What is Cheating in Art? with Jeremy and Cedar Vickery

Heat up here. — Hello and welcome everyone to another Proco live stream. Today we are joined by two fantastic humans who have so much knowledge to share with us. Uh one person that you have seen on this channel before and then one person who shares some DNA with a person that you've seen on this channel before uh who is a talented cinematographer that you're getting to meet for the first time today. Today we are joined by Jeremy Vickery, lighting mentor here on YouTube and Cedar Vickery, a fantastic person who has a course on Proco that you might not have gotten to check out yet today, but we would like to tell you more about it and why you should check it out. Uh, if you guys don't know which course I'm talking about, uh, let me go ahead and get that up on screen. Uh, it is currently on sale. So, the topic that we're going to be discussing today is going to be a little bit about what it is to um to possibly use tools that are available to you that can make your work a little bit easier or to possibly um learn how you can use some of those tools. What is cheating? What isn't cheating? And don't worry, it's not about telling you to use AI for things. That's not it. All human power in this one. So guys, how's it going today? — Good, good. I'm uh I'm really glad to be here again. Um we I have other courses out there that I've done, painting light courses. And for those who don't know who I am, I have almost 30 years experience working in animation. I worked at Pixar for many years. I've worked in games. I worked on Uncharted and Assassin's Creed and Days Gone. I've worked in television on Westworld and Fallout and a whole bunch of different things. I've done illustrations for Legos and Disney and Mattel and lots of different things. So broad range of experience and now I mentor people and I make courses and I help people grow in their own artwork and that's what I spend my time doing now. That's why we're having this conversation. So we have a new course. So we'll let you know we do have a course that we made which is photography. I call it photography for artists and then there's cinematic storytelling. So it's technically two courses in one and on Proco we've merged it into one course. So, cinematography for artists and what this is. I think a lot of people when they see this, they're like, I don't need to learn cinematography. — But today, I want to talk about some of the reasons why we would want to learn this. Like, so this is not a photography course to teach you how to become a photographer. This is a photography course and cinematography course specifically tailored to visual artists of other forms. So 3D artists, painters, illustrators, concept artists, people who want to do graphic novels, like this is how to use this as a tool for your art. — And that's what we'll talk in more detail today. And that's why I decided like instead of just talking about photography or cinematography, we're going to break this into two parts and say, well, let's come back to the big question as to why I made this course. What is cheating in art? Um because I think a lot of people um come to me and they're like do I you know is photography cheating? Is that you know is reference like what you know what is cheating? And so many of us feel this feeling of like what we have to do with original artwork is have a blank page and a crayon and just create like we did when we were four years old. And that professional artists, you know, do this process. And to me, social media is one of the problems of this. It's kind of like doing a magic trick. Like, I've got a coin here and I put it in this hand and it's not like, whoa, magic. That's really excuse me. What's actually happening at studios is like I'm going to grab this coin and I'm actually dropping it down into this hand and then I'm letting it fall into my lap here. all where you don't see it and it looks like magic, you know, and if you pay attention, you can actually see it disappear. And this to me is what social media does is they're like, I have a beautiful illustration and I'm going to just make it look like magic. Like I just I have that skill of a blank page and then poof, I this beautiful piece and if you can't do that, you're not an artist and you suck. And so like when I look at artwork, so let's look at a few images here. Um, I mean, this is what I really want to talk about today because like I look at classic art and I'm going to use a lot of older art just because it's public domain, but this could or sort of public domain, you know, like I took these pictures at the Louvre, you know, in Paris and like there's just

these are, you know, 150 years ago. Um, you know, these beautiful paintings and they have such great character and rich color and light and storytelling. Like this was from 1827. Look at what there's this dog with fire coming out its mouth. What is this? You know, like that's fun. That's awesome. It's imagine. — It's really wild artwork. And like I want to create stuff like that. Or like I saw this piece in some back alley and — it's so beautiful. It looks like it's out of a horror movie, you know? It's just this crazy beautiful image. And there's just so much life and emotion and intensity to a lot of this type of art. Or I look at like Norman Rockwell and just the visual storytelling. A lot of this work that's like from the 1930s and 40s and there's just so much visual storytelling in this. Like I feel the emotion of this kid discovering that Santa Claus um is totally real and it's his father, you know, and that's what I interpret this, you know. Um, it's just so rich. So, we go and we see all of these beautiful pieces of artwork and like I want to create work that moves people like this and has emotion and then people go to create artwork and they make stuff that looks like this. — Yeah. — You know, like there's a big leap between this and like how do we get there? because we keep doing the blank page in front of us thinking if I don't have the magic of making art that looks like this then I just might not be talented. So that's what I want to come down to is what is cheating in art? How do we learn? How do we grow to be able to make artwork like this? There is a process but that process involves using different tools rather than just magic skill. So that's what I think we can talk about today. — Okay. Okay, I have one question here. — Yep. — For you. Um, first, sorry, I had the wrong microphone, everybody. It was bad audio quality and it happens. Um, but no, the one thing that I wanted to find out was what is something that you would say is cheating? Just one small thing. Doesn't have to be your overall encompassing idea of cheating because we're gonna get into what isn't, you know. — Okay. So, so let's talk. I guess we can stop the share here for a moment. Um let's consider other areas of life because I think this comes from like worldwide. I don't care where anyone is just in the digital age now almost everyone asked me this question like isn't that cheating? Is this cheating? Is using photograph cheating? Is using you know Google image search cheating? Is using tracing paper cheating? Is using a projector if you're making a mural cheating? Mhm. — You know, like we always feel like there's some sort of rule set that says you have to do it by hand without any type of tools like pencil to the page, absolute, you know, um pen and ink. This is what I want to explore. And so for me, if you're cheating on a math test, you found the answers and you're just writing down the answers. Is there a victim? Like this is our way to say, is it cheating or not? Now, if you're cheating in a math test, the victim is you because you're not learning what you need to learn and [clears throat] they think you're getting away with something, but like if you don't learn to read, — it's going to hurt you the most. And that's why teachers are like, I want you to know how to read. do math. And the same with doing art. Um, but there are times where you're going to like want to use a tool to learn the thing. Like you're going to be in this transitional stage. you have training wheels on a bicycle before you are doing jumps and doing back flips for Red Bull, you know, like you're gonna have steps along the way. So the question is, is there a victim? And are you deceiving people? Because I think if the answer is yes, then that's cheating. So for me, and I will state this upfront because I noticed two days ago when we posted that we were doing this live stream that in the chat someone was like, I swear to God if you say a generative AI, I'm jumping out of the call. I think that there is a victim with generative AI that they stole from us as an industry that they didn't ask our permission. So there's a victim. So in my stance, absolutely not. Never. I never use chat GPT. I'm not using Midjourney. I will not use this until we figure out an ethical way and like what I want it to be used for are the technical boring tasks that no one wants to do. Noise reduction, you know, we can do rettopizing of geometry. Do the jobs that no one wants and leave — and not even not even like the idea of it being a thing that someone doesn't want to do because typically it's also we talked about it a little bit before the stream started. I think an extension of that are the things that you can do — um for yourself and is something that you just like you have the ability

