#the storyboarders/animators/whoever's responsible for this knew what they were doing.

[ctrl-lupin]

listen, I know it’s just that Goemon’s fundoshi isn’t visible from this angle but

[dragonofyang]

From the Sock Puppet’s Mouth

Well folks, good news and bad news.

Good news: the ABTV interview on March 4th confirmed for us that WEP is the reason for the last-minute changes and that certain things were fought tooth and nail for until they came down and axed it.

Bad news: WEP is still using the EPs as their meat shields to hide behind, and despite not being really able to refuse, Joaquim Dos Santos and Lauren Montgomery still said some fucked up shit in this interview and the one before. And we probably should gird our loins for the next interview with Let’s Voltron!

But Yang, why in the fuck are we not going after the EPs, then?

The answer to that and why this is happening is three little letters, my friends.

NDA.

Non-disclosure agreements.

AKA the bane of your existence. And ours. And almost certainly JDS, LM, voice actors, animators, and literally anybody who has to comply with the season 8 we got back in December and the resulting fallout.

These are fairly standard in lots of situations where you’ll be working with confidential material, stuff like stories, military paperwork, movie production, that sort of thing. They generally tell you that you can’t spill the beans until a certain date when the contract expires, or when the information becomes public knowledge and the need for secrecy is lifted. Pretty standard in the entertainment business, keeps people from getting spoiled to trade secrets or important plotlines and ensures that you can trust your employees with whatever you need done for the project in question.

One other thing that these pesky little pieces of paper do is give your employer (say, the owner of a franchise or a superior officer), the ability to order you what to say just as easily as what not to. Don’t believe me? Look up interviews with the people who were in The Last Airbender (yeah… THAT movie). During production and when it was new, they all said how excited they were to work on the movie and be a part of it, but once those magical dates came by to free them of their legal obligations, they spilled more tea than the American revolutionaries did back in Boston. As soon as they wouldn’t get sued, they changed their tune about working on TLA.

Sometimes you just don’t like a project, sometimes your boss is a dick, whatever, but the fact is, if you sign one of those little things titled “Non-Disclosure Agreement”, you are bound by law to say whatever your boss tells you to. It’s very much a “they say ‘jump’, you say ‘how high’” situation. The only time this sort of shit doesn’t apply is if it implicates you in a crime. So like, your boss can’t embezzle money and then tell you to say you did it, or that you helped, or whatever. If it means you’ll get pressed charges, then you’re free to stand up and say “fuck this noise” and leave.

But JDS and LM aren’t being forced to admit to a crime, as heinous as some of what they’ve said in the past two ABTV interviews was. I’ll admit, I saw red the first time I heard the interviews on February 25 and March 4, but ya know fuckin’ what? That was the goal. Those interviews were meant to be a targeted blow against those of us in the VLD fandom who want the real s8 and for the characters to get their stories told correctly, rather than the slipshod stoic nonsense that ultimately created a story with zero meaning.

WEP/World Events Productions/Bob Koplar holds the Voltron intellectual property. JDS and LM are their puppets right now because unless they’re ordered to admit to a crime or otherwise break the law, they could be ruined legally, financially, and closed off from their trade. Would it be nice if they stuck to the scruples they displayed back when the show first started? Fuck yeah. I’d love it if they said, “screw it, here’s the real s8 with the heroine’s journey and the parallel storylines and the ending you deserved to see and get catharsis with.”

Fact is, they can’t, but we, who have never signed an NDA with WEP, DreamWorks, or Netflix or whoever the fuck else is involved, can.

They’re lying, yes, and they said despicable things that would make anybody’s blood boil, but the fact is they’re just the unfortunate human shields that will let WEP get away scot-free and it sets a very dangerous precedent about what happens when a story is being told and someone up top doesn’t like what they see. The narrative LM and JDS are being told to spin is that when the writers left, they went ham and ruined the story and that the real season 8 would be worse than the concoction we got on December 14. LM and JDS have said awful shit as WEP tries to demoralize fans and chase them off from going after the original season 8 and deflecting blame off where it should be aimed. But why would they have to write a story that’s animated and would have been completed before the writers left? LM said it herself that animation is extremely ahead of schedule compared to releases, and if you’re a fan of HTTYD like myself, you’ll know that the third movie’s release date had to be pushed back multiple times to account for the animation schedule because they failed to accurately project when it would be complete, and so pushed it back as opposed to releasing a shoddy product.

