Ian Hubert is a legendary Blender VFX artist who is best known for directing the Blender open movie project, Tears of Steel, authoring the Lazy Tutorial series on YouTube, and creating the mesmerizing dystopian sci-fi short film series, Dynamo Dream.
Lampel and Kent caught up with Ian at BCON LA to find out what it's been like to scale up his productions, where his inspiration comes from, about the one time he used AI, and what weird shift he's noticed in the creative landscape.
You can listen to the full conversation below or wherever you find your podcasts! To see our other episodes, check out cgcookie.com/podcast.
The Creative Shift
One of the tweets from Ian that really stuck out to me was,
Everyone's getting *so* slick. Like are people still in shitty bands?? I can't remember the last time I heard a shitty band! I feel like they're important. - Ian Hubert
I asked Ian to expand on this, and he explained that he’s felt a big shift in the creative landscape over the last 15 years or so.
In the past, someone could work on a project with a ton of creative energy and be really excited about it and have no idea that it kinda sucked. Now, with the internet and social media, everyone is being bombarded with the best of the best and it’s harder to stay excited through the important incubation phase of being bad at a skill.
Instead of being the only kid in school who can do CG, a young person today who is online (which is most of them) is now immediately part of the whole global community of animators. A few people do thrive in that environment, but it can be overwhelming for anyone who falls in the common trap of comparing themselves to others. For a time, it’s really helpful to not know that you suck and to get lost in creating art for the pure fun of it.
Ian also notes that the current economy might be playing a role in the creative shift as well. The stakes are now higher, and fewer people have the free time to fart around in animation software for hours on end instead of doing things that make money right away.
One thing Ian excels at is noticing the interesting in the mundane. What other people might find boring, he sees as an opportunity to expand his appreciation of the world around him. He loves seeing other artists exploring the unremarkable.
You might expect him to be inspired the most by giant robots and giant sci-fi cities, but what he actually had as his desktop background for quite a while was the above shot of a puddle from the short film Impetus by William Landgren. He says that to be good at CG, you have to be obsessed with the real one a little bit.
To be good at CG, you have to be obsessed with the real one a little bit.
Does Ian Hubert use AI?
When the hype around generative AI was at its peak but before artists had spoken out about it much, folks were telling Ian to use it or get left behind. He experimented with making some fake album covers that he then printed out and used in the background on a set for Dynamo Dream.
He had fun making them, but didn’t feel good about them at the last minute and made new ones the old-fashioned way. Ian wants his viewers to know that everything they see in his videos was put there intentionally by a human. The use of generative AI would work against that goal, so he hasn’t messed with it since.
Art, according to Ian, is a package for human ideas, emotions, energy, and / or effort. A big question for him when evaluating art is what did the artist put of themselves into the work?
These days, it’s easy to download some model packs, some HDRIs, and have a photorealistic render in minutes. With AI and other automation tools, a person can make their render look like a million bucks, but he questions if that's really the best goal to have in the first place.
Ian's Process
At CG Cookie, we’ve always been big proponents of blocking out scenes before getting too far into the details, and Ian works the same way on his animations. Since each of his projects are an incredible amount of work over a long period of time, it would be easy to get overwhelmed if he worked on each shot, one by one, to perfection. Instead, he’ll get a rough version of each shot all the way through the pipeline and from there it’s all about improving and fixing things that bug him. It’s an effective way to work!
Ian giving a talk at BCON LA
Blank canvases are intimidating, but if given an existing shot I bet you’d know what you’d want to fix too.
Scaling Up
Most of Ian’s videos have been pretty low budget so far, but last year he had one shoot where he hired an entire camera crew, added way more actors than usual, had managers in charge of every little detail of the set, ordered catering, and rented out a giant boat for the location. I got to join for this particular shoot as one of the background actors and got to see first-hand how much bigger and more complex his productions have gotten since the days of him just filming his friends around town.
When we caught up at BCON LA, I was really curious to know if that experiment of doing everything the more official, Hollywood-like way was worth it. His response: "Oh, absolutely!" But that it was very different, and you might be able to feel that difference when watching the show. Everything had to be planned out much more meticulously ahead of time so that the time spent on location was as efficient as possible. This really increased the speed of the production overall and forced him to focus on the narrative more but also means that less of his creative energy is packed into each second of the episode.
Behind the scenes of the boat shoot with Blake Rizzo and Barry the Art Guy. The release date for the episode is currently unknown.
Because of the success of his web series and his obvious obsession with creativity and quality, Ian has talked to plenty of big-name directors but has so far not taken on any larger projects.
While he would love the opportunity to have a huge budget to do whatever he wants with, he really enjoys the process of smaller productions and sees the constraints as great exercises in problem solving. He remembers these directors warning him that when he can just ask Weta or ILM to produce whatever image he wants, there’s nothing pushing back on him to be creative. So, if you’re working on a small project in Blender, whether that’s a short film, portfolio piece, or render for a client, embrace your constraints!
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