Transcript: Finished With AI: Albert Bozesan and Robert Sladeczek on Making the AI Sitcom TARMAC

Welcome: the first pair of guests

0:07 [music] Hey, we are back live again. I always forget to turn down my headphones in that epic intro where it's just so loud and it's like, oh my god. But yes, we have another um special guest episode, our creator sessions number four with Albert and Robert. And uh we've got Andrew joining us, my regular co-host. We got Paul the producer in the back that you won't see, but so happy to have you guys here with us. Um my god, this one. Oh yes, it's so cool, mate. I hand selected it actually. I wanted it really early on in the crit sessions because I just loved this project. and uh I explained to them in the green room that you haven't seen this yet.

0:54 So, it's a real reaction and that's why it's going to be a really fun episode. Those that are tuning in that are new here, um we're also streaming to uh Albert's channel right on your YouTube channel. So, if you're seeing us for the first time and wondering who we are, um we are Chris and Andrew from the AI live show and we're also streaming on YouTube as well. So, you'll be seeing us in two different areas and we might get a nice mingling of different people in the group chats today and uh we can bring all of your comments onto stage like this. Hello Daniela tuning in and uh let us know where in the world you are tuning in from, what your interest in AI is and all of the other stuff. We do a regular show on a Tuesday where we do a 2-hour showcase of lots [music] of different stuff.

1:39 This is a very different show though. This is all focused on one creator. In in your case, it's a pair of creators, which is our first pair of creators, which is so cool. And uh yes, Tarmac, we're going to be looking at Tarmac. We're not going to be looking at a history of your guys stuff cuz you wanted us to focus on your latest piece, which is really a good idea. We did that with the same with Gossip Goblin. We just watched his latest premiere as well and focus all on the latest workflows. So, it's going to be a really in-depth session for you guys. Looking for all of the juicy details. We've got Buenos Argentina tuning in. Love to see that in the house. Um, drop your questions throughout. We're going to be doing Q&A at the end basically and watching part one and then a bit of a behind the scenes in the middle and then a part two of the show.

What is TARMAC? The pitch

2:30 Um, but yeah, I want you guys to give us a pitch, like a very short pitch for Tarmac, like how you would sell it to someone in like one or two lines. And and Andrew is a very good person to hear this because obviously he hasn't seen this. So, I'd love to know your pitch for Tarmac. Well, um, I mean, we all kind of know the shows like The X-Files and all those shows where, um, there are mysterious American uh, agents doing secretive things behind closed doors. But those all take place in the US. What most people don't know is that uh Americans have been in Germany on secret bases for decades now. They exist. They look crazy. Yeah. Yeah. So these are real places. We drive past them uh just in we're in Munich right now in Germany right now.

3:15 So we um are very aware of these facilities and we have no idea what's going on in Ramstein air base specifically. So, um, what we decided, because they won't tell us, what we decided is that, uh, in the 70s they actually, um, figured out time travel there, and, uh, Jimmy Carter, um, decided to use that mysterious, very expensive time machine to get rid of nuclear waste by sending it perpetually one week into the future. So, um you can imagine the team that is now required to stay there forever and gets up to all sorts of time travel shenanigans um because no one can ever uh um fire them or the world will be flooded with the nuclear waste of the past 50 years. But the waste problem is always a Friday, so the rest of the time is basically up to them.

4:02 Yeah. What do you Andrea? That is now Now you've heard all that, mate. What do you think? Yeah, I think it's a great concept and the first question I have to ask you is where did this even come from? [laughter] You know, how did how did how did your minds I want to know how your minds work? Like [laughter] how please I think that was in in the like in the drawer for a long time. We had like a late night writing session. We met on like a weekend and we decided okay we want to write something and as always nothing like real comes out of this and so we thought we like we took some notes put it in the put it in the drawer and then and then wrote some actual more more budget conscious uh office sitcoms. So we actually we we have gotten a couple shows off the ground um as fiction podcasts

Where did the idea come from?

4:55 um more realist like we did a startup sitcom for one of the bigger networks here in Germany uh which is a lot like Silicon Valley the office that type of thing but we always had this this sci-fi thing in the back of our minds which would take very expensive sets or animation and now very very expensive. Exactly right. And now why not we have these tools. So we went like hey why not just uh go for it with with these AI tools and actual a friend of ours Ariana Emirish who is a very talented illustrator who could let us achieve a an original style that wasn't uh just prompted you know work in both traditional and now you've gone across to the AI as well. Yes. And I I think uh with tarmac there's a lot of things that came together in this because we we did a lot of audio plays

What audio plays taught them about pacing

5:47 which you know is all about timing and pacing and it's it's without the visual layer so you have to make you know the joke land really well in just an auditory fashion. Yes. Exactly. And that's how we learned to, you know, direct these things fast cuz, you know, audio plays you have to get through like uh um whole season within a couple of days. You have to do that and be efficient and that helped us with tarmac a lot. Yeah. It makes us very impatient. So like traditional workflows we did a lot of ads like obviously we are also from the visual space but there's a reason we did ads and not like seasons of TV because they take a lot of time and um coming from the audio space we wanted that same speed of production and AI of course helps us get that with visuals which is which is amazing.

Why industry experience can't be faked

6:35 Awesome. I love hearing these stories, don't you, Andrew? Where it's like when we heard from Uncanny Harry doing the BBC directing stuff and now his ability to do the same speed of Thor and the way he can, what did he call it? His goblin cave. He was going into his little goblin [laughter] cave and then he would come out with things like 24 hours later that take him like fortnights before and everyone's found this new way of like adapting their former skills and people that are new to the space are getting the new skills. You know, they're they're having to The thing you can't learn though is just being in the industry, you know, just all of the like years and years of knowing what really slows things down and then knowing what AI really helps speed things up. Yeah. Um I've tried to teach people this uh but they don't understand it because they haven't been through the pain.

7:26 You have to be through the years of pain to really keeping But oh of course you do it like this but then no no people need that experience to yeah I think that's our superpower that experience it makes us stand out from the AI you know it's the experience that we can bring into it and I've always said that the people who are going to be the best at the video like directing videos AI videos is usually people who's got experience working in AI videos I think the odds of someone who's got zero experience writing a couple of prompts and becoming huge in this space is with zero TV um TV film background. I think it's very unlikely.

8:13 Very unlikely. It's the grounding, isn't it? It's like a stand-up comedian. Like I've I see people breaking out on Instagram now who like get a viral comedic bit, but they're not standups. They're not writers, you know? They don't know how to back it up or how to do the next thing. They don't even know what made it work necessarily. It's more of an algorithm thing, you know. Um, so it is like that, Andrew. Exactly. Even if you do hit on something big, you don't know how to continue it. You don't know how to like even understand and what went well maybe necessarily because you've not got the like, as you said, Robert, you just can't fake these things. You can't growth hack these things. There's no course that can teach you. I I've said these words out loud to people with pain in my voice. I've said, "God, this [laughter] two these used to take me two weeks before, you know, two weeks I used to spend doing this thing." and now I can do it in two hours and people go

9:04 a didn't you waste a lot of your time but they don't know [laughter] you know that makes you appreciate it's it's not a waste though right I mean you'll see today we haven't gotten into the technical details but like we went back to a lot of the tools that we learned to love like blender for example uh and of course all the aside from all the the hardware like just the recording techniques we used them we just didn't use them for the slow things that AI can now speed up so interesting there's so much there's treasure trove of of stuff that people may be coming from AI um should still be learning and I I defend that like Blender absolutely still a valuable skill set for for not everything obviously but many styles like ours. Yeah. Or Logic for example like any sound editor if you have in-depth knowledge

Were the years of traditional skills wasted?

9:50 oh my god Robert we're going to talk about Logic Pro for the rest of this episode. You start me on that. I will I used to teach Logic Pro privately for like six years and this DAW and and Ableton and Reason and all of them, you know, like I everybody that uses um music LLMs, I'm like, well, if you knew how to use, you know, MIDI and WAV stems, then you'd be able to get so much more out of Suno. And by the way, I hosted a um I hosted Dina's event last week in London and they're obviously the Sea Dance providers and they literally showed us here's how to use Blender 3D scenes to get the most out of Sea Dance 2.5 with full control of like driving video. And I was like, "Oh, here we are again." You know, cinema 4D, Blender, all of those like

10:38 exact tools that people say are AI is making irrelevant and now suddenly your superpower to make AI way better. It's [laughter] like the news can shift so quickly on such things, right? And I never gave up my DAW and I never will. And uh Logic, if you're an Apple user, is the easy one, right? Like you can buy it outright, £200, you own it and you can just use it and get better with it. And now you've got music LLMs to provide quick stems to make faster music. And it's exactly the same happening in the film space. It's fascinating. So I'm so glad you said Logic though. Not many people are logic users. A lot more Ableton users I I come across logic. But I I stick to logic. That's I I started with it. Now I know it inside out. Same. That's my thing. I actually moved from uh PC to Apple just for Logic and then I've never gone back again.

