[Mike Alderson] I'm Mike Alderson.
And I'm a thinker who makes...
Stuff like this.
So I grew up on the outskirts of Liverpool,
in a working class town, working class family.
Me and my best friend, Billy, we're never happier
than when we were skateboarding the streets in our full Liverpool kids.
And even back then, there were some kids
who want to just to kind of choose a layout and choose a side,
are you a skateboarder or you a footballer?
And we just didn't see why we couldn't be both.
I left school at the age of 16.
I went on to be a mechanical engineering apprentice at the local glass factory.
I learned to weld, I built my own toolkit.
And luckily enough, after two years of that,
I could step away and race mountain bikes professionally.
While I was doing that and getting out my system,
Billy's brother Paul was studying graphic design at a local college.
And I was just intrigued.
I wanted to do what he was doing.
It was this idea of combining pretty pictures with problem-solving
really appealed to me.
So I forced my hands to the local class.
That was a foundation degree.
I did that for two years. I loved every single minute of it.
I was almost over enthusiastic.
And I think that's because
I'd kind of learn what I didn't want to do with the mechanical engineering.
After two years of that I transferred down to Ravensbourne College in London,
where I joined the second year of a degree course, still playing catch up.
I'd take any little gain, I could to play catch up,
taking shortcuts, telling white lies.
So I joined the graphic design course.
I loved it. It was brilliant.
I loved the discipline of it.
But then on the other side of the room,
there was a class called moving image design...
And it was graphic design with a timeline.
That sounded amazing.
So afterwards, suddenly, I was a moving image designer.
I graduated with a first class honors and all that kind of stuff,
and worked in London, cutting my teeth to learning my trade.
One of those shops is Precursor, my favorite shop when I was a student,
and one of the founders of Precursor was called Tim Swift.
And in 2007,
Tim got in touch with me and told me that they would disband the studio
and asked if I wanted to become his new business partner and form a new studio.
The answer was definitely yes.
We met in the pub that night, shook hands and ManvsMachine was born.
ManvsMachine was founded on a mutual feeling that
experimental processes can be relevant to mainstream design and advertising.
And concepts and craft should not be disparate.
We want things to happen in the same space, in the same room, at the same time.
Our process is a constant back and forth between concept and craft.
We didn't even assign job titles for the first seven or eight years,
we were just looking to build a team of thinkers who make and make us who think.
And as long as we've got an equal number of those people on any team,
on any project, in any location,
we feel like we've got the ingredients to make a great job.
And that's why I refer to myself as a thinker who makes.
But what I want to focus on today is another contradiction.
I seem to be drawn to contradictions, it's skateboarding, football,
concepts, craft, experiments, mainstream.
To me, eye candy is something that has that immediate appeal.
It engages you.
And once it's got you, then you can start to reveal the layers
and the thinking within that image.
That's what I want to cherish today is the idea that just throwing shapes,
exploring visually, taking inspiration from the happy accidents.
It's okay if the craft leads to the concept sometimes.
I don't even know why there's such a stigma around post-rationalizing.
If I run a design college, I teach it as a skill.
It's a skill to have, it's a really useful skill to have.
Mark Twain famously said, "Never let the truth get in the way of a good story."
So for the poster today, we're going to tweak that a little bit and say,
never let the idea get in the way of a good visual.
A job came in from Maxon who created Cinema 4D,
which is one of the main 3D packages we use.
They just wanted us to create a launch film
for their next generation of software that just shoved the limitations.
So it was a perfect excuse to let go of the idea
and just let the craft truly lead,
and see where the breaking point was with this idea of do before you think.
There was a small team of us working on it.
So we all just threw a theme into the hat given ourselves targets
to kind of aim for to hit.
And the overarching idea or structure was just the word versus,
the film is going to be called Versus.
So we'd always have the idea of a meeting points or a conflict
to kind of refer back to.
It really was no-holds-barred.
We just looked at a bunch of visual themes
that different people in the team were interested
in animals, patterns, camouflage, flags.
We knew we wanted to look in some 3D scanning,
because that was something we were really pushing at the time.
There was even Dutch still life paintings from the classical era as reference.
The question was, could we create something that was vaguely coherent?
Combining those themes, those visual elements,
animals, patterns, camouflage,
looking into how if we pose them as Dutch still life
in a classical painting style,
what kind of looks would we get.
Got a French bulldog wearing a mask.
Pushing even further into that really kind of painterly effect.
Again, the animals still lives.
We started getting somewhere with the cloth.
We like the idea that the cloth was a mascot,
also something we could lay a pattern on.
And it concealed the animals in a kind of interesting way,
gave them a personality.
We looked into the idea that the patterns could be animated on the animals,
and then creating repeat patterns that are separate from animals,
but made up of parts of the animals.
Maybe even classical patterns that we take into a 3D world
or do we draw the patterns on the animals and paint them on,
like wall paints with this Versus theme, hand paint it, of course.
It felt like every animal in our cast needed a wall banner,
flag for its contour attached to it.
So we design those.
And that's the Owl banner, from the Owl clan.
So it's in the final cast, it was a very meticulous process of
whatever they had at the local taxidermy store.
So we ended up with fox, an iguana, an owl,
a butterfly, and an armadillo.
And a crab, we had a crab as well.
And the animals we borrowed, we went ahead in 3D scanned.
Some of them, especially the feathered creatures were a lot more tricky,
needed a higher end approach,
whilst others we could do on our small tabletop setup in our studio.
And armadillo, you get all the hard surfaces, you don't get all the kind of soft
and the kind of fur hair surfaces, so they need to be added later.
