The Future of the Movie Experience: How Nexus Studios & Meta Built Something Completely New

Steve Usher (00:00) So Mike, welcome to the Experience Designers. Mike Anderson Track (00:03) Thanks so much, it's such a pleasure to be here. Steve Usher (00:06) Brilliant. Thank you for making this happen. I know we are in two rather different parts of the world and the experience designers is typically in person. But of course, just to get some time in your calendar and explore this really interesting topic. ⁓ We've gone digital for you, Mike. it's... We have gone digital. ⁓ Mike Anderson Track (00:23) I appreciate it. Steve Usher (00:28) So I wanted to kind of, I just want to start with a bit of an intersection just for the audience, because I think the topic we're covering, it's such an interesting moment in time that I really want us to all, all of the audience to really ground in, think, because you're going to bring some of your knowledge on this particular turnkey moment that's happening in this industry. ⁓ But what I wanted to ask, what do we kind of need to understand in terms of the history or turnkey moments in filmmaking? that helps us really understand the moment we're in right now. ⁓ Mike Anderson Track (01:03) I'll try and I'll describe it in a way because I had difficulty understanding it coming into this project. And so this is what helped me and perhaps that will help other people. But in a nutshell, filmmaking and cinema is directly tied to technological advancement more than most mediums, think, or disciplines in terms of like art. Every time the tech changes you go from like an Edison kinetoscope into like projection in a big theater to an iPad to an iPhone and it changes of course the content and what's made and these are big upheavals and they're subtle but they end up being big I think. Right now we're at an inflection point I think where the way we consume media is going to move from a phone perhaps to something like these glasses I'm wearing well not these glasses I'm wearing either but they're trying to put you know media and screens and whatnot into ⁓ wearables if that happens and if that becomes a dominant way of consuming media then you open up a crazy amount of possibilities for how you can do visual storytelling and screen-based storytelling And this project is, was almost a test case and an argument for how film can change. And it was put together with Metta and Universal doing a couple of horror films in this new format of spatial cinema. Does that make sense? ⁓ Steve Usher (02:50) It makes it makes so much sense. I mean, of course, if you're listening to this, we've all been to the cinema, right? And so we sit down with our popcorn, we're in a theater context. It's a 2D screen. We've got some Dolby surround sound. We've got all of these kind of the technologies that you have shared. And of course, even Dolby didn't. at some point became a thing in cinemas, which then completely immersed us from a sound point of view, from certainly from where we were before to now. ⁓ And so kind of how we consume content and how we go to the movies, of course, we've we've been it's kind of been the same for a long time, albeit things got tighter, crisper, better in terms of the quality. For those that perhaps haven't heard of it before, or are more curious about it, what does this mean? when we talk about spatial storytelling or even just spatial period, what is the big distinct difference? Mike Anderson Track (03:46) Yeah I guess I'll just define it in an extremely narrow way so I don't get into trouble and show my ignorance, ⁓ but specific to the project that we're talking about, which is like, you want to watch a movie in a headset, like a Quest headset from Meta or in VR. and you put it on and a gigantic screen is in front of you and it's massive and it's beautiful and it's HD and you have this great incredible screen and then you can watch a film on it ⁓ in any room in your house say so if you live in it if you're living in a tiny little dorm room you can still have a giant screen and it's crazy I didn't realize how much of a shift this was from like watching on like an iPad or like an OLED TV, like 80 inch TV. But when we shot a trailer for this app, we rebuilt the screen physically in the room. So we had the actor go in and sit on a couch and they put on the headset. And then we had, we wanted to light them with the big, with the light from the screen. So we just built the huge LED screen that was still smaller than what you can see in the headset. And it was freaking enormous. Like it filled like diagonally this entire room. Like it would never fit in this room in a way. I mean, it does in headset, but physically you see how big it is. And that was a massive difference for me when I saw that you'll never own an OLED that big in your house. Like you simply won't, like you