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- [00:00]
Alejandro
When you're building AI products, you are kind of like carving the product. You're not actually building the project.
- [00:08]
Rid
Can you talk a little bit about how that influences the way that you evaluate design talent?
- [00:13]
Alejandro
I do think the future of product design, at least building in this space, requires to be technical.
- [00:19]
Rid
I think maybe I underestimated the intentionality from the very beginning.
- [00:23]
Alejandro
This idea of creating a two hour movie has been there since the very beginning.
- [00:28]
Rid
There's kind of this adapt or die mentality. And yet you had the foresight quite early on to build an entire company around this new technology.
- [00:36]
Alejandro
We have this phrase here at the company that we like to say that we believe that the best stories have not been told yet because of the access to these kind of tools. There's more chances that we're going to be seeing those stories now.
- [00:49]
Rid
Welcome to Dive Club. My name is Rid. And this is where designers never stop learning. This week's episode is with Alejandro, who's a co founder and chief design officer of Runway, which is one of the leading generative AI companies in the world today. So a big focus of this conversation is seeing what it looks like to operate as an AI native product team because Alejandro has some really compelling ideas about how designers should collaborate with engineers, with researchers, and what it takes to design a winning AI product. And also, it's just fun to hear Alejandro share about where generative video could be headed next and how that might impact the future of storytelling. But before we get into all of that, we have to go all the way back to the beginning, because Runway was way ahead of its time.
- [01:38]
Alejandro
Runway started in 2017, 2018. I met my co founders at grad school at NYU. We all went to Tisch to a program that is called itp Interactive Telecommunications Program. The whole premise of the program is to use the latest technologies as part of your creative workflows, as tool, as resources to power creative projects. When we got there, the whole boom was around VR. But I think one year in, we started reading all of the latest progress in the AI space. And most specifically on the generative side of things for us was a shocking moment. We were like, we can't believe that we can create images out of text instruction. And I'm talking about images that were 256 pixels by 256 pixels. Completely pixelated completely. The alignment between the text and the images was completely off. But coming from a creative background, come from a design background. I work as a product designer. I run a design studio. In the past, I've used Many or most of the software that exists for creators, like seeing the capability of having an idea and translating that into an image, even that it looked really bad at that moment was like a shocking moment. It was like, we can't believe this is possible. At the very beginning we were thinking, there's going to be a moment where we're going to be using this to, to tell stories and to create moving images and to create movies out of this. At that time, thinking in moving images, thinking in movies, seeing these kind of outputs was kind of crazy and it was impossible. But a quarter later we were seeing 512 by 512 pixels that were a little bit better than we were seeing 1080 by 1080 and things like that. And things were scaling until we decided that we needed to create a company that ultimately offered a set of tools that allowed anyone in the world create long form stories.
- [04:05]
Rid
What's it like to work on something and try to make daily progress when you're still years away from the technological breakthrough required to see real mass adoption?
- [04:15]
Alejandro
I believe we have been creating kind of like pillar points that have helped us going to the next phase. So when we started the company, we initially had kind of like a machine learning directory of open source models that you could use to explore kind of like creative projects that help us to build infrastructure that is powering a lot of the things that we do today. So we knew that we needed to create things that at that moment that needed some kind of like computing usage that needs to be credited by credits and things like that. And all of these kind of like small little compounding efforts have helped us to do the next thing. We passed through a phase where we tried to go beyond that. It was a phase where we started exploring more on end to end workflows. We created kind of like a video editor in the browser to do kind of the whole thing within our tool. And I think that was a little bit too ambitious. But we pretty quickly move back to more like iterative and incremental progress through this kind of like pillar points, as I said, to support the next big idea, rather than try to do one major thing at once, real quick message.