to do those things and in this situation uh there's something that is formulaic enough systematized enough that you can put like just like you know a piece of software on it. So for me as a person who has to process many many pieces of audio, pieces of video and things, there are some things that I do that are so systematized that you can make hard-coded rules in a piece of software to do those things for you. Um if for a person um let's say for uh an example of a system that artists have used for time in memorial, that's something like composition grids inside of a piece. We just recognize that there are some composition structures that work very well. uh just as a basic one as a basic example for that or is the rule of thirds you don't need to reinvent the wheel on composition you can look at it you can say does this uh do I want to adhere to the rule of thirds for a purpose or possibly uh break away from the rule of thirds here for a purpose you know there are some systems that people can use that are just quicker um and for um something like noise reduction like I can't do that there's no feasible way um but like autofocus in a camera is um that is a process that has uh a form of machine learning involved in it. And I think — my camera has — it's facial recognition on this camera. So — if I come into the focus now, you know, because it's being smart and I didn't have to manually rack focus my lens. That's okay. And the technology of that I have no problem with because I'm not paying a focus puller in the background to do this job. And sometimes with like cameras and stuff, you're out, you know, you only have five seconds to capture this moment and you that if you weren't in focus, you couldn't get it and the camera can get that faster than you could. — That's one less thing to deal with. — Absolutely. — Speed is important. — Yeah. uh to get out ahead of a some person who's trying to make an argument here in the chat. Uh there's a person here who says that uh all digital art tools uh are like using digital art tools is like using AI. It's not. Um, just to go ahead and put it out there, like the a person who goes to draw something in Procreate has to leverage the exact same knowledge of color, uh, color theory, the idea of value structures, any of those things that they have to do when they make a traditional work. It's not the same. You're a fool. Anyway, I just wanted to get those caveats there in the beginning and we can get into all the rest of it. — It's a good thing to talk about, though. This is why I think it's such a potent topic because a lot of people do have prejudices. I have seen very famous artists say you should never use photography because what your eye is going to be so much better than any camera. And though there is truth in that like if you actually understand cameras you'll realize that the human eye has 22 stops of dynamic range. No camera on the planet Even the best cinema camera is around 18 stops. This is true. [clears throat] We can see bright brights and dark darks way better than any camera out there. But there are times where if we want to grow like the audience that I'm speaking to is not traditional painters, you know, fine art. This could apply to fine art. And if you want to say, I created this without any knowledge, without any learning, without any digital tools, and I just made my own paints, you know, from finding the materials myself, then like great. I have no problem with that. And if you don't want to use digital tools in your artwork, I have no problem with that at all. But I want to talk about how I mean even in the traditional realms. Well, let's let me just share some images because yeah, I want to show what has been done through history so that we can really have this conversation because there's a lot of conflict here and there are people that promote you shouldn't use photography, you shouldn't use these tools, but let's talk about this. — Yeah. — Okay. share my screen. And again, I don't care what you take from this conversation. To me, the goal is to have beautiful stories that move people. So, if you're using any of these, I just think it's important to say, you know, like, are you stealing from someone and are you deceiving someone? So, if you're going to say, you know, like, um, I did this completely from my own mind, but you actually did do photography. That's not very honest. like I think it would be better to just say yeah I used reference for this. So let's talk about um draw just from your eye. So there's a lot of people that like you should go and do figure drawing and I agree. I do figure drawing every Tuesday night — and I've been doing it for years and years. I've done tens of thousands of figure drawing sketches and it's great. But where does figure drawing fail? Well, what if you want to get a pose like this? And this comes from

Graffit Studio, which I love. You are never — have to suspend a person from like cables or something. — You're never going to get a pose like this from a live session because it captures a moment in time. Or how about, you know, Moby Bridge? When came first invented, they didn't know whether horses feet left the ground. And it wasn't until early photography in the 1800s, 1878, that they're like, "Look, the horse actually does. all four feet are off the ground for short periods of time and they couldn't do that. Or things like this. This was early morning mist near where I live and I was driving and I was going out to do photography and the sun was out and there was just a low fog just at this spot [clears throat] and it was only here for maybe two minutes before it burned away. — There' be no way that I could come to this spot and paint this — as reference to build into my own mind because it just won't last. or try painting this, you know, like you're not going to be able to see your canvas. capture moments, you know, the early sunrise. This lasts maybe 30 seconds when the sun is doing this or an airplane flying through a scene or early morning mist. Like there's a so many different examples of times of day and very cinematic, you know, like night that you would not be able to paint or good luck painting that live, — you know. — Yeah. You're not going to catch this. There's so many things that you want to tell stories. Like classic art most likely isn't going to do a painting like this, but nowadays it would. And like you can't paint this from life. So learning to get photography or something like this where the smoke is moving. These are all photographs that I've taken that I use for reference in artwork of things that you just couldn't do live like you know even live events. I'm out on the street. I went on a trip to Nepal last year and this is all in the photography course and I talk about all these things but like I wouldn't be able to paint this. This girl was in this window for seconds you know or I was at you know I saw captured a wedding that was going on and it was just magical in a moment. I went to a friend's wedding like how do we capture things like this and then use it in art to extract from this to be able to say oh what is the shape of a head? What is the light doing? It's really pretty. I might not be able to craft this, but I can capture it. — Or, [clears throat] you know, there's another example of um things that we can't do from life. Small objects. Are you going to climb down on the ground and get your face into this? Like this mushroom is really teeny tiny. — No. And there's some things like with like some uh super crazy probe lens or something. You couldn't feasibly physically go into that space with someone did bring up something here in the chat that I think that we're going to go over. Um but I want to get it out there while we see it in the chat. — [snorts] — Um, so we have one here from uh the comic relief crusader who said, "How about 3D assets in programs like Clip Studio? I know it's considered tracing and therefore cheating, but can't it be considered to help? " First, you don't have to just trace the things that you see in uh using 3D assets first and foremost. But also, if you did as a base, I'm not mad at it personally. Jeremy Cedar. — No. Well, see the thing is, are you doing art as a demonstration of your expertise in your ego or are you doing art to tell a story? That's where to me storytelling and art like I make movies and I make games. So, I don't care how we get there. Like, and I look at like I want to share examples and I will share examples of in history what has been done and then I'm going to share examples um you know of production what what happens in actual studios. What do actual full-time professional concept artists use to make their splash art, to make their concept art, and reference is everywhere? Like, I worked on Assassin's Creed and we spent an entire year studying Greek culture. We went to Greece. We took, you know, 20,000 photos. We studied history. We hired historians. We dressed people up in costumes. We learned everything that we could in order to make the game. So if it's concept design, it is just the instructions for the final piece. So again, we come back to the question of what is cheating. If you are just worried about quickly making an illustration to tell a story that is going to lead to game production or film production, — then tracing a character, I don't care. If you don't have that skill, then do it. Use a 3D model as a reference. But eventually you're going to want to learn to draw the character from scratch and make a new pose for yourself, you know, and you might be cheating from yourself from using these tools. So there is a moment this gray zone of like are you cheating, you know, from the start. Um, you want to learn to be able to do this. Ideally, we could sit like let me show you again an example. Oh, before I go back, I want to say getting small objects. If you wanted to paint

small objects, this is a small object. Can you see this? See how tiny? — Very, very small. — This thing is so incredibly tiny. And it's a it's actually from a little toy set that I have. What if I want to paint this? Well, there's no way that I can put it right here and paint it. But if I share, if I go in with this was a probe lens, I can take a picture of this. — It's huge, — right? you know, like and I can take like this stuff that looks like plants, that's moss, you know, so like from a distance it's just green cover, but it's so close that it looks like moss, you know? Um, okay. So, let me come back and talk about the process of how do you learn, how do you build the skills to not have to rely on 3D? How do you use it and grow with it? So let's talk a little bit about the learning process because most people are not going to be able to draw a realistic human being with you know and 3D and perspective from the start. So there is a process in between. So — I think that art comes into well you know what I'm going to share something really quickly. I'm using Photoshop here and I want to share something that is brand new and I have a new video coming about this on my YouTube. Like — this looks like um what is it? Cars. I forget the name of it. The uh the operating system from the enterprise. — Yeah, it kind of does. — So I mean I again what I spend my time doing is I mentor people and I think about different skill sets foundational skills, intermediate skills, advanced skills and professional skills. And none of us learn linearly like learn all the basics then learn the intermediates then learn the advanced and then start your own film studio. And there are different skills of like drawing skills, painting skills, photography, 3D sculpture, story, imagination, research, social human skills and all of these kind of different components to this. — So our goal is to like I think foundational skills are learning to observe the world and that's why you might want to do figure drawing, you know. So figure drawing is a great way to start learning um about the world. Um let me move these let me make this full screen again. Come back to this. So like I think that this is a fantastic way to learn. Do it from your eye. Do it where no one can complain to say you've used AI, you've used cheating reference and like well you are using reference. They're just live in front of you. It's a real person sitting there. Like I was at a coffee shop recently and someone was drawing people live and they didn't know they were being drawn, — you know, they're just sitting there. Um, then there's color studies and I've done thousands of these. I did years and years of color study. So we've got like, you know, there's some there are some vegetables. Paint the vegetables. And I've done hundreds of these. And you have one hour for each of these. And every time that I do one, I learn something about subsurface scattering of bone [clears throat] — and about metal that's scratched and about rocks and wood and pine cones. And then I do plain air studies where I take my iPad or, you know, traditional paints, gouache, and go out into nature and try to capture the essence of what I'm seeing. And for those who are like digital is cheating, it's like I'm doing this on one layer with one brush and I'm doing it traditional. I'm just using a screen where I don't have toxic paints with me. So to me, I don't think that's cheating at all. I'm not taking a photo of the scene and putting a filter on it and calling it my own. I am actually hand painting this painting from that live scene without any photography involved because I want to stretch myself and build the library in my mind that I can refer to later. The more I do of this, the more I could imagine this in a painting and really understand what are the reflections doing? What is the transparency? What is the subsurface scattering of the water? Like every time I do it, I'm learning something different where I've done hundreds upon hundreds or even thousands of studies. Like this was my walk to work when I worked at Ubisoft. And like one day it's sunny and one day it's cloudy evening and the sun's at a different angle and one day it's rainy and I'm just like observing. And I can do this from photos or I can do it from life. And then I can add my own spin onto it. Like this photo is a poorly taken photo. But then I — can extract from that and start learning about reflections on cars and the amount of gradients and the shadows and I mean just like this is the method of learning from photography and growing. And if you have a problem with learning from photography or for from real life then you've got to connect with history. Do you like I don't know if most people here know that the Louve has had a they promote the idea of copying the masters like not even referencing it copying directly make it perfect and they've been doing this for 300 years. — So they expect people to come in like you can get a permit now only like 2,000 people a year can get a permit to go sit