won't have a home theater that can match the quality of this like, like. know spatial way of viewing it. Steve Usher (05:39) Is this is this kind of I'm just if I put the headset on, is it kind of going into like a gay gaming common environment? Is it full 360? Or is it you're building it in just inside of that headset in the context that room and then the then you can have a screen in there? Or is it could it be completely round and around you? Mike Anderson Track (06:01) You could do, ⁓ yeah, you know, I think the film always plays on a screen. That's just, we're in film, we're filmmaking, and there's a screen. I love screens. I'm from a painting major. I'm like, man, there's been people been looking at screens for like a million years. Like cave paintings, you know, altars, whatever you want to call it, whatever is out there. It's a great way to deliver information. Steve Usher (06:28) Yeah. Mike Anderson Track (06:28) ⁓ so I don't think we're getting rid of that. So when I talk about, ⁓ like a full room takeover, three C, three 60 takeover, that's like, you're in a set say of a world. Like maybe you're looking at like, ⁓ like Mad Max, fury road, and you build the entire wasteland around it. And so it's like a drive-in movie and you have like a screen there in the middle of the wasteland and you really feel like you're in the environment. That's one way, or there's a, we've done that. And then another way is what we did for one of our films, The Black Phone, which was one of the titles that we put in the spatial. We recreated a basement in the room and that basement is, it matches the exact specifications of your room that you're sitting in. Yeah. So. Steve Usher (07:07) Mm. Okay, so it kind of skims your room using the schematics of your room, but then overlays the basement. Mike Anderson Track (07:31) Yep. And it knows the Quest is, we did this for Quest 3, the Quest is amazing piece of technology. So it knows where your doors are. It knows where the windows are. So we could put the door from the film and where your door was and whatnot. And the claustrophobia, like how that matches you into the film is very subtle, but like your body picks it up and it works really well for immersion. Steve Usher (08:00) We're going to get on to that word immersion as well a little bit later. ⁓ Can I ask as well, from your point of view, Where do you kind of see kind of application of this kind of technique and this opportunity in this field? Like where else could you, what's the boundaries for this? Is it boundless? Do you think there's certain industries that I think... Mike Anderson Track (08:02) Yeah. Steve Usher (08:19) you think could really take this on and others that might take a little bit longer. Mike Anderson Track (08:24) my God, mean, it's well, I guess I would say ⁓ when you think about we're putting a screen that's now plastic and fluid and digital into your room, right? That can be any shape in any way and you can pop up new screens or move those screens around. And then you think every everything that's screen based that's out there. that moves information. ⁓ And I think sports is a really nice example of something that they, when you watch like an NFL game or whatever, they pack so much information onto a tiny flat screen for that. And if you can think of all these little chyrons and little scorecards and all of these different angles and different things coming off of that screen and being able to be manipulated around your room, it's an amazing way of delivering information, I think. Steve Usher (09:23) Wow. That reminds me, wasn't it like an experience once where you could, I think you could buy and go to, but literally you had really good seats, you could have beer, but literally you are on the touch line on a digital screen, like massive screen, and you watch it from that angle. It wasn't particularly dynamic, but you felt right up against it. I mean, I'm just thinking that, right? It could just be like, where do you want to sit in a stadium? How could you? Mike Anderson Track (09:45) Yep. Steve Usher (09:52) That could be something quite interesting and plug in from that perspective. Mike Anderson Track (09:54) ⁓ I think that's fascinating, you know, I'm speaking specifically of like American football too. Like there's something like, I can't remember in like a three hour. Steve Usher (10:00) Mm. Mike Anderson Track (10:05) NFL game, the ball is in play for like 12 minutes or something. It's absurd. It's not like European football where it's like 90 minutes and 90 minutes. So they fill that with there's an equivalent amount of animation, motion graphics animation in an NFL game as there is in terms of like ball and movement because they have to constantly make it fast and amazing. And there's like, comes in and two helmets smash together and they spin around and then that goes