We started to find
something that started to look like we wanted it to a darker space
and moodier space but still with that slightly kind of painterly feel to it.
Ridiculous levels of detail is in the hairs on the ears of this armadillo.
And we wanted this crescendo, visual crescendo.
And that's where the Dutch classical painting came in.
We referenced van Dyck's Samson and Delilah.
On the left there you can see our sketch up,
how this kind of crescendo moment would happen
versus Samson and Delilah by van Dyck.
Even the unwraps textures that you get out of 3D when you scan these animals
became a visual reference points.
You've got the more natural looking, diffuse map on the left there.
But just that iridescent look of the normal map,
it just felt interesting along side by side.
So the last minute we threw in some noodles in that iridescent color palette.
This is what came out the other end.
Fender approached us to create it's campaign for the launch of their new guitar,
the Acoustasonic Jazzmaster.
It was a fusion of two guitars, acoustic and electric.
So the brief was literally a few words.
The Sonic Shape-Shifter.
But the real question was can this approach translate
to the commercial world to real brief?
We found it does, and pretty well actually.
So that was a recent job for Fender.
They came to us with a few words.
There was no brief, no script.
The Acoustasonic Jazzmaster, a fusion of acoustic and electric.
The words they gave us were the Sonic Shape-Shifter
and they said, "Go ahead and do your thing."
And that's how we got there.
And it's definitely a way of working, visual first, see where you get.
It's kind of more like working with clay and then working with hard materials,
like metals and woods.
You feel your way and you start to get somewhere
and everything else kind of flows off the back of that.
And it feeds into this idea we had that we want it to be a visual R&D Studio,
who did meet your deadline and got paid.
No one is above eye candy, not even the biggest brands in the world.
But it's also great when clients want to mix it up
with a combination of techniques, 2D, 3D, photography, live action.
And that's exactly what Spotify wants to do with their new campaign,
Listening is everything.
And that really deserved an everything approach from both an audio
and a visual standpoint.
Possibly the epitome of this approach is the Air Max film we did for Nike.
That thing is just an audio visual feast.
We actually stole the approach from ourselves.
We were creating all these R&D process rules.
When we'd finished a project, we bundle everything up into a nice little edit,
and put it on our website.
And it's kind of closure.
All that exploration was worthwhile,
even the stuff that didn't make the final film.
But we found that these process reels
what they were getting as much interest on our channels
as the final films themselves.
So we said to Nike, "Hey, why don't you use this format to make a film,
a polished process reel if you like?"
All we do is visually explore a day in the life of an Air Max shoe.
Let's just take a minute to talk about the unsung hero, the audio.
Without the audio, these films would just be a silent bunch of frames
back to back, but audio ties it together.
It creates tactile, charming, playful, or dramatic experience.
I can't tell you how important it is.
And we are so thankful to our audio partners
for making us look really good all the time.
And letting craft lead the way isn't restricted to just CG
or motion graphics or animation.
We also found that applying this to live action
has led to some really interesting camera techniques
that we've got on so using Film4 for example.
We found this celluloid filmstrip technique
where we pass through the same space over and over
and it gives a really interesting result.
So let's start it out with a camera move we developed.
And the test you're looking at now is basically a camera phone,
on a skateboard sliding between two speakers.
And it slides through once and then we tile them up over and over again
to create this celluloid filmstrip effect.
We're always creating these visual techniques.
As I say, sometimes it's 2D, sometimes it's 3D,
and sometimes it's with live action.
So this one we were just waiting for that right opportunities come along.
So when the brief came in, we recreated that test in After Effects
by just mapping some imagery into space.
But to show how this technique could host stop frame animation,
it could have live action,
it could have multiple mediums working at once
and it just captured this feel of celluloid filmstrip
put in a kind of contemporary way.
We won the job, so then we have to make it, the toys got bigger.
We went to a location in California, we built sets in the UK.
We used as many traditional film craft techniques as we possibly could.
It was a film channel after all, and that was our internal mantra.
Let's make a film channel, not a TV channel.
We've even burned the set.
Well, the overthinking came in was what was in these worlds.
We had the structure, we had the technique that was locked in.
The client loved it.
And even though CG and visual effects is one of our main tools,
we were lucky enough to peer on our techniques with this,
using traditional film craft wherever possible.
Even if it was more expensive, we'd pop it a light fitting,
or slam a door open by hand.
So each of the six items has three possible endings
and you don't know which one you're going to until you get there.
So in the corridor items alone,
you've got references to Ghostbusters for the trolley.
The corridor and the room numbers are from The Shining,
the gravity is from Inception, the camera from Poseidon Adventure,
the exact paint colors from Grand Budapest Hotel,
the shoes from Barton Fink, the doors, Poltergeist,
and the fire, Backdraft, of course.
So this is just a combination of what we love to do.
On the surface, it's essentially eye candy.
It's got an instant gratification, and that's really, really important.
But if you want to delve deeper and keep looking and keep watching,
you will find that there is media in there,
but the craft is as important as the concept.
I'm going to leave you guys with a little making a film
that shows the fun we had on that Film4 project.
Run cam.
Ready?
We're really fortunate we get to work with clients who support this model
and come on this journey with us.
It's not about staying on lane,
it's finding the right lane for the job or the right two lanes.
It's thinking, it's making, it's making, its thinking.
But as long as you get great results in the end,
there is no right approach or right process.
You just got to get there.
So we'll be able to hear thinking of making and making of thinking
for a long time here.
Hope you are too.