheboygan North.  Yeah, last year was fun. We came in, you know, two years ago, talking about making the playoffs. I think we're all, to be honest with you, a little surprised we made the playoffs, but I'm not surprised at their attitude and their heart and their effort what they gave. You know, we started out in a whole own four last year, and we got to battle back, and to battle back, that just shows the character of those young men. Making the playoffs was just unbelievable. I think you got the most out of your team last year, and I think that's a tribute to you and your coaches. Well, thanks. I agree. I've got a great staff. I'm lucky. I have a great staff, some that have been here when I got here. We've made a few changes as well, but we have a good core group of coaches that really care about our kids, and they care about the kids as people before they are football players, and they specialize in their own areas, and I can't do it all. I've got all my coaches, and the delegation takes place, and they do really good work for me. And a parallel to you guys to the Girls' Basketball Program, I think the success that they have is really encouraged young ladies to go out for Girls' Basketball. Can you carry the same momentum of your success last year to the football team? I'd like to think we can. I knew when I came in here two years ago that we had those kids in the hallways, and for every reason, some of them just chose not to play football. Well, we've doubled the size of the program. We're up to about 130, 140 players in the whole program, 9 through 12, and we have generated that excitement. So we have a ways to go yet, I think, before we're going to get to that championship level, but who knows? We surprised people last year. I told the guys this year anything can happen. We're coming into a new conference. It's not going to be any easier. That's for sure. We're playing some good teams in the scrimmage coming up this Friday as well at Fond du Lac. We're playing Fond du Lac in Wisconsin Rapids Lincoln. And so you've got to play the best to be the best, and that's always been my belief. Yeah, you mentioned numbers. I heard the freshman numbers are outstanding, and again, I think that's a tribute to your success. Well, and also it's a tribute to youth football. Sheboygan Youth Football has implemented some offense from north and some offense from south, and Chris and I, of course, we get along really, really well, and we appreciate both of our programs. And they're still in the young stages of the development of getting their guys to learn our offense, but the bottom line is you look at Green Bay Schools, Manitowoc, anybody that we're going to play, they're going to have youth programs that are going to run down even further down to probably fourth or fifth grade, and they're going to run the same thing, and they're going to run in the high school. So we've noticed and we've seen a big difference this year where we've had our freshmen come in. They've been running the Wingtea now for two years, the seventh and eighth graders. We've lost freshman, as opposed to the new group that I had when I first got here. You lost some pretty good ones last year, you know, Nick Jones and, you know, Hummer and stuff, but you returned some fine players too, you know, Matt Rosey and David Thompson and a number of others. Right. Actually, our strength is probably going to be right now our linebacking core. We lost really good kids last year. We lose kids every year, but we did lose a really good group of seniors last year with Ragoza and Jones and, you know, Marafino did a great job leading us. But overall, I think that we've got guys to replace them. Our linebacking core, we're looking with three of the guys that have played there on and off, two for sure, three, mostly for the last year, our Travis Bando Water, David Thompson and Matt Rosey. Now, that's a strong linebacking core right there. We probably, for the first time, I think I've ever been a head coach, I'm going to say we're actually a little bit slower this year, I think. We've got speed, but we're not as quick and agile as we are normally, but we actually have, I don't know exactly the number, we probably have about 10 kids over 225, which is amazing for North football because we just don't seem to get those big kids. This year we have some and we're in the process of developing them into good football players. Any players you want to mention? Other big players we should watch for on Friday nights, either on the offensive line, defensive line, speciality players or anything like that? Well, there's so many, and you know, it's tough to pick one or two, but we have a lot of guys that have to prove themselves this year, and they've been proving themselves and attempting to prove themselves and get better because we still have some positions that we have to fill. Now, we haven't even been to our first scrimmage yet, so we're still shuffling people around, we're getting a little better at knowing who's going to play where, but hopefully my goal anyway is what I'd like to see in the past is it's always nice to have a standout player, but sometimes it's even better I think if you don't have the big standout player and that sort of emphasizes the fact that you've got really good continuity with your whole team and hopefully we'll attempt to do that again this year. And that's a lot what your program was last year as well. Not a lot of all stars, but just a group of kids that bonded together, so I agree with you there. New league, new challenges, huh? Four new teams in the league and you don't play everybody, it's going to be a little different. Right, well we have to adjust a little bit. You know, this conference I don't care for the fact the way it's set up, I don't mind the teams that came in I think it's great that we're playing those four bay teams I think it's going to strengthen the conference in general. I just don't like the fact that we have to play south it's a non-conference game, we'll play south every year but it seems pretty ridiculous to play them as a non-conference game and the same goes for east and west in Green Bay, they've got to do the same thing as well. We're fighting, you know, in two years they get a chance to look back and see how well this has worked and, you know, I've always been pushing and my athletic director has been pushing for two, six team divisions and then we'll have some crossover games. If they're going to go with this 12 team league, which they are then it would be better to go in two separate divisions in my opinion because it's real tough right now to decide who is going to be the conference champion. We might end up having two or three teams being our conference champion and how do you figure out who is actually the conference champion. That's going to be part of my ending you're already stealing some of my thunder because you could have a bunch of teams with one loss and it's going to be strange and I agree, I don't know about the future of this. You mentioned in our south game just so happened the way the schedule worked out that you don't play south as a conference game this year so as a result you have to play them the first game of the season and that's going to be unique. Well it was quite a special year last year in general and we have south as our last regular season football game the hype and energy that everybody brought was outstanding. We looked forward to that all year long without looking ahead but we did and I thought at the last game of the year even somewhere in the middle it's a positive thing. We'll still go at it as a positive thing I just don't think south north are going to be at full strength be curious to see what we do if we end up competing against each other at the end of the season. What I don't like about it too is it gives possibly one team in the playoffs one team with a loss already too which doesn't help as well. We'll see how that goes. Well thanks so much for coming in coach best of luck to you. We'll obviously see you a week from Friday and come out of there healthy this week on Friday night or excuse me Saturday at your scrimmage when Marty returns he'll have Coach Hine with us. Joining me on the set is South High head football coach Chris Hine and Chris a little different setup this year I know last year Dave and you were co-head coaches this time you're all alone what are some of the challenges with being the head guy? Well I think the biggest challenge for any head coach is the stuff that happens off the field the administrative stuff you know the ordering of uniforms equipment just the demands off the field have been the biggest challenge you know now that we're into practice it's actually a relief for me I feel like I have more time now to do things that I really got into coaching for and that's to work with the kids and to be on the field with them. One of the things was getting in touch with you to set up the interviews and that that we're doing today and I caught you on a bad day I was like 90 degrees out and you're moving so that's got to all add up too. Yeah that was bad timing too but my roommate decided to get married a week before