- [05:38]
Rid
And then we can jump back into it. Play is no longer just a prototyping tool because their next release introduces Play to xcode. That means everything that you've created in play, your styles, components, even full pages and interactions, can be exported as a swift package. It's never been easier to get your ideas into the App Store, so head to Dive Club Play to learn more you know what? I can't stop thinking about Cursor but for designers. And that's why I'm all in on Desen. It's not another zero to one tool for prototypes or side projects. It's a visual interface that gives you access to your company's existing code base so you, you can make updates to things like components, typography, properties, and push your designs to production without having to go through an engineer. That's what the future of product design will feel like. And you can start experiencing it today. Just head to Dive Club Desen to get started. That's D E S S N. Okay, now onto the episode. I think maybe I underestimated the intentionality from the very beginning. Like, you kind of always had the full length generated film in mind and you were thinking strategically about like, okay, what are the pillars or milestones that need to get there? I'm even getting some flashbacks. Like one of my favorite books is Creativity Inc. And just hearing the Pixar story and what everything that led up to Toy Story and years of trudging through things when everyone looked and said that's still impossible. And it's like pretty clear parallels. Which is cool to hear.
- [07:13]
Alejandro
Yeah. Our product has changed, but our vision has never changed since we started. At the very beginning, we were fantasizing with this idea of like, we should even promote the work of our users through a festival. At that moment, we were calling it Synthetic Film Festival. Now we have an AI film festival. We are running our third version this year here in New York and in la. But this idea of like, we're going to use this technology to power the kind of projects that we want to create. And those kind of projects were things related to storytelling, to filmmaking. I went to film schools for years. My co founders, they also have been working in the filmmaking kind of like industry. So we come from that background and of course we were excited by the technology, but we were more excited about the potential outcomes that could come using these technologies in the type of projects that we wanted to create. So for us, this idea of creating a two hour movie has been there since the very beginning.
- [08:21]
Rid
I want to touch on the film background piece in a second first, just to kind of give people the bookends and help them better understand what Runway makes possible. You know, you started off talking about the 256 pixel images. Where are we at today? Like, is there a use case or two that's happening on the product now that you just find fascinating? Or you could talk a little bit more about Just to give people a better sen of what's possible.
- [08:46]
Alejandro
You can generate videos using both text or image or another video as an input. And videos that are that have a 4K resolution and that can last 10 seconds, that you can extend to up to 40 seconds. And today we're seeing users using these kind of outputs, like stitching them to writers to create short film pieces. In this festival that I was telling you, we have seen thousands of short films that range from two to seven minutes. We also have an image model. The main workflow of our user, it is to first start with creating an image as a reference of the type of scenes, the type of world, the type of characters that they want to create. And then they use that as an input for generating videos.
- [09:35]
Rid
Okay, so so many companies right now are figuring out how to adapt to AI and there's kind of this adapt or die mentality. And yet, you know, you had the foresight quite early on to build an entire company around this new technology. And so how has that reality, as well as your background in film, influenced the type of org that you wanted to design?
- [09:58]
Alejandro
With Runway, we are an applied AI research company, but we framed ourselves as an art, entertainment and media company. We are going to measure in a way, success by how much art is created, how many movies are going to be produced because of the tools that we are using and that influence it a lot. On how we want to run the company, we have a creative team internally, people who have been working in the media and arts industry for long time, and we sit them together with the researchers. So we believe that we're artists doing researchers, we are not researchers doing research that we sit literally together like artists with researchers to work together towards different ideas of goals based on the type of outcomes that we want to see, also incorporating other members of the company like design as well. We don't believe that in order to create the tools that we want to create, we need to silo teams into different functions. The best outcomes that we have seen is when designers, creatives, researchers, engineers and product are all in the same table, brainstorming together how to address a specific problem that we want to solve.
- [11:17]
Rid
I appreciate the segue because that's something that I really wanted to hear more about because I saw a recent tweet where you talked about how on the design team you have product designers, design engineers and front end engineers. So can you share a little bit more about like the underlying strategy behind that way of grouping the org and what types of collaboration does that unlock?
- [11:38]
Alejandro
I consider myself design Engineering, or however it's the latest of today is.