in the Louv and spend a month copying the masters because that is the way that people have always learned — through history. You know — I think Another part of people getting mad at the idea of um using some sort of tool as like a means to an end. So let's say photography or um photography versus live reference uh digital art or anything like that is also a thing that you kind of touched on indirectly with what the purpose of making a piece is. I think that there are a lot of people out there who don't do something purely for the sake of practicing and learning. Yeah. — Uh, every single piece that they make has to be a final product. — And that's not that's an unfortunate result, I think, of how we look at art in this day and age. But — yeah, — I mean, with like being able to just practice with something and like there's low stakes because you don't mind if you fail or whatever. And that is really important for learning to be able to just like, oh yeah, I'm experimenting with this thing. How does it work out? If you put your, you know, self-worth or value in every single piece, it's going to be more, you know, emotionally difficult to just, yeah, that didn't work out. Let's move on to the next. — Exactly. — So, let's rewind then. Um, this is from the 1600s, so 400 years ago, girl with a pearl earring. — And if you don't know about Vermeere, this is interesting to me. So, there's an entire documentary about this that Vermeier's work is different. — What is that documentary? Do you know of hint? — Uh, [sighs] I don't remember exactly what it is, but there's a whole thing of like when they went to go clean these paintings, they're like, we don't see all of the layers of paint that most paintings have. We don't see sketch layers. We don't see anything underneath. And there was this great mystery for a very long period of time to go like, how did this artist skip all the sketch, you know, the sketches and just go to straight paint, like final pixel art, like working like a printer, like what people do on Instagram when they go to make a painting. and they have a blank page and they start at the top and they work their way to the bottom. Like that's not normal. This is somebody who has years of experience. They already know and they have a plan for what they're making and they're doing a magic trick again in front of you to make it look like they're just that talented. Like I guarantee that they're not actually that talented. Um they've put in years and years of work. Anyhow, with Vermeere, the current philosophy is that they've used something called a camera obscura. And a camera obscura has been around for thousands of years. And what you do, and I'm going to share some pictures. I shared this in the photography course, how to do this. And then a friend of mine, Catelyn, took this and went and made a bigger version where she blocked out the light in a room and blocked out all the windows. And if you make one tiny little hole, only one hole, and then turn off all the other lights and let your eyes adjust, what happens is that the entire room, you're going to see what's outside the window, and it's going to project [clears throat] on the wall like a projector. Again, this is technology that is thousands of years old. The ancient Greeks discovered this camera obscura is a Roman term or a Latin term that just means darkened chamber. And so this was what they thought Vermeier did to make these paintings. They actually made a little dark. So, you have a dark box in a room and you have someone stand there and he traced from real life onto the back wall of this little darkened chamber. And that's the question for you as an audience. Is that cheating? Did he cheat to make this classic piece of art that is in, you know, a museum? I don't remember which museum this one's in. I think it's in New York. Um, but like this is an ancient classic painting, but they were using methods like this. — Yeah. Let's look at DGA from the 1800s. DGA caused a big stink during the 1800s because in the 1850s something became commercially available called the degarotype camera. And cameras were brand new. They were invented in the 1800s — and DGA used them to capture things. You're not going to get a ballet dancer to stand on their toe for eight hours while you paint them. — So photography was the answer. And we actually have the final piece and the photography that he took. Now photography was really limited at that time or Russian painter Reppen really beautiful colorful artwork but we also have reference photography that was taken instead of having somebody stand in that same pose for days you know or weeks like a lot of these paintings took a really long time you know like when I look at people in traditional art schools are like I spent three months painting this you can't have a reference model stand for three months but you can take a photo in a few seconds to do this. Andrew, [clears throat] here's the final artwork. Here's the sketch. There's the photograph. — So, — this is something that has been done in

classic art. Gustav Corb waves crashing photograph, you know, like able to do this. Like there's so many examples, you know, from art or even looking at like Norman Rockwell in the beginning. I went to the Norman Rockwell Museum and you're like, "Oh, he's so talented. " And you're like, "Wait a minute. " — Yeah. It it starts from a photo and it's it becomes a thing that you modify as like as you intend. You know, you get to like exaggerate the nose if that more plays to what you're looking for. Obviously, a hat is removed here and the guy behind the counter becomes more. He's a guy who's been put upon by life. You know, there's the board behind him. That's reference. This is also another small thing that people think of don't think of when they look at drawing or art as a practice. Uh they think that using reference can be cheating because a person has so much of the information there. And we came across this when we had a lesson with um uh Elisa Vonova that we put out because she would have reference and people like well there there's two cases that essentially came up. one where people say using reference is cheating. And then one time when Elisa was using a reference in a video that we had with her where she didn't make a thing at the end that at the end of the day looked very much like the reference photo at all because she just used it as a springboard for something. So there's this weird split in people where it's like ah it's cheating. But also the other times where you don't make something that does look exactly like the reference and they get mad. So like — right — what you gonna do? Well, the funny thing is like I mean I think let me stop sharing for a minute so we can get back. We have these two bubbles that we somehow like as a culture and I don't understand it because we have things that are like oh no I'm doing figure drawing and I'm drawing literally what I see on screen you know or I've you know I'm going to paint there's a bowl of fruit and I paint the bowl of fruit. That's art. But the moment you put a face on that bowl of fruit and like you cheated. You used a real bowl of fruit and you're like wait a minute. Okay. So where's the line here with how we are creating — and it's a tough topic. There is no absolute answer here. And you have to find this for yourself. For me the answer is I want to be able to create 100% from imagination without references. But I have to build the skills to get there. you know, like I'm gonna have to learn. And seeing what other people have done in the past gives me the freedom to be like, okay, this is great. Like for me in the 90s, James Gurnie, I love James Gurnie. And James Gurnie has some fantastic Dintopia artwork. And he has a book that's called imaginative uh illustration. Um, — let's find out. — So, there's one called Color and Light that I really love. — Imaginative Realism. — Imagine how to paint. How to paint what doesn't exist. That book is awesome because you can see he's hiring models and he's dressing people in outfits and he's building mckettes and he's building puppets and he used that as a way to help build, you know, uh, this entire imaginative beautiful world with physical paints like physical oil paints or acrylic paints. I don't remember which he did. I think they're oil paints. And it's gorgeous. And he used reference and that frees me to go I think it's about the storytelling. It's not about him having ego and saying my process was pure and I didn't use any reference. — So that's my goal when I'm making a movie. My goal is to move someone emotionally, not to boost my pride. Um — that's fair. So I think here, so we're 34 minutes into the discussion on this. — Yeah. Uh, I want to go ahead and ask, so how does this apply and why are we here talking about your guys's courses today? — Yes. [clears throat] — Okay. So, again, this was driven out of a I want to help people grow. So, I've been thinking forever like I love photography and I love something. Actually, you came up with the term or we heard it somewhere. Skillsharing. — Skill blending. Tell me — basically the concept of how each like different skills merge together and they enhance each other. Um so it's like being a jack of all trades, knowing a little bit of everything is not only just like good for being more versatile, but it's also good for getting better at those other things you want to do. So like learning a bit about photography will make your artwork better. Uh learning a bit about screenwriting will, you know, make your storytelling or your, you know, other skills better. I mean anything. They all interconnect and overlap at a lot of — I know that when he was a kid because I do like the art side of things and he's not so much of a painter. He's a screenwriter. So he studied screenwriting at New York Film Academy and he's you know we've been doing films

