AnsweRED Podcast Episode 22 — The Spider-Verse, VFX Mastery, and the Future of Animation

This transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Paweł: Hello and welcome to the AnsweRED Podcast. My name is Paweł Burza and I'm joined by Sebastian Kalemba.

Sebastian: Hello, everyone. Today we're hosting Pav Grochola, who is Effects and Look of Picture Supervisor at Sony Pictures Imageworks.

Paweł: It's gonna be a great talk. We're going to talk about everything from Spider-Man: Across the Spider-Verse to his experience in the industry. It's going to be a big one. Let's jump straight into it. All right, Pav Grochola, welcome to the... It's Gro-ho-wah, right? Or Gro-ho-la?

Sebastian: Gro-ho-la. Grochola.

Paweł: All right, my bad. Welcome to the podcast. I was actually... We were talking about this because you use Pav and I remember I spent 4 years in the States as a kid. I remember they always have problems with Paweł. And you go by Pav, which is like a shorter version of it. And it makes total sense to me.

Pav: That's why. Because they have problems with it.

Paweł: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Pav: I kind of got sick of... although if I go with Pav now, they respond with Pat and I'm like, no, no, no, Pav. Today I actually had someone say halve.

Paweł: Okay.

Pav: Halve? No, no, no. Pav. P-A-V. I always have to spell it. It kind of defeats the purpose. I thought it would be easier, but maybe in some ways not so easy. I should probably just stick with Paweł. Or Paul.

Paweł: That's what I would do. I would go towards Paul.

Pav: It's too late now, though. I can't go back.

Sebastian: Yeah.

Pav: Everyone knows me as Pav.

Sebastian: People will get lost. You'll say, "call me Paul now." Like, what?

Pav: And then next month, actually, Pavel.

Sebastian: Every month, a new version. Exactly.

Paweł: So we start these episodes, since we're at Promised Land, with a brief introduction of who you are, a bit of your background so people get to know you a little bit.

Pav: Do you want me to go for it? All right, I'll do my whole spiel. So I was born in Poland, but I grew up in Australia, that's why...

Paweł: I can tell by the accent.

Pav: Yeah, got the Aussie accent. So I started to get into visual effects straight after university. Studied fine art, didn't know what to do with myself. Computers were just starting to be a thing, so I thought, I'll get paid to do work because I thought being an artist, I'll be living under a bridge, which I wasn't too into. So I got into computers, started in commercials in Australia, got an opportunity to work in London, went to London, lived there for six years, came back to Australia because we had a kid. And then, well, I've always wanted to go to the United States. After three years in Australia, I went to the United States and worked there. And I've been there for 12 years now. I've been working in the industry for about over 20 years now, which I feel really weird about because I feel like I'm so old. But you know, it suddenly happens where you're like this old senior person. It's like I didn't plan for that.

Paweł: But it's incredible because you have the experience, right? And we were talking about this before we went live, like sharing this experience and actually sharing the knowledge that you accumulated over this time. We move into a mental space where we hit a certain age where we just want to share the knowledge and pass it on to others so they can learn also from our mistakes or from things that worked for us and all that. But to give a little bit more context to your background, you started with doing adverts, if I'm not mistaken, right?

Pav: Ads. Yeah, commercial work.

Sebastian: In Australia?

Pav: In Australia. I was working in a commercial house for like three years. I was doing everything, I was doing modeling, animation, which I learned I was terrible at. So I didn't want to continue doing that. But I found myself already at that stage, I was already drawn to things that involve more technical programming type stuff. So I knew that that's what interests me. With the kind of work that I do, it's called procedural, a lot of the work that I do. So it means you are setting up systems rather than actually manually doing stuff. And I really liked the systems approach because you can reuse tools and it's like engineering, it's like visual programming almost. That somehow appealed to me even though I had that fine arts background. So that lends itself very well to the career of an effects artist. So an effects artist is basically someone that works more on the technical simulation side of 3D animation. So you'd be simulating destruction and water simulations and all that kind of stuff. But you're doing all of that in a piece of software called Houdini. Generally, it's like the standard. And Houdini is excellent at doing that kind of work because it's all procedural. But the other cool thing is you can do other cool procedural things with Houdini. So I was very much interested in using Houdini to explore other, like, rendering and stylization techniques. Which is why Spider-Verse was so cool for me, because I got to explore by doing that on Spider-Verse.