football so at that time I thought I probably should move out probably the right thing to do and yeah it was not a very nice day weather wise. Now Ray Smith was one of the top backs in the conference last year and he got hurt he's coming back from an injury and how's he doing? Well it's early in the year I mean obviously we've had three padded practices at this time but we have huge expectations for Ray he's started since his sophomore year and he's known in the conference as a talent as he mentioned he missed the last four games really of last season and he looks to be healthy we're just hoping that he's coming out with the attitude that he should dominate games this year and we really expect him to. Beginning of last season you experimented with a one back offense and finished up with a two back offense what are you going to go with this year and who's going to be that second back and who's going to vary I mean it really depends on who emerges in the first two weeks of practice we're going to try to get our best 11 players on the field and we really don't know at this point who those 11 are going to be if it's going to be four receivers and one back or two backs and two receivers or two backs and three receivers and no tight end I'm really at this point I can honestly tell you we're looking at that that's why we have two days do we have so many that can be in the back field with Ray or are we better off with another receiver when you look at Saltaille football over the last seven, eight, nine years I think one thing that stands out is the offensive line play has really excelled actually and how does that look to be this year? We're very young in the offensive line it's very likely we're going to start four juniors and one senior James Poutel is our only returning starter in the offensive line he is a junior so we're inexperienced but we're very excited we like our kids there a lot it's just how long is it going to take them to mature to understand what it takes to play football at the varsity level in a very good conference in all this year One of the things that you're coming back with is a lack of skilled players at least starters from last year you know you lost Wilson and Lancer was an excellent tight end Taylor Schwartz at quarterback who's going to fill those spots? Well a quarterback right now looks to be John Kabai but he's being challenged by Jake Risto two very good athletes that we like a lot Good friends too am I right? Yeah good friends play baseball together we like both of them a lot we have a lot of confidence in both so we're going to use our quarterback I think more than we have in the past so John right now looks to be have the lead at that position at the other receiver position we do return Travis Burnett at our split end there's a competition between Wilson Curtis Wilson and Grant Renzelman who's out for football for the first year and we're really excited about him and what he's shown so far Now we've talked a lot of offense I know you love defense in the football game and you've called the defense over the last number of years with being the head coach how is that all going to shake out calling offense calling defense Well I'm still going to call the defense and that's my primary focus what I think I know best so I don't want to move away from that and Chris Korf will be our offensive coordinator this year he did I think a great job the last five games of the season last year stepping into a position that he never done before so I have a lot of confidence in him calling the offense and really want to stay out of that as much as I can Let's talk a little more about the defense Chris you know the unit itself what's going to be your base defense you know who's going to excel on defense Yeah I guess basically we're a more defense I guess you'd call us but we do play multiple fronts we've done that since I've been here and we'll continue to do that we don't bring back a lot of experience on defense really two kids that started for us last year Colin Johnson who was all conference safety last year and Jeff Zelko and in week four we'll be getting back Steve Bakke who should be an exceptional linebacker for us so we're going to be an experience on defense I remember back when I was at Chilton one of the best teams they had was a very quick team on defense I'm talking about how's the quickness look on your defensive unit I like our speed right now I do and it's a good thing we have speed because we don't have a lot of size especially early in the season until we get some of the players I mentioned before back we're going to be small in defense but I take speed anytime over size and since I've been at South we've never really been a very big defense we've always predicated our defense on speed and hustle and really trying to eliminate mental errors let's talk a little bit about two-way starters because I know there's an argument on the board you know people say we want to get your best athletes on the field and there's another argument saying well you want to keep your best athletes at their best position fresh now where do you stand on that well we started two platooning about four years ago and I think it's something that I still believe in I think it has advantages to it I think it helps your numbers because you have the potential to have 22 different starters which helps your off-season commitment I think we can focus on that one player can focus on one position and should become theoretically better at that one position than if he had to spend time in practice trying to learn an offensive position and a defensive position so I think we also elevate each player's ability at their one position so it's not something that we really can't get away from there's always exceptions although this year as of right now is the first year that we will have nobody as of right now playing both sides of the ball I like your argument I think it's really valid let's jump over to the new conference this year obviously you're going to place north the first game of the year it's going to be non-conference how does south seem to shake up in that respect with the new conference I know Ash Wabanan and Bayport are pretty tough but I think it's important that our conference has gotten significantly stronger in football I mean Ash Wabanan has won numerous state titles in the last decade alone Bayport's been in the state quarterfinals division one the last two years so we're bringing in two very highly respected very strong football programs into this conference not to mention the peer which is an up-and-coming program in Pulaski so and you add that to Notre Dame the new conference and things have gotten tougher and that's no secret to anybody how do you see your team shaking out this year well I think you know number one after last year I just don't even want to think about predictions we didn't pick you you know the one thing I learned from last year is don't ever take health for granted whether it's our players health or my health missing the north game we just were devastated last year by injuries and so number one we need to stay healthy if you could guarantee me right now that we would stay healthy the entire season then I could give you some predictions but I don't know if you can make that guarantee Chris thanks a lot for stopping in and good luck this season we'll see you on the 24th we're going to step out when we come back Chris and I will be on the set and we're going to talk about the TV8 schedule and about our annual predictions for this upcoming season so stay tuned we'll be right back welcome back everybody thanks for coming in and helping to make this show possible they always give their time Chris and we really appreciate it yes and they're always just wonderful interviews as well and Sheboygan should be very lucky to have such fine gentlemen running their kids programs let's talk a little bit about TV8's football schedule and if you don't have it I've got a copy but we've got some great games coming up not just on a high school level either yes we're going to obviously be out of Lakeland again this season which is always a fun trip to go out there and it's going to rain on us like it did last year but they have a new coach out there as well so things will be changed out there a couple Lutheran games and of course probably get to see a couple new teams that we talked about before that have entered the conference let's talk about that first game coming up North-South North-South game right away on a Friday and Coach Brickson I know mentioned that it's going to be a little strange starting at the beginning of the year those teams probably won't be at the peak of what they will be at the end of the year they're going to have to go off last year's tape maybe some tape from the scrimmages if they send a scout or how not that any coaches would do that but go to the scrimmage before that but it would be exciting at the beginning of the show we talked just briefly about the new schools in the Fox River Classic Conference and we're going to get to see two of those schools Ash Wabanan and Depeer what do we know about Ash Wabanan well as I mentioned before they're