It’s simple enough to realize that the story being spun is just logically fallible and factually untrue, but because so much of what’s been said has been attacking the fandom, it’s easy to believe it. I almost wanted to believe that, too. It’s easy when there’s already a face and a name to blame. It’s harder to dig through stinging nettles, even if you know there’s a pot of gold under it all. Luckily I brought work gloves and have friends who know how to wield gardening shears.

We knew before that there was last minute edits to season 8, and @leakinghate did an excellent breakdown of that here in case you want to settle in for a nice read to see what should have been. But the interview on March 4th confirmed multiple times that the problem with the changes and story didn’t come from the EPs or even Dreamworks. The pushback came from the IP owners. JDS says so right toward the beginning, about 12 minutes in when he’s talking about Adam and Shiro’s romance. JDS and LM both discuss how it was the IP owners who gave the order to change an already-storyboarded and approved plotline for Shiro, which directly negates their tweet on March 1 claiming that the store has no creative control and the letter Bob Koplar wrote to a few fans, also written March 1, which claimed the same thing and seemed intent on absolving him as a responsible party for s8. Sure, the person tweeting and the person handling orders might not have to approve things, but that account and the store are both owned by WEP, which is easily proven if you dial WEP’s number. But the IP holders got discussed multiple times throughout the entire episode, more towards the first half than the second, which is when what they’re saying gets really screwy in terms of logic and what they’ve said before and general bullfuckery. Until JDS and LM are thanking the hosts for the unprecedented two hour interview and JDS says, “I don’t agree with myself” at 43:03, they were thanking the fans and apologizing for what happened and explaining that it wasn’t them or Dreamworks, but rather the IP holders who were pushing back.

Don’t believe me?

Click to 12:10 of the March 4 interview. JDS talks about Adam and Shiro’s relationship and how it was originally meant to be portrayed, and at the 12:50 mark he says that they got pushback about their relationship, not from Dreamworks, but from “other controlling parties with Voltron.”

Click to 18:52, where JDS mentions how they didn’t have the position as being creators of the IP. He also points out that, “We were, for all intents and purposes, like, started as a show for boys 6 to 11 to sell as much toys as possible.”

Does that phrase bother you as much as it bothers me?

Because it should.

Ever since VLD ended and the fans started pushing back against what got published as season 8, the EPs have been silent, at least for the first two-ish months. They didn’t say a word anywhere publicly about the show or if they liked it, because their NDAs probably had an “if you can’t say anything nice, don’t say anything at all” clause. Generally, that’s the case because part of your job is to build good PR and hype up your project. Don’t believe me? Look at how they were after literally every other season, they came out immediately saying how much they loved it and how much they hoped the fans would too, and when there was pushback about Lotor’s abuse and the colony plot they were like, “please trust us, we want to do his story justice” even when it probably would have served them better to remain silent.

Not with S8.

Until these interviews, nobody talked. And when they finally did start talking?

They all kept saying the same things.

“This is a show for boys and their dads” and “this is a show meant to sell toys to little boys.”

At no point before this did anybody on the production team say anything even remotely related.

You can look for yourself, but I guarantee you won’t find anything. “Boy toy show” has been the go-to phrase for everybody ever since the silence around season 8 broke, and it’s not their words.

It is, without a doubt, from the IP holder.

We were promised that Lotor’s arc would continue and that “there’s a lot that is at play in his brain and his mind,” in the GeekDad article about him. Narratively, Lotor and Allura were meant to foil Zarkon and Honerva/Haggar. We should’ve gotten an alchemist-versus-alchemist showdown and a cool Lotor and Lance arc. Many things that were built up in seasons 1 through 6 were dropped, and if you refer back to Hate’s meta “Seeking Truth in Darkness”, you’ll find her analysis on what was cut, why, and the plot she pieced together based on the inconsistencies in the details of the season 8 that got released. In the latest interview, JDS said, “We were just trying to break the trope, our own trope. You know what I mean? Like Voltron was its own trope and the sort of little nook that we inhabited was, like, sort of boys toys was its own weird tropey situation.”

And despite all this talk of family and love and complexity and breaking barriers, we received two things from December 14 and on: VLD season 8, and silence.

Complete and utter silence.

The VAs were trotted out to face the wrath of the fans at SAC Anime 2019 and there was nary a word to be heard from the EPs, Dreamworks, WEP, Netflix… Nobody had anything to say about the final season of Voltron. The VAs even commented that there were things they were and weren’t allowed to say. And if they wanted to say anything, their NDAs and general social etiquette prevented them from saying whatever was actually on their mind, because I guarantee you nobody happy about the season would have kept silent. Even when all the season 7 backlash happened, JDS and LM asked us as a fandom to please wait and see, because there would be narrative payoff.