- [11:47]
Rid
Yeah, yes.
- [11:48]
Alejandro
But I come from, I've done product design, traditional product design in the past, but then I learned how to code, I guess, and I moved to applying code as my, my tool for designing. And when we started the company, we were just designing mostly in code. For the first four years of the company we went from sketch to Figma and we used it as a reference to map ideas. But we were not working with the traditional process of designing, handing off things to engineers. We started by building things first, understanding the capabilities of specific things that we want to try. And in the very last part of the process, we were redesigning our packaging or thinking on the final user experience. But we always started with this approach of let's build first and then we go back and think more on the ux.
- [12:50]
Rid
Has that evolved now that you're operating at a greater scale than you were in the first four years?
- [12:54]
Alejandro
As we scaled the company, we naturally had to start separating different functions within the company. We had to create the product design function, the engineering function, the research function. We started to see the need of, okay, we need to have a representation of what we have in the product in Figma so we can iterate there faster. Maybe we can hand off some of the things that we're working to new members in the engineering team for them to work. But today we have kind of like a mix, as you were saying, of product designers, engineers and front end engineers. Because we have learned that in order to build the things that we are building, the things that are most specifically the things that interact with AI models, with machine learning models, we need to be able to visualize them first, to test them first in order to see how they perform, rather than going too far on the purely design phase. We have learned that sometimes if you don't invest in building an MVP or a V0 of something that you have in mind and you purely focus on mocking this in Figma, you might dream too big. And then the reality is that the model will not perform as expected on specific things. So for us it has become crucial to try to get as fast as we can to the final thing and then go back and rethink how we want the experience to be. We have tried different things. We have a program at the company that is a design rotation where members of the front end team can apply to move to the design team for up to a month and report to design. There are three different reasons for that. One is the thing we have learned that building fast and Building first influence the type of products that we are creating, and also influences ideas on research on how do we imagine the interaction to be, how do we want the user experience to be. And that has influenced a lot on how we want to build those models or how do we want to build the underlying tech to support that. The second reason is at Runway, we don't have a design system. We have some kind of style guide that we use to maintain consistency. We move extremely fast, and sometimes it's really hard to have full consistency on all of the things that we're working. But we are doing more efforts on improving that and on having more coherence and consistency across our product line. And I don't believe that we're going to get there by writing a document, writing a style guide, or sharing something that other members can consume. I think we're going to get there by experience. So the idea there is that engineers come through these design conversations. They interiorize these ideas of where do we want to focus, where do we want to put more attention in having more consistency and more coherence. And hopefully they can propagate that when they go back. And so far it has worked well. And the third, just to build more strong collaborations. And we believe that we need to create more ideas because we are working with things that are new that we haven't seen before. We need to explore a lot and we need to test a lot of things and hopefully as fast as we can. So we have learned that building these kind of collaborations between design and engineer have a payoff really well for influencing some of the product decisions.
- [16:43]
Rid
I love that. And a hypothesis I've even been thinking through is just the best measuring stick now for design development. Collaboration is the percentage of exploratory code that's just thrown away because it ensures the development is getting involved super, super early. And what better way to do that than to directly embed them on the design team? I haven't heard that type of rotation program before, but I think it's a really cool model.
- [17:07]
Alejandro
Yeah, there is this whole conversation of, like, should designer code or not? I think yes, for sure. Maybe they should learn everything. I think the role of designers is to be curious and learn as many things as we can. But I think most importantly, the function should know more of the technical aspects if you're building a product. So I don't think it's a matter of an individual within a team. I think is a function of the team to have this, internalize these skills together, to pursue any kind of like, Idea of exploration.
- [17:42]
Rid
Yeah, I'd imagine there's a lot of natural osmosis that happens just by working closely with engineering too. Like as a designer, I'm probably absorbing a lot of technical know hows or mental models seeing things a little bit differently.