since he was little. We would do these Saturday short films just for the fun of like — father son would go out we come up with an idea in the morning. We'd shoot it in the afternoon. We'd edit it the same day like a one-day film. And we just did tons and tons of those as a kid. And then you got the bug on your own when you were like 10. You're like, I want to make my own movies. So he made his own YouTube channel and did stopotion animation. And his stopmotion channel, his old one that I don't even know if exists anymore, — he got 400,000 views on a stopotion animation that he did when he was five. — And that means that this was also in a time when 400,000 was like the holy crap numbers, you know, — right? Yeah. you know when YouTube was only three years old you know like it's it's way back but you know through the years of doing film making it's amazing how much as a concept artist and as a lighting artist studying films and understanding films and making my own films has expanded what I can do in an imaginative illustration because again that the skill blending a rising tide lifts all boats if I learn about how cameras work and the discovery of And then I go back to my desk and I've seen so many different angles that work for a physical camera. It enhances my ability to draw. It expands the library in my mind that I can refer to when I go to be imaginative. And I think that that's part of the reason why we want to encourage people to be like learn everywhere. Learn as much as you can. Like when I got into games and I shifted away from animation, I was just kind of like I love animation but I need a break. I need a change. and that I kind of accidentally got into games. And um when I was in that realm, I was like, "Wait, these openw world games like Assassin's Creed are more like theme parks than they are like movies. [clears throat] — Why don't I get online and learn a little bit about theme park lighting? " So, I reached out to a Disney Imagineer who did lighting and he and I became friends and we've talked several times and we've talked for hours about like, "What do you do? " And he's like, "I want to learn about games and what do you do? " is sharing information back and forth just out of the pure curiosity and I learned so much about that process and like I think we should all have an insatiable desire and a curiosity to learn science and geology and history and acting like you know — so many of us want to hide behind our screens like we're artists because we don't we're not theater people we're not out there going da da you know like but if you stretch yourself and you take an acting class. It's amazing how much you learn about posing characters, — you know. Figure drawing is such a good thing, you know. And then if you have advanced figure drawing where it's not about like strike a pose like this and then like that, you know, just weird things. It's like tell your models, think of an emotion, give me panic, give me absolute depression, give me, you know, struggle, you know, and put it put your whole body into it. That's what we're using when we're making illustrations and we're doing concept design and we're making key art. We have to tell a story through body language. So, let's learn body language. Let's not just sit at the page and just imagine it. Let's study it. And that's where a lot of these classic illustrators and painters through history have done this. They've physically done like Norman Rockwell got people together. And I'm sure that they didn't just say strike a pose, take a picture, we're done. They probably tried lots of things and had like, "No, bend your head this way. Snap. No, try that. Snap. Take this way. Snap. " You know, do this again and again. So, we will have in a moment, we'll have some examples from our photography class to show you how this [snorts] can be used to apply to your art and the freedom that it gives you. So, it doesn't all have to be just out of here. You have the whole world, the entire library of every film and every game and every illustration to look at and say, "I want to be inspired by the lighting in this one, by the camera in that one, by the pose in this one, by the materials of this thing, — and merge it all together into something brand new that the world has never seen. " But I'm extracting the essence of these things. If you see my other in my YouTube channel, I have a whole big video about extraction. And you know, I try to give examples because this to me is the magic that makes you go from I'm copying a bowl of fruit to I'm drawing original illustrations. And often we keep these two bubbles very very separate from each other. And people get frustrated when they're like, how can I can easily copy things, but I can't make something new. And like extraction is the glue that holds these together where you're not copying the pixels. person, you're extracting the essence. Let me show you an example of this because I think showing is better. You know, show don't tell. Okay, let me come back here to Photoshop. Let's look at um so here's an example where

when I went go to figure drawing what I've been doing recently is instead of drawing the person exactly as they are I'm like tonight's raccoon night and so I take the pose of the person in front of me but I try to make and again I only have two minutes each these are five minutes of each — really fast speed sketching you know and then like here's the 15 minutes at the end you know and I'm trying to be imaginative, but I'm not coming up with everything. I'm looking at the person in front of me doing this pose and then I'm turning them into something else. — Mhm. — So, I'm extracting and I'm able to make art like this and like this is not all out of my head. There was somebody sitting there and it was cold and there was a heat lamp in front of them. So, I'll, you know, I'll do this. — I'll come, — you know, I'll come up with reference or — like you want to paint something that's made out of metal. Um, I modeled a 3D skull or actually I did a 3D scan with my phone of — different materials, — right? You know, take it into 3D software and be like, what does it look like if it's made just out of like chalk now? [snorts] It's out of wax, you know, or it's out of — like — a velvety material. It's like flocked or something on that purple one, — right? You know, and like I want to learn the essence of this so that I can extract from it. Like this was something that I gave to people that they like, okay, coloring book 2. 0. I want you to color this, but look for reference. Like I want it to be a gummy material. What's the essence of this? And I look at the way the highlights work, the way the subsurface scattering works, the way the refraction on this works, and I'm able to extract from that and put it into my own painting. So I am using reference, but only of the material. Like I'm understanding the shapes, but I'm able to do this. This is the magic to me. I have entire videos about this, too, to be like, "Okay, so we're going to paint this horrible little coloring book. " And we could do this where local colors dominate, where like the grass is green, the water's blue, the sky is blue, the clouds are white. But what if we look for reference from different places? Like, is this cheating? Now, for learning, I don't think that this is cheating. I a really valuable skill where I find an image that's very similar and I'm taking the light and the color and applying it into mine. It's not a direct copy. Let's look at other examples. It's not the same, but I'm like, I want that level of atmosphere, that time of day, the this color palette. So, I'm stealing this color palette and putting it into my composition. And this is something that is very commonly done in the industry where like I again I'm looking for reference and I'm stealing or extracting. I like the word extracting because stealing implies that there is a victim. If I am stealing somebody's work and I'm plagiarizing it, that's wrong. Shouldn't do it. If I'm looking at reference and there's things like shot deck. com — and shot deck is just they've got millions of frames from movies and it is for [clears throat] directors of photography and art directors to look at different films and say I want this kind of style and this type of color grade shot. — It is made for the industry — to extract from to be able to make new artwork or like things that are less direct. Like I saw this image and it doesn't look anything like my painting, but I'm like, "Oh, it's kind of green lighting and then this glowing — orange and I'm like, "Oh, what if my river is made out of lava? " So, it's like an indirect reference. This is all new, hand painted by me. No color picking, no copying, no pixel stealing, no AI generation, but this was my inspiration for this. — Yeah. And it's process, it's clearly processed through your own preference and style as well. If anyone's seen your work before, the piece on the left that you made is one that it positively reeks of Jeremy Vicker's preferences, you know, — it's like all over it. The way that the actual like the glow in the background, you that could be um like you clearly enjoy a very soft diffusion coming off of a light source in general. — Uh and that's in there. Uh the other thing I want to make sure and get out there for something that is like uh the stealing thing or uh the cheating is that the other thing that you look at in that is if it replaces the thing that it is that it would be stealing from — the you can look at that a couple different ways in the situation. Uh a thing that we've been talking about a lot is if it replaces the idea of you actually learning the skill uh then you are in many ways cheating. You know it's a thing that you stole like you said from yourself. You don't have a way to achieve that thing without that result — or without that technique or use. — Right. And so something like this the more you do this process the more you start internalizing these traits. you like I could paint this multiple different ways just from memory because