Which is why the latest two interviews with ABTV are all the more rightfully infuriating.

In the February 25 interview, LM specifically says that the initial pitch was to kill everybody, everybody would die and that would be the end of it, and that they had to back off from that. After the broken promises of season 8, that’s pretty damn believable to a fandom who’s rightfully hurting and grieving what could have finished a great show. But then with this March 4 interview, she says that she wanted to go Sailor Moon with it and have Allura come back as a baby after sacrificing herself. Kind of hard for those two stories to mesh when the person LM says would raise Allura would also have been one of the ones to die in the initial pitch.

So what exactly is the truth there?

Frankly, I think neither of those ideas is the truth. At least completely.

Why? A) It sounds like a super early pitch idea and B) because their general behavior disagrees with every interview leading up to season 8. Because if LM and JDS were proud of this product that got released, they would have said so and behaved as normal, if maybe a little more reserved due to fandom backlash. Because they wouldn’t be silent and only coming out with interviews after two months and several of #TeamPurpleLion metas that poke massive holes in what exists of season 8, CallVoltron has been sending letters, and #FREEVLDS8 garnered over 30,000 signatures. WEP has been trying to do damage control ever since we as a fandom started putting two and two together about where these disastrous last-minute changes came from, and only when the petition got updated to include WEP as a point of focus did WEP start trying to discredit the fans and meta writers who were coming too close to the truth. Here is a complete list of everything that’s happened since December 14, to give you an idea of just how wild of a ride this has been.

One main consistent thing throughout everything that’s happened since season 8 dropped is that everybody from the EPs up is lying, whether by omission or outright or through someone else, people have been lying like mad. WEP doesn’t want you to know that they own the IP and have strong input, despite confirming it by liking a tweet on February 13 and how you can be directed to their store if you call WEP’s phone number. WEP doesn’t want you to know that they gave the original season 8 the axe. WEP got scared that we got close and so they trotted out their EPs after two months of silence to try and break those of us hunting for the truth. These two interviews, which, mind you, came after what was scheduled to be the last one.

The official story continues to fall apart with every word of these last two interviews, too. JDS says that they were crafting the epilogue for season 8 during the aftermath of season 7, but according to him they completed season 8 back in June.

Again: which is the truth?

I stand with @leakinghate and the rest of #TeamPurpleLion and think that the original season 8 was completed back in June, but that the backlash from s7 and the general disapproval of a story of empowerment caused the truly-eleventh-hour edits to s8. The EPs are being forced to lie to you due to their contracts, WEP wants to keep hiding and lying and calling their customers liars and mocking them. But the funny thing is that the more intricate the lie, the harder it is to keep it straight versus the truth, as evidenced by how JDS and LM seem to be confusing what was in s8 versus what was pitched versus what they were told to say.

So what’s it all mean, then?

It means you should be watching and writing letters and calling WEP and calling them out publicly whenever WEP and Bob Koplar lie to the consumers and customers that express dissatisfaction with their service and their products.

WEP forgets that there is more to fandom than diehard dads and young boys.

The more they ignore the majority of their consumers, the more money they lose, the more faith they lose, and the less people will want to follow their future projects (like if they decide to do an MFE spinoff). Let’s Voltron is coming up with a new episode with JDS and LM, and they’re hoping to get it up soon. I’d just like to remind y’all that it’s scripted and pre-recorded, it’s not live, and it benefits from being the official Voltron podcast and has to keep good relations with WEP in order to retain that status. So don’t stop calling, write letters, hell just leave a Facebook or Twitter review of the business to express your satisfaction or lack thereof with how WEP treats customers and its show and everything. After all, the road to s8 is paved with honesty.

@felixazrael @leakinghate @crystal-rebellion @voltronisruiningmylife

[mandibierly]

Why 'The Deep' episode of 'Blue Planet II' is the one you can't miss

A bluntnose sixgill shark arrives to feed on the carcass of a sperm whale in the Atlantic Ocean (Photo: Will Ridgeon)

Each episode of Planet Earth: Blue Planet II, airing Saturdays on BBC America, is special in its own way, of course. But there’s a reason this weekend’s installment, “The Deep,” is truly exceptional — and it’s not just because we see sixgill sharks devouring a whale carcass or learn what happens when you have a leak in a sub as you’re 450 meters below.