out. Steve Usher (10:35) Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, I never thought of that. I never thought of that. Yeah, there's a reason for it being there to keep us engaged. Yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Mike Anderson Track (10:36) And you want that? Yeah. You have to keep it going. I think you'll start to see that things like that work incredibly well in spatial, like unbelievably well where you're delivering information, but you also have these moments of like deep immersion and like excitement and you know what you can do with somebody when you have the use of all of the space in between them and the screen and you know where their walls are and you can remove them and bring them back in. That's great. But still screen-based media. Like you're still just sitting in a chair watching a screen in the end. peripheral a lot of this. Steve Usher (11:15) Yeah. And what's just in terms of like the project. So let's take the audience through this because I think this is such a unique project and one that I think ⁓ I'm absolutely certain you can kind of take us through kind of step by step. And I'm really curious to kind of get under the skin of it a little bit more because of obviously its uniqueness. ⁓ But let's just start from the beginning because obviously with something being quite new. There is normally some kind of convincing that needs to take place and risk taking as well as ⁓ excitement. ⁓ Tell us about that kind of moment where the opportunity arose and some of the challenges in those moments to get something like this even just signed off and over the line, never mind into the creative process. Mike Anderson Track (12:00) Yeah, there's a lot of, it was extremely complicated, both ⁓ like creatively and conceptually and technically, very complicated technically. But I think the most interesting and unique thing for me about this pitch is we were, when was it pitch stage, is they ask us nexus to jump in, we, ⁓ Nexus is the brilliant place, you know, it's super award-winning. All the awards have all the awards. ⁓ But the studio is very unique, I find, in that they are storytellers, they author their own films, they have a great roster of directors, and they also are able to bring in new technology. And that doesn't always mean that's not always the same people. It's like some people who bring in new technology can't make good things. And some people who make really good things aren't flexible enough to handle new technology. They can't turn the battleship. And Nexus is very agile and very talented, I think. So anyway, we get this pitch and Meta's all about it. They're like, This is the future. We're working with really great people over there. Rick Rae is brilliant, who was the head of this project over there, or one of the heads, I guess. ⁓ He sees this as the future, but our job was to both realize this in a functioning app where it works with two movies. is to create the template of the language of how you watch a film in spatial, the template for how you take a film that was made for 2D rectilinear distribution and redo that into spatial cinema with all the bells and whistles. And then along with that, we had to prove that this was a viable format that would scale, that Universal Pictures would look at and be like, amazing, I see it, this is the future, let's go, we can do 50 movies like this. So there was a lot to unpack. Steve Usher (14:17) my, okay. Let's start. Cause there was three segments you shared there. Let's start with the first, cause I think the language and the description and the kind of the definition of this form, which kind of is still new and emerging. how language is important for these things. what just talk us through that around the definition and ⁓ the scoping of it. Mike Anderson Track (14:38) Yeah, you know, it's always fun when you make something totally new because you don't even have words. Like, what do you call the moment that you're doing in this film where a the dust particles that you see in the movie are now present in your periphery watching it? So like, do you call that when you're trying to describe that to your coworker and you realize you have to create definitions for like everything, you know? And then you have to try things out and fail at them miserably in order to find out what works and what doesn't. Cause the first thing everyone thinks is they're like, oh, that's cool. We're just gonna like take your room and, or we'll get rid of the frame around the screen. It'll be like theater in the round. And you know, we'll tell stories like that or. All sorts of stuff. Somebody will throw an axe and that axe will come out of the screen and hit you in the face. It's gonna be awesome. But the reality is that stuff actually isn't that awesome. films are perfect. Like the film we're making on is like perfectly