- [17:55]
Alejandro
Yeah, 100%. And we're trying to go beyond that. I think now it's just purely on front end engineers rotation to design teams. But I think we're also exploring how can research and design have some more kind of collaboration efforts in which we can get closer to understanding earlier some of the key concepts of how to build the right experiences based on what is possible.
- [18:23]
Rid
Can we go a little bit deeper there? Because the idea of collaborating with a research team has come up now on a few different episodes. And I'm sure for the vast majority of people listening, it's a bit of a black box still because most people haven't worked in that environment. So can you talk a little bit about what that collaboration looks like, but also just the flow of product ideas in an org where research is a core component?
- [18:45]
Alejandro
Yes. So first of all, we as a company, we don't have roadmap that we a product roadmap that we follow. We have research areas of exploration. And one of the things that is hard to do when you are a research organization is that you never know when research is going to be ready and if it's going to get there. If you're going to find things halfway through, you might discover some other things while you're trying to get to a specific place. So the way that we work is that we are constantly talking and monitoring what's happening in the research side of things to see what are the things that we can extract from there to create some ideas, some prototypes, some mocks, some things that we believe can be beneficial for our users. At Runway, things change constantly. I think because of this dynamic of like Steam, what's the status in research for different things? You might be working on something on a specific week and next week there is something else that we discover and maybe we switch gears to explore that. And when those things happen normally, as I said before, like researchers, designers, product engineers and people from the creative team sit together and say, okay, we are here. This looks amazing and this has a lot of potential for these three use cases. Let's try to explore more a little bit here to see where we land as a team for thinking on a specific feature or product. So I think that relationship or that process of working with research is pretty dynamic and change a lot Depending on.
- [20:36]
Rid
Where research is, I'm going to double click on that because there's a few different variables that I'm going to summarize real quickly leading up to a question that's on my mind, which is you're working with AI, meaning a lot of things just have to be explored in code because you have to get the output from the model to even see what the heck this looks like. You also have the lack of a formal long roadmap just because everything's changing all the time. And then you have much of what you're actually going to be focusing on birthed by research and the different possibilities that they unlock. So in that type of environment, what's the role that design plays in shaping product strategy?
- [21:19]
Alejandro
When you're building AI products, but you're also creating those models and designers models for specific type of use cases, you are kind of like carving the product. You're not actually building the project. You have an hypothesis of we have this model. We have invested time in researching and creating a specific model that can perform specific operations. But what we have learned is that most of the times it unlocks many things that we have maybe not considered as well. So you start by creating an idea of how to interact, how to communicate with these models. The way that I see is this huge stone that is presented to you that is a beautiful stone that has a lot of potential to become a great sculpture. But then you start taking out pieces, which is like building productize, creating mocks. And then you start discovering different ways of how you can use it for new use cases or new things that you didn't anticipate that are possible and that you're seeing that work. So a lot of the design and I guess design and product role, I believe, is to identify that kind of possibilities by testing, by constantly exploring how you can use or how internally, us as a team are exploring the capabilities and the possibilities and try to frame that into something that everyone can use.
- [22:51]
Rid
I love the idea of carving the product. Is there a specific example that we could use to shine a light on what that looks like in practice and better understand what it's like to be a designer?
- [23:00]
Alejandro
At Runway one is the motion brush tool, which is a control tool to allow you to decide how you want to move a subject within a generated scene. We identified many different ways in which we wanted that to happen by exploring different ideas. But it ended up working by kind of like creating the smoke ups those ideas or prototypes, and working together with a researcher who kind of like decided how to design the underlying model to allow for that kind of user experience. We went through different phases, but at the end, I think it informed a lot the type of interaction that we wanted to have to decide which approach we wanted to take.
- [23:51]
Rid
So it sounds like in that situation, there was a user opportunity or problem where it's like, okay, we need to move things in a scene, and design could probably pretty clearly spot that. And then the collaboration is like, okay, what can we do with research to build the functionality needed to achieve this user outcome? That probably is somewhat intuitive. And like, it's. It's not hard to look at the current set of the product and say that is needed. Is there another example where maybe a certain possibility emerged from research that design wasn't even thinking about that? All of a sudden you're like, whoa, let's figure out how to make use of that.
