Lopsie SCHWARTZ

I don’t write scripts for these. I ask questions and listen. The story reveals itself in the interviews - the pauses, the unexpected answers, the moments someone says something they’ve maybe never said out loud before. That’s where the real film lives. This video for WTS Puget Sound was built that way. Real conversations. Real people. Shaped into a story that makes you feel something, and understand why the work matters. Because the most powerful stories aren’t manufactured. They’re discovered. When organizations try to “sound polished,” they often lose what makes them human. My job is to find the human part - and build a narrative around it that connects. If your organization has something meaningful happening inside it, there’s a story worth telling. You just have to be willing to listen long enough to find it.

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Simulated Head Tracking in Atmos with TouchOSC and MaxMSP. 📱 Random Cafe Walla generator with 16 channels of stationary sound objects. 🗣️ Dial for Head X axis XY fader for Head Y axis and Tilt Toggle for Randomize and Sustain 🎧 Output is Binaural Stereo

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Lots of producers and script development people take a weird, potentially hazardous approach to notes. They try to fix individual scenes before they fix the story. Why is this hazardous? Well, mainly because just like in medicine, if you get the diagnosis wrong, the fixes won't work. In fact they might damage the project so fatally it doesn't survive development. A classic example of this would be, a reader says to the writer "Hey, buddy, I see a lot of classic act two problems here. Let's see if we can punch up those scenes." - This sounds reasonable, but unless they take the story back to outline, it's entirely possible they'll miss the real problem... act one. 95% of the time, act two problems have been caused by a failure to set up the characters properly in act one. And in these cases, it's likely that the central characters have no agency and are passive. Act two feels weak and artificial because it's just a series of plot levers designed to mechanically shove the character through the plot point. A problem you'll never solve by fixing scenes. But why is this approach potentially fatal... bad notes lead to writer resentment. When the notes don't fix the problem the writer will blame the notes and the producer will blame the writer. Trust is eroded in both directions. And because it didn't fix the problem there will be more notes and more rewriting. If you go through the cycle of bad notes and bad rewrites long-enough the project will collapse. Both parties blaming the ineptitude of the other. This happens more often than you'd imagine.

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I miss some of these Tool stack: - ChatGPT for the images - Lightroom to remove the sepia vibe (not sure why ChatGPT does this to the images) - Luma AI to animate the images - Suno for the epic 8 bit track - After Effects to put it all together Example prompt: Isometric 3D scene of a towering Sony Walkman being assembled by miniature construction workers. Pastel blue body with yellow buttons. Workers are on ladders and scaffolding, while cranes and a helicopter assist. Headphones not included. Sharp square layout. Bright pastel colors under neutral daylight with no warm filter. Natural shadows and highly detailed materials. Have a fantastic weekend! -------------------------------------- If you found this useful, someone you know on LinkedIn will. ♻️ Please Repost ♻️

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New media artist Steven Mark Kübler continues to experiment with multi layered screen projections, and this demonstration is a great example of how the setup can be turned into a playful curtain of light, with the potential to be connected to a generative sound system. The layers could also become cross sections of a product, allowing participants to explore individual layers/features. #LightArt #TouchDesigner #NewMedia #Art #Interactive #Exhibition #InteractiveDesign #Retail #ProductInteraction #RetailExperience #ExperienceDesign #InteractiveArt #ArtandCulture #Austria #Artist #Experientialism #Peace

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I didn’t expect Vertex Block Descent to scale this well with hard constraints and high stiffness, but this AVBD paper by Chris Giles, Elie Diaz and Cem Yuksel pulled it off. Real-time performance on GPU with stacking, friction, and joints, without blowing up the iteration count. Definitely worth reading if you care about speed and robustness: https://lnkd.in/gC5WeqHn https://lnkd.in/gHuGWnxT #vfx #gpu #houdini #pbd #vbd #avbd #solver #performance