a powerhouse and they'll be a team to reckon with in a couple of minutes let's go through the part of the program that we really enjoy and we did terrible last year let's talk a little bit about the Central Lakeshore Conference last year I predicted Ozaki as the winner you also predicted Ozaki as the winner the winners were Random Lake, Cedar Grove and Howard's Grove they all finished at five and one this year I'm going to go with Coach Al and Random Lake earlier in the program I'm agreeing with that statement too Marty so we're right off on the same foot so we're both going to be wrong on the same one this year again the same conference I think Random Lake has a lot of their horses back as Coach Holsheimer mentioned and I agree with that one of the things that Coach Al said was that most of those schools that were up at the top last year lost some players and I know one good we saw last year Cedar Grove's Joe Burton they're gone and he ran all over Sheboygan Lutheran Kohler last year and I think the teams in that conference are glad he graduated let's talk a little bit about the Eastern Wisconsin Conference last year we both picked Sheboygan Falls they did not finish on top it was Q. Oskman Plymouth at six and one this year I'm picking Chilton yeah well with Sheboygan Falls finally losing Coach Yedis after a number of years I'm going to try to make a change and I'm actually going to take Plymouth this season and I'm going to take the purple land over there next door to us but I think they'll be kind of an interesting team to watch and we should watch them in the paper because Falls is always very exciting for football the new coach out there is a gentleman by the name of Mike Nixon and I know I'm talking to Doug Johnson throughout the summer we umpired some baseball games together he thinks they're going to be pretty tough again yeah I'm sure they will okay let's jump to the Fox River Classic Conference and they have four new schools Ashwabana and made the playoffs or not I was definitely able to nail down Bayport made the conference or made the playoffs last year last year I picked South you picked Notre Dame it was a co-championship so you get half a point I got zero Manti and Notre Dame both finished at six and one I'm picking Notre Dame this year I think Notre Dame will be outstanding but one thing as we mentioned before with the schedules mixed you don't always play certain teams you don't always take Ashwabana as a power and to spoil the old schools of the valley alrighty our first TV8 game is going to be August 24th we've mentioned it over and over on the program it'll be North Salt and it'll be a non-conference game thanks goes out to the crew for their fine work Kerry Kautzer, Scott Miloff, Fritz Zink and Steve Reiner for Chris Wright I'm Mike Martin saying thanks for watching everybody and we'll see you down the road


But let's be really like, that if the projection comes from you, you are the only one that can adore it, you would have to take that back. So taking back your power, the power that you've given to everything you see, you have to take that back into the quantum field. So whatever I have put out there, I would draw that back into where it never came from. In case you didn't hear that, that's the key point.  Or in the Course in Miracles it says, I have done this, and it is this I would undo. Done this, I have done this cosmos, and it is this cosmos I would undo. You can forget about, did I make this one pregnant? Did I murder somebody? Did I live a good enough life? Was I a good enough son and a good enough daughter? Look what this kind of thinking does to family relationships. Think how much guilt is associated with family relationships. Was I good enough? Was I a good enough son or daughter or a niece or nephew or father or mother? All this stuff about family relationships from the quantum perspective is a bunch of the Huey. Family dynamics, having a good family, having a good wholesome family and everything.  It's all total fabrication. No wonder there's guilt about it. Not that guilt's natural. The unified field isn't going, I am so guilty for being one. It doesn't have that experience. Switch it off at any moment. Any moment that you want to. It's not real. It was very touchy, beautiful to see the crystals of the water. So when you treat with love and not love, the difference. Yeah, we talked about the idea that it seems like thoughts can be made manifest in that particular sequence. We were talking about random generators and how just the intention to have more ones can bring about more ones, or just thinking about water molecules and then the different pictures just showed it. So that just shows the power of thoughts. But also, in the end, where could that power of thought lead you except to the quantum field?  So that's one of those stepping stone ideas where you start to see, wow, if I'm thinking thank you, or thinking I love you, or the chi of love, that's a pretty interesting snowflake, a picture of a water molecule.  Then he says if our thoughts can do this to water molecules, imagine what they can do to us. Imagine what they can do to my perception of the cosmos. If I'm holding on to hatred, grievances, if I'm holding on to the idea of separation, then I will see a fragmented cosmos. Not that it's real, but that's what I'll perceive. Huge implications. Imagine growing up with a science teacher when you're sixth grade or something, or when you're in high school, and you get this as a presentation of science. Well, that will have an impact. It's a message there. Sometimes it's just mind blowing. None of this matters because we're just a unified field, and there aren't any people here or whatnot. And yet it's kind of fun, and it's definitely where the mind is going, but then there still seems to be these practicalities in terms of living with what seems to be a body in the world. And sometimes I feel like we hang around in that area of mind blowing stuff and still needs to be a bridge to where we are now. Yeah, I think of course that's what my seeming life's work has been. It's all on the internet. It's all there. The bridge from human being to divine reality is a beautiful... It's not a real journey, but metaphorically it's very helpful to go from things. We were up in Gordon's land today, and he was just giving us this beautiful tour of his property and eating the fruits and being in the flow and out of nature. It was pristinely quiet. You were there. And then with the twinkle in his eye, he says, I have no bills. Now that's practical. If I looked at you and I said, imagine if you could live in a state of mind where you didn't have any bills to deal with. That's a practical kind of thing. Without getting into quantum physics, you know, you could say, well, that feels just the sound that feels pretty good. My shoulders are relaxing a little bit. I can breathe a little deeper if it's a practical reality. So that's like a step. Now, no bills by itself, you know, you have to go into what is it? If I'm living in a state of harmony, if everything is becoming so simple and easy and I'm experiencing the quantum field and the flow of all that is, then that is very simple and very practical. But if I believe in ego constructs, lack, scarcity, those bills are going to... In general. Bills in general. The concept of bills. If I believe in the concept of bills. If I have no bills, but I perceive that there's others that do have bills. Oh, that's a killer. Or that thing of possessions, you know, St. Francis was big on no possessions, you know, in Assisi and everything. But if you still believe in the concept of possessions, that will sink your mind right back down into the illusion. So it literally has to become... I think Keith's question is that it all sounds really good and very high and beautiful. But practically speaking, what about the things that I have to actually deal with on a day-to-day basis? That's really the question. And what I say is, in the end, time itself, time and space and the day-to-day is even up for grabs to be questioned, you know. When does a day begin and when does it end? What about these artificial increments of time that we call days and weeks and months and hours and minutes and seconds? What is a second or a minute or an hour or a day or a week or a month or a year or a decade or a century or a millennium? What does any of that really, really have to do with the clondon field? Nothing. What about spatial things about Europe and America and Australia and Asia, all these different continents, continental drifts and all these theories about how the continents drifted and everything? What's that had to do with the quantum field? Nothing. What's all this struggle about interpersonal relationships? Are we in a relationship or not? Is it a good relationship or not? Do we have good communication or bad communication? What does all that have to do with the quantum field? Nothing. You start to get a sense that the only practical thing is the quantum field and you start to get in your mind that everything else other than the quantum field is, by definition, irrelevant. Why? Because it's a hallucination of fragmentation.