- [24:28]
Alejandro
A lot of things come from, like, oh, design wasn't even thinking on maybe that as a possibility. And I think the other ways around, and not necessarily influenced by design, I think a lot of them also influenced by the creative team that I mentioned. Because researchers want to apply their research into applications, right? But when you pair that with other team members who have experience in creating films, in creating campaigns, in creating things, they know where the granular things that are important to consider that perhaps a researcher might not have had any exposure in the past. And I think when you sit them together to kind of, like, try to influence each other is when I guess the magic happen. I think that happens sometimes from creative or design or product.
- [25:16]
Rid
I have a smile on my face because so many teams operated in this traditional stool or whatever you want to refer to it, as with, like, the product design, engineering. And here you are just doing things way out in left field. Like, you have the research team, you have the creative team, and all these lines are blurry, and there's lack of roadmaps. And honestly, it just sounds like a really fun place to work.
- [25:35]
Alejandro
It's really fun to change a lot in what you will be working each week at Runway. I think something that I talked a lot, especially with the design team, is that you never know. Like, we only have three meetings weekly with the design team. One is Monday to plan, Wednesday to kind of, like, do design critique, and Friday to talk a little bit more ideas and inspiration and things that we want to work next. But many Mondays, you don't know where you're going to be working, because things have changed. I come from Chile. I like soccer. I see myself a little bit of, like, A coach mentality and I like to try to. To put players in different positions. Sometimes you will be working on the user workflow side of things and the next week you will be working on the tooling. So there's no specialization. I want the team to be exposed to everything because I believe everything is one as a whole. If you work on all aspects of the tool, you build and share more knowledge with the rest of the team and we all gain much given the.
- [26:33]
Rid
Amount of change not only in the technology, the product, also your role as the team grows and you become more of a coach and less of an ic. Are there ways where you have made a conscious decision to evolve the way that the team operates or certain processes or rituals? Where have you strategically made like org level changes? And can you give us a little bit of the reason why?
- [26:59]
Alejandro
I do think it's mainly this idea of incorporating or making the design team a technical function. I do think the future of product design, at least building in this space, requires to be technical. We had for a brief moment this idea of like product design is just traditional product designers and all the technical aspects were handled in the engineering side of the company. I do think that bringing this idea back from when we started that everything was a little bit more blurry, a little bit more mixed has created a big change on how we approach building and why I'm saying this because the main change that has happened there is it's really hard to build confidence in building AI tools when you cannot test them. Right. You can have like a broader exploration of many possible things that you can do for one specific project. But at the moment of testing that in the browser, in the medium where it lives, you need to be able to consider like latency or how to respond or what's their user expectation when they're waiting. Are we blogging some stuff? I think many things that perhaps are hard to measure, test or visualize purely on the design phase are crucial. And I think since we start adding more technical folks within the team, that has changed in growing that confidence in which direction seems better than other. And we do that through building actually real prototypes within the main kind of like code base or externally in completely separated playground environments to help us influence which decision do we want to take here?
- [28:51]
Rid
Can you talk a little bit about how that influences the way that you evaluate design talent? Like how high is your technical threshold that you're looking for?
- [29:00]
Alejandro
It depends what we need in a specific time. Again, with this soccer mentality, I think teams work better when you identify different skills that are needed for specific teams like a soccer team. You need someone who can create a play, who can score a goalkeeper. I do see it very similar in that way. I don't think like having great product designers who are great at the craft or visual creates great product design teams. I think it's a combination. I think if you have someone who is really great at visual, someone who is really great, maybe research someone who is great at implementing those ideas into things that we can test, someone who is more inclining to understanding how to better communicate through copy and can help partner with other designers into solutions to that. I think that's how I see it. So it depends. We have needed different type of skills at the beginning. Perhaps being more of a generalistic was more important than today. Today we are seeking for more like kind of like a, like kind of roles that can support different aspects of the team.