Sebastian: I was totally impressed by Spider-Verse in general. I'm a huge fan, I love it.

Paweł: Amen.

Sebastian: It's so refreshing. I've been studying the script for like 10 times.

Pav: Oh, really? Wow.

Sebastian: I have an obsession over the script.

Paweł: Sebastian's background is animation.

Sebastian: I used to be Head of Animation at CD PROJEKT RED, and animation director before. And right now I'm running the project with my huge team, over 400 people on the new Witcher. But generally animation is my passion. So I've been studying Spider-Verse because it was... actually, you also worked on another great movie that I really love, The Mitchells. I love it because this is what you bring to the industry. I mean, you and your team and your co-workers, they're at Sony, right? It's super like a spark. It's a new thing. It's, you know, it's... this is what, in my opinion, the industry needed. It was great, kind of super refreshing because... for me, till Spider-Verse, everything seemed to be kind of driven by this very not nuanced R&D. Let's make great snow. Okay, let's make great snow. But it wasn't surprising, you know what I mean? Like, Spider-Verse was like, oh my God. And then the second part, when I've seen Hobie and his clothing is animated on fours and the guitar animated on threes and you know, like, dude, I've been scrubbing frames. Oh, that's so cool.

Pav: He's my favorite character. Hobie, right?

Sebastian: I love him. Hobie, he's so awesome.

Pav: Such a good character.

Sebastian: Yeah, exactly. Have you actually been part of like, let's say making this texture that is constantly living on him or the shading?

Pav: Yeah, what I helped develop was the line work tool. So all the lines that go on around him, the way that they kind of change and redraw themselves. It's kind of like, when I was developing the linework tool, it's not actually difficult to get a line that sticks around an object. You can procedurally work that out. It's not terribly difficult. The question is, what do you do with that line when the character's moving and animating? How do you refresh that line? Because you have to refresh it. Because if it just sticks to this part and then it moves, it looks wrong. So you have to redraw it. How do you redraw it in a way that looks not distracting? If you draw it and suddenly change the line every frame, it's gonna look "pop-pop-pop". The line's gonna look really, like, poppy. So you have to think of a way of blending out that line. And then blending in the new one. So you're constantly blending out, blending in, blending out, blending in. So it's lines refreshing themselves. And the really surprising thing about that system is that it actually feels nice. Because it feels like it's what artists would do when they're drawing. They're kind of constantly redrawing. It's not distracting. It just looks, feels good.

Sebastian: It was like, I've been very impressed by it because I remember very old, even Red Bull adverts, you know, they were, doing...

Pav: Right! Yes, I know what you mean.

Sebastian: Very, very easy drawings. Very flat, very 2D stylized. But you can tell that it wasn't anything procedural. It was literally an animator that was, you know, doing this in post. Making sure that the gaps are moving forward and they kind of add to each other to make a fluid feel. And I was like, yeah, I get this. I could probably manage to do it. When it comes to Spider-Verse, I was impressed because of the 3D space. You know, you move, rotate in every single direction. And I was like, you know, going crazy about, like, oh, my God. How did you manage to do it? That it's not distracting.

Pav: That took such a long time to make, figure out. It took literally, like, six months.

Sebastian: It was bloody rocket science, man. Honestly.

Pav: It was really hard.

Sebastian: How come? That's why the impact is so big.

Pav: I think the impact is big because of visuals firing on all cylinders. It's not just the visuals. It's the story, it's the voice acting, it's the music, it's the soundtrack. It's like David — Daniel Pemberton, who did the score? Fucking genius.

Sebastian: No, man, it's absolute. Even the trailer, it gave me such a promise and me as a part of the audience generally, it was a very promising trailer that you will deliver some sort of emotions that I was expecting, and you deliver it. So also, you know, as you said, firing all cylinders. Even the marketing bit was very coherent with building the expectations in the audience. And then you deliver it. Honestly, I'm very impressed.

Pav: Thank you.

Sebastian: And one more thing on top of the line, as you just said, because I can imagine, and I hope you elaborate a little bit more, generally when you look at the, let's say, sequence, it looks very busy. Like, super busy, because everything moves differently. Then you have the line that is moving constantly and is living. And you can tell, it can't work. Because how to then make an image? Make a sequence so the audience will exactly focus in the spot that you want to focus in such a busy image. And you also manage. So how come?