made for what it is. You know, it's not, there's not something missing. Like that director wasn't like, dang, I just wish that axe would come out of the screen. Steve Usher (15:37) You Mike Anderson Track (15:55) they shot it and edited it exactly how they wanted. And so what we began to realize is that subtle lighting shifts that played on your own walls in your room that are not noticeable, but not that noticeable would do a tremendous amount to enhance a scene. And once we started to see that it was very... Steve Usher (15:59) Hmm. Mike Anderson Track (16:21) subtle and peripheral and abstract were some of the most successful things. We started to realize we were working in something that we called, it's an oxymoron, but we were calling it visual sound design. So the way sound design functions in the horror film, like if you pull the sound design off of like, you know, the spooky part in a horror film, it falls totally flat and it's terrible. And... That's why it's always been there, you know? When they invented audio for films, they had to invent sound design because it never existed in 1927. We're doing some, we had to do something similar here where we're creating a sound, kind of a sound design, but it's visual. And that's a second layer that you can access for another sense during a spooky part in a horror film. And it's tremendously effective. Steve Usher (16:58) Yeah. Yeah. Mike Anderson Track (17:17) That was fascinating for me. Steve Usher (17:18) Wow. Wow. Can I ask that? Because I'm also I'm a basic audience person, right? So I can shoot I'm a consumer of it. ⁓ Of movies. So if I I if I put put on the goggles, I enter enter, watch the watch the movie. How how what did we I'm just trying to get a question around how we would actually what's that depth that we because you saying kind of kind of inviting people to step into the movie. Mike Anderson Track (17:27) Yeah. Steve Usher (17:48) How does that look? does that feel? Like what am I experiencing whilst in that space and engaging with spatial? Like is it literally a dust particle like where I can go, man, that's right there. Like it's got so much depth to it ⁓ on a screen on the wall as an example. Mike Anderson Track (17:57) Yes! Yeah. Yeah, you know, we have a we had a tremendous amount of possibilities in there. So at core, we were we knew we had to deliver like an absolute best in class movie watching experience. So better than any app that we saw on the quest. This is going to be the best way to watch a film. We. Steve Usher (18:14) Yeah. Mike Anderson Track (18:36) No, one of the North stars that helped us with this is that film is just light that's out. It's recorded onto a negative and then they shoot it out of a projector onto a big screen. And that's where we started to realize that if we lean in the lighting, it always fit with film because film is an essence light. And so we built this. So you sit down in your chair, you have the headset on, you go through this beautiful lobby that's like reskinned at your walls and it's all scary and spooky and you push play and then the screen comes up and your room darkens to roughly the same lumens that a movie theater darkens to. So you can still see like popcorn in your lap if you're gonna eat popcorn, but it's very cinematic or Steve Usher (19:28) Yeah. Mike Anderson Track (19:29) Diatric, I guess and then the screen itself lights your room really subtly So we built this whole thing. So in real time, whatever is happening on the screen is also lighting your room correctly with all the colors just like giant OLED does in your room And so when you have that you feel physically like the film is there it fits where you are ⁓ And it's a subtle thing, but it's completely necessary, I think, to fall into it. Steve Usher (20:00) Yeah. Tell us a little bit more about the actual project and the actual movie that you did just to share with the audience which genre you actually ended up choosing for your first one. Mike Anderson Track (20:09) Yeah, you know. Well, they wanted horror because everyone because they're like, horror is like, you know, a big thing in VR and you can really you can really damage someone with like horror because really scary. ⁓ Like I've watched a lot of horror films, you know, I love it as a genre ever since I had kids, man, it's hard as hell for me to watch a horror. ⁓ But I, you know, I love all genres. love it. So anyway, we, had us partner with Blumhouse, who makes incredible horror films. I think of them as kind of like that. They're like a more, they're very intelligent in how their model works where They're smaller budgets. They're a little more indie. They're very intelligent movies. They partner with some good stars in there and they're less like slasher films and they're more like more accessible 824 horrors. It's kind of, I kind of think of them