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Most people covered the HOLYWATER x Jeynix deal as an acquisition story. It's not. It's a eulogy for the old VFX trade-off. For decades, the industry ran on an unspoken rule: quality costs time. Speed costs quality. Pick one. The entire structure of post-production — the waterfall schedules, the bloated vendor chains, the 18-month timelines — was built around that rule being permanent. Jeynix getting absorbed into a microdrama studio tells you that rule is dead. Here's what's actually happening beneath the headline: Vertical content used to be where VFX went to die — compressed, compromised, good enough for a phone screen. Now it's where the most aggressive pipeline experimentation is happening. TikTok and YouTube Shorts don't give you 18 months. They give you three weeks. So studios either build AI into their workflow or they don't compete. Holywater didn't acquire a VFX studio. They acquired a speed advantage and wrapped storytelling around it. The three things I think this signals: 1. Mid-size studios are about to close the quality gap faster than anyone expects. The talent moat that protected large studios is eroding. AI-assisted pipelines don't replace skilled artists — they multiply them. 2. Vertical content is the new proving ground, not the consolation prize. The constraints are forcing innovation that will eventually flow back upstream to long-form. 3. The studios that resist this are making a strategy decision, not an integrity one. Speed and craft were never actually opposites. That was always a workflow problem dressed up as a values problem. I've been working inside this shift at 3D Services India — our AI-enhanced VFX and animation pipelines were built for exactly this inflection point. Not to replace what makes great VFX great, but to stop letting timelines and budgets be the reason it doesn't happen. Genuinely curious from people building in this space: where in your pipeline is speed still costing you quality — and have you found AI actually solves it, or just moves the bottleneck? #VFX #AIinVFX #PostProduction #Microdramas #ContentCreation

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Jim goes big in the UK with a 1 Billion dollar studio build. "The proposal includes 18 soundstages and a skills academy aiming to “harness AI and the digital revolution to revolutionize the art of storytelling.” Cameron has supported Marlow throughout and has floated it as a potential base and training center for Lightstorm3D, a company he set up to develop tools and tech for movies." https://lnkd.in/gBshkQCy

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To master the hybrid workflow, you have to stop viewing AI as an "Easy" button and start viewing it as a Force Multiplier for your creative taste. In a traditional edit, your energy is often drained by the friction of technical limitations and stabilizing a shaky shot, cleaning up muddy audio, or manually masking a complex subject. By delegating these "pixel-level" tasks to AI, you reclaim the headspace needed for "story-level" decisions. The real magic happens in the Iterative Loop: you use AI to generate three different pacing variations of a scene in seconds, but then you apply your human "Senior" lens to identify the one frame where the emotional subtext actually hits. It’s about using the machine to do the heavy lifting of construction so you can focus entirely on the artistry of the final polish. #videoeditor #videoeditingtips #brandedcontent #tvc

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Please, consider not using AI voices, or internal resources for your concepts, pitches, animatics, etc... Let's find a way to use the same human talent (hopefully) you'll consider for the final!! Even the "union rate" for demo reads is pretty low, AND it gives you the chance to start the connection between talent, copy and client. If your client deserves YOUR creative talents... imagine the value added by a trained human artists! Cast them early! Have them standing by. Another tool in your toolbox, ready to make the project shine. In 2025 I worked on several projects that I was able to negotiate attractive demo-fees, so the producer could afford multiple adjustments or even full re-writes as we worked toward the final spot. When that final session date came, it was like old friends walking the path THEY CREATED! Smooth, tested and pre-approved! Adding VO doesn't have to be last minute every time. It can be early, and part of the creative process. 😉

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The surprise announcement of Guillermo del Toro's "Pan's Labyrinth" getting the 3D treatment for it's 20th Anniversary, led me to speculate what other slightly offbeat titles or filmmakers work could make great dimensional viewing? How about Wes Anderson? His visual style certainly looks like it might fit the bill and he has previously expressed interest in 3D. It's also an instance where the well known side-effect of stereoscopy's potential to create a slight miniaturisation effect being a positive to explore as opposed to something to try to minimise and work around. So how about "The Phoenician Scheme"? Could it be a good candidate for 3D conversion? READ MORE: https://lnkd.in/eH8esGQy

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Happy to share that all eight Flame Learning Channel videos I’ve been working on over the last several weeks are now live! They span a mix of brand new Flame 2026.2 features, as well as recently updated features. Topics include: - Snapshot - Selective workflow improvements - ML Automatte - Project management improvements - The Type node - The Subtitle node Big thanks to Frédéric Warren, Stephane Labrie, Francis Bouillon, & Louis Martin for their collaboration and trust. https://lnkd.in/e4kDFwfe