Pav: Do you know what that is? It's the art direction. We would get a painting where we would try to match, and then we would have reviews with the art directors and the production designers and the directors, and they would look at that image and they would say no, it has to be lighter here. Reduce the contrast here, increase contrast here. It's almost like every frame is its own piece of art. Super nitpicky. But for good reason. Because they kind of like, it needs to be that nitpicked. Because they're very specific about what they want you to look at. Because otherwise it would be like what you're saying, a mess. You wouldn't know what to look at.

Sebastian: Exactly.

Pav: I feel very honored to be part of that. And I've learned so much working on these films. I was just saying that, you know, I'm getting to an age where I feel I need to start passing on some of the stuff I've learned. I want to write a book, I want to do all this. All this stuff to kind of, like, help spread the information that I've gotten. And that's why being in festivals like this is so rewarding for me, because I can — I took a lot of time to write that presentation. I took like six months of thinking about it to really think about what I wanted to say. Because I enjoy looking at things from a top artistic level and like thinking about the theory about why things work the way they do and what does it mean from an artistic perspective. And for me, it's so rewarding to share that because not only am I kind of like trying to — it's like writing, right. You kind of get the ideas really straightened out in your head. Like, oh, it means this. That's what I'm thinking, is this. And you get it. It's so rewarding. And then to have the opportunity to share that with people about a project that they're interested in, it's like, wow, what an honor.

Paweł: I feel like everybody wants to know what's the secret sauce behind what happened in Spider-Verse? Because it's something that redefined how we, like, consume stuff. Like it's a different type of animation. It's a different art style than we were used to. Like you said, it's different. Like the whole, whole puzzle pieces put together create a different thing compared to what was previously in the industry.

Sebastian: Regarding the secret sauce, like Pav. What's your take on it? Because there is a secret sauce. When I look at your productions since Spider-Verse. Mitchells, and the second part. And even before: Cloudy, even Surf's Up, like 20 years ago almost already. And Hotel Transylvania, right?

Paweł: I love that.

Sebastian: What I see, because I have all the art books, I study them like, you know, man, I'm a nerd.

Pav: Awesome.

Sebastian: Yeah, so when I study them, I always notice one thing that is in common, kind of nominator. It is that you are smart about picking the right battles. It's not that we're gonna focus and do everything at once. It's not, no. This movie is about these three aspects. Like, for example, Hotel Transylvania. I want to make sure that the poses will look like they are sculpted, but they are moving and expressive. Like, we need a tool to let animators sculpt the pose to be able to control each single frame they want. Yeah. Okay, let's do it. And then we have the Spider-Verse, which is like an animated comic book for me. You know, and then you have The Mitchells. When the camera is all the time there. I had the feeling that, you know, I'm in a ritual, like National Geographic kind of a vibe that I'm, you know, I'm there. There actually is a flood, you know, I'm there. I love the humor and Cloudy? Super fresh concept, right? So these things are very creative, and you keep surprising the audience around the world. And I think being very smart about finally making the — you have a budget, you have a schedule, right? And you deliver something super outstanding. If you could just tell us maybe, and tell people like, what is the secret sauce at Sony, maybe.

Pav: Oh, man, I wish I knew. I wish I could say. As you're talking, I'm like, yeah, you're right. There is some, like — and some of those projects were even before my time. So I don't even know. I didn't work on those. But I can maybe speak to some of what I'm seeing, what's happening on Spider-Verse. One of the big things I've noticed working on a film like Spider-Verse versus other projects that I work on is that there is a very unified, very strong commitment to a very distinctive thing that they want to do, and they don't budge. And when I say they, I mean, like the top brass, the production designer, the executive producers, the directors, they are all on board with commitment and committed to doing something very specific. They have a very specific thing in mind. They may not know the details of it. They're kind of like, that's something that obviously we figure out as we go. But there is a commitment to doing something that I think would scare a lot of people. You know, for example, on the first film, there was a moment where... so I work for a company called Imageworks, which is the production company for Sony. So we produce the films. And Sony Pictures Animation is kind of like the director's art side. And we'd be sitting in a review and there'd be like, one of the things that we're scared to do sometimes is, like, to go completely black. No information, just pure black. But that's what you need for comic books, right? There's a lot of moments, parts in comics where it's just pure black. And it's like, oh, wow. I remember, the directors and the producers being, "Pure black!" "Pure black!" You know, it's that kind of commitment to following through on a style. I think it's very easy to be scared and pull back and shave off edges, kind of like shaving, "Oh, that's too —" Then before you know it, you're back to beige.