Alrighty, let's play this in full We got bubbles Nice, it's very cool Now before I say anything There was someone that posted a comment on the channel and I'm gonna read that to you just in case you didn't see this the very valid points I never thought about that to me it was just about the mechanics and Not really thinking about what he or she was saying I remember who commented this So the question is why would this character leave in the first place? Because this is really big and seems very very safe But the argument here is that this could probably already be on fire all of that Maybe wood and the sheets that could already have The fire on and maybe you could have like a quick glance this arm Coopy I know this is very a destructive note as it changes everything I'm just want to pass it along because there's some good notes in there You know that could be something where it is slightly more like oh gotta be careful this fire here So then That would be the jump over there So that could have a very nice effect in terms of storytelling. That's the note here Maybe the bed is even sinking to the lava slowly, right? So it could almost be a tilt or something like this how it's slowly going down and There's fire here, which adds more urgency The dresser is made of wood so he wouldn't be able to hang out there for too long either Which is why it continued through the dangerous jumps Right, so it's basically following the logic of everything's on fire Right, so but then you have to start going all over then is this on fire is this on fire They could be this and fire could be creeping up here And again quick look maybe over there And they could be like a drawer that's out on fire or you're slowly going out And maybe maybe the lava is raising. I don't know and then this happens. What does he say here? Maybe the door or some kind of exit is just beyond the swivelly chair And that's why he goes over here. So maybe Tricky with with this how you would do that, but maybe this would be the wall But why would you have I mean, I guess you could do something where the desk could be here and that's the wall and here is a window and And You know somewhat half open and it could be doing the swivelly thing It could be This and on something like that could almost be like an arm reach out We need to get to the window but turns again And then there's the same thing trying to get to To the window as you know by now everything will be on fire Anyway, that was a comment on the channel. I thought those are interesting notes Since you are mentioning here in your email General feedback here would be great. You know that things are still clunky. So that's why passing this along Let's pretend none of this happens. I mean this could also just be cosmetic and you know It could just be tilted and it would be maybe a slight change in that leg pose and the rest is just fire But it doesn't really the only thing would be maybe some head turns But speaking of head I'd be careful on something like this. It feels like that head has a You know world headline ike head whatever the control is on that rig But there's a lot of change here in terms of the rotation in the chest And then going back while that head doesn't quite move. It feels very fixated here I know that's the that's the point of interest there for the character to look at But it feels very much like a stable gimbal Where the head doesn't move you might be able to go in there with a earlier foot roll And as you get to this with like a slight earlier swivel around this These are picky notes here and maybe you want to It might be a bit of a bit of a faster push maybe a bit up And then by now that leg would trail a bit more So you really want to feel the push that this is pushing really hard until The character is like that where it's off balance enough to be on this side so maybe A bit more that and as you push this fast this arm would drag just probably a bit more Because of that sudden surge this feels a bit Conky like you mentioned here that turn how It starts a rotation this way, but then kind of stops and also line wise See this it's almost if you do this here See how that chest doesn't go past well probably delete this past that Line here that I'm trying to draw See here So it could be something Not changing color but taking on onions getting here as you turn and have a Push off here, but it's still a bit of a forward lean That by this I will probably do less hip forward chest back Maybe have that so that character is still somewhat hunch forward. It also adds to The line going I need to go this way and also kind of the urgency and just the feel I need to move forward And then delay that a bit Because I know you're doing this going back looking because of that, right? But it's also looking here. So I would just make sure that this works a bit Stronger in terms of that change of momentum Once you're there with the proper weight and everything Then this goes up and then whoa, and then you can have that reaction But then I'll probably also be in the pose where It might be something where it's a bit more out Like that where it's always a bit too relaxed. I think at this at this point character might be more ready Overall just a more triangle pose on your legs there And then you can always bring the legs together for the jump I do like this though. I do like the wobbliness and whoa getting ready Same thing here. Just watch out for your head. Head has a lot of one axis rotations in a lot of Staying within the same axis doing big moves Because even on something like this here you you have to think about what what side is is favorite this side Or this side. It's just like lean maybe to the side left hand right handed I mean, this is more stable because this is off the edge here So all of that will also change the side to side rotation, which then in turns In turn changes the balance here and the rotation side to side That's cool This really feels delicate. Whoa, that's cool. I like it both of that would just be proceeding with arcs and and Spacing and timing all that, you know, you get some points where the arc where the hand stays and pops back and suddenly goes down So that's for later cleanup or in the land like this Bringing one arm lower just for negative space. I probably rotate this further back So we don't have this this growing out. This might even be See how much you can twist it, but imagine that would be a bit further out so that this Shoulder here and then you can still see part of that arm Just for silhouette. So you have more stuff like that And less stuff like this where just where's that arm? This momentum wise watch out. There's a big move back here especially with This rotating over and the momentum going back and then here it suddenly stops. So this would definitely continue either you slide that foot back for uh balance Or that stays here and takes it off all the way back here To be a bit more balanced there, but that move back Right there doesn't work Just because there's so much energy momentum starting that just stops. So that has to continue that route would probably be here Excuse me, and then you have to look at okay. Well, how does that route stop from going there? This is this leg sliding back then pushing this way or is this take taking a step back and then pushing this way Again, I think this you might get a bit too relaxed I think you still want to have arms up and maybe Some faster head darts looking around like what can I do? What can I do? Maybe it's because of that. It's a bit more of an urgent Look that is good then then you go. Whoa Same thing as you move over this way It's a big move that kind of stops. So you want to make sure that that doesn't Go back stop too quickly same thing here with this going back you're going back like that And I know you mentioned this is all clunky I'm just mentioning what I'm seeing and then you can we can grab all those notes and Do whatever you want to do this starts to feel also a bit too Sideways I almost rotate this a bit more I mean I know he has to look at that and it is a bit of a sideways move It might just be a bit sooner turning over into a position like that And then you have to look at the transition of Oh, probably when we bring that leg in sooner, so it's the leg that initiates that turn And then have a bit more drag on that It's like whoa, and then it Catches up might still be dragging and then it catches up might even go out this way And then you can think about well, do I want to do the window here table here change? And that's about that It's almost like everything should be on fire. He looks into camera and goes this is fine All right, thank you All right There's an email you can sign up you can start whenever you want you can submit whatever you want You get 16 submissions either way a like and subscribe would be awesome. All right. Thank you


Hey, good morning everyone. You're all awake? Good. Anyway, welcome to the pipeline presentation of spring. This is really a first here, because this is a little bit more technical than I normally get, and maybe this is also not my area of expertise, but I'll try to explain it as best as I can. For those of you who don't know me, I'm Andy, I work at Blender, and in April we made a film, well in April we published a film, we premiered a film called Spring, and yeah, we made it over the course of the year at the Blender Institute, Animation Studio, and yeah, we published it in April. And for me this was really a first, because this was actually the first film I was really directing, and I had a number of other tasks during the production, so I was not only scrambling to make this a good film, but I was also doing lighting, and I also did environment modeling, and I did the occasional map painting for the film, and I did a lot of simulation for it, and some rigging for the simulation, like the hair for spring, hair grooming was also a lot of fun to do, shot assembly, which ended up eating most of my time, and that's actually most of what this talk is also going to be, and finally some occasional rig fixes, you know, because we didn't have our rigor in-house, and some things needed to be fixed, but also the animator had to do rig fixes, so yeah, and finally grading, so there's a big number of things that I was fortunate enough to get my hands on, and that was really cool, because I could look into all these different areas of filmmaking, and yeah, this is why I'm giving this presentation, because I want to share that with you guys, and we'll