The fact is, we know more about the surface of Mars than we know about the difficult-to-reach deep ocean — the majority of the living space on Earth. As episode producer Orla Doherty tells Yahoo Entertainment, “A deep ocean scientist that I spoke to very early on in the production said to me, ‘Orla, if aliens came down to Earth, they’d land on land, but they would look in deep oceans and say, ‘Those are the most abundant, most prevalent organisms on the planet. These must be the oldest occupiers of this planet,�� and us little human specs would be kind an insignificant blip, frankly. That gave me this sense of perspective of, ‘Wow, this is an enormous world, and it’s one that we just know so little about.’ We don’t know how it functions. There are amazing scientists trying to figure it out. But it’s got to be fundamentally connected to everything else in the ocean, and therefore to us, and we’re only just scratching the surface of what that really means.”

Here, Doherty offers a preview of the most memorable sequences in “The Deep,” premiering Jan. 27.

Yahoo Entertainment: You and your team were the first humans to ever dive to 1,000 meters in the Antarctic. As we see in the “making of” segment at the end of the episode, you were a half hour into your first descent when the three of you in the sub noticed a small puddle forming. How did you remain calm? Orla Doherty: I’ve had a lot of time at sea. I’ve had a lot of situations happen. I’ve been in storms, I’ve been in cyclones, I’ve been in all sorts of places, and I’ve learned that panicking is not gonna get you anywhere. It’s not my natural instinct, anyway, but it’s just not gonna do anything. So okay, I’m in a tiny submarine and there’s water coming in. There’s not a lot I can do. But what I can do is do my best to just work with the pilot who does know what to do and assist him. I’m very used to responding to commands in an emergency situation.

Another standout sequence is when the team films sixgill sharks, who may only feed once a year, tearing into the carcass of a dead sperm whale on the Atlantic Ocean floor. Why was that a behavior you set out to capture? We did it with a bunch of scientists because studying these whale falls is one really clear way to show how our life here up at the surface is connected to what happens down in the deep. Scientists have studied these whale falls in the Pacific Ocean before — in the original Blue Planet there were some great shots of a whale fall in the Pacific. But nobody had ever done it in the Atlantic. … We were really curious to know what was gonna happen, what animals were gonna come in. And it was absolutely astounding to see these beautiful sixgill sharks. On my very first three sub dives, I met a sixgill shark each time, and so I felt really connected to that animal. I think it’s a magnificent, beautiful, ancient animal. And to see them come in and be a little bit less graceful, a little bit less gracious, and just rip the carcass to shreds, and sort of wrestle each other out of the way, it was just phenomenal. And you know, the scientists learned that it was within 25 minutes that the first shark came in, so these animals are constantly on the move and have extreme sensory capabilities to be able to find food when it’s there. So it was an amazing piece of discovery — not just for us, not just for the footage, but also in terms of really understanding how that ecosystem works.

BBC Earth released a video (above) showing the sixgills pushing the sub because they, at first, considered it competition for the food. Were you in the sub when that was happening? No, my assistant producer was down there in that scene. It would have been amazing. I dived on that whale carcass a little bit further down the line. I was off somewhere else doing something else at the time that was all going on.

The episode talks about how even four months later, there are still zombie worms feeding on what’s left of the whale. It must have been really satisfying to be able to keep going down over a long period of time. That was the whole purpose, to be able to do this repeat study and to be able to see what happened over the passage of time. I think it was something like 12 or 14 months between the first and the last dive that we really got to see how this carcass just slowly falls apart and becomes recycled back into the system.

Producer Orla Doherty in the submersible Nadir, capable of reaching depths of 1,000 meters (Photo: Luis Lamar)

Another jaw-dropping sequence: the cannibal Humboldt squid, 800 meters down off the coast of South America. As a viewer, it’s shocking to see them turn on each other when they’ve run out on lanternfish to prey on. What was it like for you to witness? It was shocking to be in the sub and see that all play out in front of us! I mean, it was just incredible. We had to use lowlight cameras, like really sensitive camera sensors, to be able to film those scenes because we were part of the first [team] to ever really try and document the natural behavior of these squid in the deep ocean, in their world. Any time they’ve been filmed before it’s been when they’ve come up to the shallows and have been filmed by scuba divers.