Sebastian: Yeah, exactly.

Pav: You ask everyone what the best color is and end up with beige. So, they kind of committed to a color. They committed to a style. And they held us to it. Like, no, we want that.

Sebastian: That's the courage.

Pav: They were sure about what they wanted. And that's not an easy thing. It's not an easy thing to kind of like, I'm putting myself in the position of them. Because you're kind of putting your reputation on the line if it doesn't work out. And you're really sticking your neck out. It'd be much easier to go, yeah, we kind of want a comic book style, but no one's seen that before. Maybe we should just tone it back just a little bit.

Sebastian: Happens very often.

Pav: It's like tone it back, just tone it back. And before you know it, you're back to normal looking CG.

Paweł: And that's what you don't want because then it doesn't stand out. And this stands out totally.

Sebastian: It's not innovative anymore, you know what I mean?

Pav: But you need those people at the top to be committed. Because there's no point in other artists like myself going, no, it should be this extreme. There's no point. We don't have that power. It's the people at the top that need that kind of like force and drive to say, yeah, it's definitely this.

Sebastian: And it's also great for the entire team, I believe. Because if you have the top that is super committed and they believe in it. The people will follow.

Paweł: It's a unified vision.

Sebastian: It's easier to make a call that is braver, you know, with more courage. And that's tough.

Pav: But it is tough also because they have to be sure they're right. And like, you have to know that you're right.

Sebastian: And I'm sure they are not right all the time, but they pretend to be.

Pav: They have to be right enough of the time.

Sebastian: Exactly, exactly. They at least have to pretend and then just, "yes, I was right."

Pav: I'm sure it was like that on the first film. Because you don't — no one knows, right? Like I was saying, actually at the artist interview, someone asked the question and I was saying to them, when you're working on the film, you never really know if it's going to be good or not. You never know. You'd think that you would, but the reason you don't know is because we work on the building blocks of the film. Right? That's what we do. And when a film comes together, it's the way that those pieces interact as a whole. That's what makes it successful or not. And that's what we can't see when we're making it. We don't have the music, we don't have the soundtrack, we don't have the audio, we don't have the final color grade. We can't see any of that so it's really hard to know whether it's gonna work or not. At the end of the first film, I wasn't sure if it was going to work. Like, I was really scared. I was like, this is either going to be a huge disaster or it's going to be excellent.

Paweł: Thankfully it was the last.

Pav: Yeah, thankfully. But you never know. So like you were saying about the top brass, did they — they were right.

Sebastian: Yeah, they were.

Pav: I wonder how confident they were.

Sebastian: Oh, I can imagine. We had actually a few, you know, at CD PROJEKT RED we had some situations like that. For example, the scene system in Cyberpunk was super new and super risky and they were exactly as you said when you were telling about, like taking a step back to make it less and like, no, the system doesn't have to be that first person. Let's take a step back and make the regular cinematic language. And they were like no. We've been very committed to it, but of course there were situations of that. But it's also risky to pursue this direction. You know what I mean? Finally it paid off. But I remember very well those two or three moments in production when it was a lack of belief. And finally when we got the very first mock review, they said, that's going in the game.

Pav: That's awesome.

Sebastian: And this is exactly this moment, some kind of leap of faith. Like, if you want to push the boundary, you have to be a bit crazy.

Paweł: You have to take risks.

Pav: I agree, you have to take risks.

Paweł: You stay in the safe spot all the time, then you're not really developing or trying new things because you're always defaulting to the stuff which feels like it's safe.

Pav: There's a saying that I go by that if you always do what you've always done, you'll always get what you always got.

Sebastian: Exactly. You are actually standing still.

Pav: Yeah, if you always do what you've always done, you always get what you always got. So you have to change what you're going to do to get something different.

Sebastian: Well said.

Paweł: Let's write that one down.

