How a change in sentiment can make it possible for creatives to work on Everything Everywhere All At Once pt1/2

I promise this isn't a film review, but we can learn a lot from its means of production to demonstrate how an unconventional creative team can achieve world-class results, and why this philosophy will be increasingly adopted within industrial and automotive design studios.

Over the coming days, you're going to hear a lot about a film called ‘Everything Everywhere All At Once’ (or EEAAO for short).??Produced by the indie studio A24 boasting a near-flawless record of late, EEAAO is written and directed by the 'Daniels' (a duo who have no problem handling high-concept material) and stars Michelle Yeoh as her character navigates both the IRS and the multiverse. I'm no critic but this has all the ingredients to suggest EEAAO could achieve cult classic status.??Estimating the financial, critical or cultural success of any high-concept theatrical release is challenging at the best of times, particularly in the current competitive climate of big-screen vs streaming, but given the track record of the studio and directors, moviegoers are at least guaranteed to experience something, brave, experimental, and most importantly original.??

If the early reviews are anything to go by A24 and Daniels have nailed it.

So what compelled me to write an article highlighting some aspects of the film's production considering Rotten Tomatoes and IMDB are a click away, and how does it relate to individuals, teams and even entire studios across industrial and automotive design???

To answer that we have to focus on the talented artists selected to work on the film's 500+ VFX shots.??As you will understand later, this team perfectly demonstrate how an agile 'non-traditional' group of creatives, are capable of generating world-class output comparable to the big established studios. More importantly, this demonstrates a trend where decision-makers are increasingly willing to deviate away from tried and tested pipelines (be that tech, talent or suppliers) to embrace dynamic unconventional creatives to achieve their goals.

So how did Everything Everywhere All At Once break industry norms?

To answer this question accurately we need something to benchmark EEAAO against, so let's use a reference we are all familiar with. The MCUs pièce de résistance and the second-highest-grossing film of all time, Avengers Endgame.??

Industry-leading multidisciplinary teams (consisting of artists, animators, editors, supervisors, developers, pipeline, compositing, lighting, rigging & and many more) at ILM, Weta Digital, DNEG, Cinesite, Framestore, Digital Domain, Rise VFX, Lola VFX, Cantina Creative, Capital T, Technicolor VFX & Territory Studio worked on 2,500 shots containing visual effects in Avengers: Endgame.?Not only did these teams push cutting-edge technology to the fringes of what was possible, where necessary, brand-new software and hardware solutions were developed in-house specifically for Infinity War/End Game. This essentially means the boat was being built after the team set sail towards their destination.??While exact figures are hard to determine (here is the ILM VFX team alone), I can conservatively say?over 1000+ VFX?artists & staff?worked on the film and to be honest, those collective efforts are reflected on screen in every frame they contributed to. After a decade of meticulously building one of the most ambitious film franchises ever, the most ambitious and meticulous artists from around the globe played a critical role in ensuring Marvel stuck the landing for their centrepiece.? What has always fascinated me about the VFX industry, specifically on projects on this grand a scale, is the way multiple historically competitive studios are able to seamlessly dovetail, compromise and collaborate to achieve a singular vision (not long ago one house would complete all the VFX shots on big films eg ILM for Star Wars/Terminator 2 or Weta for the Hobbit/Avatar). Even if you're not a fan of the films themselves, the achievement of the artists and studios must be respected.

With that established, let's revisit EEAAO

In contrast, the VFX team working on Everything Everywhere All At Once was .…SEVEN. That’s not the name of some obscure up-and-coming VFX house, I mean 7 people total on VFX.??To remove any ambiguity that's the?number?following?6?and preceding?8 meaning the entire 'EEAAO' VFX team could fit into an SUV to watch Dr Strange when it's released to compare notes on the multiverse and they'd only have to expense one large pizza.? Admittedly, I initially dismissed this claim as false until it was later confirmed by one-half of the directorial duo, and upon further investigation, things got even more interesting including the fact that it was actually 5 people that delivered the majority of the SFX & VFX shots. But wait there's more. Not only did the artists who worked on the film have?no experience?of note at any of the big VFX houses, but they are also mostly self-taught, completed most of the shots from home during the pandemic, and predominantly had backgrounds in directing music videos rather than big-screen features.

Ok, you could argue the 2 films and VFX teams discussed are not directly comparable, and in many ways, you would be correct. There is a huge disparity in budget [$365m vs $25m], studio [Disney vs A24],?and prestige [beloved 60-year-old franchise vs original script], but the fact remains, both of these ambitious films are heavily reliant on a backbone of digital artists and VFX to deliver a complex narrative to their respective audiences.??My aim here isn't to analyse old vs new, large vs small but rather to highlight the chosen strategies of each film and what they represent. Viable alternative options are available for all parties, put simply, competition. The filmmaker (or OEM) has multiple options available when selecting a team of digital artists for a project. The tried and tested efforts of established VFX houses or an unconventional group of creatives composed of one or more micro-studios assembled (which ironically sounds like the avengers) for a specific task, with both choices proving feasible in achieving the desired result. This is a healthy competitive service market.

What the scenario represents for creatives (the supplier) is that alternative routes are emerging that provide access to prestigious movie projects. In addition to the established career path(s) that a VFX studio provides, talented individuals (and teams) are increasingly able to forge new unorthodox career paths that can lead to equally prestigious projects. This is a healthy competitive market for human capital. The most important takeaway is that decision-makers now recognise unconventional teams of 'creative misfits' provide a competitive service and offer unique value to projects difficult to find elsewhere. Long term, everyone benefits from competition

creative misfit?= individuals who don't fit the prototypical profile of a given sector or those with domain expertise who transition into a new vertical where their niche skill has become mission-critical within a new sector. They typically arrive within a given sector with a dissimilar background, education, career path and/or age consistent with the majority of their peers.