11:31 Totally. Yeah. 100%. What was you guys' first editing program like? Oh, well Paul the producer will have a great answer to that in the back end. Uh, I started late with editing, so I Yeah, I was I was just in the typical Premiere Pro, you know, like uh Adobe suite type stuff. What was yours? Press. Oh, no. I was just saying my background was I worked at radio for the BBC. So, I actually was using Cool Edit. So, I was really focused on the audio side of things. Cool edit. I don't know if anyone remembers cool edit which is now Adobe edition but um that was the one that I learned on yeah it was cool edit back in the days and then Adobe edition and then once cuz I understood audio editing moving across to video editing wasn't that big a jump obviously there's a lot more to it but it

First editing programs, and how they met

12:24 you kind of get the the different tracks etc. So yeah, for me, what was yours? I remember uh Final Cut Express and that was the time of YouTube tutorials where uh you know, you wanted to do all the crazy green screen effects, but it didn't allow me to do that. I could key something, but it couldn't like autotrack. So I had to like manually key frame myself onto my hand. That's like these kind of videos I did. And these techniques still kind of hold that video you're describing right now. So before I Before I liked Robert, I knew Robert for many [laughter] years. He was in in the same class in middle school and we we did not we didn't care much for each other. We weren't like enemies, but we were like, "Oh, that guy." So, I saw I saw [laughter] his lightsaber video on like Facebook and I was just like, "I can do that." And that motivated [laughter] me.

13:16 So, we were just kind of like pushing each other to to a a level of skill at which point we could no longer ignore that we should probably work together. [laughter] I love that. That is brilliant and that was one of my questions actually was you know when exactly did you guys meet? So that's a great one to have answered up up top like that that you knew each other in middle school but you actually started working together later on. That's brilliant. How awesome. It's crazy that Andrew and I have been doing this for like three years now and that we didn't meet before that. I mean we did actually mate, didn't we? We've been talking for longer than that, but yeah, you've be you've been in like like I'm a I I'm surprised that when you were leading MySpace that we didn't meet because I was managing bands and stuff at this time, you know, had a record label who were doing things through MySpace and he was like leading the social media at MySpace or or the growth marketing or what was it exactly?

14:08 So I joined MySpace to give you idea of time it was 2006. So only Facebook was when Facebook was available to students. So it was those early early [clears throat] days and I originally was there to do marketing for music and then it just went to everything because it just blew up so quick. So it was literally went from a couple of million people on the site to hundreds of millions and becoming the biggest website in the world in like a year. So your change quick. So one day I'm doing Yeah. Suddenly your job is everything. Wait, I have a bit of globalist and you're like what? So, uh, yeah. So, um, yeah, I'm surprised we didn't meet, but, uh, yeah, like I said, I was all over the place during for a while.

14:54 Imagine imagine your paycheck when you're like dealing with a million customers and then 100 million customers. You like, can I get paid 100 times more, please, to doing this job? Yeah, that didn't that didn't happen. Yeah. It's the same. [laughter] Yeah. Yeah. You're going to you're just ride out this in insane expansion and uh MySpace MySpace was a thing of the past. Let's talk about a thing of the future. I want to hear more about CarMac now. I really want to hear some more about like not just how you come up with the ideas, but just like the storytelling behind it. That's something that we tried to do on this show is it's not just the technology. It's understanding the power of story. And that's the thing I really want to kind of get into, but I really want to see a clip of it.

Setting up the pilot

15:45 I want to see that. Yeah. Well, I was going to say it's probably best if we do watch part one being that you don't know uh the show yet. Obviously, me and Paul are well aware and many of the other people watching will be aware. But if you are watching it for the first time, let us know in the comments. Also, as I said, get your questions ready because we're going to be um saving them all up for the for the end of the show to answer. Paul the ice cream fan turned up. Oh my god. We we have an ongoing uh we have an ongoing joke in this show where he tries to pull up when we're live and he never manages to do it on a on the Tuesday, but he's here on a Wednesday. [laughter] Damn. I've heard screaming. Hilarious. Oh my god, Paul. I could just imagine Paul laughing in the background now.

16:33 Anyway, let's watch uh let's watch part one, guys. Let's do it. Yeah, let's do it. Nina, WE GOT TO GO. WE GOT TO GO. WHAT'S GOING ON, DADDY? She's back. Mommy. No, mommy's still with Derek. The mothership. She's coming. The others saw the lights again. But it's school night. Honey, if we finally get Daddy's evidence tomorrow, he gets to school the government. Go warm up the car. Ow. Hey, it's not for you. It's for them. Why do aliens need Coco? Did you not read the ABCs of alien encounters? I did. I promise. Um, remain calm. Bring cocoa and don't comment on the green skin.

TARMAC, PART ONE

17:21 That's bas right. And that's the kind of thinking that gets people bro. Dad. [screaming] It's beautiful. [music] [laughter] They're buying it. Not a single eyes on us down here. We're a go. Let's get it moving, boys.

18:07 God help us. [music] Ah, I was going nuts without daylight down here. Just had this installed. Same guys who make periscopes on the big submarines. Weirdly, they still installed it wearing wets suits. You should enjoy the sun before you head back to your lab, doctor. Darn right, sir. But first, I want to introduce you to Paul, the new recruit. He's my half brother. It turns out I heard about you. Another secret president kid, huh? Uh, yes, sir. But I don't know which one.

18:55 Can I tell him, Colonel? Rhymes with shush. Bush. Oh. Oh, no. Actually, rhymes with classified. I was attempting something clever there. I bet it's a blink. Mom likes tall guys. Why not, son? What's your background? Actually, he has a lot of experience. Tell him about your jobs, Paul. Oh, yeah. I've done a bunch. I field tested mosquito sprays. Picked out fonts for label makers. What the? They have me on guard duty for telescopes once. I still don't know what that was called. Okay. Okay. All right. Thanks, Paul. Anyway, I look forward to the gig. This is not a gig, son. When you take this job, there's no side hustles, no days off, no moonlighting. Do you know what moonlighting means, son? Uh, it's when you show your ass, sir.

19:42 So, what do you do here? Anyway, that's my half brother. Um, I'll show him around. Thanks, boss. Shake it off, Dean. They'll be fine. At least you know what you're doing, General. In the mid1 1970s, my predecessor designed the Time Spring. It's your new best work, friend. WOW. OH, the government didn't know what to do with it until our old tree hugger, Jimmy Carter, figured it out. Why is he standing like that? He's looking the other way for America. Are you sure it's him? He suggested we use it to dispose of radioactive waste.

20:27 Once a week, we get a shipment from the States. The big lever gets pulled and the barrels go barreling into the future. It's so shiny. Oh, it's also super expensive. I'm the quantum physicist here. I pull the lever. Aw. So, what do I do? Oh, you'll be delegating the time budget. I do calendar stuff. Well, sending radioactivity into the future actually generates power that we can then spend on other time travel. For every ton of waste we send per week, we can send another ton in the opposite direction. Weak tons. It's why I have a shadow Nobel. Ooh, what did the last guy do? Oh man, he was great. One time he measured one entangled particle and then immediately traveled back a few ns and checked the second particle state. Oh, he did like science. Well, yeah, of course, but we figured out all the big questions already, so he left for CERN.

21:20 I guess you can just make it your own. Um, I need a coffee. Okay, see you later. How fun is this, Andrew? And My god, you can tell these guys have worked with Amazon and Audible, right? Like for real. Like you can just see it from the writing, from the character choices, from the interaction. It's just so good. It's so blinking good. Well, thank you very much for setting the stage, Andrew. What do you think? Yeah, I was just saying that to for me I thought was brilliant so far, but the two things that really stood out, one, you can tell that you guys script writers. Like just the way the jokes were coming in and the timing of the jokes and when to place the jokes and also it

First reactions

22:11 visually it looks stunning. Yeah, it's it's Thank you. I love the style. What what what uh platform were you? Because it couldn't have been Hicksville 2.5 or uh it's [laughter] you mean dance 2.5. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's 2.0 still at that point. 720p. 720p. Yeah. 720p. And the the trick was practically every single shot is based on a still that we put together in Blender. Yeah. So, um we we I mean we have we have like the slides where you can see some of the the behind the scenes stuff. We want to dive. We're going to do that. Yes. Exactly. Yes. We what we generally do is it's repeat uh replaying now without any sound

Seedance 2.0 at 720p, and why every shot starts in Blender

22:58 and as soon as the the clip's gone Yes. We'll go we'll dive into the deck. Also, Paul found a really nice behind the-scenes video that you've got on your YouTube as well that we're thinking of playing as well. Um, if that's okay with you guys. It's a it's a great intro, I would say, actually. Yeah, if we if we just play that right away and then we can go into details. That makes makes sense. Oh, really? Before the deck even. That's um that's really really cool, by the way. So cool that you've made this and that you're do like we're seeing this pattern now, aren't we, Andrew? Where like things that are really popular get a BTS video and it explains so much to those that are so curious about it in a creative way as well. So really awesome that you did that. If we've got it, Paul, let's let's show it. However, I I think we found a new way to do 2D animation.

BEHIND THE SCENES FILM

23:44 I think so, too. But if all the character designs are made by humans, the voices are acted by humans, the scripts written by humans, and the whole thing's edited by humans, what did we do with AI? We're about to show you. Welcome to Tarmac. Do you know what moonlighting means, son? Uh, it's when you show your ass, sir. [laughter] I can't fake laugh as good as I can. I absolutely adore workplace comedies. And we wanted to combine it with time [music] travel and then tarmac of old. In the mid 1970s, my predecessor designed a time spree. It's your new best work, friend. Wa. When I work with Robert, it's completely different every time. Sometimes one of us comes up with a structure for an episode and then we get together [music] to write gags for it.

