Джурабаев – из Таджикистана в голливудское кино / Jurabaev – From Tajikistan to Hollywood

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18+ НАСТОЯЩИЙ МАТЕРИАЛ ПРОИЗВЕДЕН, РАСПРОСТРАНЕН ИНОСТРАННЫМ АГЕНТОМ ДУДЕМ ЮРИЕМ АЛЕКСАНДРОВИЧЕМ

Джама Джурабаев – концепт-художник, работал над: «Мир юрского периода», «Алладин», «Мандалорец», «Первому игроку приготовиться» и многим другим. Интервью – про то, как устроен визуальный мир очень большого и очень дорогого кино
https://www.instagram.com/jamajurabaev/

Наш телеграм-канал https://t.me/yurydud

0:00 Вперед!
0:38 Важное объявление
1:01 О чем этот выпуск
1:47 Почему мы в Лондоне?
3:07 Инопланетянка для фильма, вдохновленная женой
7:40 Здесь научат разбираться в кино
11:03 Как ты создавал динозавров для «Мира Юрского периода»?
17:05 Динозавр и Франкенштейн
19:08 «Я жил в интернет-кафе и спал на коробках из-под мониторов»
31:29 Внутри Голливуда
34:11 Как снимают сцены с динозаврами?
36:05 Ты рисовал сковородки, но попал в кино. Как?
50:37 Кокосы vs персики, Восточная Европа vs западный мир
55:51 Работать на Лондон из Душанбе
1:00:12 Чем крут Майкл Бэй
1:02:55 Гай Риччи, Стивен Спилберг, Уилл Смит
1:07:19 Война в Таджикистане
1:14:01 Ты создавал мир для «Звездных войн»!
1:16:52 Художники, которые жили в бывшем СССР, отлично рисуют апокалипсис
1:19:23 Ты нарисовал маленького Йоду, но его не утвердили
1:23:21 Отношение к таджикам в России
1:30:24 Для чего художнику нужен VR? (показываем)
1:37:28 Ты верующий?
1:43:48 Когда-то ты был вне политики, но в 2020 году что-то изменилось. Почему?
1:51:18 Сколько. Ты. Зарабатываешь
1:54:10 Искусственный интеллект – проблема человечества?
1:59:48 Сканируем Дудя!
2:01:40 Делаем из Дудя персонажа
2:03:23 В чем сила?

Current material (information) is created and distributed by a foreign agent Yury Dud Action! I came there from Tajikistan. How? How else? Are you a Star Wars fan? Wow.. I’m also getting paid.. We can turn you into an alien. Let’s go! A short message before the episode starts.

Subscribe to our Telegram channel, It is finally active. If YouTube gets banned in Russia we would keep in touch in Telegram. This is the name of the channel, I’ll leave the link in the description below. And now, onto the episode.

Jama, you are a concept artist born and raised in Tajikistan working for huge Hollywood movies now. The Star Wars, Jurassic World, Aladdin, Fantastic Beasts.. And many others. And many other projects I can’t mention yet. We would like to ask you how you got here in London. And how this profession actually works.

Super, I’m up for it. Jama Jurabaev, 43 years old Concept artist, creates characters design and visual effects for movies Born in Dushanbe (Tajikistan) We’re in London. You’ve been living here for twelve years already. Twelve years, right. Why London? I moved here to work. I got my first offer from Microsoft..

It didn’t work out and then I got an offer from London. I got an offer from Moving Picture Company and moved here. I used to be a freelancer and eventually I settled down. Let’s explain how the industry works. They are making a new Jurassic World movie in Hollywood.

The producers are outsourcing all the visual effects. They are hiring another company to create the visuals for them. All the largest VFX companies are located in London.. It’s true. Here in Soho. These companies are creating the visuals. There are different departments in these companies. Some of them are responsible for explosions..