I've done so many studies and make something original like here I'm going to just show you a piece of art that I did last week um right here let me move this up move this I have a very complicated Photoshop file that you can't see me the workings of the magic behind the scenes of this but I will put this right here okay that was 100% from imagination on my iPad in Procreate. I didn't use any reference other than looking up tattoo studios. But like I saw a picture in a gallery that had this little hummingbird flying on the back of this girl, you know, near her back. I'm like, "Oh, it looks like it's giving her a tattoo on her lower back. That's funny. " I'm like, "Wait, that's a clever idea. Why don't I do a tattoo studio? " So, this was 100% from imagination. There's no photo reference of alligators or rhinos. I mean, I actually did look up what does a rhino face look like, what a hummingbirds look like, you know, but I'm not copying from anything. And the lighting anything, but this is because I've done years and years of studies like this for films to build this trait. So like here's something that you can do to learn. So merge artwork and this is where extraction. So I'm going to take something like Gary Larson. I love the side. — So good. So, we're going to learn and we're going to say,"I want to light this scene, but I don't want to just do normal daytime out of imagination. I want you to extract the lighting. " So, I found a piece of artwork online and I'm giving credit here, so I'm not taking from this artist. I love this lighting. I think it's really fun. So, I want to take these two and merge them together to make something like this. And I'm not stealing directly from this person's work. I'm not taking their concept design. painting. I'm just looking at the light and saying I'm inspired by the warmth of that light, the amount of atmosphere in the air, and then I have to make up how does the light work on the car and the headlights. And like I didn't refine this. This was a really fast sketch. — Yeah. — But I learned so much about lighting color that now I could paint a scene like this just from memory because I've done enough of these. Like another one is Dr. Seuss. I love Dr. Seuss paintings. Why don't we try colorizing these? You know, like I'm just trying to find any way that you can get practice where you don't have to do 100% of everything out of your head. Take this and turn it into like what if you're gonna make this into a film and you wanted to paint a color key from this. Look for references of jungles, you know? Take something like this and like how would I colorize this — and get rid of the line art and make something brand new? Miyazaki work, you know, old frames from Studio Gibli. — How would you paint this? you know, and pretty soon you'll be able to have the ability to change the lighting in so many different ways. Let me show you a different type of extraction. So, like — a friend of mine, we gave word prompts. So, like this one, the word prompt was chipmunk. And I thought it'd be really funny to have a chipmunk that is a monk. — I Yeah, it's a chipmunk. — Right. So, I had a picture of a chipmunk that I took and then I looked online for a picture of a bag of chips and then I sketched over top and then this was my final piece. So, I'm just utilizing reference so it's not 100% out of my head. Let me show another example. And this is actually in the photography course. So, okay, we wanted to do a painting of somebody falling off of a bridge. And that angle is really hard. So, Cedar volunteered — to get down on the floor — and to hang, you know, like make it look like you're falling. So, we didn't actually have to have him dangling off of a real cliffh — and then we kind of like readjusted the angle. And then we extracted the perspective from this by looking at parallel lines in the actual real environment to find the three-point perspective and where the vanishing points are and where the horizon line would be. And then we painted in a new painting as an example of extracting the pose and the camera and making something new. — Now I could have made him into a completely different character. I could do a lot with this, but I just wanted a real clear fast example of a speed paint that's like a 30 40 minute painting — certainly, — but I'm doing this not completely out of my head. If that — So the thing the thing that people would say would be cheating here would be using the photo reference, — right? — Yeah. — But then the piece that you shot this intentionally. So from stem to stern, it starts with your creative intent. You sought the things out or you made the things and then it was a springboard for the final piece that you were making. — Exactly. So the next thing that I want to share is a story sequence. Now so we have two courses. He has a course. I have a course. His course is about storytelling in cinematography and how to make short films. And my course is about how do you use the camera in a right way. um you know like one of the prejudices that people have against photography and I've

heard famous people say this don't copy from a camera because cameras are you know terrible and it looks bad and like well you got to learn how to do good photography to have good reference like all the images I showed earlier are things that I shot and I know how to use a camera — with excellence and use that for my art to extract the lighting from that so that way again there's no victim I'm not stealing this from somebody else's artwork online, someone else's photography and claiming it as my own. I'm like, I'm doing it myself. I'm getting up at 4 in the morning to capture the sunrise on the beach in this place and then I take it and I put it into my own artwork. That's the fun of the whole part of the process. So, together we shot several different short films and tomorrow we have another a second stream where we'll really dive into cinematography in particular and we're going to study sequences and like why should we understand these sequences? But you came up with the idea, the little Jack and the Beantock thing. — Yeah, I was inspired by like having big differences in character sizes because that's like a fun thing to play with fantasy. We were trying to talk about how to do storyboarding. Um, so the general, it's pretty simple sequence, but just a character kind of sneaking around at this giant's kitchen as the giant's cooking, trying not to be spotted and climbing up on some things and then accidentally like kicking a nug mug kicking a mug over. it shatters on the floor and then kind of gets caught by the giant. As just a little example of how to make a storyboard sequence using photography as reference. Um because the flexibility of, you know, if you're trying to do the full composition, you want to be able to just iterate on story and being able to move the camera around the room. um just to be able to quickly go like what does it look like from this angle, from that angle, from this angle and try out tons of different compositions to iterate to find what com conveys the most interesting, compelling story. Um that flexibility and speed is really important. — Yeah. I mean, I think part of this is like a lot of people think that you have to be blank page final stuff. So you got to figure out your camera angles and your perspective every single time by hand. So I want to show this process. So, I'm going to show you the animatic. Now, an animatic for a feature film, this is very commonly done, is very loose sketches, but you're planning how long are the shots, what is the timing, what is the pacing, what is the feel to this. We're going to show you this little short scene. I will share the video file here. Let me do this. So, this is the um this is the sequence. We're just going to play it back. It has sound. We just kind of mock this together. Huh? — Now, what do we have here? — Let me go. [snorts] — Okay, so that's — classic. It's just a really simple little sequence. Um, — but it's important to do this like if you're going to make an actual 3D animation, you don't want to just go into it without a plan. You want to make sure is the story moving? Does all of the elements kind of work together before you commit to modeling characters or building environments. You want to make sure that the story is working and that you can adjust things early uh to save time. You know, good pre-production practices. So, what we did for this is like part of the thing that's hard, you know, like if you're going to shoot a liveaction movie, just shoot the movie with real people. But if you're going to do animation or visual effects, that's where we want to be creative. Like I don't have a tiny person that's this big that can run across the counter for reference for photography — currently. — Currently, right? you know, um, until we finish the machine that shrinks people. But I can use photography and 3D and extra tools as a way to speed up this process and make it easier. So, let me share my screen again [clears throat] — and let's see entire screen. Okay, so what we did was we went into our kitchen and we made these horrible story boards. And we have an entire version of this that is like barely legible. Like if I showed this to you, you wouldn't know what it was. But we were sitting there with my iPad and talking through the shots. Like this is the shot where he's like kicking the mug off the counter and it goes down to the floor and like there's barely enough where like this is going to be the giant and this is the countertop and here's the little Jack — for us to remember and be able to go like yeah that's enough. We'll remember that. And then I took all of these different frames, put them into a video editing program, kind of figured out, okay, how long would this action of climbing up the mug take? Like I kind of think through it, kind of acted out in my head, and then I, you know, put it play that image, hold on it for this many seconds. Uh, and then I added in a bunch of sound effects, and I did little bits of, uh, voice acting for the