24:29 We We didn't sleep for a long time. It's a lot of in-person [music] joking around. How long is the nuclear? You can't ask how long the nuclear Oh, 30 years. Thank you, everyone. It's an AI animated show, but we didn't want to do this alone, so we called up some friends. Hi, my name is Martina. My name is Chris Aubber. I'm Ariana, and we organized a whole recording day. I'm excited because we've had a good filming day so far and I'm excited to see everybody's talents exercised on game day like this. [music] I wish that everybody would have a little we call it pigeon camera and it just makes the whole situation so much lighter and better. We're keeping a lot of human elements in the process, the character design, the acting, but then also the writing. Yes, we do that on the cheap. Don't judge it. So, he thought the whole process of creating an animated show would be a blast.

25:20 Today was a great day. Should we tell him about the computer stuff, Albert? The fruits of entertainment are nourished in the dirt of pain. It's way too late. Didn't even do anything creative. Okay, Albert, what are you doing right now? The actual scenes of Tarmac are built primarily in Blender, the 3D software. So despite being AI, we're blocking out the full environment [music] using very rough objects, so that the AI later knows where furniture is, where walls are, where the characters are standing, and can create kind of the final quality in AI with very high precision, very high directorial control. Uh, yes, sir.

26:07 But I don't know which one. For a project with this many parts, minimizing clicks is super important. And that's why I built a custom browser plugin to help us with that. It reads in your images for Blender, and you can drag and drop them into [music] Magnific. It even glues together a prompt for you. So that's also just copy paste. For composing other complex prompts, we're using Crumpet, a free app that saves you a lot of time on your projects. You'll never want American coffee ever again. Check it out. Want to be in Italy? Uh-huh. Here, have an espresso. France, have a French press. Germany? Um, this how long do I have to stay here? What do I do without clawed code and food? Yes. Yeah. That's awesome. That's great for you. The truth is this is your time to shine

26:52 dimly underground. We're halfway through production of episode 1, which means right now is your chance to support Tarmac. We're looking for distribution support. And if that sounds like you, write us a message. Can't wait. Love that video. Oh my god, it's so much fun. The way you edited it together and showed all of the things. I didn't know about the um the custom thing that you'd made though, the browser. That's why we I only recently I only recently found out that um by doing so we actually broke the terms of service of Magnific.

The custom Magnific downloader

27:39 So don't tell them. [laughter] Oh damn. What? By building your own integration you mean? Because they they don't pro or at the time they didn't provide any metadata to the downloads and we desperately needed that because of course this we're we wanted to make a professional show and you need all that stuff in order to convince a distributor to go for it just legally and so the downloader gets all the prompt and the model and everything. We didn't like hack Magnific but they also didn't want us doing we politely asked the website I sort of special thanks to them at the end as well. Yes, exactly. [laughter] Was that done by code? Did you do it by claude code? Because you mentioned Claude code in there as well. Okay, cool. A lot. Yes. Yes. Nice. Yeah, that's so cool to think about like

28:25 like, oh, we've got a pipeline and we don't have a tool. Like, if there was a tool, I could go use it, but if not, I can just go make one. And this is so awesome to think about how things integrate into one another. Now, I also thought about like um you know, I've played with the Ableton MCP and the Logic MCP and stuff through Claude and I'm like, "Ooh, things are starting to get really interesting here where I never saw these bridges before and suddenly you can imagine like um uh you know, like a visual that's uh using uh audio to sort of move it. You know, you can imagine that these things could totally intertwine." Now, Kyber, if you ever use that, was an OG platform that used to do things like that. But like I was thinking about building my own version of Kyber recently because I haven't really seen one going on and I was just like we can do that these days with claude code.

29:18 It's kind of wild. So only because you know the platform and that's where it is gets interesting, right? Because we knew Blender and what it can do. We decided to just piggyback off the the whole software to just do uh what our pipeline needs to do. [snorts] Oh, hey, greetings back to Romania. Hey, a former student. Awesome. That's cool. That's awesome to hear. That's something we also share in common, by the way. Andrew does workshops, I do workshops, you do workshops, and you're doing Curious Refuge right now, workshops, and it's so awesome. Congrats on that. Um, you know, we're a big big fan of all of the all of their stuff and we've had Dave on, I think, four times on this show now.

30:03 Um, and he he was the OG actually, you know, I actually helped with one of his pieces. He did Battalion or something. Um, like one of his really old pieces back in the like mid Journey uh runway one days and um I made a song that went into this talking about music. I um I made a remix of a specific song that he requested as a director. You know, he's like, I really like this, but I need it to be more dramatic, have more trumpets and have more sort of orchestral arrangement. And I was like, yeah, I can do that. So, I used Logic and Udo at the time and and stems and stuff like this. And and then I was like, Dave, why don't you come on and show it on the show now. Look at where he is. He's just announced [laughter] Andrew, by the way. They're part of the Disney accelerator program and he's got a feature film coming with the guy from back

30:53 rooms and you're like big [laughter] big stuff. He told us back then he said wait you just wait for the big announcements that's coming and I was like well now we're here and now couldn't be couldn't be a bigger announcement. Yeah. It's so cool to see it honestly. And Gossip Goblin announced his feature film as well. We've got like five known feature films, pure AI and some hybrid AI coming before the end of the year now and they're coming to theaters and this is going to be really interesting. I just went and saw one yesterday in a theater, a privately booked theater. It was amazing. Um, thank you to Artless for inviting me for that one. By the way, I went and watched the Ark, which was a series premiere, and they booked the electric cinema

31:41 theater in Notting Hill, which was beautiful. [snorts] Wow. So, going back to um your behind the scenes, you've got obviously your friends coming over and delivering like basically all together. Was that all done in one day or was it like seven days they came over? So it was just one day and then we Yeah. Yeah. We did one recording day. We planned it thoroughly so we can So So was uh as we did with the with the uh audio plays. It's basically one person in the booth, everyone else in a separate room reading back to them. So we capture the emotions and like a proper response. So they're not only reading their lines, but they're reacting to something that they hear over the headphones. I mean, ideally, if we were able to do this in like a full studio with a with a TV budget, that sort of thing, I think we would prefer doing the whole ensemble at once, cuz

How do you record a cast in one day?

32:35 that really lets people play off each other. But the way we did it literally in the room next door. Um, it was one uh one at a time in the actual booth and the other one kind of got to warm up the lines before they got to go in. So, faster even. Have you done this before? Not AI, but have you done this before? Like when your TV work for the um for the audible work we did and the and the comedy oh animation work we actually that's the kind of the funny thing we got into animation you're right we did a couple animated ads um for entertainment projects animation is I think lends itself better to AI at the moment than live action styles so I'd say that's the reason we got so deeply into animation lately um and to be totally honest I'm kind of an animation beginner in the sense that I am only now

33:25 really learning the craft myself by hand. Like I'm I'm teaching myself illustrating and that sort of thing because I bring the the directorial and the writing work but the actual um animation stuff I mean in our case uh Ariana studied that so that the the designer of the characters of Tarmac um we've been bringing that in externally to to get that expertise. But yeah, and that's why we also chose the style that we have right now because we're good in 3D, right? Yeah. And the characters, we wanted to be animated in 2D. That's why we matched up like the styles so we we could uh generate and create the the uh environments and the surroundings. And then we asked our uh Ari to just create uh distinct characters for this. We gave her some some reference inputs.

Designing a style the models could handle

34:12 Oh yeah, exactly. very very old style like here are the 2D shows we love like mash mash up the actually um we it we kind of we did the reverse thing so we knew just from experience what 2D styles Nano Banana Pro was good at handling and Cance 2 was good at animating and um kind of had Ari design the perfect handmade style to match that. So the outlines for example are kind of pencily. They're a little rough. they're not perfectly clean because AI video models at the time um still didn't keep outlines clean. So, we thought maybe a rough pencil would lend itself to that. Um that's kind of how we smart. Again, it's it's experience, right? You guys have been just generating for years now.

34:58 You know exactly what Nano Banana can handle, what it can't handle, and then you're like so smart. And again, you can't fake that experience. A lot of people that are just getting into AI now, they don't have any idea about the history of AI and where we've come from and what's been struggling up till now. They're just like, "Oh, Seance is crazy. This is cool." And I'm like, "Yeah, but you have no idea where we've come from. The struggles of mid Journey 3, Miden 4, all of that." Like, oh my god. Like, pitfalls where you spend 50 bucks on a on a clip, all the pitfalls. And but how cool is it that we started so early with AI because now we get to have our minds blown by the new models. Absolutely. Now they're doing what people have always thought AI or honestly what people have always thought like VFX was already doing, right? It's almost the computer and we appreciate it. [laughter] Expectations are crazy in newbies.