- [30:13]
Rid
So how much exploring are designers doing in code today? Like I know you're saying like this is kind of where it's going, this is the trend. But given the closeness of collaboration with engineering, does that also mean that like, okay, maybe designers actually aren't into the code that much or where does that line exist?
- [30:29]
Alejandro
No, designers, product designers are not in the are not coding. They're working with design engineers or front end engineers. I think the whole idea is that I want them to work together or we want to work together and we want to measure things on mostly interacting with the things in the browser with things that are functional rather than spending too much time reviewing static prototypes.
- [30:58]
Rid
Hey, it's Rid. I'm constantly asked about my favorite product, so I'm going to take just one minute and give you a quick rundown of my stack back. Desen is how I ship design changes without having to code. Framer is how I build my websites. Genway is how I do research. Jitter is how I animate my designs. Play is how I design and prototype mobile apps. Visual Electric is how I generate all of my imagery and Raycast is my shortcut every step of the way. Now I've hand selected these companies to partner with me so that I can do these episodes full time. So the best way by far to support the show is to check them out. You can find the full list at Dive Club Partners. Okay, now on to the rest of the episode. I want to take a little bit of a hard left and zoom out a bit because the impetus for this entire conversation was a tweet that you had that I haven't stopped thinking about since I read it. And I'm just gonna read it so people have the context. And then I'd love to hear you just unpack the ideas a little bit more and what you're thinking. You said, I see a lot of opinions about taste as the key differential skill in the future, but I think intuition will play a larger role. What do you mean by that?
- [32:11]
Alejandro
Yeah, when I read these comments about taste is going to be the key differential skill to have, it assumes that you are kind of like acting as a curator when you get exposed to kind of like outputs that are produced by the machine. So I take that as like, the ones who are going to succeed are the ones who are going to be able to understand or filter things that are good. Right. But I think when things start to become good as default, I think it loses its value. And I think it's more important to think about what else? Where can I take this? I'm here. If I'm evaluating many good things, I'm in space, what else can I do? And I think that comes more from intuition to ask yourself, what other thing can I do on top of this when everything is good? So, to me, because of the nature of our company, I go to a lot of panels that are around AI in filmmaking and how AI is going to influence storytelling. I think those are very valid questions. And we assume that we're going to be creating more and more ambitious type of movies and short films and stuff like that. But I think, in my opinion, what is going to be really different are those who are going to start thinking, what are the kind of things that we can create with this? What are the new things where we can take this to the next level rather than curating what is good or what is bad.
- [33:43]
Rid
I like that because it's like intuition's almost the root skill. Like, intuition is how you create the playground that you're even exploring within, where maybe AI can scale, iteration, and then you're curating and your taste is coming in to make sure that you're selecting the right things. But being able to understand where to point all of these new tools, nothing really matters if you can't do that effectively.
- [34:09]
Alejandro
Yeah, exactly. I think I'm just talking purely on who is going to stand out. Right. I think if the question is if you want to have a skill that you will use to stand out, I don't think it will be just identifying what's good specifically, not when good is the default and the default and everything is good. It's more like I acknowledge that maybe this is Good. But I'm going to question myself, what else this needs to take this to another level.
- [34:41]
Rid
All right, so then I want to hear a little bit from you about the futures you're imagining. Because going back to the beginning, you started at the 256 pixel squares and now you have these like 20, 40 second videos. All of a sudden the full length generative film doesn't just feel not impossible, but it feels like quite attainable and inevitable. And so I would imagine that you're probably even looking beyond that a little bit. So put us inside of your brain for just a second. Like, where can this go once these new types of creative abilities are completely democratized?