Sebastian: Yeah, one of the things that you can tattoo on your back. Yeah, but the thing is also that by doing it, you show others that they can also. And you push the industry. Which is great because you raise the bar and, and there's more trials and more errors too. But still, that's pushing the industry. And this is great that we can learn from each other. That's one of the missions from Promised Land, you know, have people like you coming and Alyssa Zarate, you know, Albert Szostkiewicz, all these great guys exchanging experiences.

Pav: Right, right, right.

Sebastian: And, you know, who knows what will come to your mind after Promised Land, you know what I mean? But yeah, this is good.

Paweł: One thing we're also kind of talking about and we see it's a theme throughout Promised Land is the fact that a lot of artists are now going back to the fine arts and their fine art background, and you also have a background in that. But also, on the other hand, we have this ever-evolving technology and the new possibilities in terms of new tools and how they influence our workflow, how we work on projects, how we do our projects. So how do you see it in terms of like fine art and its influence or actually artists going back to fine arts and sticking to that?

Pav: So I think what you're referring to is there's a moment that I'm labeling and I think I've heard one other guy say as well. So it's not mine. I shouldn't say it's mine. It's a return to the real. Meaning that people are going back to traditional because AI is... all of a sudden, AI is coming along and making digital kind of cheap in a way. Right?

Paweł: Cookie cutter.

Pav: Yeah. In some ways, you — okay, I've got a slightly different take on this that may, maybe not — I haven't heard anyone express before. And my take on it is that if AI can basically take all the art that's happened before this moment and create new art based on that. What that's going to do is it's going to create opportunities to find new ways of visual expression, new avenues of visual expression that haven't been seen before. And I think that's a cool opportunity for artists to explore. Because if AI is going to kind of come along and kind of basically steal all the art that has already happened, then humans with their — like, humans could come along and find completely new avenues for expression. That's kind of the positive spin of what could happen. I fundamentally think that there's a massive ethical issue with AI, though. Which is obvious. But I think that the ethical issue applies to AI in general. Basically what's happened is we've got these companies that have come along and taken global knowledge, whether it's artistic knowledge or knowledge in all fields, and they've almost like laundered it, you know, and repackaged it. And said, hey, here's all this knowledge. Now you pay us the money for access to this knowledge. I think there has to be some sort of government intervention with this, because it's not... I don't see that as being fair that a company can't come along and launder global knowledge like that and repackage it to us. Even though it was ours to begin with.

Paweł: Exactly, exactly.

Sebastian: Absolutely.

Paweł: Well said.

Sebastian: Totally agree. But actually, you said something very interesting. I haven't thought about that, like, you know, this positive spin that happens that, you know, we had already a few chats with other speakers, and as Burza mentioned, people tend to come back to fine art. I don't know if you had the chance to talk to Greg Rutkowski. And actually this situation kind of motivated him, inspired him to get back to the roots. And to be very honest, of course I knew Greg and I really respect his art.

Paweł: You're also fanboying a little bit.

Sebastian: I'm a huge fanboy because I love Matejko and just huge pieces that are epic, the moments. But then, you know, I was smashed by his Instagram. Exactly when he realized that this is the moment for me to get back to fine art. And he started dealing with these huge canvases that are like very Matejko, I would say, oriented. And that's also, you know, kind of the outcome and this is part of this positive spin. So I always try to look at the bright side, and I absolutely don't believe that AI will destroy everything. But this is great. And I'm actually wondering, and maybe you have an idea if you think that this positive spin will have also an influence on the film and animation industry? Because look at that. After Winnie-the-Pooh, for example, right. Disney closed all the 2D departments, I think Winnie-the-Pooh and there was this Princess and the Frog and they kind of closed this. And legends like, you know, James Baxter, Andreas, Deja, Sergio Pablos, legends from Disney, they left. Of course they found their own unique way of dealing with art, which is great as far as I know. James Baxter is the head of animation at Netflix right now. But still they closed the top department there. But 2D is in games right now. And, you know, what do you think about how this situation can impact the animation industry?

Pav: I think we're all still trying to figure out where it belongs and if it belongs anywhere. I, um... AI as it exists right now is — this whole text-to-image thing is just obviously not going to work for any kind of production. Because you can't change it. There's no way of controlling it. I think there might be an opportunity to create our own models in-house and train on our own data for a very specific purpose within our pipeline. So it's very tailored to address one particular issue that is very kind of like, it's hard to find the rules for it. It's more about kind of like... I see maybe there's a chance there. But it's this whole thing about AI with the text-to-image thing, I find it uncanny. You know, the uncanny valley thing, it's like to me, it's uncanny valley art. You know, it kind of has all the surface level sheen of art, but none of the soul.