35:50 I can't believe how high their expectations are. It's like God, if you've known where we've come from. Anyway, we've got your deck here, which you were very, very thankful for bringing. Oh, you haven't? Okay, perfect. Well, you've loaded it in. Okay, that's us. In your control. Yeah. Um, so I thought we've got some as well as doing a BTS, you have this amazing deck to go through and all of this and you, by the way, I just wanted to call attention. You mentioned in the BTS there that you're looking for publication help. So if anyone is watching this, you know, that has any sort of funding or anything like that and they're interested in the show, it's unbelievable what you've been able to pull off in the sound recordings of your booths that you're doing right now. It's such a great showcase for what a real studio booking

The production deck, in public for the first time

36:36 money could do, you know, like as you said, just taking this to a as you've already done studio stuff too, so you know exactly what you're doing in there. It's just like get us the money to be able to do that ourselves basically. It's um so yeah, I just wanted to draw attention to that if you're watching this is this is something you want to back financially. Awesome to see all this stuff though, the BTS, the the the walkthroughs. And are you doing this in some sort of um a workshop environment or anything like that? Are you showing people this or is this just for us like this sort of deck that you're that you've made here? I mean I think you're a you're an exclusive in public. So we did an internal one Curious Refuge as as part of my AI animation class there. Um but this is the first time we've been sharing this actual deck. Uh well thank you so much for doing

37:25 we really appreciate it. You get a premiere. Yeah. Well, thank you so much for having us on. Um, yeah, I just so welcome. Like I said, I hand when it when you showed it to us in the WhatsApp group, I was like, this style, this hype in production, these lines, this character design, everything, the writing, I was like, it's so unique and I I wanted to know more about you guys straight away. So, I was like, cool. got to have them in the first five of the creative sessions if we can align our diaries because I know how busy you are making all these courses for Curious Refuge. Again, thank you for doing that because again, I bet you're doing a lot of LA time jumping as well right now, aren't you, with those guys and it's not easy. We know all about all that as well. So, yeah, and you were shooting all day today and so you're taking time out of your day in order to literally show us this.

38:17 But yeah, please tell us more. We we we would love to shoot more tarmac. So, I'm so glad to be here. This is very important to us because that's the stuff we want to be working on, right? And I for for the solo creators because AI, a lot of people getting into AI, right? Uh they're coming from maybe a vague media background and they're first time experiencing, wow, I can do this on my own. But the message that we're trying to send with this piece is that it's really still the fun parts are in collaborating with people, right? That's what you see on this slide is you don't want to, you know, rationalize away the the parts that really spark joy in the classical way, which is writing, which is riffing off like the text that is on the page and

Why collaboration is still the fun part

39:04 then trying to figure out if it suits the uh the actor, the actress, uh doing a table read, eating together, having fun. Uh these moments I really like and this was our vision for this for the show. Absolutely. Yeah, exactly. Yeah, that's why Chris I mean we Chris is an American stand-up comedian uh who we're so lucky to have in Munich because that's also that's a whole challenge by itself, right? I mean you guys you have access to English talent everywhere around you and we do have a an excellent pool within Munich but it's a very small pool. So, uh, Chris and Martina are just we're so lucky to to have gotten them for this project and, um, they have that ability to, you know, we're not we're not stuck on our script. We write it, we think it's good, but then on the day amazing stuff happens.

39:54 We're happy to change lines around and that's not something an AI voice, even though they are getting very good, will ever do or the push back, right? Like, well, see, I'll push back, but it's never good. Very good point. Yeah. Yeah. Especially if AI just agrees with everything you pretty much say. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. [laughter] And the motivational part here. Oh, sorry. Sorry, Andrew. No, no, you go you go. The motivational part um the the one motivational part that kept us doing this thing because it was a long way. It wasn't just an afternoon. It was a month. Um was that we had we asked five people to help us with this thing. They better see it. [laughter] Yeah. Yeah. you you start owing people a result, right? Which at least to us is personally a very strong motivator cuz like this is going to sound like weirdly weirdly psychological, but like I'm I'm okay disappointing myself creatively.

40:45 Like you know, if it's not done, I'm I'm totally know what you mean about that. And yeah, you've got like, you know, people to get the show out to, you know, you've got people that want this to do well and yeah, you want to please them much like Yeah. Collaborators and yeah, it's so interesting, isn't it? In fact, I'm so glad that we did choose you as number four because um Zach London, who's based in, you know, Gossip Goblin is his handle, uh based in Sweden, is also booking English talent in his small little Swedish place and getting them to locally record. And I'm like, what's going on here, Andrew? where like the UK and suddenly British talent is suddenly being booked

41:32 abroad. Yeah. And some of the best stuff we've seen in AI to date. And actually, Zach said um he really didn't like in his previous episodes when he used uh like virtual talent for voice acting because he needed that same in the room thing that you just said, which is the oh the back and forth on the lines. That's not how I deliver it. and and the guy that did the really Cockney accent was like, "No, that's not what a Cockney would say. This is what a Copney would say." You know, and it's like, "Your writing can go so far, but I actually lived this stuff." So, it's like it's it's like that back and forth dynamic. Again, I love that you're bringing attention to that. We were all so siloed in AI. So many of us are like in our bedrooms now making individual projects.

42:19 And I love seeing that this is the graduation of it all. feels much more big and professional and and next level and that these sorts of projects will be what people will really gravitate towards, you know, less the solo creators, um, more the teams of people. Yeah, I think I I do a lot of stuff with TV production companies and what you said before would be so refreshing to them to say that actually it's not a so we're not going into a world of solo uh freelancers working by themselves in silo. It's actually teams. But I'd love to see more of more of this deck. I'd love to kind of go through more. So you've got Yeah. Yeah. And then of course I mean you saw this in the BTS, right? Ari doing these amazing character designs and we've already spoken a little bit about how we made those creative decisions together.

Ariane Emmerich's character designs

43:10 And just to be to be clear, so she designed the characters in a way that we could then process not just in actual animation, but also in the various poses and things. So the the posing for the various stills that we then fed into Cance to animate them was already uh helped by AI. So we were able to prompt and that stuff which we had this discussion with her cuz of course I'm I'm not a professional illustrator. I've never professionally illustrated for anything and neither has Robert. So we were curious to speak to her as someone who works as in this position. Is the task of drawing all those individual poses, the stuff we think we want to do with AI, is that a task you want us to take away from you,

What does an illustrator want AI to take away?

43:55 right? Is that passion of yours that we're like just kind of driving over or not? And she made very clear um I mean in school you know her much better. Yeah. what did what did she tell you uh that that she learned from her animation professor? [laughter] So, I I think there's there's the interesting parts of animation that still are fun to breathe life in. Uh but the the long stretches of especially TV uh 2D animation, it's back and forth and you these this she'd happily skip and rather create the world around you. There's there's tedious parts to every job, isn't there? And if you're working in it every day, you know the parts that you find tedious. So, it's fascinating that she's like fully said that's the thing that is tedious.

44:43 And so, wow. It's a back and forth, right? There's like the standard um standard poses and stuff. It's that can be done with AI. But if you have like a special moment where Paul's jaw drops down or something, that's again something where we would ask her back. It didn't happen in the pilot, but we would ask her back to draw that to make it like uh true to the character because if you alter it too much, see like Nana Banana just goes anime. Yeah. Yeah. So it's it's really I mean of course this is another budget question. Obviously, we want everyone on the team to be paid in in a way that's fair to them, right? So, in future episodes, we would definitely bring her back and do much more detailed character sheets with her, have her do some I mean, obviously, there's a bunch of characters planned for this season that we haven't seen in

45:35 episode one, but it was an interesting interplay with with her. Um, also like on an ethical sense, right, to figure out what do illustrators actually want to see from AI that actually helps them and keeps them excited about the project rather than just, you know, giving her AI results and having her fix them, which was necessary in some cases. She did that for us. But it's it's always a play of of uh Well, it's so nice that you're just like um you know, really asking these questions because I think Paul Trillo when we had Paul Trillo on his episode and he did the music video with the LA based illustrators, he asked the same sorts of things. You know, it was what in uh you know, what could we take away that would be a hassle for you to do this and you don't enjoy. You don't enjoy.

46:22 Literally, it's the part where you go, if I could do less of this and more of the other thing, I'd really enjoy my job more, you know? Um, and it's kind of funny that we all have those things. I remember mine was looking through stock photography libraries for literally hours and hours and hours, like typing into search engines, like trying to find specific exact things, and it's just so boring. And now, MidJourney is like the exact antithesis for this. It's like right now I go type what I want and I can, you know, keep rolling and rolling and rolling till I get what I want, you know, and and hand select. Isn't it a funny funny time we live in with all of this? But I'm just very happy to hear that illustrators and animators are okay with working on AI projects. There's been a big backlash from that community. I've seen specifically 3D too. You guys are both 3D and you're doing this, you know, and

The backlash, and what's happening at SIGGRAPH

47:12 VFX is the newest one. I'm feeling like, you know, um you get real sort of painful sort of public backlash. But again, I I say 3 to six months from now, um there'll be a lot less of that and a lot more of them on board and actually really enjoying it too and getting more uh fulfillment out of their role again, which is something that a lot of people don't talk about with AI is literally enjoying a game. Most [clears throat] people online speaking about speaking for every creative about them hating AI, like that's just not true. They obviously people say that they're obviously not going to the conferences and being professionals about it. I literally just came from Sigraph in LA most talks which is like the conference for new visual effects

47:59 products and and everyone everyone presents their newest technology there like rendering engines really highly technical stuff it was mostly about AI and people were excited about it. So yeah, I mean, no one significant in the AI space that's like getting traction and making cool stuff is coming out of nowhere. They're all creatives who you can't speak for if you're anti-AI. That's just not true. Exactly. And it's such a big buzzword, right? You have Corridor Digital creating a new kind of uh green screen removal tool that is AI. [laughter] Yeah. No one will see it. It. Sometimes professionals choose to not use AI in the final pixel, but everything up leading up to this, I mean, why not? It's a spectrum. I mean, I don't agree with every AI opinion out there, obviously. I would say I mean, it's coming across quite clearly where we're in the middle of that spectrum somewhere.