- [35:21]
Alejandro
When the camera was invented, we never anticipated cinema. Like cinema was a consequence of the invention of the camera. And cinema is an art form that now we cannot live without that. Unfortunately, I don't have the right answer to say because of what we're doing today with Genai or generative media, it's going to translate in this new art form. But I have no idea, no doubt that it goes to translating something that we have not even considered in the past. I think there's going to be more movies that are going to get green lit. There are going to be more artists from different places of the world that are going to be able to tell the stories that they couldn't tell before. And saying this being someone who come from Chile, who went to film school in Chile, who understand how complicated is to think on a, a filmmaking project when you're in a place where it's really hard to think about projects like that. I think because of the democratization of this type of tools, we're going to start seeing more stories that are going to happen. They're going to be produced from places that traditionally haven't had much of a chance to create these kind of projects. But on the other side, I think we're going to get to a point where through usage, we're going to understand this technology in a way that we're going to be, the artists are going to be challenging its usage and creating new ways of using it that we cannot anticipate. Today. We are tracking and we are monitoring what's happening in other things, like what's happening in gaming, what's happening in VR, what's happening with the headsets, what's happening with fan fiction, what's happening with different kind of things. But I don't think is the role of us to say this is going to translate and that is the role of the creators, the role of the artists to use this tool to push them, to push the boundaries of what they can create. They are going the ones to going to tell us what new art forms are going to be created.
- [37:28]
Rid
I'm also interested just to see the new distribution channels that emerge too because just because there's all of these new movies, which maybe that word in the long run even feels a little bit antiquated, doesn't necessarily mean that they're discoverable. And so I feel like it's going to force different ways of, of plugging in to a much, much, much, much larger set of feature length films or however you want to refer to it. And so it's fascinating. It's a fun thought exercise to imagine what the world looks like and we don't know, right.
- [37:58]
Alejandro
I guess things can translate to be in stories that never end. And maybe you don't consume them in a large screen, maybe you consume them in your phone. Every day they change because the ability to produce content is going to be simpler and, and more accessible. So maybe why to think that you need to work in a project that is going to be displayed in this specific location at a specific time. Maybe they can happen simultaneously, they can be in real time or they can live in different spaces that they have lived in the past. So I don't know. But I think when you ask me what's the future that I see, I think a future of a more creative world, a more creative outcome overall because first we're going to have, have more stories. We have this phrase here at the company that we like to say that we believe that the best stories have not been told yet. And I think because of the access to these kind of tools, there's more chances that we're going to be seeing those stories.
- [39:02]
Rid
Now I had the picture of the game you play where you draw a portion of a picture and then you pass the paper to your friend and then they draw a portion of the picture and they pass the paper to the next person. And I'm like, man, what does it look like to have, have collaborative filmmaking where you're crafting the story in real time together and you wake up to the next chapter that your friend made or something like that. That's crazy.
- [39:22]
Alejandro
Yeah, I'm super interested in that area actually that you know how we, when we watch TV show, when we watch the season finale on a Sunday night, next lunch on the Monday after, we all discuss the final, we like to talk about what happened or what could have happened or what we would have liked to And I see a scenario where it's us who can continue that conversation in the form of video, in the form of something that may perhaps interactive and that can. That's why I was saying that we're more than like fan fiction. I think a lot of things needs to happen in order for that to happen, like to be able to produce that. But if we are just purely speculating, I think I'm excited about a scenario. Where is the viewers, the fans who can contribute to the story as well.
- [40:18]
Rid
Interesting. You're right. It's like a totally different way to think about ip. Like I'm thinking about the severance episodes and they air and then all the memes take over Twitter and like what if I could actually imagine what the continuation of the next episode would look like? And when I contribute back to Twitter, it's actually like a, a 30 second snippet of like, what if this happened next and people could watch it and then you tune in and see okay, what actually happens. That's crazy.