So we were on a bit of a stakeout down there. This was all off the coast of Chile. And first we saw them hunt the lanternfish, and that was amazing — just incredible to watch them hunt with such precision and move in such coordinated ways. And then, one day we went down and there weren’t any lanternfish for them to hunt — that’s when we saw a sort of squid tug-of-war over another squid. And it was just extraordinary because scientists have known for forever that Humboldt squids eat Humboldt squids, because they’ve analyzed their stomach contents when they’ve been caught in fisheries, but nobody’s ever actually seen that happen. It’s something like 30% of their diet is made up of other Humboldt squid, so they’re mean, nasty cannibals, but to actually have it demonstrated right before our very eyes and be able to capture it as a scene, it was just extraordinary. We all have imaginings and fantasies about what goes on down there, but we’ve just got a very privileged glimpse of something that is going on over and over and over again.

When you’re watching something like that from the sub, is there a lot of shouting, like, “Whoa!” Or is it all just stunned silence? [Laughs] I’m reasonably vocal. I’ve been known to scream with excitement or to “woop” or whatever. Usually whoever’s working the camera is a lot less verbally responsive — he would then just focus on really getting the shot — and the pilots are just always focused on where we are and are they lined up right. They’ve got jobs to do. I’ve got a big job to do down there, which is look for things to film and figure out the story as we’re filming it, and figure out which shots we need and all of that. But I don’t have anything physical to do when we’re filming, so I’m much more able to engage with the animal and just be reactive. It’s just fun to be down there and seeing things that you know people have never seen before. It’s extraordinary.

When this episode aired in the U.K., the clip of the cutthroat eel going into toxic shock from a brine pool in the Gulf of Mexico circulated online. Did you know what you were witnessing when it was writhing around? I knew the brine pool was this lethal lake at the bottom of the sea, which is a head spin in and of itself. I had a whole storyboard of a really complicated bunch of shots that was gonna try and illustrate just how toxic it was. I can’t actually even remember what it was I was thinking of doing down there. But again, it was on our first dive there, and that eel took its dip in the lake, and within 45 seconds had just demonstrated perfectly that this is how toxic the lake is.

I talked to just about every scientist probably that’s ever dived and done research there, and nobody told me about the eels and the reactions that they would have. So no, we got the surprise of our life. That was yet another moment where I — actually, I think all of us were cheering and just all going, “Come on! Come on! Come on! Get out, you can do this! Shake it off!” Rooting for that eel to get away, which he did.

Not all of the creatures do, though. There’s a sort of graveyard of the fish and things that didn’t make it out. That must have been even eerier in person. Yeah, and some of them were still in the sort of death throes, and it was kind of awful. The whole thing is just such a head spin: You feel like you’re in air because you’re looking at a lake, but you’re not in air, you’re underwater, 750-meters deep. And yet I felt like if I could just get out there and scoop this thing up and lift it up into what looked like the air — but it’s not, it’s water — it will survive. Really, really painful to watch. But that’s the ocean — that’s just part of the circle of life down there.

The team also captures amazing shots of volcanic eruptions in the South Pacific. Is that all real sound, or is that enhanced? I was desperate to use genuine sound recordings. Those are genuine sound recordings from the eruption, which is just incredible. Recording sound in the deep is really difficult because if you’re in a submarine you’re making a lot of noise, so you’re therefore going to get mostly the sub’s noise.

The other thing is I worked with scientists that would try to deploy hydrophones to the bottom of the Mariana Trench, the deepest point on Earth, to find out what the sound is down there. And I was like, “Wow, great, fantastic. You’ve gotta give me those recordings when they come back.” And when the scientists got those recordings back they said, “Orla, you just don’t want them.” And I said, “Why, why?” They said, “Because all you can hear is the sound of ships. The sound of ships 7 miles above at the surface passing.” We’re making noise in ways that you could never believe, and it’s because sound travels so much further and faster underwater.

We’re just beginning to learn how much animals in the ocean, from the coral reefs really, use sound. Sound is part of their world, and we’re changing that world because of the sound we’re making.

There’s the sequence in episode 7, when clownfish (which make alarm sounds for each other, and to try to scare off predators), can’t hear because a boat is overhead. Exactly! Exactly! We didn’t know this stuff even maybe 5, 10 years ago. There’s so much going on down there that we’ve just got no idea about.

Speaking of sound, the music is so beautiful in the entire series, but it’s so interesting in this episode creating suspense in the darkness. We talked a lot with Hans [Zimmer] and [the team at Bleeding Fingers] about how this has gotta be a sci-fi voyage through these magical, wonderful worlds where you meet all these alien creatures. The moment that sticks out for me, and it’s one of the more subtle pieces of music in the film, is when the sub actually does finally touch down on the sea floor. And the music that they wrote for that moment… I just almost well up every time I watch it because the music completely enhances the sense that we have now landed on another planet —  but we haven’t, we’re here on Earth. It’s incredible.