48:52 Definitely more excited about it, but yeah. [laughter] Isn't that awesome? We need this is the spectrum that we've been waiting for, the flourishing of it all. I'm seeing, you know, really big music directors, Hollywood directors getting involved in it now and and everyone at the bottom, too, and everything in between, which is so cool. My personal thing is this hybrid thing recently. Um, seeing all of, you know, the different collaborations between people in different spaces and then using real cameras and AI and it all intertwining. I I can just see so much coming from this space, you know, like um it's the most exciting to me and I think it has a lot of the less of the anti-I hate because as you can showcase in this beautiful deck, there's real people.

49:40 There's a real stand-up comedian. These are real voice actors. They're involved in this project, you know, these aren't sea dance characters. These aren't sea dance voices. It's uh it's it's great that you can have that as well. Um, what I thought was really really good from the behind the scenes and connected to what Chris has said was actually what you've got in the deck here where you went when you you done the design in the set and then you put it into the what you put into the AI. I thought that was amazing like so how how you know what I wondered about this just as a quick tangent could you get full copyright for this because you can show the Blender files which are just you know the AI rrendering is just a rrendering. You've got the human-made Blender files that you can literally submit for copyright, you know, like is this is one of the most copyrightable AI things that I've ever seen because you've gone scene

Is TARMAC copyrightable?

50:29 by scene and made every single piece of furniture exactly as is. Like I just I think in our jobs we we talked to a lot of lawyers. They [laughter] have a lot of different opinions. And what I learned about this, it's a spectrum. It's not 100%. We're closer to the hundred than we are to 50, I think. Well, yeah. I mean, um, just shout out to to Storybook Studios. Until very recently, I was, um, working as head of creative tech at at a Munich studio here, Storybook, and I I see some of the their, um, team members here in the chat, actually. So, hi, Farzen. Um, and we had a lot of these discussions for our, um, our productions with some people who like even consulted on the EU AI act. So people who can't possibly know it any better

51:19 and even they are like in the end someone's got to do it and try it, right? Like this is unprecedented and basically the the recipe is you just try to put as much human touch in it as you possibly can and that's what we did. And so we believe it's copyrightable and I don't think a lawyer would uh could could be more clear on it than we are. Yeah. Although I'm sure a lawyer would disagree. Oh yeah, [laughter] that's their job. Exactly. So no, I just love knowing that you've gone to that level of knowledge about it though and that you are talking with real lawyers. I um I don't know if you know um but um Oh yeah, of course. When I Yeah. So when I was invited to Adobe

52:05 originally, I I heard the story about her court case with all of her, you know, for exactly the same thing, you know, like copyrightiting her majourney images and stuff like this. And just thought it's so fascinating at that time. And we haven't really seen something in the EU that would challenge our data and stuff. And in the UK, we are I I think of us still in the EU. Yes, we had Brexit and it's a bit of a complete joke actually, but um you're welcome back anytime. Come. I would love to come [laughter] back. We never wanted to leave. It was been stupid as hell that we left, but you know, I think it's same regular rules roughly around the data protection thing. Um so yeah, again, I'd love to know if you, you know, please keep me in the loop if you do go any further down the like I want to copyright this thing.

52:52 We would love to, you know, keep a thing up on the show where we let people know here's the next space they're at, you know, like here's where we're at because no one's done that. Eagle Eagle. Yeah, [laughter] that would be awesome. How cool. That would actually be really cool. That would be really cool. What I wanted to show you is the the kit bash that the mockup that Albert did here. Um, yeah, let me let me one more sentence actually about that. I just had the thought. Um, so we briefly mentioned this earlier about the the like custom downloader and metadata and stuff. And this is super nerdy, but to anyone out there who wants to make their stuff copyrightable, step one is documenting every single asset. As dry and uncreative as that is, every download, the prompt, the model used, when it was used, who did it, what was the input if you had real illustrations like we did.

Document every single asset

53:42 And so tarmac behind it, if anyone were to um to purchase it, and we are actively pitching um We have all that. So all the backgrounds, everything is in a clean file system. And it it was really tough to do that while being comedy nutcases. But uh that's very worthwhile pursuing if you want to get a professional production off the ground. That is put that in. I was How did you manage to get all of that? Like truthfully, how did you clawed that or you like um like are you Yeah. Okay. We that seems like an ungodly amount of data [laughter] to store our moonlighting. Our moonlighting. Yeah. Yeah. The moonlighting is uh we studied uh management and technology where a lot of like

54:29 uh computer science basics came from that now come naturally like all the GitHub set. Yeah. I thought I I thought I wasted three years of my life but no that helped. just like just like the logic thing. It's so like you you guys have this underlying system ability and that's going to help you no end, you know, like for real. I think that's this is why you've come to the same conclusion no doubt with Blender and doing all of this and um yeah, please explain to us what we're seeing here exactly on this Blender scene. So this is actually this is kind of an early version of the colonel's office. So what we wanted to do just for camera control and you can see two of the cameras here. Those those are those kind of triangles floating in the middle. Um that's the angle on uh on the various characters.

Inside the Colonel's office: the Blender walkthrough

55:20 And because those are repeating like we chose we we built them like sitcom sets. You know if you've seen Big Bang Theory or something like that how they shoot those multi- camera setups they have some pretty clearly defined um angles. And we did the same thing. We thought about where people are going to be standing sitting and just had a system which was also vibe coded. It's a separate software that we built for Blender to kind of um pre-render these very rough compositions in layers. So um we could render out a gray version of this with slightly more detail. That's why I said it was an early version. So, we did end up replacing those boxes with an actual table and chairs like you saw in the BT.

56:05 Well, that's basically that. You saw it in the BTS. This did get more um detailed because we realized it needed to be, but we rendered that out as gray and then brought it into Magnific with very very detailed prompting. And this is a very early version. Of course, it got a lot more detailed. And then once we had the version we liked of each perspective, we split that into the various layers again. So we did have the desk for the foreground, the chairs for the middleground, the background for the background, and brought that back into Blender. And then suddenly we had a fully rendered style version of that room that didn't have to didn't have to like ray traced anymore because those are that's just a

56:52 PNG basically that's back in the room. And so we could place the characters back in there, put them in their seats, so just in front of the layer of the chairs and um then have a set we could play around in with as many camera angles as we wanted. We can very easily create new ones and um render out the the stills in um inside of Blender and bring those into Cance. So, it sounds way more complicated than it is because once it's set up, we just you know, it's just behind it. That's exactly the gonna say like the 3D understanding too. You know, you're making a 2D thing, but you're making it driven by 3D. And and that's what's so fascinating. Um, look at that.

57:39 Yeah. Amazing. Most people would just type um officer in an office and that doesn't work because it deteriorates, right? It deteriorates over time. So, the the background things that we have like all the detail in the in the images, uh, we photoshop that in. And if you have like a couple of iterations of Nana Banana, it it it can focus on problems. Yeah. All your little Easter eggs like when you do like later on you do different episodes, you could put little Easter eggs for people to see. But there was a really good question um by It's Mary Unfiltered and she said set design question. The full season is outlined up front. Did you plan the world set across all 15 episodes before animating or does the facility grow episode

Did they build every set for the season?

58:29 by episode? Who? Um, we have the sets we needed for the pilot. Yes. [laughter] Okay. So, we did uh we did I mean it's it's kind of a normal process, right? If you're doing a pilot episode, um it's going to be more expensive because you have to create everything up front that you need for that. And episode two, I'm assuming 80% of that episode is going to take place in the same sets with the same characters we already have. So that's going to be easier. But uh we do love good flashback humor like uh like Family Guy or or I guess they're not flashbacks in that case, but like cutaway. You're right. Cutaway is the term. Cut away. Yeah. Um and those are going to be unique. Like we have a little um we have a set actually coming up in part two that I don't want to give away. Exciting. Those are going to be the those are going to be more effort of course. Um, yeah,

59:17 it's so cool to just go back through this slide again so that I can see the 3D to 2D thing happening again because if people like could see that and the level of control of this, you know, every single wall, every single piece entirely fabricated in 3D, reimagined and retextured in 2D, but as you said with Photoshop Elements for the background to add your Easter eggs, Andrew, it's like this is the level of control that a truly professional professional AI, you know, series needs to be, you know, whereby an Amazon or a Netflix or others that are going to buy this type of stuff are going to want this level of continuity and control and like it truly is awesome, guys. Like, you've done something here which I haven't seen. I haven't seen this level of control yet and the metadata and the scraping of it all and the exact like you know

1:00:09 diary entry however tedious it is as you said especially when you're doing comedy and you're no doubt changing lines every single like I can't even imagine it like to be so like scrupulous with data retention on top of all of this it's like it's such a bundle of stuff that is so sellable so it's very you know it's very interesting to see it produced like this. Um, thank you. Yes, I'm so glad it's appreciated. I know because I know this inside out, you know, this sort of stuff. I know the effort that goes into this. I know the attention to detail and I've not seen it before. I'm I'm telling you the truth. You know, I'm not trying to I've literally It's baffling me right now that you're the only ones that have shown us this.

1:00:55 You know, this idea. That's why thank you for having us on the show. You're welcome. Gosh, I didn't know we were going to get this much detail. I just loved the show and now I know you really like but that's first the sharing the sharing cuz like a lot of people started getting very secretive about AI workflows really early on and I'm of the belief that we're still building a market right now like we can absolutely we can we can become capitalist enemies in like two years where we never talk to each other again and try to you know take over theater screens for each other but none of that is happening yet. We need to get on the same base level and figure this stuff out together. One thing that we figured out workshops, sorry, go on. Yeah.