characters to make a really simple basic edit. And then we went back and we cleaned up — That's what that one was for. Yeah. — So, this is again in our kitchen. My kitchen is set up very similarly to what we wanted. So, I had a little toy and like I'm standing at my sink and it's set up in the same kind of way. So, we've got like this little tiny character running across and we're like finding what is this camera angle, what is this lens instead, you know, like I want to cut to a close-up. So, we're following classic cinematography of like this is like a 24 millimeter somewhat wide angle and then we cut to a 50 millimeter close-up with the background out of focus. And like we're just capturing stills in the actual place just trying to figure this thing out. And this helps us with thinking through how are we going to tell this story? And it only took us we were in the kitchen for maybe 20 minutes at most gather all these images. And then we also were like, "All right, so now I want the exact poses of the character outdoors. " So we went outside and this is Cedar running around climbing on our car. — Yeah. — Little Jack character — experimenting with what are these poses? And then I saved all of these off. Like you can see another image here that is like we wanted one of the shots when he's climbing on the mug. Let me just turn all these off one by one. Oh, so like this is a great way to discover this pose. I'm not used to drawing people from above hanging off an edge. I'm just not something that I've done a lot of. Not a lot of people have. So, why not go and take We were outside maybe 5 10 minutes — and we can find this and reference this. So, when it came into the storyboards, the other thing that I did, the other way that I've cheated was I built this scene in 3D. — Nice. — I mocked it up and I went a little bit fancy. I have a 3D background so like I didn't have to put in all the props and stuff but — but it's fun when you do — right you know like this is literally cubes spheres the fanciest thing that I did was this little tree route this is not advanced it's not advanced materials it's really simple and then what I did was I just made new camera angles and this way I have something to draw from for each of these shots and I made 22 different shots and then I could draw over top of this. I didn't have to light it as well, but I'm a nerd, so I put lighting into this. I could have just done screen captures. So then here's the final story boards. And if I go into any one of these shots, like let's say this shot, you can actually see my 3D version. And then I drew over top of this. And I have the different iterations of, you know, the mug falling. And all of this is based off of this photograph. So if I hide this, you can actually see I'm cheating here [snorts] to come up with that pose. But the question is, is it cheating? — I mean, I think for people that are learning, this is a great method. Or people that just want to get it done fast. — Yeah. Yeah, — if I showed you I mean like when you see art books from um from the big companies uh me stop sharing real quick. They're going to show you the curated version of like the prettiest artwork. So you buy the Zootopia artwork, you know, book. You buy the, you know, whatever movie, The Incredibles, you know, art book, and you're going to be like, "Wow, every single piece is so inspiring. " And like they are holding back 80% of the stuff that was done that was thrown away and that was scribbly but it really helped us. Like I worked on the Blue Umbrella which is a short film at Pixar and it was a lot of fun to work on. Our color script was chicken scratch. Yeah. — Never make it into an art book, but it was a conversation between us and the director about like here's when the rain starts and here's where it goes crazy and crazy and here's where the color shifts and it's literally almost napkin sketch-like. And it's amazing how much that this is what actually happens on real sets, on real movies. It's the we don't care about the quality. We care about the communication. We — care about the team being the most creative possible saying the potential of this. Oh yeah, I was about to just say that like seeing the potential of something so that you don't invest too much into it and then waste your time because oh actually we're going to change this entire sequence all the way through the end of the movie. We already fully animated it and rendered it and then now you wasted a ton of people's time. — Yep. — Yeah. Like that's so there are a couple times when uh let's say for something as simple as what we do here at Proco where we're supposed to be doing a thumbnail and all [clears throat] like the way the process starts off for us is that uh the one of our main publishers uh he'll put stuff together some like either some like loose mockups or some that are very

simple to put together that could be the finished released thumbnails. Uh sometimes someone will have an idea and they'll say something like oh like this would be cool if they had like a you know white outline on them uh and we made the eyes pop a little bit more with contrast you know um those things those are totally fine to communicate in text because they make sense. But then there are some other things where a person will say something like ah like this element in the screen or in the thumbnail is pulling folks a little bit more. What if we did this this and they're talking about a big overhaul. It's way more useful to like rapidly iterate that thing with just some little kit bash version of a thing rather than spending all the time to make a fully nice one so that you can see whether that idea actually works or not because the amount of times when I've been like, "Oh, this should be how we would do this thumbnail. " And it's a terrible idea. It's an awful idea. And I need to go through and then kit bash the thing real quick to see it works or doesn't work before I go ahead and put that idea forward. Um — the then you have other situations where in a professional context like uh what I've heard what we've all heard about I believe uh for the last Spider-Verse and the new Spider-Verse film where they have whole chunks of that production that are put together that they're like doesn't quite work. Let's change it. — Yeah. — And that's why it's taking so long to get those freaking movies. It's wild to see one little change at an executive level. Like that's part of why I think Pixar was so successful in the past. You know, like when I was there, I feel like it was the golden age where every film was a hit. Is it that way anymore? — I don't think so. But a lot of leadership has changed and like the leadership there at the time was spend your time on rough storyboarding before you get to 3D versus a lot of the other big studios — would cut entire sequences and it's just a huge waste of millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions of dollars because you have a director who can't see the potential in a rough sketch. So like this is a skill. This is one of the things that I do in my mentorship with people is right when — people find those mentorships. — So if you go to lightingmentor. com/metorship, you know, go to lightingmentor. com, there's a mentorship tab. Actually, that whole chart that I showed at the beginning of skills, it's on there. You can download a PDF of that if you want to like jump in. We could talk more if we have time about it, you know. But — wanting to learn, I used to teach like first learn to copy, then learn to extract, then tell your stories. And though that is a natural progression, I think that the skill of creative storytelling is actually so important that I want people to start there first. And like we've seen a lot online, first make it exist, then make it good, you know, like the circle type thing. So instead of making artwork that looks like everyone else's artwork and then you're frustrated that you can't get a job because your portfolio just blends in just like everyone else is, tell a unique story. Make illustrations. So, you've got a hummingbird tattoo parlor. Why not make it? Even if your perspective is off, if your idea is clever, no one will care. I mean, look at South Park. South Park's technicality is very flat and simple, but they're potent stories that hit people in the face with their political opinions. It's not about the technique. It is about the speed and the storytelling. There's I mean whether you like that or not, it's just the truth of like there's so many different mediums. If you can get to the point fast of saying I'm going to learn the imaginative skills and the storytelling skills first and then I will learn perspective later around that project. You're going to reach your potential faster. Like storybased projects will be the quickest way you can learn. It'll be painful. It'll be hard. But you're going to hit like if you do key art. I know we're always a promotion of, you know, proponent of make key art because you're going to have to learn camera and perspective and angle and environment design and character pose and lighting and material. You're going to have to do every single piece of the pipeline when making key art. So, why don't you just dive in and make key art and fail forward? — I like this idea. Yeah, especially people are so scared of the idea of being bad at something. It's good. It's a good thing. You're only bad at something until you're not like that's just do the thing, learn the new skill and at the other end of it, you're gonna look back at some stuff that you probably did while you were bad at it and still think that there was something interesting in it. — One thing as well with doing learning with stories is that you're committed to like I want to tell this story. I want to get this project done. So if you encounter you'll encounter problems that you wouldn't otherwise if you're doing that and it'll really force you to learn and grow. Whereas, if you're just doing like a study where it's just like, I'm just going to sit here and paint this thing and that's it. I'm just trying to learn this one skill. You could just like back out of it, you know, because

you're not committed to it and be like, ah, that sounds like I'm I don't, you know, if you're like, I'm bad at characters, I'm just not going to draw faces. Or, I'm bad at hands. I'm just not going to draw hands. But if you're telling a story, it's like you can't not draw the hand — because critical to telling that story. So, it forces you to really get a holistic, you know, that skill blending. You got to do everything. — Yeah. Because the situations where you really try to just uh let your weaknesses dictate what you do, — then you end up having, like you said, Cedar, like the idea of every character is now instead wearing gloves. — They have like uh garments that in some way obscure the parts that I can't draw, you know, and so you end up with 90s image comics. — Yep. Yeah. I mean, and then the other thing that I think is really important is group projects because if you're painting by yourself and you are your own art director, you encounter one of these things, you're like, and the character hops up on the top of the hood of a car. — Great. Wait, I don't know how to draw cars. They hop up on a rock. — Yeah. You have the ability to change it. You're working on a film with other people. They're like, "No, no, no, no. You have to learn to draw a car. " The end. this character. We've already decided as a group this is what the character is. And this is why I think that [clears throat] film making even if it's cheesy with your phone film making is such a good thing for artists. It is so good for the soul. Like every year — at every company that I've been at because if they didn't have it, I'd start it. A 48 hour film festival — and you show up on Friday night and you're like, "Okay, you have you can't make more than two minutes. You're going to over the weekend make a two-minute film. You can do it by yourself or with your friends or with your family or with a team of people from work, you know, whatever. But here's your limit of your genre and a prop you have to use and a line of dialogue you have to put in it. We'll see you on Monday morning. And that's your delivery date. And so you have the weekend to go be creative and you create something brand new. And it might be cheesy throwaway, but you're going to learn something about film making. You're going to build with a team. You're going to have group collaboration. You're going to learn people skills. It's just so good to do. I want to get that started here. Like where we live right now, there's a theater in town and like I just need to go down and talk to them and be like I want to start this. Like they had a huge horror festival in October and like I know that they have local filmmakers sharing their films and like let's do a 48 hour film festival. This would be great. Let's build community with actual people in actual person making actual films, you know, like let's think, you know, like I know we're doing this call right now remotely, but like can you be more physical, — you know, and — yeah, — be present in the moment and I don't know. I think it's something that's just so good for it's good for your soul. It's kind of like travel, you know, like I think travel is especially good for people to see a different perspective and a different way of life. And whether you're traveling, you can do photography and now you have a whole reference of that place, you know, and yeah, something different. — And you get to car you get to carry it with you going forward. It informs your experience. Every single bit of it, I think getting out into the world was nice. Um, let me see here. Uh, someone in the chat here said, "The link was confusing. Do I need like a Proco account for the course? " Yep. Yeah. Uh, that's u maybe it seems weird like you need to do this extra thing to get a course. Um, but what you actually get out of that is the ability to have an account where when you submit your work for any assignments or anything like that on the Proco website, uh, you can get direct feedback to linked to you for the work that you submit. Uh, also Proco is not going away anytime soon. Um, Proco has, uh, shown that it will be here for quite some time. Uh so we have you you'll have this limitless access to your courses that you buy on Proco even if in the future if let's say um [clears throat] Jeremy had courses on Proco uh but Jeremy now has decided that he has no interest in teaching anyone anything ever again and Cedar has taken on his entire empire and decides that you can only get them on lightingmentor. com which is also a fantastic place to pick up their courses. uh but he's going to remove all of those things from Proco. It's okay. You purchased it with Proco. Uh you will be able to have it there to stream, to download whatever thing you like uh in perpetuity. So — yeah, it's a benefit. Um I did want to ask here so we've been talking about the idea of using images that you make for yourself uh with the knowledge that you have built up to inform later more let's say like a high-minded uh narrative pursuits but that's not necessarily the thing that the first half of your course well this overall course but um your half of this course Jeremy teaches tomorrow we're going to be talking about Cedars a little bit more in depth, the cinematography side of things. Um, but your course actually