wrongly or rightly. That's how I thought of it. And so we did the Black Phone and we did Megan, that movie. Steve Usher (21:18) Mm. All right. Yeah. Mike Anderson Track (21:25) completely different films once you get into it. I love them both. I watched them both probably 400 times making this thing. They're amazing. But totally different approaches. Megan's a horror comedy for the most part and Black Throne is just like a brutal, almost nihilist like film about a serial killer. Like trying to kill a kid. So it's like, it's pretty, they're pretty different. Steve Usher (21:54) And what's it like? So, because this is something I'm really fascinated in as well. When you're taking a movie that's been historically has been filmed to your point earlier to 2D movie, translating that then taking that how it's been shot, how it's been filmed, like all of those nuances and then translating that into this new form. Like, how does that work? Mike Anderson Track (21:54) I'm out. Steve Usher (22:21) And what's the what's the what's the I guess the metamorphosis that has to take place and that how the edges suddenly become unlimited and just more expansive and more depth is my thought here. So like, how do you, how do you fill in the cracks of that? How do you fill in the gaps of when you've taken something and made blown it out? ⁓ Yeah, curious on that on that transition. Mike Anderson Track (22:34) Yeah. It's very tricky. ⁓ We got very good at it, I think. I'm very proud of what we did. At all times, you have to hold, again as another North Star, what the intent of the filmmaker was. Steve Usher (22:48) Yeah. Mike Anderson Track (23:06) And that's critical. And that that scene by scene, shot by shot, you got to pay attention to that. We want to show something because in the end, it's had to go through the filmmakers to for their approval. And we wanted something that, you know, I've worked on feature films. are so hard to make. And like, you don't want someone to come along later and be like, you do to do to make this a little bit better, you know, and like mess it all up. I understand. And this is where Nexus was really good with this because as we were filmmakers, we, I think, were more respectful, I think, of what that intent was in this. But it's something you have to keep all the time. I mean, it's a tricky thing working with films that were already made. Steve Usher (23:56) Yeah. Yeah. Mike Anderson Track (23:58) But there's a consistency in films because they all follow the three act structure for the most part. so there's just like, and horror films have really prescribed beats. All of them. just like you open with the death and then you go in the explication and then you have like ramping and then there's another death and they all happen kind of at the same times for everyone. So when we talking about scalability and how to scale this for like, look, we can do these two films, but throughout the entire genre, there's going to be these beats. We know. ⁓ what kind of enhancements and interventions we're going to do along each beat and we can estimate out how it's going to work on each film. Steve Usher (24:35) Yeah. I was going to ask on that actually, because now you've tested and created a format and a way of doing to get a movie from this traditional form into the spatial. What is the productization of that? Have you created something where in the future you can literally just drop in an 80 % then and you kind of refine the next 20 % to give it that and then it kind of goes into spatial? Yeah, I'd love to dive into that. Mike Anderson Track (25:02) Yeah, yeah, pretty much, know, you, ⁓ you, we developed an amazing set of tools, brilliant people worked on this. We had this huge problem initially, that the how you know, if you let's say you have like, I don't know, there's an explosion in a, in the film, and it was done with VFX, they spent So much money making that explosion over the course of the long period of time and use like 8k textures or two nose simulations, all this crazy stuff compositing and it looks great on screen. We have to remake that explosion. So it works on a quest, which is essentially almost like a mobile. It's almost like a phone. You know, it's really souped up, but it's still like real time mobile is how you need to think about making those effects. So it's very difficult and these geniuses at Nexus figured out how to make this thing called the second stream so we could run the VFX at extremely high fidelity while playing this movie at HD huge screen and lighting all simultaneously so it looks great. Now, the long answer to a short question, the... So, building, putting that technology in place removed a big part of the lift it had to do with this. Knowing we had to do two movies, put in a... Steve Usher (26:45) Yeah. Mike Anderson Track (26:49) conscious amount of scaling