Any underdog story where a team of artists deliver an outcome greater than the sum of its parts should be celebrated because that is what all collaboration between creatives should always aspire to achieve, but this article is neither a victory lap for the 'creative misfits' working on EEAAO nor praise for the big VFX studios. I want to now use this example to focus on the parallels between Disney and A24 if you were to imagine them as an incumbent design studio and a disrupter design studio, and how the healthy competitive environment for VFX studios in the films above (resulting in new services, career paths, technology and transition of skills from parallel industries) is also manifesting within the design studios within the automotive/mobility sector. Once we establish that similar factors are contributing to the changing composition of the contemporary design studio, we can better position ourselves moving forward because these changes aren't just incremental improvements, they have the potential to be transformative and won't be stopping anytime soon.

During the pandemic, I was tasked with helping a number of organisations (re)build teams, (re)train teams, or help identify staff for design studios of various sizes and maturity. Over the course of this process what became apparent was a shift in sentiment regarding;

• how the creative resource was selected,
• the type of skills in demand
• the emerging roles that had now become mission-critical,
• the profile of supplier studios are now willing to collaborate with
• the reduced importance of where the resource was located.

What creatives reading this should focus on is how these seemingly subtle changes in philosophy within the design studio will continue to have downstream effects that stimulate innovation, expand career paths, and continue to make a wider range of opportunities available for a wider range of individuals 'within' the studio, especially for the creative misfits.

But I'm a [insert discipline] designer, how does this example apply to me in the automotive sector?

The automotive sector was already undergoing huge disruption as it transitions from ICE to ACES, automotive to mobility, but the design studio itself, hasn't been as innovative as the products they produce (more on that later), but that mentality has been stress-tested in the past couple of years. A confluence of factors have shifted attitudes across automotive?design studios which are now increasingly willing to explore what unorthodox studio configurations, technologies & teams can achieve, just like the unconventional choices for VFX on EEAAO. Across the automotive sector, lockdowns and WFH policies have facilitated increased trust in staff, more contemporary security policies and flexible working conditions where one's proximity to HQ is of less relevance. Supply chain shocks have prompted companies to reduce over-reliance on any single vendor and diversify where they hire/contract from. Increased competition between startup and established studios has seen staff moving between offices at a greater frequency, something which generates a healthy cross-pollination of ideas but also simultaneously sees HR teams fishing in the ever-diminishing talent pools forcing them to hire more creatively. Not to mention the uncertainties of IR35 and Brexit in the UK. Any one of these reasons alone would contribute to a more open-minded attitude toward talent acquisition, but they are compounded by the 'great resignation'/'great reassessment' which has seen a huge number of experienced stalwarts exit the industry (or start their own ventures/move to startups) creating a knowledge vacuum that new ideas can fill. Once all of the above are considered, this is a talent shuffle and process revaluation not seen since the aftermath of the financial disaster.

As a result, of the above, we now find ourselves with a generation of tech-savvy digital natives who are entering positions of influence within various studios en masse across the industry. Not only is this new wave of managers likely to maintain, refine and evolve the best elements of hybrid work, but they're also likely to promote further innovative thinking within their respective studios. We also see some of the most trusted senior operators in the industry moving to startup studios, immediately providing young companies with a wealth of experience, contact lists and gravitas which theoretically condenses the time required for them to reach productivity and competitiveness. In summary, changes to the studio primarily driven by survival over the past couple of years have fundamentally changed attitudes and given way to one of innovation, one that realises alternative strategies can be deployed quickly and efficiently and is aware of the threat of new competition. This attitude will continue to determine how design projects are staffed, how teams collaborate and how studios are configured, something which will only get more interesting moving forward having seen the '3 stages of truth' play out in real-time in months rather than decades.

“All truth passes through three stages. First, it is ridiculed. Second, it is violently opposed. Third, it is accepted as being self-evident.”

- Arthur Schopenhauer, Philosopher

Remember, initially, we couldn't wait to get back to the office, studios couldn't wait to bring the workstations back onsite, IT teams couldn't wait to turn the VPNs off and many were certain remote work would expose security vulnerabilities. The most insightful managers were rightly concerned they'd lose spontaneous onsite 'water cooler collaboration'.

A couple of years on and...

Ok, still no direct replacement for the creative serendipity of 'water cooler collaboration', but we have become accustomed to, and pretty well-versed in hybrid work. We can see productivity is achievable, access to world-class talent across extended geographic regions is possible, towers have been replaced by mobile workstations and some design studios are now using WFH or flexible working as one of the top lines in job ads to attract talent for core roles illustrating the level of importance this option now provides so many. And all this was achieved without a catastrophic security breach of note anywhere or any drop off in efficiency.

It wasn't perfect, in many cases studios were held together with duct tape and hope, but in adapting to new conditions, studios didn't let the pursuit of perfection get in the way of progress.

Fears didn't materialise and some perceived downsides actually became benefits. In reality, the longer we live with these cultural changes, the more accepted hybrid work has become which increases the likelihood of the 'decentralised design studio' concept and everything they entail surviving long-term. The Lindy Effect.

We can now see how adaptable staff, systems and entire departments are. Many things once considered absolute fundamental facts within the studio have been now proven to be 'wants' more than 'needs', but what does it mean when the genie is out of the bottle?

When sentiment changes quickly, what does that yield next?

more on that in pt 2/2 - New Environment. New Opportunity