teaches people the basics of using a camera and many other things. Do you want to talk about any part of those? — Yeah, I mean, let's let me share my screen again. Uh, because I [clears throat] think that there's a lot of going to show you this beautiful photo. You can learn to take photos like this as well. You too can make art that looks as beautiful as this. Um, — where's this photo? I'm going to judge this photo. — It's beautiful. — Okay. So, I mean, a lot of people when they go to create Oh, let me uh let me do this and move this screen over here so I can go full screen with this 100%. There we go. Um, when people judge photography and they're like, why you shouldn't use photography for um for your own reference and you should use your eyes, it's because they're looking at cheap photography. like this is these are this is me when I was a kid. this photography that my family did with flash cameras. And sometimes you get an image like, all right, this one's okay. — This has composition to it. There's colors. I think that there was the 603010 rule in there even, — right? You know, but there's a lot of really bad photos. I actually like this one. This one was fun. Me and my sister, you know, like there's some energy and life in this one. And sometimes you get photos that are really good, but a lot of times you get photos that look like this. It's overexposed. It's flat. It's gross. So people are like, you should never use reference. And this is where, again, I won't state names, but there are people out online that are very famous that are like, "You should never paint from, you know, from photography because your paintings are going to look like this. " And it's like, — I think it's okay to mention the people if you want. There was one that I'll go ahead and say where you had said that um there was a way that Marshall had communicated that in a video that made it seem like you can't work from photos. Uh, I think that he oversimplified his point in the video. But what people do come away from that is thinking that he means never use photos, you know, and that is essentially because of what he said or how he said something, what he's saying. And that that's the way that art education ends up working. Someone says something and they take it as gospel truth. You know, there are other people who just flat out do say and they mean never use photos. You know, they think that um you are you're not understanding the totality of something that it um puts other constrictions onto something like there's curvature or forcehortening and things that are being introduced or taken away from a piece because of lens choice. Um uh colors are being limited or even the way that phone cameras now work where they all by and large a lot of them assert this HDR look onto the pieces, you know. Um, some of those things are valid points, but others photos are great. Photos are great reference. — You learn to do the right photo to go instead of this, let's do this. That's more appealing. This has like, you know, foreground. We're using the lens, we're using the angle, we're using everything to make a compelling image. Like this little prop that I have that's like planes of the face of a skull. If you were to paint this, it would be a really terrible painting. But what if you painted this? learn to light the objects to photograph the objects. A jacko'lantern. So, this is the jacko'lantern with my phone in my kitchen when I made it. And then this is where I actually brought out lighting and a little smoke machine and made it spooky ookie. And these are the things in the course that I'll actually talk about and I'll use like just available light, cheap light sources, you know, how do you actually do this? How do you light scenes? You know, like you want to do a self-portrait. Well, you don't want to use a thing like this with your phone. That's gross. like learn to take an actual proper photo and now you have something that you can reference. Or like here's another example of like I went to this drive-thru safari park that had all these Disney bears that couldn't be released back into the wild because they've been trained for movies. So now they live here. There's that photo, not that great. There's this photo, much better. What is the difference? What are the technicalities of the light, the posing, the lensing, the speed of capturing this, you know, like years ago? And these are again, these are all photos that I took, all the bad ones I do, — you know, and there's different times through the years, like I remember being at Disney World and trying to capture the light show with my phone and it didn't work out so well. And then years later, once I understood how cameras work, I captured this image in town here in Washington because it was like, oh, there's this awesome giant volcano and the fireworks and it's going to be really cool. and I looked for the right location and the right time and the right exposure and how to capture that moment in a way that's really compelling. And that to me is what I want to teach people how to do. So like if you're going to use this tool, if you and if you have a prejudice against photography or against 3D tools, that's okay too. You can do that. That's your life. That's how you want to work. If you want to just learn physical, you know, piece of charcoal and that's it on

paper, great. All the more power to you. But I want to be able to tell as many stories as possible using every tool possible. As long as there's no victim, as long as I have intention and I'm making it, handcrafting it. So for me, photography is a joy and I learn so much from it and I've been able to extract from that and put it into my paintings. So I want to go out and I want to learn these things. There is something else and I want to bring you into this because another reason to learn about photography and especially cinematography is how do you stitch multi-shotss together to tell a story? — Okay, — so like this will bleed in Neil like I'd like to transition this to set you up for tomorrow's live stream because you know what like what you — Yeah. I mean, for the cinematic storytelling course that I created and put together, it's really about how to make short films. And I start like super simple, like just a simple phone camera in like a bedroom, no fancy stuff, just one character. And how do you have different shots that you cut together to draw attention to, you know, the character's facial expressions or certain things? And learning those skills can be useful for any kind of you know storytelling. Uh like obviously movies and things like that but even like if you want to do comics like understanding you know you have one painting that's like a further back shot where you can see everything like what's the layout where are all the characters or you can do more close-ups to focus in on certain elements and learning that through cameras can be very useful. — Yeah. I mean I think that we're we want to cover everything. So that's where like if you purchase the complete bundle, it's you know that we're calling uh cinematic — cinematography for artists is the overarching thing. The first half uh so the Jeremy half of this being photography for artists and then uh Cedar's half being cinematic storytelling. — Yep. So, what's kind of cool with this is that I'm going to go from absolute basics to say, "All right, let's say you have only the money to buy the course and you um you just want to learn this. I'm going to show you how to do just using your phone, you know, like everybody, if you're able to get a course like this, you have a phone camera and pretty much everyone does, you know, unless you're really old school, but — how do you do this inexpensively? " And then even if you never buy a physical camera, you know, understanding what has been done and how to analyze images from film and to look at it and say, I can understand the lensing, aperture, the ISO, the shutter speed, the timing, the movement of this, and I can break down basically what they've done. But when we get to the end of my course in the beginning of his, I kind of go still photography, videography, and then cinematography. So we actually shot four different short films for the making of these two courses and we hired um actors and we flew people out and we you know rented locations and we brought in lights and then as part of his course that we did together we actually are providing you want to say what we're providing? — We're providing 40 minutes of raw footage so that you can actually edit together one of these scenes. It's like a scene from a movie that we shot with you know professional lighting and acting all of that. Uh so you can download it and you know practice with like how do you choose which camera angle when and put that together. — We're trying to give as much of a prof an insight into professional storytelling. Again I've worked on a lot of movies and a lot of TV shows and these are processes that are used in real production but we've made it where it's accessible. So we're not going to be like well if you have $100 million you can do this too. We're trying to make it where you can get the experience of what it's like even if you have a limited amount of money. Now, of course, I will show lots of things in here that do get expensive. Like they say, you know, like if you give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day. If you teach a man a fish, he'll live for a lifetime. It's kind of the opposite thing of like if you, you know, give a man a photograph, he'll have a picture, you know, of something. But if you teach a man to photograph and show him how to use B&H Photo, he'll be cool for the rest of his life. Yeah, there's a reason that you and I as people who uh have used lighting and things like that, your space right now looks like it does because you have access to these tools. My office here does not look like this. My office from home, wildly different thing. The thing that I the thing that lights my room uh when I want like a nice soft ambient light in my space uh is an entirely too expensive video light that has uh like it has the attachment on it for a spotlight and I fire it up into the ceiling so it's a very diffused soft light — just because I have production tools available to me. — Exactly. I mean when I look at each of these lamps and these lights and these things Yeah. This is these are professional film lights. Even the light bulb behind Cedar's head, if you lean over a little bit, — this way. — That way, that light bulb is actually an Aperture BC7 bulb that doesn't flicker