I love the idea that the episode ends on, that if there’s abundant life existing down at those extreme depths in our oceans, and we know that there are deep seas on the moons of Jupiter and Saturn, then it’s possible there could be life there, too. That actually cycles all the way back to your very first question — why should we care about what’s in the deep ocean. Because how astounding is that? If the sun goes out tomorrow, we’re all gonna die, everything on land is gonna die, everything in the shallow ocean is gonna die — but life is gonna go on down at the hydrothermal vents. That’s just extraordinary. You take away our energy source that we are all utterly dependent on, and yet life will go on. So yes, to think that there is stuff going on down there that could inform us about how to find life elsewhere in this amazing universe is just mind-bending!

One final question: People who watch the end credits will notice James Cameron is given a special thanks. Why is that? He’s been someone that I’ve known and talked to about the ocean for nearly 20 years. He’s an ocean soulmate that has explored in an even deeper way than I probably ever will, and he has just been a guide for me. A guide and a friend.

Planet Earth: Blue Planet II airs Saturdays at 9 p.m. on BBC America.

Read more from Yahoo Entertainment:

10 Grammy Best New Artist winners you forgot about

How to watch all the 2018 Best Picture Oscar nominees, from ‘Get Out’ to ‘The Shape of Water’

40 years ago, the Doobie Brothers’ ‘What’s Happening!!’ episode preached evils of bootlegging, joys of racial harmony

[s0023329a2film-blog]

S1: Post R. Collated Quotes

Can Guleserian be considered to be an auteur as a director of photography, and if so, how is it linked to his personal auteur style?

Item 1: “I kept saying, “I saw ‘Like Crazy’ and that was so beautiful. I loved the informality and brightness, so whoever we get, we have to get it to look like ‘Like Crazy.’” Someone finally said, “You know, just ask the guy! See if he’s around.””

Item 1: “So I both love the way he made it look, but he also basically did the whole thing with the camera on his shoulder. That meant it was a very relaxed atmosphere on set — none of the sticks and the tracks and all of that.”

Item 2: Q. What do you think is the biggest misconception about being a Cinematographer? A. We are not just the camera man. We are all very different, but a cinematographer has many responsibilities and should be equal parts Artist, Manager, and Technician.

Item 3: “We knew we wanted to have some underwater shots as part of this montage, but I was worried about the time and resources it would cost for us to put a camera and operator in the pool for just a couple of shots. I ended up having the idea to put a GoPro on an old $10 monopod and just dunking it in the water and following the action around. This was difficult because I couldn’t monitor the camera while shooting. I was just hoping for the best and luckily, it worked out great.”

Item 5: “This is always a challenge to me because I believe every shot is telling your story and nothing should ever feel arbitrary. I also think some scenes work best as a single shot, and having a second camera around can give us all a “let’s just shoot it so we have it” attitude. Patrick and I decided early in our planning stages that we would avoid that way of thinking.”

Item 9: Q. When shooting a film this intimate, the cinematographer must feel like another cast member. Jones: Absolutely. John Guleserian’s presence was so important to us feeling as comfortable as possible. We luckily had a man who’s not only extraordinarily talented but has the ability to observe without being intrusive. That was the key really. He’s a substantial man. […]  His energy comes through the camera.   

Item 9: “His eye is so unique. I think he’s an incredibly unique DP.”

Item 11: They flirt, meet for coffee. Right here, the film’s core strength becomes evident: This awkward, sorta-kinda first date is punctuated by the weird non-sequiturs we all slip into such conversations, when not wanting to reveal too much of ourselves too quickly, but at the same time wanting to come across as, well, brilliant and perfect.John Guleserian’s camerawork catches all the essential details: Anna’s shy, nervous expressions; Jacob’s somewhat more self-assured replies.

How has Guleserian used his experience from other media forms to develop his own style? Does this strengthen or weaken his ‘auteur’ status?

Item 2: Q. Have you ever thought of getting involved in other aspects of film making besides Cinematography? A. Not really. I have always had a passion for images. I would love to work as a visual consultant for animated movies someday.