see, so filmmaking is really complex, and for a short film it's a little bit simpler, but you still have to do all these steps to get to the final product, and how do you do those things, and how does everything get together? If you read up some of that stuff on the internet, you get a lot of simplified versions of it, you know, there's this pipeline thing, and the word pipeline suggests that filmmaking is really a linear operation, you go from the first concepts to the storyboards, and then you make an animatic, and then you end up somewhere with the final film, it's really not like that, it's more like a lot of things overlap during the whole production, so a lot of departments have to work with each other, and they have to communicate, that's a very big challenge of filmmaking, and the pipeline is really there to just facilitate that, to help people to communicate with each other, and on the most fundamental level it's about putting all the stuff together, so the putting all the stuff together is what this is about, and I don't have enough time to show you everything, because you could literally give an entire conference about the things that we learned during this production, but yeah, here we go. Another thing is what makes us as the Blender Animation Studio different from the rest, apart from the fact that we use Blender. For Spring we used Blender 2.8, we switched halfway through the production to Blender 2.8, and that was really wild because everything was super nice and cozy, Blender 2.79, and then we had to port our entire workflow to Blender 2.8 while it was being developed, and that was super challenging, and that also influenced the entire way that the film was being made in many ways. Another thing is of course that we are an open source studio, so we try to be very open about everything, and we want to make sure that we use open source software for filmmaking, because we don't think that filmmaking should be limited to big studios that can afford to push all this money through development of stuff, so we try to, while we use Blender for almost everything, and there's some 2D work that has to be done in Krita, Inkscape, GIMP, and that kind of stuff, and then there's other open source tools that we use, and we develop as well. The next thing, the next challenge is that we don't have a really big team, like for Spring, it wasn't really like we had a, well not a handful of people, but a bit more than a handful of people to make this film, and that means that a lot of people have to do a lot of different tasks, like you could see from my first slide, like everyone had to engage in a number of things that they weren't originally planning to do, but sometimes you just have to put out the fires in the places where they get started, and a big thing was also that we didn't have a full-time TD on this project, like we had a lot of really great developers on this project who were like really putting all their energy into Blender 2.8, and the filmmaking aspect of that was sometimes on the sidelines, because you want to do all this great stuff with Blender, but sometimes you can't put, you can't do everything, so that's also where the pipeline kind of ended up being very manual, very grungy, very down to earth, because a lot of the things that we would otherwise automate, we couldn't, because there was simply no time for it. That's maybe what you'll see here. Another big thing is that we published everything on the Blender Cloud as we go, so during spring we had Friday weeklies, that's the right name, and then on Monday when we all got back into the office, we published it on the Blender Cloud, so it was out there immediately for people to see, and we gathered this huge library of all the concept arts and the work in progress shot, like on a shot by shot basis, the work in progress of the film, was really cool, but it also just exposed us for a lot of input, and of course you want to follow everyone's advice, make sure that you're not doing anything stupid, so that was also really challenging. So let's figure out how to make a film. So I think the most important thing for me, the most down to earth thing for me to start with, is where do I put everything, right? So where do we put everything in the studio? It's kind of a little bit of a twofold thing, like it's a bit more complicated than that of course, but for us artists, we basically have to worry about two things. So we have our own hard drives, and those house the production repository of Spring, this is where we store all the things that make up the film, and that's on the hard disk, it's managed by a versioning tool called Subversion, it's fairly old, it handles binary diffing really well, so that's why we still use it, and the artists commit and get updates from that SVN, and then we also have the shared storage, which I will just refer to it as Slash Render, because that's how we call it in the studio, and that's where all the big stuff ends up being. I'll get into a bit more detail. So this is the most important folders of the Spring repository. We have libraries, we have the edit there, we have all the shots and the scenes and the tools, we put that all in those very important folders. In the libraries, we put more folders for characters, for props, for environment assets, for the sets, can't read that actually, some extra nodes, and then maps for generalized textures. In characters, we have subfolders for each character, so that's where the actual blend files for the characters end up being, it's usually a big mess of files, but there's a main file, for example, Spring.blend, where you find the character as a collection, and we have maps, which are specific to that character. It's similar a bit in props, so you have maps again, just for the individual props, and this is where all the props end up being. This is actually not props, the nodes are really small, maybe I should look there. What I just said, sets, this is where we store the sets, and then there's a bunch of other things, edit contains the main edit, I'll go back to that later, and nodes, we store some general node setups there, tools are tools specific to that production, scripts, add-ons and that kind of stuff. The main thing is scenes, scenes contains all the shot structure of the films, and in subfolders there, we manage how the different scenes come together and the shots within those scenes. I'll get to that later also. On the other side of things, for the big data storage, we have slash render, so it's all about, this is where the caches go, this is where the final frames go. We have shots and frames, which are kind of similar, frames is more like the render farm output, so all the raw stuff from our internal farm gets dumped there, and then shots is where it gets cleaned up later on, and everything gets nicely put together, so we can refer it for the rest of the process. We have plates for background plates that get to be re-rendered and used in individual shots, and export is where always the latest version of the film is, if there is a change, so each Friday we'll render an export, but I'll get to that later. These are the two things that we as artists have to worry about in the studio, these are the two locations that we mainly interface with, and how this interfacing actually works, I'll explain that in the course of this presentation. Let's get to actual production. You've seen this earlier, and it's a bit simplified because I don't include everything of the whole production process, like concept art is not in there, and some of this stuff, like character development, might be even before the storyboarding starts, or some of this stuff might be in different order, but the main thing to take away from this is that you have basically two things here. You have one thing that goes on during the entire production, and that's asset production, so you're developing all the things that you put into the shots later on, and then you have shot production, which is more of a cyclic thing, it's a cyclic operations because you have many different shots in spring, we had 102, and you just go through these things, and it repeats a lot, because for each shot you need to set it up again, and then you need to link stuff, so a lot of cycles happening there. Let's start with the first bit. How did we do the storyboarding for spring? Storyboarding is a very versatile process. We've seen a lot of great work by tangent animation, like how they do, how they work their magic with grease pencil and everything for us. All the tools were still in development, and we were a bit uncomfortable with it, because we're not storyboard artists per se. Our storyboards were done in post-it notes, and we started out using grease pencil and a number of other things, but it really became too much of a thing that you have to worry about how the tools work and that kind of stuff, and that was really getting in the way. For us, the best communication tool was just to put the stuff on the wall, because also it was me, Hjalte and Pablico, our animator, who are putting these storyboards together, so a wide range of different styles, but we had to communicate about it, and post-its were really the best way. We then scanned those in batches on A4 paper, we cropped them, and we put them in a blender sequencer, and this is how we put the first version of the film together. This is how the first animatic was born, and this is also how the genesis of the edit.blend contains the entire edit of the film during the entire production, and it changes over the course of the production, of course, and you move things around, but it's always your film, you always have a film to look at, and it'll come back during this presentation. So this is how the first animatic was born. It's really a crude thing with really crude sound effects, but it helped getting our minds around this thing, because it's a really complicated thing. It's very good to, even at the simplest, in the simplest form, to have a version of the film at every time of the production. While that's going on, there's also character development, and I could go on and on and on about character development. It's really important, and it's currently our focus at the studio also with the Rain Rig and the Rain Tutorials to make this process better, and it's a time-consuming process, and it's the most important thing, because your character is the main focus in the entire story. It's how you connect with it, and it's so important. So there's a lot of back