- [40:40]
Alejandro
Yeah. To me it's a form of like what samples is in, like hip hop or music is like you take something and you it to a different way of using it. I'm super excited to see how that plays in the future if there is something there. Again, a lot of things needs to happen to allow for that to be actually possible. But it could be one of scenarios, why not on the other side? I just become a father. I have a one and a half son, years old son. And I drop out from film school because thinking on a filmmaking project used to take two years to actually materialize in something that you can have any type of feedback. Today you have feedback in a couple of seconds. I like to think about like by the time that my son start reading or creating his own story, the stories on his own, he will start having immediate feedback on those, on the visual feedback on those stories. And what are they going to be creating? They're going to have so much access to fantasizing, imposing possible words that we maybe discuss. I didn't have that kind of access in the past.
- [41:48]
Rid
A hypothetical I love bringing up is just I can imagine myself in the kitchen because I also have a one year old in two months. I'm same exact journey and I'm just like, man, by the time she's like 4 years old, what if I'm in the kitchen and she comes around and she's like daddy, look what I made. And it's a freaking movie, you know, and she can develop her own IP and tell her own stories and maybe they're even multimedia. You know, maybe some of them are like movies, some of them are books and you can just create, I mean just endless creative capabilities for that generation. It's so hard to imagine. And even the idea of like, you know, screen time. I have a brother who has a six year old and it's like that's a really big thing you're thinking about as a parent. It's like, oh my gosh, like how much screen time do we give them? But I'm like, how does that discuss, discussion, change in a world where most of the screen time is creative and you're making rather than mindlessly consuming things? That would be my hope. And man, does that just blow the roof off of what it looks like to be a parent coming up here.
- [42:51]
Alejandro
Yeah, for sure. I see it as a more creative outcome or results like having access to things that can augment the things that you have in mind and have real time feedback I think is going to be super powerful.
- [43:05]
Rid
Yeah, I'm just excited for more IP to exist in the world too. Like I unrant that I have that. It's not even a question. I'm just going to rant because I don't know who else. I don't have another guest that I could rant this specific topic to, but I was looking at the highest grossing movies from last year and it was a top 20 list. And I believe 19 of 20 had no new IP associated with them. They were just sequels. Just running it back again again. Like my God, stop making Toy Story. It was perfect two ago and you just keep running it back again. Because there's this risk aversion in film right now because everything has to be a hit. Everything's so expensive and at a very high level. I'm rooting passionately for the long tail of film and I think it's just going to be good for society as a whole for that level of creativity to be birthed.
- [43:53]
Alejandro
Yeah, for sure. There's so many stories that haven't had the chance yet to to be made and that come from different places and most of them are local stories. Like again, coming from Chile, I know there's a lot of local stories from myth or street stories or things like that, or characters that are local that haven't had the chance to be created into something that can be shared with the rest of the world. I think now that it opens up more possibilities for those things to happen.
- [44:26]
Rid
Well, how do we conclude here? Is there a through line or piece of advice or something that you want to leave designers with before I let you go.
- [44:35]
Alejandro
Yeah, I think we're not entering. We already entered this phase of like a whole transformation in many different ways. But I think there is one thing that will not change, that is being curious on the possibilities that are ahead of of view. I think we know that our lives are going to change, our professions are going to change, work is going to change in different ways, things are going to get augmented, things are going to get, are going to enter to different processes. But I think at the end, what will not change for creatives, and most specifically in this case for designers, is that they will require solutions that someone needs to in some cases implement. And I believe that keeping being curious and understanding, even non mastering, just like exposing yourself to understand as much as you can from everything that is happening, even if it's new or you don't understand. I like to say to my team here, the designers who that they should join like things that we have internally, like paper readings, who sometimes are very technical, but I think think those things build knowledge in you that you can apply when you're thinking in a solution, in a project. And I think just being exposed to many things, or as many things as you can, even if you don't understand.
- [46:00]
Rid
Them, I think that's probably the best piece of advice you could possibly give in this age. So thank you, Alejandro, for coming on and giving a little bit of behind the scenes of the story and how you work and all the different ways that you're kind of just pushing on the way that things happen have been. It's really, really exciting to see and I'm rooting for you all. Thanks again.
- [46:19]
Alejandro
Awesome. Thank you for having.