because we're like, well, there's going to be an explosion here. There'll be something like an explosion there. Maybe it will be fog rather than smoke, but we can kind of figure it out, say. ⁓ And then, yeah, you. like in terms of like how we would do like 10 more horror films or something you always need people there to understand the filmmakers intent you can't just automate it i believe you can automate this just as well as you can automate making the movie you know you just don't want to do it but we can tune all these different subtle things that we have in there Steve Usher (27:33) What does this mean for movie theaters? Or could mean? Mike Anderson Track (27:38) Yeah, you know, I'm really curious about it. I go to a lot of movies in movie theaters. That's my preferred way to see a movie. ⁓ I think that like, you're just looking at different beasts, the way that we're looking at an iPhone or an iPad and ⁓ cinema. I think that Steve Usher (28:01) Yeah. Mike Anderson Track (28:03) people who can't afford an OLED screen because you're in a dorm and you're in college may end up watching films like this because it's the equivalent of that. And there may be some degree of social, you know, stuff where you have co-watching, two people watching at the same time, but a theater is just a different animal. I mean, when you're in there with a hundred people watching like one battle after another, it's just a completely different feeling. So. Steve Usher (28:33) So what's, mean, ⁓ I'm just thinking, I'm just thinking like existing, existing IP. I mean, you could literally, if it's, if you get able to translate over quickly and easily and cost effectively, I mean, back catalogs galore, right? The, the, opportunity in there is, is absolutely vast. All different kind of genres, all kind of, whether it's just movies or documentaries, or you go to Antarctica. And I mean, you could have all sorts of like, Mike Anderson Track (28:35) But. Yep. Steve Usher (29:02) really, really interesting opportunity in there. ⁓ What about like new films, like from scratch? you're not battling with that. What's the space in that space with maybe new up and coming filmmakers who are going, I'm just going to go spatial from the start? ⁓ What kind of thing does that unlock and what possibilities exist there? Mike Anderson Track (29:25) I mean. Yeah, think ⁓ this is just me blue-skying away thinking what's out there. I think that we have a distribution model that's great, know, with Netflix is putting things in theaters and then they put stuff on the, you know, your screen was streaming. I would think that we will initially see, and they have like an app on a Quest. Steve Usher (29:36) Yeah, sure. Go. Go. Yeah. Mike Anderson Track (29:59) Let's just say everybody suddenly has a quest that works really well, or 30 % of people do. Then they can do a co-release where you can pop it in the 3D, say. Because it's really easy to make something in the 3D with AI now, or getting easy. And you can just imagine they're going to hit all the back catalog with that. And then that'll be really easy to watch in 3D when you have these glasses or headsets or whatever. widely adopted so that'll hit um so you might have like a co-release of a 2d rectilinear film and it has like an immersive side and a non-immersive side they did that um that hitchcock movie i brought up uh blackmail that was released in silent and it made more money in silent and it was released in sound. And they did that all the time when sound came out because not only half of the theaters or something like that had audio because of the adoption problem. So at first you'll hit that. They also went through the back catalog of silent films and added sound to a whole bunch of them because it's for all the same reasons that we make it spatial. But then eventually the new filmmakers get in there and they make the shit. And that's where I am beyond excited to make a film from the ground up in this format. What you can do in this is insane. And it's not the same as storytelling, I think that's often been done in VR. Steve Usher (31:12) Yeah. Mike Anderson Track (31:34) where it's more like theater and around, say. This is a very screen-based kind of storytelling. We're still using shot reverse shots and all sorts of stuff. And the language of cinema that we've built over 150 years or more. This is like, it's gonna open up possibilities. And I'm really, I guess if I was gonna talk about one specific example of like how this works is like, Films are linear in how they unravel in time on a static screen, but you run into problems with filmmaking in love scenes, ⁓ montages like in Ocean 11 when they're getting ready to do a heist, ⁓ martial arts, movies a lot of times. These are all non-sequential moments. Steve Usher (32:29) Yes. Mike Anderson Track (32:29) in scenes where they