and forth between concept artists, modelers, sculptors, textures, animators, and rigors, and that goes on during the entire production, and it ends at the very end of the production when the last frame is rendered. So it's immensely complicated. The second most important thing I would say is props, because in Spring we had a lot of props that were actually related to the characters, and we also started fairly early. Might be a bit wrong here, but we started them fairly early because our staff, the chimes, and other things were really important to the story, and that goes on also to the end. And props are usually the things that are objects, but they can still be rigged because they need to be animated by people, and they also need to be constrained to the characters. So they're the second most important thing, because they're also there on the screen, and they move and everything. So layout. After storyboarding is done, again this is very simplified, but after storyboarding is done you want to get a three-dimensional sense of how the movie looks like, and layout is really the best thing, because you're really mocking up how everything looks like in 3D, and you get a lot of clues about where to place the cameras and how sets are built and that kind of stuff. For us the layouts were really made in big files, like one blend file per scene, and all the edits within that blend file were done with camera markers. So we would place the markers and then put in a lot of cameras in the scene to edit the film together and to find a way to put the storyboard on the screen, and of course that would also get put into the edit. So you see that there's very crude animation, a lot of skiing dogs, and yeah, but it really just helps to put everything together, and I always think that's funny. Anyway, while the layout is in progress, it's also a very good tool to get your sense or your mind around what this movie is made out of, like all the different assets that need to be put into shots, like all the things we need, we need trees, we need rocks, we need plants, we need icicles, and all those things, like at that point it starts to dawn on you what kind of work you need to be putting into this. So this is also where slowly we start to work on an asset library, because it can be very mind-numbing to think of the whole movie as this very complex shot by shot thing, but if you have a library of stuff that you can just bash together, it's a bit easier. So library work started really early on, Julian did a lot, he modeled the entire film basically, so it also goes on during the entire production, because something is never finished. Once you have a good library or you have some assets, you can start putting the sets together, and sets are really the background for each shot, and in the set file, like for example here in the set file, we link all the assets from the environment asset library, so nothing ever gets appended or so, it's all just a reference. Set building usually starts from the layout, so in layout you get a rough sense of how everything is put together, laid out, and we start from the ground planes and some rough models we made during layout, and then we put them into the sets files, and then we detail them or we replace things, we put collections and we place assets. One of the most important things during that time is ground contact, because over the course of the production you might be working on the set and you start animation and the character still has to put their foot on the right places in the ground, so you have to watch your ground contacts at all times. At this time, we also put the cameras from the layout into the set files, but we also didn't have a good way to keep them up to date, we'll get to that later. We had six different set files, six main set files for the whole film, you can see them listed here, and also the names, and one of the most important ones was the river bed, where like with a pillar, and that was really literally used in almost 80% of the whole film, and the rest of the sets were really just one-offs and things that were constructed out of environment assets for specific shots. At some point, the layout is done, it's never really done, but at some point you have to push production forward, and this is really a crucial step, because in layout it's a very organic and messy process, so the stuff that you're creating there needs to be cleaned up for the rest of the production, so I've said we have this edit, we have all the scenes, like all these scene strips in the edit, and at some point we go in there and, well I go in there and I place these color strips to mark each individual shot, and then the cool thing is that we have this attract add-on, which adds the shot to our internal, into our cloud database, so we can actually access that from the blender cloud, and all the blender cloud users can do this, so this is where we actually get the big picture of how this film is put together on the shot level. We need to name shots, but we can also see how long each shot is, because we get that directly from the frames in the sequencer, and that's really a crucial information for the next step. By the way, how are things named, how are scenes and shots named during this film? We had 11 scenes, 10 plus credits, the scenes were really just given individual names, because it's a short film, you don't have that many, you don't have to number those scenes, so just as a reminder, we give them interesting names, and those are usually prefixed by a number. On the shot level, it's a bit more complicated, so again we have the scene number, then we have the shot number that we increment by five, why do we do that? It's sometimes easier to add a shot in between if you have some space to do things. If this is a bigger production, you might want to increment by 10 or by 100 if you don't know how many shots you're going to add in the middle during this whole process, and then we give it a letter at the end for takes, because sometimes you want to do a different version of that shot. In the blend file level, we give the blend files a little dot notation appendages to signal that this is the task that this blend file is associated with, and these are also put in the shot level of the whole production tree that you saw earlier. Once this cleanup is done, you can kickstart animation basically, usually it's a very stumbling kind of process, because animation also takes a lot of preparation, you know, the rigs need to be done, and there's a lot of stuff that needs to be ready for that time, but you have to put the layout into a form so you can use it for animation, because the animators need some files to work with. They can't start with a layout file, which is incredibly messy, so we create a file called the shotname.anim.blend, and this file links in all the character assets, it links in all the props that are needed for this character, and we link in the sets as a background, and this is really the bread and butter what the animator deals with. So, how does that look like? Well, we're preparing a blend file basically, we're starting with a completely empty file, and then we just go file link, and then we link in collections that are in the rest of the production tree, and for the characters, we had, you know, we had collections and rigs in the collection, so we used the old proxy system for that. We had a tool that was a leftover from the agent project, which was kind of a bit icky to get to work with blend 2.8, but that helped us also to prepare individual things within the file, but not a lot of us automated there. Then the most important thing is the frame range, so how long the shot is going to be, we get that from a tract, we copy paste it from a tract into the file, and usually we start the blend files with frame 101 to give us a nice pre-roll for simulations and that kind of stuff, and we also add handles of five frames, so whenever there's like an edit change, or even just, you know, for motion blur glitches, you know, when the character's moving into a shot, you don't want it to be static before the shot starts, you want to have it, like you want it to have some movement, so there is no first frame that looks out of place. Then we set up the collections for the animators, and those get prefixed also with the shots, because we might want to link them into other files later on, and this is also where, like sometimes the animator also makes different collections to manage everything, so it's not all set in stone, and then there's a crucial step, which is putting the camera from the layout into the animation file. Now we used normal cameras with object animation for the layout, and we had a camera rig for the production, because we wanted to have some additional controls, and we wanted to use action to animate the camera, and we wanted to, you know, give it different pivot points, so we had a camera rig that needed to get this information from the layout camera, and as some of you know, armature coordinates and world coordinates are sometimes, they don't really work, so most of the time we just had to hand animate the camera and do our first camera pass at that level, and then, yeah, you just prepare everything for, you know, for setting different visibilities, so the sets are usually set up in a way so you can hide certain things, so the animator doesn't have to see everything at once, and also some things are just low resolution, so we want to make sure that only the essentials are there for the animator to worry about. Then often, we, well, most of the time, we put a reference shot into the file, so we, I mentioned the exports, so we always put the latest exports into the file as a sequence strip, and then we line up the shots with the actual start and end, and so the animator gets some context where they actually are in the movie, like the previous shot and the next shot. Then once the animator keeps doing animation, they do viewport renders, and they save them in sequential order on our shared server, and this is the kind of stuff we can critique and we can do notes on, so you're saving the stuff in shots, and you're referencing that from the edit. A next crucial step is naming the actions, so all the actions get prefixed with the shot, and then the character it's associated with. While animation is going on, you you can already start doing lighting, and usually during spring, we started lighting roughly after the first blocking, so you already get an idea of how the shot is