Why share the workflow at all?

1:01:41 Oh, yeah. Um, what did we figure out, Robert? I don't know what you're going to say. Oh, yeah. Sorry. We figured out along the way, which is not obvious, is that, for example, posing the characters. So Nana Banana can only focus on so many things as we so generating the characters within the scene is gives you a less qualitative output than generating them separately on say a gray background and putting them back in which then makes such a big difference even on like a 720p output and and you save a ton of credits that way, right? Like honestly it's probably embarrassing to admit how little we spent on this episode. like we're both in the Magnific Creative Partner program. We did not get more seance credits than that provides.

1:02:28 And it's a lot. They're really cool. But because we were able to reuse so many images. Oh yeah. It's like we have a library now of Paul in every possible pose and expression and we just put that into a new location. We even have like a feature that lets us change the lighting on him without AI like in Blender. Yeah. So, it's a very it's like a sitcom. Just, you know, reuse the sets and just write good scripts and uh stay stay low budget for it. It's again, why use AI where it's not necessary? If you've got the ability to use Blender lighting, then why not, you know, because it's absolutely free to rerender it there and it's um it's like why pay for the AI version of it which is less controllable and also expensive in credits and stuff. So again, fascinating to hear where you're using it and where you're not using it and how you're using it and that this is the first public showcase.

1:03:19 Um, for those that unaware and that want to learn more, you have Curious Refuge uh courses that people can go and actually purchase through them, animation courses and stuff like that as well. Again, like more Yeah, you can you can see much more of me. A couple hours worth and live once a month. I try I try to be live once a month. [laughter] I I don't know where you get the time for this. I don't know. For everyone in the chat, if you've got questions, please add more questions. Put all your questions in the chat because we want to ask want to ask um as many questions as possible. Is this the question you meant? Let's let's take it. Sure. And then then we get to Mary's question with the localization, which is interesting as well. Oh yeah. Um, so what do we say to the newlyannounced law in Europe to mark all deep fake AI generated material?

The EU's deepfake labelling law

1:04:09 Um, I'm all for transparency and thankfully because they did get good expert consultation. Um, it doesn't affect entertainment products as much. Like a lot of people are panicking and thinking like, oh, you need like it's ridiculous. You're going to sit in the cinema and there's going to be this little AI modified overlay or I've seen the AI modified in the in the ads. Oh, in ads. Well, in ads it almost makes sense because they're on screen so short, but like basically you just have to put it in the credits like it's I think if someone makes deep fake content that looks real and puts it on the internet that should be marked and it's not going to damage our enjoyment of a fictional product if we know it's fictional cuz we already do, right? Like

1:04:58 I don't know. I'm I'm pro AEU generally and they have made some strange decisions in other laws recently but I think I don't disagree with it as it is now the problem I have should implement yeah the problem I have is that where's the line and what I mean by that is if I took a picture of myself and then I went to chat GBT or Nano Banana I say can you do something and it's just a slight edit and then I'll have to say it's AI generated but then I could take that same image go to Photoshop comp change it completely and I don't have to say anything So yeah, where's the line? And I think that's what we need to kind of distinguish. Where's that line before we start saying this is AI generated? And then the next question kind of goes into what you were saying. Do we care? You know, if you turned around to me and said, right, that that cartoon

Where is the line?

1:05:44 is AI generated and this one isn't and I enjoy yours more. I'm like, I don't really care if it's AI generated or not. It's a good story is a good story. So that's the other thing as well. So these are some of the things that I think it's so weird isn't it the context of all of this because as you said Andrew like Photoshop is seen as a skill almost and AI is not seen as a skill and therefore it's okay to manipulate via a skilled software but it's not okay to have a you know my misinformation is valuable. Exactly. It's like it's so strange the lines isn't it? Yeah, but I think we're in the middle of this, right? In other areas and trades, we establish common sense in like the greater public that say like a couple of years down the line, people will say, "Okay,

1:06:32 well, this is AI slop. It kind of it hurts our society or me or misinforms me. Okay, this is not okay. Slap a logo on it." And well, here's a comment. Some countries do have the disclaimers that things were retouched in Photoshop, which I also think is interesting. It makes sense in theory and I have seen these ads. I do feel like that particular disclaimer is just on all the ads now. So, people kind of don't care anymore. And this was about beauty standards. I think it was about protecting teens from from beauty standards. It's one of the reasons which is a good impulse. But then everything when everything's marked, nothing is marked. So, I do appreciate the differentiation that EU thought up where it's AI free, AI modified, and AI generated.

1:07:18 It's there's no like specific wording for when it is when you reach that generated threshold. I would argue tarmac is modified because so much of it is real, but I could totally see people say like, well, but the final animated pixel is AI, right? So, it's generated fascinating. I don't show the Blender 3D scenes that show exactly the sort of like humanbased. So, again, I would argue modify would be correct. um even if the final output is entirely AI generated because you can show the 3D driving scenes, you know, you can show all of the um yeah, if people That's the thing is with people in public though on YouTube channels, they're not exactly wanting the evidence, are they? They just they're just being haters for haters. And we've got I had to delete a lot of slop comments under tarmac cuz it's just like

1:08:11 I I used to engage I used to engage with them but you've ne I've never once someone who gets into the conversation with slop like that's just an insult. They're not going to change their opinion. I do have critical comments that I engage with and I am open to discussion to it but it nuance and the internet don't go together. It's actually disgusting to brandish status slop when they know, you know, as we've just seen in the BTS. So, how many real people are involved with it? How much skill and 3D software, all of it. Like, it is really as I'm very sorry that you got brandished as that and it was just so quickly written off in people's minds because of the, you know, the mention of AI or mention of AI. It's ridiculous. They did catch on it somehow. Like they did get hooked on it on some level and disliked

1:08:59 that they were sp Yeah. Like otherwise, why waste my time to comment something negative on the internet. It's just Yeah, I don't know where they want to admit to themselves. [laughter] I think says it right. He goes, "Using the word slop is pure batty rage. Sometimes doing it just just for B." But one thing I will quickly say is we there's a lot of questions coming in. I think we hear We hit something. We've definitely hit something like a little mark in the it for the community. But before we do that, should we watch the second part? Yes, we should watch part two. Let's do it. Yes, let's do it. Paul, uh, what? How are you, Paul? Honestly, I didn't sleep on the flight and I wasn't planning to fly and I'm not even totally sure where I flew.

TARMAC, PART TWO

1:09:47 Yeah, sorry about that, but you love it here. We're in Rumstein. Where? Practically the heart of Europe, you'll never want American coffee ever again. Check it out. Want to be in Italy? Here, have an espresso. France. Have a French press. Oo, Germany. Um, this How long do I have to stay here? Oh, kid. Follow me. I'm afraid the government asked me to really hide you away this time. It's just too dangerous a world for a boy like you. I could hide myself. When we hide ourselves, sometimes even we can find ourselves again. It's best left to the government. I don't know. This is such a physicy place with math and stuff. Are you sure there's not another outdoor place I could be? Do you remember back in Paraguay when you were covered in bug bites and I told you this was your time to shine?

1:10:39 [music] [music] This is your time to shine. Uh-huh. I was lying to make you feel better. The truth is, this is your time to shine dimly underground. How about I make you a steaming mug of Then you head to your new office and figure out something to send through time that these nerds have never seen before. Thanks, Norbert. I'll give it a try.

1:11:27 Okay, everybody ready? Is that what I think it is? It's inspired. This will only use .05% of the time budget. Ah, you know, I thought I'd start small, but interesting. Your nickname in college, Colonel, huh? Is it enough? It's original. Really? We can get some good data from it. Okay, let's do it. What could go wrong? [music] So, how long's the battery on that thing?

1:12:15 It's not a battery, sir. Um, what is it? Nuclear. Oh, how long's the nuclear? It's not. You can't ask how long the nuclear Oh, 30 years, sir. Thank you, airman. Do you ever crash one of these? We don't crash these, sir. I know. Just theoretically, what would um theoretically it would level six city blocks and we would not be here to discuss the theory. Oh, right. You're in safe hand, sir. No city blocks out here. Oh, I think they've dropped out. I think they're coming back in.

1:13:01 Here we go. Is it working? Yeah, it's working. T Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. Oh. There we go. [laughter] In and out. In and out. We're back. How fun is that? Oh my gosh. So much fun. I love the coffee. I love the coffee bit. Yeah. I just I love all There's this. If there's Italian, there's this. If there's German, [laughter] I won't say it because I don't want to get demonetized. No, that's great. I I really and I what I like about that it is very much like a pilot in the sense that it's you can see where it can potentially go like so many different directions it can go. It ended in a I want to know more and I think that's so key. Um yeah I really really enjoyed that and I really hope we get to see a lot more of that.

1:13:48 Is your audio coming through okay? Give us I mean honestly we're Oh no the audio Yeah, your audio is funny. The audio is coming through strange. It's coming through funny. Yeah. You guys as well. Ah. Oh, the old live situation. Hey, Andrew. Is this better? There we go. I think we're sorted. Maybe not. Oh, live. Don't you love it? Yeah. And it's quite laggy as well. It's quite laggy. Yeah. I don't know what's going on. Okay. No, we can't. Your uh your audio is totally We'll have it in a second. We have so many options here. I'm sure we'll find a solution.