jump in and out of time and they break them up in a movie in all these weird different ways and then they have to put music over the top of it to kind of blend them together but I think you'll start to see non-sequential moments like that handled extremely differently when these move into spatial cinema would be my guess. Steve Usher (32:49) Yeah. Just for the audience. What is the quality? Is it like insane quality? I haven't tried it yet. And I think next time I'm in London, I'm going to talk to you the team and see if I can go and do a little preview and check it out. And maybe we can shoot something else there and share that. But yeah, lots of like, I mean, just to describe, because this is so new. I've never really, I haven't seen this before. So I'd love to get an understanding of just what you get, what you see. Mike Anderson Track (33:02) Do it. Yeah, it looks great. You know, I mean, it's like a big solid crisp HD screen that's lighting your room. and we got spatial audio into the ears while you're watching it. So yeah, it looks good. And then that's just another thing that's going to be hardware reliant because it's really hard to get really. Steve Usher (33:19) It's insanity. Yeah. Yeah. Mike Anderson Track (33:43) pixel density in each eye with a headset. And so that's the thing. And how you can stream, ⁓ like, because you know, you have to stream the film in order to get it to work because the 8K film was really, really big and you don't want to download it. So there's all these little technical things that, you know, really smart people are working on. Steve Usher (34:11) Yeah. And you know, I think this is something which, uh, for, those that follow the show, or if you haven't, please go and watch these, these episodes. But you know, this has got such a, I think this is also like another, another genre of where technology is really enabling new types of experiences in so many different forms. We've got frameless in London, which is the number one immersive art gallery where their challenge was taking, I don't know, like a ⁓ a famous art piece and then trying to like a Renway, don't know, and turning it into a Rembrandt, or in turning it into like an immersive experience without losing the essence of the artist's intention and honoring it and not kind of just making it into like a spectacle just because it's fun to do. ⁓ And then also they didn't actually have music that would, well music, and then they had to compose music of that era. to then compliment the experience that you're entering into. And the technology is the enabler in order to be able to do that and for us to engage art in new ways, which is so cool. I I loved it. And then there's Marshmallow Laser Feast in London as well, who are really, really, really great and I follow a lot, but just, again, like leveraging technology for us to, or for them creating windows into nature and for us to see. even just looking at a tree, but actually seeing really what's going on inside the tree ⁓ and showing our connection as humans to nature. And so I, to now hear of this, was spatial storytelling and spatial tech. It's kind of like, this is cool. This is now another form of technology that's enabling us to get, you know, to engage and to get creative with storytelling in new ways that perhaps we haven't been able to do before. Let's see what emerges as part of it. ⁓ Mike Anderson Track (36:04) yeah. Steve Usher (36:05) lot of parallels, but different, different industries. Super, super interesting. Mike, can I ask a question as well around, why, why are you excited about this? What, what, what do we need to know about Mike to, that will help us connect why, why these roads led to where you are on this project and you being so excited about this. Mike Anderson Track (36:25) I I ⁓ Well, I've just always made art my entire life. Like I said, I went to the Rhode Island School Design for painting, got a painting degree, loved painting. Then I moved into installation and did installations in Manhattan and all the time. And then eventually I taught myself filmmaking and broke, don't know, I broke into much as I climbed from the valley, the bottom of the valley. of the industry slowly and arduously up ⁓ to this glorious point. But yeah, I think in all of it, I love new technology. I'm always trying to tell a story, but it just doesn't seem to fit with what exists. And recently with some of these new advancements over the last maybe... or more widely adopted advancements of the last decade, like real time animation, experience design, AI has some interesting opportunities now. I'm able to like find ways to tell stories that feel more aligned with our time that we live in, if that makes sense. And I'm seeing it's... Steve Usher (37:48) Mmm. Mike Anderson Track (37:53) really, and I love the puzzles of figuring out something new. And we're