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Agree 100%. I often tell our clients and designers to conduct a simple test and observation to prove the importance of audio design, musical score, and even sonic branding. Watch 10 minutes of a movie with the audio off, and 10 minutes with the visual on or off at your discretion and then tell me what you remember in detail about the scenes. More often than not, the audio scene contains far more information and emotion that the viewer remembers, particularly as many layers are stacked in the audio containing large volumes of information about the character, tone, emotion, narrative, and speed of the scene. #auditorystorytellong #music #immersion #creative

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It has been 4 years now since we opened HAA, the first specialty school for animation in the US. 100% animation in person for 8 hours a day with training from experienced Hollywood animators and directors. Students learn with classical animation training and industry geared projects for film, games, and television. It has been a great joy to develop the kind of curriculum I wished I would have gotten from Cal Arts after working in the industry for 30 years. Most colleges leave their students without guidance on what they specifically need for a competitive portfolio today. Students do character designs and student films that are misguided and unpolished. We build projects that are industry relavent and train students 6 semesters deep in order for them to reach pro levels. We even help our students build their portfolio websites and teach them how to be a professional within a studio system. This is a school striving to lead education with cutting edge technology and experience. Learn feature storyboarding from experienced feature story artists. Learn TV production boards from primetime directors or TV board artists. Learn Previs from a top previs lead from Marvel and Universal. Learn game animation and cinematics from an experienced lead and game cinematic director. Learn Unreal Engine for filmmaking from feature and game directors. The animation industry is more challenging than ever and for serious students we offer one of the best solutions. Daily in person professional guidance with a structure that is second to none in practical real world training. In 2026 we launch our next intermediate level program for online students called Creative Edge and grow our 3rd year Mastercraft program with fantastic pro level projects. It's going to be an exciting year and we invite new students to check out our website and contact us if you are interested in learning more. https://lnkd.in/g8E8uFuU #animation

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High-end real-time visuals aren’t about pushing complexity. They’re about controlling it. Every technical choice impacts performance, timelines, and long-term flexibility. That’s why I favor texture projection workflows over unnecessary geometric complexity and UV mapping. This preserves visual quality while keeping scenes efficient, scalable, and adaptable, even late in production. Optimization, at this level, isn’t a technical constraint. It’s a creative advantage. Choosing the simplest path is often what enables the most refined result. #RealTimeVisuals #DigitalEnvironments #ProductionWorkflow #UnrealEngine

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Proud to see how raw facial performance capture transforms into expressive digital characters APPLE ARTS STUDIOS Motion Capture Services. With 15+ years of experience, we continue delivering high-quality motion capture solutions for films, games, and virtual production. #MotionCapture #FacialCapture #VFX #Animation #VirtualProduction

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Modern Mythology Episode 25 explores the Cypher System through a fantasy lens with guest SJ McKean, covering universal RPG design, narrative mechanics, and flexible storytelling.

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Saying something has "No CGI" or "No VFX" in a film/show is not cool, especially when there's obvious CGI/VFX in them and there are even credits countering these statements. You're essentially insulting and slapping an entire hard-working department in the face and seemingly trying to discredit and erase them. We are here, we always have been, so please for the love of filmmaking, stop this trend. We can all appreciate practical approaches, but VFX exists in ways that many people forget so please remember that we're all collaborating artists and we all deserve respect for one another's craft without trying to erase each other's contributions. #vfx #filmmaking #television #visualeffects

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When artists integrate AI into their workflow, they can either use Additive or Subtractive AI workflows. With Subtractive AI workflows you create a large swathe of different content. And curate it down to the few items that most closely represent what you may have been going for. With Additive AI, you start from some piece of media, be it a storyboard, concept art, photography or something else that already has a large amount of intentionality behind it. And iterate upwards from there. In my view, both are valid. But Additive workflows are the best for total creative control, resulting in media that is precisely what the artist intended. This is an example of an Additive AI workflow. I start with a clear idea of my character. He's a half Maori head of a security firm. Battle hardened, but from a sophisticated social class. I start by drawing and describing the character and his backstory. I then enhance this drawing in the storyboard mode to speed up the rest of this workflow (optional) And then in Cinematography mode, I bring the character up to a final character sheet. Along the way there were many iterations - over 30 paint overs and modifications, but I'm happy with the result and ready to start filming. Filming itself is done using an AR camera in real or virtual environments, and directed using natural language. Eg. "Mate, can you give it a little more intensity? There's more at stake". You can also use a real actor to drive these performances. This was done in LiveMind Aperture. I'll share more workflows soon.

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