going to look like. We create a lighting file, and this is also called dot lighting dot blend, and that links in the character and the props, the sets, but also since we're constructing a shot, we're also linking in individual environment assets and changing that environment for this specific shot, and there we can, like we have a clean file, and we can set render defaults, and we can optimize this file for lighting. Then the crucial step is that we link the actions from the blend file, you know, we have to make sure that they're named correctly, so whenever the animator updates something, we get that change in the lighting file as well, so we're linking the actions from the animation file into the lighting file, and you can see that here, like you can touch all that stuff, it's still left to the animator, so while you're doing lighting, you get the latest updates from the animator, and then of course we set up different collections for lights to be put at, and we can shuffle things around, and we can add more objects, and those get put into different collections. The test renders from those lighting files are put into frames, and those are also loaded into the edit. While we're doing lighting, we can also do simulation, and usually simulation has to be done after the animation is finished when you have all the movement in the shot, so we create a simulation file, and the simulation file can be a bit more messy, but it still links the animation from the animation file, and then of course we need all the other stuff that we have in the shots before. As I said, the file is very messy, so here we can do a lot of things, we can throw objects around and make stuff local partially, which is really cool in the new collection system. You can only get into your file what you need, and also you can make objects local and still keep their mesh data linked, and of course you have to make objects local, in this case if you want to influence simulation parameters, but since the armatures and the actions are all linked, it's all still kept in sync. There was a lot of simulation during spring, mainly smoke simulation, so the smoke caches were really the biggest data we had to push around, so the simulation file puts all the stuff into caches, and there's more stuff that gets put into the caches, like we have some general simulations, like for falling branches, for grass, for growing plants, those were cached to Alembic, and all kinds of different things that we need in the background, like generic caches. From the lighting file, we can reference all the data from the caches, so we link everything into the lighting file. For smoke, it's a bit complicated because you need the smoke domain, actually, so you append the smoke domain, and then you're loading the VDB caches on top of it, and then you can do lighting and shader tweaks on top of that. There's more simulation for spring, like we had first simulation, which was a big thing, but we only did it in a number of shots, so we couldn't do it on the entire film, so we just did it in very specific shots where Autumn, the dog, had a big moment in front of the camera. Another big thing was particle simulation. Particle effects were handed a little bit differently on the linking side. We didn't cache them to file caches per se. They were cached within the blend file as particle data, so what we do is we reference that data in the form of collections from the lighting file, so the lighting file links in the collections from the simulation file with all the particle animations in it. So here you can see, like all the pebbles, they were simulated in the sim file, and that whole collection was just linked in, and that means that every time we update the simulation, we also get all the new data in. Finally, we can do some rendering. Now, this is final rendering, of course, because during the whole lighting process, we're doing rendering all the time, we're tweaking things, and at some point, you can do the final thing with all the samples in the world. So what are the settings for it? We rendered everything to 2K, and we outputted that render as multi-layer XR, 32 bits. Why did we do that? I'll get to that later. We used 2,000 samples, plus sometimes we used 4,000 samples, sometimes we used 6,000 samples in some shots, which were incredibly noisy for smoke. We limited the number of bounces to 2 or 3, and we used motion blur as well, which was incredibly time consuming, but crucial for the animation to work, so these are the settings that we use generally in all the shots. Of course, they vary a bit. Then we used Cryptomat, which was really, important and very handy, and we denoised also. We put in all the denoising passes into the multi-layer XR, so we had the noisy image and the denoised image always in the XR output. Those XRs get very big, and they're saved from the render farm into the shots directory. Why did we use multi-layer XR? Well, we did some cool tricks using sample merging, which is a process where you can render a chunk of samples on the farm, and then you get it back. It might be 10 samples, and you see, okay, the shot is okay. There's no pink textures. Let's go it. So we render it with an offset, and we render more samples on top of that. And then what we can do on the farm is just merge that together, and this is actually what Flamenco, the thing that Sebrin made, supports, which is super cool, because you get a really quick version at the start, and then you can add more as time allows it. Then, of course, we did denoising, and the denoising we did actually in post, because we had to do all the sample merging, so we couldn't do all the denoising after the fact. So we had all the denoised passes, and we used this handy operator in Blender to denoise the individual frames and override them. So here we get the denoised image. Once we have the frames, the denoised frames, the clean plates and everything, we do some compositing on top of that, and sometimes also fix this. So we create a compositing file, and this file is usually separated from the rest of the whole production. It doesn't link in any animation, and we link in the data from shots into that file. So you get frame sequences that are loaded into a compositing setup, and in this compositing setup, we can do a number of cool things that are specific to that individual shot. So I mentioned Cryptomat, so we can access all the objects and do adjustments based on that. What kind of adjustments?  We had some problems making him visible, actually. So what we could do with custom animated masks and Cryptomat is actually do some color correction, like some brightness changes on top of it. Of course, we didn't do a lot of color correction in the compositing because we didn't want to deviate it. So we did grading at the end of everything, but I'll get to that. Also, what we did is render fixes, a lot of render fixes. So we had to border render a lot of stuff on the farm that had to get fixed. For example, Autumn got first simulation during the middle, like after the shot was actually rendered, so we had to comp him in with the new simulation on top of it. So we used Cryptomat, and here you can see custom animated masks just frame by framing to put the dog into the shot with the actual simulation. And then we did other things, lots of other things, like, for example, we had these glitches all over the place where particles were floating around, and then we did some custom masking to hide our crimes after the fact. Then also, what happened in compositing was adding plates, most notably for fog breath, and we rendered out these plates with smoke simulation, and we rendered them out in Eevee because that was super quick.  And we put those plates in the plates directory, and we referenced them from the compositing file as well. So you can see there are just a number of image strips, and they get some color correction, and then they get some translation on top of them to place them in the right point, and then they're just added on top of everything. Number of other things get added in compositing. We had vignetting. We had lens flares. We had some chromatic aberration on top of everything, very, very subtle, which was just basically a RGBA separation with some translation happening. And yeah, we output that compositing, this compositing sequence into the server, and we saved that as 16-bit EXR files, usually to save some space, but also we don't need all that multi-layer data later on. So 16-bit EXRs, we put them in shots, and we can do grading based on that. And the grading was actually done in the edit and reading the data from shots. So here you can see the film with the grading on top of it. So we did all the grading in adjustment layers, and there was usually just some color, small color corrections to get shots color-wise to line them up with each other, and that was done in adjustment layers in the edit of the film, loading all the 16-bit EXRs, which were linear, by the way, and the edit was all in filmic. We also did some other grading, like some generalized film effect, if you can call it. It just makes it a little bit more filmic, like to add some warmth to the highlights and make the shadows a bit more contrasty. Yeah. Then we also added some sort of film grain on top of everything, because we had denoising, we had real noise, and we just wanted to put everything a little bit together, so we rendered some noise plates, and we put it really, really subtly on top of everything, just to mash everything together and make it feel organic. Then we can output the film for further processing, and we do that as a TIFF sequence. It's actually a 16-bit, not 12-bit, that's an error there. So we output everything to 16-bit TIFF, you can see 16, yes, and that also gets put on the server. From those 16-bit TIFFs, we can actually process them and render out the film using FFMPEG and put it on YouTube. We also put all the data of the film on the Blender Cloud, all the characters, and all the assets for the film, and we packaged some of the shots that you can see on the cloud. We put everything together in April, and that's where we are at the end. I think I'm a bit over time, I'm sorry for that. I just wanted to say thank you for our great team to make all this possible. This is not my own work, I'm presenting the work from other people, so a big round of applause for them. Thanks to all the people who watched the film, and all the 3 million people on YouTube, and thank you for watching this presentation.