Item 12: Q. As a first-time director, did your Director of Photography help you with location scouting, storyboarding, picking out lenses?  How involved were you? Chris: All of that stuff. Oh, John Guleserian, I just love him. He was wonderful. [...] The beautiful thing about movie making is that we all know cinema so you can reference other films so you can say “That. How do you do that?” Luckily, I had a lot of people who were willing to be patient with me and walk me through. But he was there every step of the way through storyboards and scouting and all.  

To what extent does Guleserian conform to the conventions of the romance and drama genres, and does this undermine his 'auteur’ status? 

Item 4: Q. What’s the worst advice? A. Everyone always wants to tell you that there is right way to do things. (This is the way you light a night scene. This is the lens you use for a close up. This is the coverage you shoot in a car.) These are conventions. The way you choose to do it is the right way, and you shouldn’t feel obligated to follow conventions.

Item 10:  Luckily Dormeus’ trusty cinematographer has experience with the ever-tricky sci-fi romance, by shooting the underrated About Time with an unseen flair for a quick, bouncy montage. Guleserian expertly conveyed the barriers of romance in Like Crazy (distance) and Breathe In (in the shadows).

[brendagilliam2]

Why design is key to Airbnb's incredible success

Julia Khusainova, experience designer at Airbnb, will give a presentation about designing the pivot at Generate San Francisco on 9 June, where she will share her process for developing new products from ideation, testing and validation, development, to release and beyond.

Airbnb‘s mission is all about making people feel at home – whether that’s during a stay with one of its hosts or on its website. That means communicating effectively with a global user base, and building a design language that can scale with the company as it continues on its meteoric trajectory. We chatted to vice president of design Alex Schleifer, about how the design team is helping Airbnb fulfil its mission.

How has the role of design changed at Airbnb since the company launched?

Design has always been important at Airbnb – it was founded by designers and the first guests were coming to a design conference in San Francisco. Some of the biggest changes have come from scaling and adapting to the momentum. 

Our design team has evolved. We have researchers, writers and even engineers that all are today part of the design organisation at Airbnb. We’ve built better tools and processes. We have designers embedded in all our product groups. It’s constantly evolving but at its core it hasn’t changed all that much – there’s a deep passion for design.

At Generate San Francisco, Julia Khusainova – experience designer at Airbnb – will walk through her process for developing new products

How is the design team structured?

Design is a multidisciplinary group that includes experience design and research, content strategy, localisation and design operations. These teams impact everything a user will interact with – this includes internal users like our customer agents. It’s a real advantage to have so many disciplines within the same team, as you’re constantly exposed to many different facets of the work.

What are the core principles your design teams work by?

Airbnb has a clear mission that drives all of our decisions: To help build a world where everyone on earth can feel like they belong anywhere. When applied to product design, the key principles this translates to are designing for trust and designing for everyone. These really apply to everything we do and impact the progress we make towards our mission most substantially. 

In April 2016, Airbnb introduced an updated app designed to match people to the homes, neighbourhoods and experiences that will help them live like a local

How do you apply those two principles in practice?

Building trust is really about creating an environment where trust can manifest itself between what are often two strangers. There are very explicit ways to do this, like reviews or verifying profiles, but also subtle ways, like how much we emphasise real people and real homes.

As for designing for everyone: We’re building a product for a truly diverse and global community. There’s something unique about our global reach – when a host and guest meet they’re often from different parts of the world. That means every decision we make needs to be done with a global lens. Our community is also incredibly diverse, and making sure everyone feels like they belong on Airbnb is in part the responsibility of our user experience design.

What’s the role of research in this?

We have a strong research team that does substantial global studies and is constantly meeting with our community all around the world. Without local knowledge we can’t develop a truly global product. The research team helps develop and iterate on features by capturing real user feedback, but it also takes on larger, long-term research projects that guide the overall product strategy. The work of researchers is critical to every decision we make on the product. 

The same goes for data science. Our community is so large and diverse it’s incredibly important to have a team that helps us understand behaviours on our platform. In most cases, data scientists will work closely with researchers to help us learn more about our users. All of our designers are motivated to learn more about data and how to read it. 

There’s a healthy balance between art and science that makes working here really rewarding. Data and research really help us fine-tune our intuition.

Research and data science play a key role in developing Airbnb’s products

How do you manage the design of Airbnb products?

We set out to build a design language system (DLS) with some specific goals: create a common language that is understood across disciplines, establish an iconic visual language, and define components that make designing and building software easier. It’s all in the name of creating a beautiful, cohesive, usable app or website. For this to happen we need everyone involved, not just designers. It’s been great to see engineers really engage with the project. 