Sebastian: That's true, no intention.

Paweł: There's no background there.

Pav: And all the ethical issues aside, like just for now, purely from an artistic standpoint, as an artist looking at art, it kind of makes me nauseous. You know, there's something unsettling about it. It's kind of like looking at those early days of Final Fantasy when they're trying to do photo-real humans and you're like, oh yeah, it's not... Not to kind of throw any shade on Final Fantasy. I mean those guys, they were doing really groundbreaking stuff at that time. But it just goes to show how difficult the problem is. And the problem is much harder than just —  kind of like, even for a neural network that kind of has a really good pattern recognition thing. There's something about things that are made by humans that are very special. And I think part of the things that — what makes human art special is that when you create artwork, artwork that's created by a human, you go through steps, you make decisions. You start with a sketch, you maybe color that sketch, you make compositional changes. And all those steps along the way to your finished piece come from that human being's personal choices. And all of those choices are baked into the final product. You can see them all. It's intentional. You can see all those choices, the way they painted, the choices they made. And that is visible. It's a spirit that's visible in the image. AI has no chance of competing with that.

Sebastian: That's true. Even looking at kind of real images, real pictures of, I don't know, AI pretending, or creating an image that represents riots on streets. You see, there's no riots. People do not behave like that. They don't have, the micro expression is not absolutely matching the pose. You know, it's like... it's like comparing two pictures of — I'm going to take a picture, right? Smile and you smile and I look at the smile versus a documentary picture of a person smiling and you have a smile that is real. Because whenever we smile very intentionally, like, yeah, I'm going to smile right now. We do not even trigger the same amount of muscles in our face while smiling from the heart. Like those two smiles are actually — because different muscles, you know, are actually incorporated into the smile that has intention, and when the subconscious level is even triggered. So, AI doesn't know that. And, you know.

Pav: You need an artist that understands what it means to be a human. To put that in, right? I, I... with the whole AI thing. I've heard a lot of people describing our moment in AI as a bubble that everyone is jumping on board. Like, this is going to fix everything. It's going to be amazing. I'm kind of like, I don't know if that's really gonna be... I think right now the big thing with AI is that they think by scaling these large language models, by making more and more training, by making more, like that's going to be the solution to get them there, to kind of general intelligence. But we'll see, we'll see if that kind of works. But even if we do get to that point in AI where we get these general intelligence large language models, I still have very big reservations about whether it'll ever get to a point where it would replace real human creativity.

Sebastian: Yeah, I agree.

Pav: Because it can only copy based on what it's seen.

Sebastian: Yeah, that's true.

Paweł: It's kind of something that during the festival Bjorn Hurri mentioned, it was very graphic in this case. So if AI eats something, then the thing that's going to come out of it is something that is going to eat it again and like, you know, digest it out, in and out and in and out, where it's lacking the human agency and the creativity and intentionality like we talked about. So like all these things are gonna get lost somewhere. So there always will be space for, you know, actually thinking about the process. Like you said, starting from sketch, going to final, adjusting things on the go. It's very important. You need these steps and need to play with the whole thing.

Sebastian: AI Centipede.

Pav: Like the snake eating itself. I mean, there is like, they have done studies where they've shown that if you train AI on AI, it just ends up with garbage. It ends up with gibberish. And that's actually one of the big areas that they're worried about right now because there's so much stuff on this Net that's generated by AI and that's terrible for training. Because they need human data. They don't want to train it on itself. That's a hilarious problem. So you kind of polluted the environment and now you're complaining that the environment's too polluted.

Sebastian: That's super interesting. Right.

Paweł: Well said. I want to ask this, a question that we ask everyone here is what inspires you, moving now away from the AI discussion. On your day to day, where do you get inspiration?

Pav: I love photography. I'm really big into photography. I spend a lot of time doing photography. I do... talking about that return to the real moment. Remember that moment when Midjourney came out and it just started to get good? I went through a thing. I went through a thing where I was just like oh shit, I see it coming. I started drawing. I started doing these big charcoal drawings. So now I'm doing big charcoal drawings. Talk about like positive —

Sebastian: That's nice.