This video is going to be a little bit different than usual. What is up everybody? This is Chris from the Rewired Soul, where we talk about the problem, but focus on the solution. And today's problem is how our lives are being dictated by our fear and caring way too much about what people think about us, especially when we have well intentioned motives. You know what I mean? But you know, like here's what I need you to do. I'm tossing in a clip real quick. It's going to be about one or two minutes. So bear with me and please watch it and we'll be right back. It's crazy to me how much I care about everybody's opinion. Like these two people in the fourth row have hoodies with my quotes on it. I care so much about what they think about me. You would not believe it while equally really giving no about what they think.  I never let somebody else's opinion matter more than mine of myself. All right. So that right there is Gary Vaynerchuk. If you don't know about him, you better ask somebody. But if you need help overcoming fear, if you need motivation, if you just need positivity in your ears to drown out the noise of the people in your life, go check out his channel, go check out his podcast, read his books, whatever you got to do. But I wanted to talk about this because this is something that comes up so much. My friends, my family, my coworkers, you know, clients that I work with. I hear this all the time. People are so worried about what people think about them. We're being driven by fear. It is holding us back. It is killing us mentally, spiritually, emotionally, whatever you want to call it because we care so much about what people think.  And here's the reason why and I want you to remember this. To thine own self be true. Okay, because I hate to burst your bubble, but you are never ever ever going to make 100 percent of the people happy. So once you get that through your head, you're going to start doing a lot better. So the only person that you need to get right with is yourself. Check your motives. Always check your motives and your intentions. Are you coming from a good place? Are you trying to help people? Are you trying to become a better person? Because if those are the cases, then you're doing just fine. If you stay on that path and you're being guided by your moral compass, then it doesn't matter what anybody thinks about you. That is the only way that I continue to improve and succeed in life and improve myself mentally, because I realize, especially with this YouTube channel, I know that some people just aren't going to like me, right? They're not going to like what I say. And heck, I've even had people come up in my comments, act and all ratchet, and then through a conversation, they're like, oh man, like this is a decent dude, like he actually does have good intentions, right? Like I talked to my fellow YouTube creators out there and, you know, they're worried about posting different things and what people are going to think and, you know, are they going to look at me this way or that way and this and this and this? I'm like, well, what are your motives? What are your intentions? Are you trying to get clicks? Are you trying to get views? Are you trying to use people to make money?  Are those the things that you're doing? Because if you're not, then you're fine. Then keep going in the direction that you're going. And here's the thing too. Not everybody's going to believe you. Not everybody's going to believe that you have good motives and good intentions. And here's why. See, I can empathize with that. I understand that because I lived a very guarded life.  How was I supposed to trust that you weren't trying to use and abuse me, right? So when people come at me sideways and they think that I have bad intentions, like I get it, I empathize with them. I'm like, you know what, maybe they've grown up the same way that I do. Maybe they're used to people trying to use them. Here's a prime example. Here's a prime example for you. So some of you who follow my channel, you know, I've done some videos about Demi Lovato and her situation. So I made a video about the mean tweets about her and I made a response to it. So the next day I was on Twitter just kind of trying to check for updates. See how Demi Lovato is doing. I saw more people talking about these mean, you know, insensitive tweets out there. So I posted my video in a couple of places. I'm like, hey, I absolutely agree. I actually made a video on this if you want to check it out. And this one young woman, she came at me sideways about it.  Right? I'm like, huh, that's interesting. That's interesting because we live in this world where people are so used to people just trying to spam links and trying to get, get, get, get, get. But let me make it clear and I understand this young woman doesn't know me. But here's the thing. I'm not trying to become the next Jake or Logan Paul or YouTube millionaire. I have a full time job. I go to work every single day and I love what I do and I get to pay for my bills and support my son and all those things. But I love helping people so much with their mental health that I come back home and do this, right? So I share my content just to do a few things. Increase awareness about mental illness and addiction to decrease the stigma. I try to educate people and help people understand this young woman who's doesn't know me from anybody else.  And I get that. I empathize. She doesn't understand my intentions. But here's the thing. Once people get to know you, they will eventually see that your motives are good and your motives are pure. When you are guided by your moral compass, you know that you are going to be fine, all right? So we need to drown out the noise. We need to quit worrying. What's my mom going to think? What's my dad going to think? What's, you know, my coworkers or people or, you know, these random people online, like, here's like, man, it breaks my heart seeing so many YouTubers talk about these comments and these comments and how it puts them in a dark place and these negative comments. Like, what? What? Like welcome to the Internet. Like, do you not realize that a lot of people are just Internet trolls and they're going to say whatever they can just to try to get under your skin by letting that affect you. You are giving them exactly what they want. Like, you should see me reading my comments, like, especially the negative ones or people who make fun of like my weight or my appearance or whatever. I crack up about it.  I'm like, this person might be having a really bad day. I've even had people comment saying they were having a bad day. You know what I'm saying? So like, but the fact that I do care about what you all think of me, it keeps me moving in the right direction. Here's the thing that you got to realize. The only time you should care what people think is when you're doing something wrong, all right, because what that is, guilt, shame. This is the body. This is the mind's internal alarm system. It's letting you know that you're straying away from the right path.  When people are assuming things about you, oh, my God, they're right. You know what I mean? So if that's happening, then you really need to take a little audit of your situation and say, am I doing the right thing? Are my motives good? Are my motives pure? Was I being selfish, self-centered or self-seeking in this situation? Because if the answer is no, then you're okay. You need to start drowning out what other people are thinking about you, all right, because here's the thing. Nobody on earth has ever done anything amazing, anything great. It pursued their dreams by caring so much about what other people think about them, all right, and use that as motivation to overcome your fears when you want to try something and, hey, I'll burst your bubble again. Aside from not being able to please a hundred percent of the people, here's another bubble burst. You're going to fail. You're going to fail a lot. You know what I'm saying? But like, man, like one other thing that I love about Gary Vee is like, like learn how to like take that and use that as motivation. Like when you get knocked back and you're starting at the bottom, man, the only way to go is up. Like I've screwed up. I failed. When you take these failures as learning experiences, you will constantly improve. You will constantly succeed. Listen, everybody, you're talking to a recovering drug addict and alcoholic. I completely destroyed my life by the age of 27. And my life is amazing today because I was able to start at the bottom and just do nothing but upward trajectory, all right. So go out there and screw up and mess up and improve and learn because if you're learning from your experience, you're doing better than most of the people out there. All right. So check in with yourself. Check in with yourself and seeing how much of your life is dictated by caring way too much about what people think, especially people who don't mean a dang thing in your life. All right, but anyways, I just wanted to go on this little rant and I really hope this motivated or inspired some of you and do me a favor. Leave comments down below. Let me know. Let me know why you think you care so much about what people think. And also let's do this. Let's add a second part to this. What's the worst that's going to happen? What's the worst that's going to happen, right? If somebody judges you, okay, we all judge. So let's have a conversation. Let's get it going. Let's provide each other with some support down in the comments below. Okay, but anyways, that's all I got for you. If you like this video, please give it a thumbs up. If you are new here, I'm always making videos to help you out with your mental and emotional well-being. So click that little round subscribe button and thank you to everybody supporting the channel over on Patreon. And if you would like to support the channel and me spreading a message of hope, go ahead or click or tap on that Patreon icon right there. All right. Thanks so much for watching. Quick caring about what people think and I'll see you next time.