1:14:39 It sounded better then. It's still a bit croaky, but it was it did sound better. Yeah. Daleks as the Daleks have entered the building. And Lawrence, I saw your message. Give us like 20 seconds. Lawrence, I saw your message earlier about being in commentary. No worries. Looking forward to seeing you on Friday. Come to the Emirates. Oh, mate, the Premier League starting up again. I shared a video today um from someone that was excited about the Premier League coming back. Oh, I can't wait. Can't wait. It was one of the best like physics football things, but I'm not going to show it to you uh because obviously I've saved it for next week's live show. Nice. So, it's one that I'm keeping off. But yeah, Premier League this weekend, mate. Oh, no way. Guys, in the chat, if you got any questions, let us know. Put the questions in is we was just saying in the in the in the um green room like we're loving these guests.

1:15:29 These guests are so funny. They're talented. We definitely want to get them back on on on the show, you know. They they're very open as well. They're let they're really breaking down like some nuggets, some golden nuggets as well. So, yeah. But I can't believe the whole like, you know, actually getting every single thing into like a log basically, you know, like actually keeping every single prompt and keeping everything. [clears throat] Are we back? Oh no. Oh, the audio is still broken. Damn it. Uh, Ziggarat said, "Your guest choices are always amazing." Yeah, that's what we're trying to do.

1:16:17 We're trying to bring you some of the best guys all over the world. All over the world as well. Absolutely. You know, definitely got some. And if there's anyone that you want to see, anyone you want to recommend to us, let us know. Go to the website. Uh, the website is I don't know if we've got it, the AI live. Oh, yeah. The ailive show.com. Ailiveshow.com. Let us know from there. Grandma Grace said, "My AI short film just won the Higsfield weekly challenge. Well done. Can you check it out real quick and give me some feedback?" Uh, what we do? Yeah, that won't be on today's show just because today is just about Albert and Robert. But we're back on Tuesday. So, upload it to the website which is there and uh yeah, we'll we'll we'll definitely Well, the fact that you won an award, I'm sure we'll

1:17:03 play it on um on Tuesday's show which is 400 pm UK time. Hey, Kareem's in the house. What's going on, Kareem? I missed you yesterday, brother. Oh my god. Oh, we have a crew now. A London crew. Me, John, and Andrew. Uh me, John, and Kareem, mate. Uh we got to get you there. You're the London boy. When you I'm in London next month. So, I'm in London in September sometime. And I've got a few dates, quite a lot of dates actually coming up. So, uh, yeah, what I'll do is I'll let you know and then let us know what's going on in town. Uh, definitely. Yeah, definitely want to go there. Are we back? Maybe. Maybe not. No, I still hear a bit. Yeah.

1:17:51 Yeah. No, it's still a bit I'm not sure what's happened. I'm so sorry, guys. Mary says, "Come to Canada." We would love to come to Can Whereabouts in Canada are you from, Mary? Again, let us know. This is the only trouble with live, huh? Technology. Eh, I've always technology. Wait, I'm surprised it's not mine, honestly. I'm surprised that it's not mine. I'm I'm glad it's not mine, but I'm surprised it's not mine. Yeah. Um, so Cory Campbell said, "Any of the characters based off of real life people?" That's a really good question. We'll definitely get that is a great question. Answer that. Like if if for whatever reason they can't make it back, we'll definitely be speaking to them. He's trying every way now. He's trying his iPhone. Oh my god.

1:18:39 You tried. Oh, that works. That works great. Perfect. Oh my god. Let me put you here. Hello. Yeah. I mean, you've seen it for for an hour now. So now now we can change. We can now we can be chill. Yeah. [laughter] This is what you see when we when we pitch to you pitch you tarmac officially. Yes. Like [laughter] yeah you've seen it now. Yeah. Yeah. Now now we get the behind the scenes stuff. Now thank you so much for the extra effort to join from your iPhone on this with the same Streamyard link. You must have transferred your link to yourself to do that. That's awesome. You guys are the best. You guys are the best. Call the cable company. Alba says [laughter] now you can see brilliant the heatwave maybe let's let's get into the questions that piled up right

1:19:31 I don't know what you discussed but uh we've got a lot of stuff car well the most interesting one that came in as you were just there is are any of the characters based off of real life people? Uh, not characters but jokes. Like some of the silliest dialogues are real things that happen to us. Um, wow. I uh you you were there for the be background ones, so you talk about that. Oh, yeah. Yeah. [laughter] This is great. So, as comedy writers, we keep a little list of things that happen like in every meeting on the street, in a subway, and we then just look like when we have a task of writing a scene, we look for through this thing, and then we try to just squeeze

Are any characters based on real people?

1:20:19 it in the the second it, you know, it works. So, um, the if I don't know if you caught this cuz 50% of the people uh thought it was like one of the funniest things they saw. It's the background joke. And the others didn't get it. So, the colonel says, "What is your personal background?" Paul turns around, doesn't say anything. That actually happens. It happened. [laughter] Oh, you cut off a bit. Oh, no. Ah, you're cutting up a bit. Oh no, we lost him right in the best bit. Yeah, you was about to Oh, you've gone into slow motion. I don't know whether it's the Wi-Fi. I Yeah, for the 5G.

1:21:10 Oh, that's a shame. Oh, no. There we go. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Where did I lose you? You you said about the background and he looked and then okay background uh that was a real person at a conference with uh native native language not English um he just misunderstood the question of what's your personal background with what is your personal wallpaper on your computer showing behind us right now [laughter] he he like it was some video game it was like oh well this is XCOM and I like it that killed the question we never we never found out where he's from or what he studied, right? [laughter] And the other one is the moonlighting joke, which um

1:21:57 I like some guy just was talking about moonlighting as a as a young guy and his son was right next to him and he was his son was like I don't know 14 or something and he used the word moonlighting and he was like, "Oh, actually son, do you know what moonlighting means?" And the son like started sweating while his dad Yeah. This was like a fancy dinner. And he was like, "Um, it's when you show your ass, Dad." Yeah. [laughter] It's been stuck in my mind since then, and I'm so glad I got it out. [laughter] Wow. Oh my god. That's That's the great thing about writing a series as well is because you can turn around and say, "I want to include this, but not this episode. I'm going to put that in that episode or that." It's like with musicians, they'll have lyrics. They're like, "I can't put it in this song, but I'm going to make it in that song. I'm going to use this lyric in this song.

1:22:45 And I that's why I like when people can create series because you can always link it. That's why I think one of the cleverest series was How I Met Your Mother. They I thought it was really smart the way they wrote that. Like I just really appreciate smart writing and when I just even just looking at the the the pilot of this one, I'm like immediately you're like, "Yeah, they're smart writers." Like you can that's what I'm excited to see the rest cuz I really appreciate that. We got another question. We have ideas for um the well we have more than ideas. It's outline. We have outlines for the whole season. So um I I I can say as much we're definitely going to make more of this. And I guess the question is uh who who will join us? That's the only question cuz just for personal reasons I want to see more. Yeah. Yeah. [laughter] Yeah. Definitely. It's happening. And I mean with the new CDN update it's it's getting

1:23:37 it's only going to get easier. So yeah. Right. Well, I had a technical question about that actually here from Lauren saying, uh, have you had generations to generate any images? Oh, yeah. Yeah. Uh, so there's ways around, um, generating things that the the the services don't let you generate. There's you can't work. I mean, the easiest thing is remove whatever is offensive and put it in differently. Like if it's on audio, for example, the like it won't it wouldn't do the ass joke. I had him say sass and then of course the original um voice actor had said the correct word and cut it in. So it it goes through sea dance, but we did bring in the original audio back in the edit.

How do you get around the filters?

1:24:22 So we actually stuck to the performer's original way they said it. Um that's an easy one. Surprisingly the um the coffee joke didn't like it just worked. It didn't trigger. Yeah. didn't trigger at all. [laughter] Yeah. But then then again, uh I know C dance is on our minds and we're doing everything in C dance, but when Cedance says, "Hey, um you can't do that." You just go to something else. Yeah. Or what is your second mini? Okay. Cling. Yeah. Others. Yeah. There's loads, aren't there? Yeah. Because it's always like you It seems to me right now Seance is like the number one. Like eight, nine months ago it was all about VO models. Yeah. What? Like for you, what is the if it doesn't work in sea dance, where do you go next? Is it VO? Is it Cling? Is it Miniax? Is it like

Where do they go when Seedance says no?

1:25:10 Clling is very reliable? Yeah. Yeah. So for us, it's just it needs to handle um lip sync well. That that's the key. Yes. 2D scenes. If it doesn't dance unlock tarmac for us because of the lip sync more than anything. Of course. Of course. um less of a question. There's uh Comfy Cloud. I've been using it very very regularly for the for the Curious Refuge course and it's a great way to use very high quality models um that are I don't want to say completely uncensored um but without having to um be afraid of a lot of the filters that are on most of the commercial sites. And it's I think cheaper than individual generations if you just book by like credits uh and and and

1:26:02 or by time rather and run Comfy UI workflows. So while Comfy is not um necessary for making tarmac which I'm very grateful for uh it is a valuable tool to know in the AI space for um very specific controllable reasons like that. Oh yeah, let's grab the design sets uh question. I think that went under um when we went under. Yeah. Uh localization for so for everyone listening localization is when like Pixar for example they create versions of Toy Story where um posters have uh don't have text on them and the various localizing studios can put it in in their local language. For example, Inside Out also uh the kids in Japan

Localisation, and why not to auto-dub

1:26:48 weren't eating broccoli. they were eating some other vegetable that kids in Japan don't like eating because Japanese kids like eating broccoli. So that's that's a process that's done for a lot of animation projects. Um honestly I would have to just say we would generate the shots again if we were lucky enough to have the budget that international audiences wanted versions of tarmac. Yes. And one thing like in terms of language if if it comes to translating only the the language and the performance I so in another job that I did for localization it is super or maybe you've seen like the Amazon example right with a AI generate localization of the of the whole movie. Uh they probably haven't cuz I think English audiences often don't. Um you you guys don't do dubbing as much as the German audience would usually.