Some of them are modeling characters.. Some of them are drawing textures.. Some people are drawing characters. You used to work in such department. Not only characters. This is called visual development. Characters, environments, visual effects.. Some graphics for Marvel characters.. All these tiny details..

We’re at your studio. This room is located at your home. This is where everything is happening. It is. Mostly. Ready Player One. I created a few drafts and this one was the most basic. I created it in a couple of minutes. I used symmetry tool and then I fixed his legs..

It looks like a generic rock t-shirt.. Steven Spielberg picked this draft because it matched the description. Movie characters are generally more basic than the video games characters. You only have two minutes of screen time to tell this character’s story. You can’t make him too complicated for the viewers.

A skull on the chest and it’s ready. He is a villain. So then I was asked to add more detailed. And you drew this. I did. I added more color, added some metal.. And then I was asked to draw the close-up. Steven Spielberg doesn’t like horns. He asked me to remove the horns.

You drew this character inspired by.. My wife. And you didn’t tell her. How did this happen? I created the villain first. Steven Spielberg approved it. He said ‘very nice work’. My self-esteem skyrocketed. And then I had to draw Artemis. She’s an alien. She’s an attractive alien.

I said I would do it. I created the first draft..It was a real alien with a little weird face.. It wasn’t a human. They told me she didn’t look attractive. And my self-esteem and my visa hopes crashed immediately. You had a working visa back then. I did. Steven Spielberg didn’t like my work.

I was dating Polina and I asked her if I could take some pictures of her. You didn’t tell her the purpose. I said I was working on some project with Steven Spielberg. I needed a reference for one of the characters. This happened a long time ago.

Four years ago I was working on movies that you’re going to see tomorrow. This happened in 2015 and the movie came out in 2018. I wanted to make the character’s neck a little longer.. This girl had to look tough..She whooped other characters’ ass. However, she had to be cute, too.

I didn’t just paste my girlfriend’s face.. I was inspired by some of her features. I worked on the character and got a ‘yes’ from Steven. My self-esteem was recovered. And then I drew the outfit.. Ready Player One has a lot of pop culture references. She had an eighties outfit. A bike from Akira..

Wow.. Before the official premiere we get a chance to see the movie first. This usually happens a week or two before the premiere. You can also bring one person with you. I took Polina to the premiere.. After the movie she said that Artemis looked familiar..

She said that Artemis looked a little bit like her. She was glad that the character was inspired by her. They have similar ears and necks. We just met Polina and she really looks like this character. The initial draft wasn’t that good but I’m glad that I had such kind of experience.

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Back to London. This is a character from the Jurassic World. I designed the villain dinosaur. This is the concept art. The early stage of the character. It’s not about the anatomy or the details.. It’s about the character.. His mood. Yes. This dinosaur had to be streamlined and black..

He would gallop like a horse or a dog. Its arms were long enough to gallop. It evolved..Fingers can tell you a lot about the character. There was an episode when it tried to touch the girl with its fingers. This is mentioned in the description of the character.

They didn’t know how exactly the character would look like. How long did it take you to draw this in Photoshop? It took me about a day. What happened next? Next step: the same dinosaur but now it’s ready for production. With all the corrections and details. We added this yellow line..

It reminds us of poisonous snakes. I want the character to look familiar and new at the same time. This is a crocodile scale painted black. Intuitively you know that you’ve seen this before. It makes the movie more believable. We’re standing at the Natural History Museum.

You would come to this museum to work, too. What did you do here? When I was working on Jurassic World and also on BBC documentary.. I needed to do my research before drawing dinosaurs. This is a great museum that does all the research for you.

I went to this museum in the summer of 2022.. They had a huge dinosaur skeleton in the main hall. Do they still have it? They don’t. Now they have a big whale skeleton there. So you went to the museum to look at the skeleton.

I did. I needed to find out how this skeleton worked. If you know the proportions and how the bones interact.. You will be able to put any kind of skin on this skeleton. Including a non-existing skin.