Something at this scale is never easy and there are many ways to define what a component is, how atomic you should be in your definitions, what’s called what. These are the conversations that improve the system and since its launch six months ago it’s only become a bigger part of the conversation at Airbnb.

What was your process in putting the DLS together?

We started with a small team that essentially built a manifest of all the patterns, flows and elements that existed in our products. It was important to quickly build a scaffold of sorts for the system; a set of common components with common names. This showed us we could take something that had been developed over years by many different people and organise it into a very reasonable set of patterns. We did visual and brand work alongside this to get a sense of what we wanted our future products to feel like. We knew we wanted to let the photography shine, to bring in typographic qualities that support a range of languages, and so on. 

Then the work really started. We began building some of the components and getting deeper into the UI. This involved many more teams and conversations around specific philosophies in design and engineering.

How is the DLS used now? 

It has already changed the way we build. It’s now owned by everyone that works on our product, which means it’s growing and changing every day. The way we look at it, we’ll never be done. A design system needs to evolve at the pace of the company – or preferably even be slightly ahead, so it can support new projects. 

Airbnb’s design language system is made up of common components that translate across disciplines

How important is storytelling?

It’s incredibly important to use. We actually use storyboarding for a lot of our projects. We are big fans of companies like Pixar and often use professional illustrators to communicate a concept. We also create a lot of content ourselves: short films, animation and music that get integrated into the app or communication. There’s a huge variety of incredible talent at Airbnb and we’re lucky to have a community that brings so many amazing stories with it.

How often do you bring in outside contractors?

We will work with the best talent the project requires. This means we’ve worked with many incredible people over the years. We will usually find people that have specific skills, like illustrators, musicians, data designers and so on. 

What’s your workspace like?

Most of the design team is based out of San Francisco in an incredibly varied and creative space. We work in what are essentially neighbourhoods built around large ‘project rooms’ that are modular spaces with displays, whiteboards, pinboards and tall tables. Everyone is free to pick up and work in the many open spaces distributed around the office. People are also free to change spaces by decorating them. 

The design team is distributed, but we have a few key spaces that are shared. There’s a crit room that really is our main home, as well as the common studio, which is set up with a variety of creative analogue and digital tools.

How do you communicate with your team?

We’re growing very rapidly so reducing the communication overhead is important. Distinct product teams have their own cadence. There is one all-hands every two weeks where the entire team gathers for updates from various parts of the organisation. Individual disciplines also have stand-ups weekly, where most (if not all) of the week’s work gets an update. I try to personally meet with different people from the team as much as possible, but it’s become harder as it has grown to over 100. I will walk the office and try to chat to whoever I meet about what they’re working on. It’s one of my favourite things to do.

The office layout centres around large project rooms, surrounded by plenty of free workspaces

Do you use any particular tools?

I’m a big fan of Slack and its integrations. It’s really easy to share files and feedback. Our team uses it pretty much constantly. I always have it open on my desktop – I like being available if anyone on the team needs to talk to me. We’re also building internal tools for asset management, file sharing and prototyping that we’ll share in the coming months. In general, we try not to burden people with too much software, as each team has their own needs.

Tell us about the role of atomic design at Airbnb…

Any company that builds software at the rate we do ends up using some sort of atomic process. There’s no way to scale if you don’t become somewhat capable at building systems. We’ve got a lot better at componentising everything and building tools as well as processes. 

Tools are a huge part of this. We have a team dedicated to building and integrating tools for our designers; everything from asset integration into Sketch to prototyping environments. Having access to everything quickly is crucial, whether it’s an icon or a piece of research.

As the company has grown, what have you learned about implementing design thinking in a large organisation?

I think it’s about creating simple frameworks and giving people the right environment. We’re lucky because design thinking has been part of Airbnb since day one, which makes things somewhat easier. The other thing is to make sure you don’t consider ‘design thinking’ as something that exclusively resides within the discipline of design. 

This article originally appeared in net magazine issue 287; buy it here!

Airbnb will be represented by Julia Khusainova at Generate San Francisco on 9 June, a one-day/two-track conference, which also features speakers from the likes of Netflix, NASA, Twitter, Uber, Microsoft and Salesforce to name but a few. You’ll learn about prototyping, adaptive interfaces, web animations, design systems, performance and lots more. Get your ticket today. 

Generate London, meanwhile, will return on 20-22 September, featuring Anton & Irene, Jaime Levy, Steve Fisher, Seb Lee-Delisle, Chris Gannon and many more world-class speakers. Early bird tickets are on sale now. 

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