1:27:38 So that's a [clears throat] big culture here in Germany that we have uh an entire industry of actors who make careers out of playing the German voices of American stars. But I don't remember the the Amazon uh film that so the name of it that they autodubbed everything. It was terrible. It was really really bad in a lot of languages. So, I wouldn't go for automatic dubbing. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. Yeah, I've I've seen that in sports when they've had AI over sports and I'm like, what's I don't I didn't even know what was happening. I was like, what is this? [laughter] Like, it was a joke commentator and then I realized it was AI and I thought, oh no. Oh, no. Yeah, the YouTube autodubbing is not great either, is it? Yeah, I wouldn't rely on AI to do the translating of um I mean, especially not comedy. I would, at least for the German version, I would personally want us to oversee the the translation.

1:28:32 Like, we would rewrite jokes. There's there's I mean, just like the jokes we just mentioned, they don't work in German. Um, and and we would try to make that as as human done as possible. Yeah. Probably still be dubbing. Yeah. Well, I know that we're a bit over time now and we lost you for a little bit in the middle there and I'm so sorry about the technical issues that we had with you guys. Like um if you guys have a hard stop I can't hear you Chris actually. Oh, do we? I I can hear you. It must be on the No, you're back. Wait, you I can hear I can hear you, Andrew, but I can't hear Chris. Chris, can you hear me? Oh, you hear me, Andrew? I can hear you. Yeah. Oh, interesting. What's happen? Anyone in the chat, can you hear Chris on in the chat?

1:29:20 Uh, if anyone in the chat, if you can hear Chris, just let us know. Hello. Hello. Test one, two, can you hear me? I I can hear you. I heard the test just now. The test one two. I heard test one two. I'm back. I'm back. Okay. Okay. I'm back. I'm back. Yeah, everyone can hear you. Yeah. We've had all the technical issues today. [laughter] You got to love it being live, don't you? I was just saying if you have a hard stop, I know that you've been busy today already filming and stuff and that we're already over the a lot of time, technical difficulties aside, we would just love to have you guys back another time, you know, just loved having you in the WhatsApp group. I've been saying just love this this exposure we're getting honestly and and hearing you guys and your I just love the passion that you've got for it all and that you've got teams involved in

1:30:09 it and all of this and yes let's go with the show you know let's get some real financial backing to make this a bloody show where I keep thinking is where the hell is the gen TV cuz that would fit perfectly on that you know who the hell is owning gen TV because give us that number. Tell us. I'm trying to find I'm trying to find your next guest. Just Yeah. If I have anything to to ask for in this AI space is let's figure out distribution. I know there are many great people working on it. I mean, we have showrunner, we have escape, but that's the main thing to crack here because we have so much talent that you're talking to all the time that we have in these WhatsApp

The distribution problem

1:30:56 groups that we have all over the internet. But we need to break through that ceiling of finding like reaching people to watch the stuff. Because it's good, not because it's AI or not. And that's because the things are good. That's Yeah, I've always said that in my I worked in the music industry for 10 years. I've met a lot of talented broke singers and it wasn't that the fact that their content wasn't good, it's just distribution. Um, and that's like I noticed that same pattern across loads of different things and AI will be another one. We're going to see a lot of talented people, but because of distribution, their content is not going to get out there. So, if we can work out ways to get our content out there, get the distribution out there, um, I think we're definitely on to something. And that's why we started the show, truthfully, is exactly the same reason. you know, we were like, "Wow, these guys are so talented and there's no platform for this yet."

1:31:48 And uh we've recognized this and you know, over time it's grown to unbelievable like content that we're being sent now. Like the stuff that we're being sent, I genuinely think if this was on YouTube or Netflix, I would just watch it. I'd pay for it. I would have happily AI or not, it's just so good. the storytelling, the visuals, the color grading, the sound design, and it's all next level stuff. And often it is projects involving multiple people that really blow my mind. Like this one did. And yeah, Gossip Goblins one, I was just like, my god. Like, wow. It's amazing. It's unbelievable, isn't it? It's Yeah. But but you guys are right up there with this show. Truthfully, what you've shown us today

1:32:35 is like I think in Europe, I haven't seen anyone go to this level of like trying to keep everything and trying to document everything and trying to really make the show fully like you can hand over to some someone a real distributor and say here's everything, you know, people involved everything. The Germans the Germans we need to learn this lesson efficiency is [laughter] German efficiency. You can you please pass off some of this to the rest of Europe? Just you've got too much of it. So just start handing out some to the rest of us because we need it. We're going to Warsaw literally. Shout out to shout out to Warsaw Glitch. Actually, if anybody listening to this right now, I will be in Warsaw next week. Um so hit me up there. There's lots of the real dreamers going Warsaw [clears throat] Glitch.

1:33:20 Yes. And where else can we hear where else can we hear stay up to date with with both of yourselves? We're very active on social media. also super responsive to DMs. Um, honestly, being a business nerd, LinkedIn is probably the best place to reach me at least. Yeah, same for me. But the the uh tags down there are also accurate. So, Instagram, we we try to keep the same handles everywhere. Um, Instagram YouTube channel. I'm I'm trying to be more active on YouTube as well where this is streaming too. And um yeah, can't wait to hear from from anybody who wants to to have a chat uh about about AI, about what we're doing. And um Exactly. And this is about figuring it out together. So even if you have some question that might in your head be dumb.

1:34:06 No, it isn't. Any [clears throat] of the questions in the chat, I've seen some great ones we didn't get to. So send them over. Exactly. And like I said, we've even seen some people in our little WhatsApp group saying, "Got to have these guys back again." You know, so more questions for the next round. And um long may the show continue. Is there plans to initially do the next episode anytime soon or anything like or or is it on to other projects for now and or or Yeah. Oh, there is. Oh, great. We've blocked some time for us to to do that. Um in in the fall, I would say we're definitely going to be working on episode two. Yeah. When it gets rainy, when it gets less hot. Yes. Can we all have a little break from the heat, please? That would be very nice. Thank you very much. It's too bloody hot out here. Wherever I go as well, it's like everywhere seems to be hot.

1:34:52 No, nowhere's the UK is not safe anymore. It used to be safe, didn't it? I used to come back to the UK and get away from it and now I'm like coming back to it and I'm like, "Oh, when does it end?" London. Yeah, we we we visit Zack in in Sweden. Yeah, that's got to be. Exactly. But how cool that the local booth recording, Andrew, was a thing back to back that we understood here. You know, this is something like audio nerds. I'm like, even we brought up Logic twice in two episodes. This is crazy to me. Like, I never thought we'd be here and suddenly we're here and I'm so happy about that. Like, uh, yeah. Now, I know you guys are really into the audio space. You're going to have to stop me talking to you truthfully because I'm just going to like, you know, like pick your ear on all of this stuff.

1:35:39 We have about the audio stuff. [laughter] Oh, do you? Yeah. I mean, yes, we should. No, no, we have to we have to together. We should we should we should just do a straight up we do the visuals on YouTube and then the audio stuff on [laughter] I love it. And uh the kid also said that um it was 90% sound in his film. You know that's what he thinks of film. It's 90% sound and 10% visuals. And he he rightly pointed out if you you know change the background music you can make a very nice scene very very chaotic and you can make a very happy scene like evil just by changing the music. It's really we did sound first on tarmac. Yeah. It's all sound first and then we put the visuals on top of it. Yeah. But that's fantastic. You guys absolutely smashed it.

Sound first, visuals second

1:36:27 Yes. You smashed it. Thank you so much again for coming on and rereaming us through your YouTube as well. Um, we're gonna get you on for another maybe normal session or another creative session. Uh, what whatever you guys uh like honestly now that I know that you do workshops and all of this, our regular show is just more submissions kind of like what your uh uh students would get Albert, you know, basically. And actually, we had that won the Curious Refuge competition and stuff like that, the animation one do submissions and I think we're going to do X-P prize next. Andrew, I don't know if you've seen, but there's insane amount of great auditions for that and looking forward to that. And I think we we need other experts to come on and, you know, give feedback with us, you know. Um, and we definitely like to get you guys back. Definitely. Hopefully,

1:37:15 we we distribution will be sorted. You've done 14 15 episodes of season 1. It's going to be on Netflix or the AI version of Netflix. All of that by hell yeah by October, November time. We're getting lots of claps from the people tuning in and uh yeah, thanks for tuning in from LinkedIn or YouTube or wherever you've been tuning in from. Uh we're live each week usually on the regular show and uh yeah, big fans here. Mary is a big fan. Um I also got some really lovely feedback that you're so good with your course and your feedback and stuff, Albert. So again, like that's mad props for you for doing that and that yeah, that level of dedication I understand is a lot. So yeah, and no doubt there'll be more and more people coming in after we uh you know end the live stream with a love and thanks because there's always a bit of a delay.

1:38:06 But yeah, we will kill the show there and uh join you again in the future.