Pav: Because that was what I was doing back in university and it was just like I feel I'm reconnecting with that side of myself. But right now I'm doing a lot of photography. I collect art books, particularly photography books as well. So I'm getting very — And I just like reading and consuming everything art related. So I've got a huge Pinterest thing and I kind of, I just like art in general. I love imagemaking. That's my thing. I'm not particularly interested in one style of art. I want to know art from a kind of bird's eye perspective about imagemaking. What is imagemaking? What does that mean? What is a good photograph? Why does that photograph work and why does this one not? Because with photography, the really interesting thing about photography, is that you can look at a photograph and you instantly know what it works but you don't know why. it's like that. There's something about that that speaks to me on a deep level. I don't even know what it is. For me it comes back to that thing of, you know, David Lynch, he talks about visual, the visual language as being its own language. It's beyond words, it's beyond kind of like, when you try and translate the language of visuals into words, it loses something because there's something inherently inside of visuals that can't be expressed in words. And I just love playing around with that whole thing and trying to figure out what that is and like, creating images. So I've got very varied tastes in art. Broad across the whole spectrum. So kind of like making, I want to make a photography book that also uses natural media. So painting over photos.

Paweł: Oh, that's cool.

Pav: Like Arnulf Rainer and, a lot of like German artists. So yeah, I just love art in general.

Sebastian: Awesome.

Pav: Yeah. Very broad taste.

Sebastian: Yeah. Okay, you thought — I need one more question. Because you said that you consume books and about the art. Is there any book that you would recommend?

Pav: Oh shoot. I mean, what kind of stuff?

Sebastian: One of your favorite books of all time.

Pav: What kind of art?

Sebastian: Whatever art. I don't know, not about photography, about the visual language maybe as you said.

Pav: Okay. I've got a really good book that I read recently. Have you read the Creative Act by Rick Rubin?

Paweł: Yes!

Sebastian: Yes.

Paweł: All three of us read it, perfect.

Sebastian: Yeah, I was very impressed. Very, very.

Pav: That was great.

Sebastian: Super holistic approach. Very open-minded.

Pav: Very spiritual. I was surprised going into that book. I thought reading a book about creativity and spirituality, I'd be like, that's not for me.

Paweł: I had the same thing.

Pav: But when I read it, I was like, oh my God, that's how I think about art.

Paweł: So many eye openers there and so many things that you associate how you consume and look at art, how you talk about the creative process itself is just incredible. But he names those things, which is very hard because we always talk about creativity as something that comes from within, but we hardly ever name where does it really come from or how we digest things. And he can pinpoint those things, which is incredible. But it comes with the experience that he's had in the industry, which is just amazing.

Sebastian: And I love it, how it's really published, how it's edited because it's not like, kind of quantity over quality. It's very quality. Like every word counts there.

Pav: Yeah, I met the writer.

Sebastian: Oh, yeah?

Pav: Yeah. He was working, he worked in collaboration with Rick Rubin. I did this talk actually at the Motion Picture Academy in Los Angeles and there was a guy in the audience, when I mentioned the book Creative Act because I just read it and I was like, this is great if you ever want to read about creativity. A guy came up to me and said, do you want to meet the author, Neil Strauss?

Paweł: Strauss, yeah.

Pav: Do you want to meet this author? And I was like, holy cow, I would love to. He came to the studio with his kid and I showed him all the Spider-Verse stuff. Really great guy.

Sebastian: I'm glad we asked then.

Paweł: Yeah, we need to go to that studio, see all the Spider-Verse stuff.

Pav: Oh, please. If you're ever in LA, come visit.

Sebastian: Oh, yeah, we need to do that.

Paweł: We totally need to do that.

Pav: If you're ever in LA —

Sebastian: Geek out.

Pav: Open invitation.

Sebastian: Awesome, cool. Thank you so much.

Paweł: We'll hold you to it.

Pav: Please do, please do. I love showing people.

Sebastian: That's awesome, man. Expect an email from me. Thank you. Thank you so much.

Pav: Yeah, my pleasure. Thank you so much. Thank you, thank you.

Sebastian: Thanks a lot for watching and we hope that you enjoyed this episode as much as we did.

Paweł: It was an amazing one. And as always, don't forget to comment, like, subscribe all that jazz. Let us know what you're thinking about the episodes. And as always, let's stay in touch and we'll see you in the next one.