on camera and I can unplug it and it'll still stay lit and I can make it any color I want with my phone because I'm a nerd. And that's why Stephen and I bonded immediately when we got to know each other a while back and we're like, we're both such nerds, — you know, but that's the joy of it — and it's the things that you learn. So, um, I think the thing that I'd want to make sure is known here for people is that it's you don't have to come into any of these courses that we're talking about here with the full totality of all video production things uh or the knowledge of the stuff. The first and foremost the a person who has no knowledge in anything in art just because they have a nice tool in their hand. They could have the most expensive pencil, the most expensive paints, uh the most expensive cameras and everything, the most expensive lights. They'll make a trash image. That that's just how it's going to go. what you get here in these courses that we've been talking about so far today. Uh these are things that will give you the materials in video to be able to edit those things without you having to go and shoot all of those things. So you can still get that practical experience like Cedar was talking about as well as the knowledge to know what is bad and what's good when you do go and shoot those things yourself. Uh there are plenty of parts of production uh the things that uh you learn along the way where when you first start to learn it, you only think that you are bad at this thing. You think that you're making very bad uh very bad material. That's because you're learning what is good. — That's an important step in that process. Um, so pick up a course, check it out, like learn the things. They give you the tools to be able to look at the um to practice uh to be able to make something good. And you don't have to start fully formed. That's the joy of these kind of things. And if you can't afford it, we have YouTube and there's [clears throat] a whole bunch of free stuff. I have my entire YouTube channel and I share as much as I can, but I also have like I want to sustain myself as well. So like if you want to dive deeper we have the courses and if not we offer so much right here and I just all I want is to encourage people to just go and create. Did you have something to say? I was just going to add with tying in what you were saying of um the — I was kind of lost the thought but with ne with the next stream kind of talking about also breaking down and analyzing other movies as well and that you know even if you can't create it understanding like that's also what we go into with the courses is like — how to break [clears throat] down and understand movies and learn from them as well. Yeah, we do a ton of that, you know, where we'll break down, we'll pull up different scenes, actually entire scenes, and like how do they tell their story? The whole thing, the whole sequences, — which is what we'll do live tomorrow with K-pop Demon. — Do you want uh Yeah. You want to give them any sort of uh any sort of idea of what things we'll go over? You said K-pop demon hunters. We're going to go over. — Also going to look at Knives Out and if we have the time for the D and D Honor among thieves movie as well. A couple things. Okay. Heck yeah. — Films we made. — Yep. Yeah. We'll talk about the short films that we've made as well and talk about how do you get accessible. Again, I'm just wanting to find paths. There are so many people from around the world that write to me and say, I'm from this small country that has no film making, you know, um support. How do I break into this? I love movies. I love animation. I love games. How do I break into it? So I want with all of my soul to give a path because I didn't grow up in LA. Hollywood. I didn't have any family members who did this. I grew up in a small town in New England. And so like it's — I was able to find the path into the industry. And that's what I want to help other people do too. So, — you know, I want to show you how to create and how to um to be free to tell your stories on the cheap as well. you know, free tools, cheap tools, $5 lights, available light, you know, all of these things, but using the principles of visual storytelling. Um, there's a lot of overlap. For any of you that have taken my painting light courses, my painting light 103 is really an advanced like why do we do things? So, painting light 101 is about copying. Painting light 102 is about extracting believable light. 103 is really about why of cinematography in your paintings. How do you light characters? environments? And there's a lot of overlap with the photography course where we actually go and light realworld environments and look for the right time of day weather and like all kinds of tips and tricks and tools and anything you can to be able to get that light that is just awesome. Um, you know, and kind of pulling the layer back. Like if I were to zoom back and show you everything

you'll see the mess that is this room and like all the lenses on the floor down here. — Yeah. The seaands that are behind me that are always moving around, you know, and the tripods and all that kind of stuff. Like it looks pretty from this angle, but not from every angle. So that's what we want to do with any of these courses. And that's the heart of Proco as well is like it's accessible. It actually is accessible to you that you can learn these skills. It is not magic, you know, like this, you know, type of effect and like I just dropped the coin on the floor. You didn't see that. It's all magic. Like, no, it's science. It is a science to this. These are learnable skills and anybody can learn them. Some people will learn them easier than you. Some people it will be harder, you know, to learn, but they are all learnable, practical skills to help you tell your stories. And we man in the way the world is right now I'm not going to get into politics here but — more than ever we need everyone's voices. We need your stories and in the world where AI wants to take away your voice even more why you should learn these skills so that you still have a voice as a human and as a person that can respect other people and bring your stories. It doesn't just have to come from one place. It doesn't billionaires alone. It can come from all of us, from every background, and it's [clears throat] more important than ever to do this. — Yeah, I think this uh slides us into uh the like a paid comment that we got here today. — Yeah. — So, this was from uh Lunar Fifth Studio, I think is the name here. Uh they said, "The story is king. That's why they say a picture tells a thousand words. Great stream. Going to peep the YouTube and the course. " — Awesome. — You you've made a fan who's willing to give you money already. Yeah, thank you everybody for showing up to this uh this stream. I hope it's inspiring. I hope it opens your world a little bit more. I hope it gives you more freedom in the tools to go and create and come back tomorrow. You know, the other stream. It may look like it's disconnected to this one, but it is very much connected. And we're just going to continue the conversation and we'll like get really practical. Like we'll break down actual sequences and like talk about what they're doing, like how do they tell these stories. — That's going to be Yeah, — I look forward to it. Um so yeah, go check that out, guys. Right now, like I said, um the course is 25% off. It's 25% off, but if you guys buy both of those parts on the course, it's actually 30% off. So, I saved that little piece of information here for the end. Um, go check it out. Uh, but more than anything else, you don't have to spend money because you can come back tomorrow and find out more entirely for free. We'll be here. Um, it'll be a little bit later in the day, uh, just by a couple hours, but it's okay because you're definitely already following here on YouTube, so you definitely see what the time is on the subscription feed, right? So, um, in the meantime, go ahead and also check out Jeremy here on YouTube. Uh, that's Lighting Mentor here. and at lightingmentor. com. Jeremy has many other courses that you don't just have to buy on Proco. If for some reason you don't want to buy courses from us, we understand. Go ahead and buy them from Jeremy. — I do have one course that I've decided not to put on Proco. It's — okay. Yeah. What is that one? Feel free to — Foundations of Drawing. — It's Foundations of Drawing. Um, and the reason that I made it is because a lot of people come to me to learn color and light and they don't have drawing skills and they really struggle with painting. they don't know how to draw and like okay I have a unique perspective like I didn't think I needed to do this because there's places like Proco that have hundreds and hundreds of hours worth of great drawing content and like I send people to Proco all the time and I really believe in it and it's awesome but it also can be incredibly overwhelming. So like I made a little tiny course that's super cheap — on my site and I'm like I'm just going to keep it here and it's like really inexpensive — and I don't use any digital tools. They literally use a number two cheap 25 cent pencil and printer paper. The end, [clears throat] you know, for the whole — Yeah. — So, yeah, whatever. Anyway, again, I want people to be able to learn and to be able to, you know, like see like this is my thoughts on what you actually need to set yourself up to be ready for painting. So, just the foundations and the basics of things. — Heck yeah. Um, so here in the chat it said, uh, Jeremy and Cedar Vicory, can you link official channel? I'm going to go ahead and give you that uh that YouTube one here just to make sure that you have that. Um — tomorrow let's link Cedars cuz Cedar has a new YouTube account. — Oh, I didn't know that there was another YouTube account on the table. — Okay. — Well, we'll do that. We'll do that in tomorrow's. — Yeah. Yeah. — Yeah. [clears throat] — Okay. Yeah. Well, thank you all for being here. Uh I will see every single one of you, including these two handsome gentlemen, tomorrow. Have a good one everybody.