seeing this convergence, I think, happening where we have ⁓ the experience design that you were talking about. In those examples, you have essentially AI in real time operating to build like the Wizard of Oz experience in Las Vegas with giant screens in the sphere. you know, which is also made possible by new technology. And this kind of thing of how you combine all my loves, which is like flat storytelling, like painting, but also installations and time-based media, and it all comes in the one thing, the spatial cinema. It's just, it's incredible the possibility there, so. Steve Usher (38:44) Yeah. Are the audiences ready for it? Mike Anderson Track (38:48) ⁓ yeah, because it speaks. Well, I think I'd like the thing about like this. There's disciplines and there's mediums, right? Like a different discipline is like painting and sculpture are different and say like the the Renoir painting is a different discipline than like the intervention with like the media. And then there's mediums because like painting has like acrylics and oils, you know, one's better for with another like acrylics are great for painting a bag of Doritos, but oils you should better for painting the pear. or something right because they're organic and for this I wonder I'm not sure yet but I wonder if we're making a different medium for filmmaking than has ever existed and if it's just a medium then every audience is all ready for it we're all insanely well versed in how this works If it's a different discipline and you're really going to break out of there, then nope, not ready. It's going to be a brand new thing, you know? Steve Usher (39:51) So what's next for you, Mike? What are you kind of excited about with this for the future? What's your like? Mike Anderson Track (39:58) Well, you know, the projects I'm on right now are extremely AI based, working on similar to this, AI pipelines, ⁓ both in short form commercials and then ⁓ long form animated storytelling. That is a whole other thing where we can talk about how AI changes the language of narrative as well. Steve Usher (40:15) Yes. Mike Anderson Track (40:23) in what it tends towards. It's really fascinating. I think it syncs really well with the language on social media and how we give stuff a little bit more into that than traditional like 1970s style films. And I think I'm pretty excited in the few years where I think all this stuff dovetails around. And we have all the... AI language and filmmaking and techniques that we've come up with. They're still telling beautiful storytellers and employing tons of great artists because you don't get rid of that. And it comes into distribution on new platforms, which allow for more, more stuff. So that's my goal. Steve Usher (41:05) And any kind of any last kind of like predictions or like future future gazing? are we we gonna maybe in 10 or 15 years time? How are we how are we gonna look back and and describe? How we consume movies maybe Mike Anderson Track (41:21) I don't know, you know, it's just gonna be, I think it just comes down to, you know, The Jazz Singer was that film that came out in 1927 that made, that was so big that it pushed audio in all the theaters and made the investment. And then after that, let me see if I can remember this, it cost Warner Brothers, I think, made their first film. It cost. 23 grand to make and it grossed like 1.5 million dollars. It's a 5,000 % profit. So when that happened, that's like... Steve Usher (42:00) You Mike Anderson Track (42:05) done. They're like, we'll pay to put, you know, we'll pay that 220k for every theater. All we're waiting on is that just a jazz singer and then the profit and then you'll have an adoption across the place. So I'm like, if that happens in two years, then it happens. If it happens in 20, I don't know. But I think we're just waiting on that. Steve Usher (42:11) You Yeah. Yeah. Mike, thank you so much for joining. ⁓ been a real ⁓ insight and definitely, I think for anyone out there who's really curious about future movies or video filmmaking, ⁓ then we urge you definitely to start doing your research on spatial ⁓ and seeing where it's kind of application could apply into some of the work that you could be doing in the future. I think that's really important. ⁓ And also if they want to follow you, Mike, what's the best way for someone to get in touch and to follow you? Mike Anderson Track (43:03) you know, just look me up via Nexus Studios. Hit me up via there. Steve Usher (43:08) Yeah, we'll do that. And we'll put some, we'll put some links in the show notes as well. Thank you so, so much. It's a real pleasure. True experience designer dude. So thank you for joining and yeah, good luck with the future of spatial. Mike Anderson Track (43:21) Well, thank you so much. My pleasure, Steve. It's so wonderful. Steve Usher (43:25) Great to connect. Thanks.