Yes. If you take a look at the Star Wars first drafts you’ll see that the artist knew how animal anatomy worked. Your characters won’t be believable if you’re bad at anatomy. Motion designer would work with the character after me. If you got the proportions wrong motion design wouldn’t work.

Jurassic World is a Hollywood product. They made dinosaurs more scary and more evil. BBC Prehistoric Planet documentary had a scientific approach. We worked with real scientists who told us how these skeletons worked. They would tell us to add feathers.. How long did it take you to get to the second picture? Nine months.

Nine months? You didn’t work on it alone. A big team worked on this character. Who are they? I created this image alone. However, there were also motion designers, modellers who also worked on it. They all worked at the different stages of production.

They were doing it at the same time. I was also involved in this process. Modeller created a model of a grey color. It would take him a lot of time to add scale. They would send it to me and I would draw the scale.

As a concept artist, I’m cheaper and more effective in production. It takes less time because I’m creating a static image. Someone had to animate these porcupine quills. Someone had to animate these scale patterns.. It takes a lot of time and talent. I respect these guys a lot. Modellers, motion designers, rigging artists..

There’s a skeleton inside each dinosaur. There are also muscles on top of the skeleton. And these muscles are moving under the skin. You can’t just move the skin. It wouldn’t look natural. I think that you’ve noticed how the muscles move.. Same with fat.. This is also a job.

This is called rigging and it takes so much time.. I told my friends that I created a dinosaur for the Jurassic World. They told me that I didn’t create dinosaurs. They existed before me. My dinosaurs were different, in fact. They had their own temper.

They laughed at me and said that animals didn’t have temper. Animals do have temper. They do. Jurassic World dinosaur was created off of Frankenstein. Initially we thought that it meant that it was built from different species.. We combined a few dinosaurs and Spielberg hated it.

Later he showed me a reference. It was a picture from a comic book by Bernie Wrightson. It was a picture of Frankenstein sitting in a cell scared. A picture drawn by pen and ink. Spielberg told me he wanted the dinosaur to have a similar story.. It would suffer in a cell.. Similar background.

He was also created in a lab. I had to create a character with this kind of background. It was also sitting in a cell with claw marks on the walls.. And the warden would hit it with a taser. When the dinosaur escaped from the cell it was very aggressive.

It had a poor childhood. Traumatized. Yes. There is an artistic element and a technical element to it. You were born and raised in Dushanbe. Your parents worked in a theater. Yes. Your father was a ballet dancer.. And my mother was a lighting designer. How did you become a concept artist?

I wanted to become a coder. I liked computers. I studied coding in Turkey. I didn’t like it. I realized that I would get expelled. I asked myself what else did I like. I was obsessed with airplanes. When I was a kid my dad would buy my magazines about airplanes.

I decided to study aerospace. You were studying in Turkey. I was. You went to a Turkish-Tajikistani school in Turkey.. I went to this school in Tajikistan. I received a scholarship in a Turkish university. I entered one of the best Turkish universities in Ankara. Middle East Technical University. I studied Computer Science.

Did you study in Turkish language? No, we were studying in English. This is a great university. The only time I used my diploma was when I was applying for a British visa. Is it true that Aisultan studied in a similar Turkish-Kazakh school? Yes, it’s the same system.

All these schooled were opened by a Turkish religious movement. Later Turkish government had a lot of problems with this religious movement in 2016. They would build schools after the Soviet Union collapse. They would mostly build schools in former USSR countries. I don’t know if they were right or wrong because of the coup.

There was a civil war in Tajikistan. Public schools were closed. While we had computers in our school. We studied maths, we studied in English.. This was a boarding school. I stayed there for five days a week.

Sometimes I would stay for the whole week. There was a civil war and there was nothing to do outside of school. I was very lucky to go to this school. I got my education from this school. They taught us really well. This schooled helped me moved to Turkey.

I entered Middle East Technical University. You studied computer science and left the course pretty soon. I studied for a year and a half..I realized that my days at the university were numbered. They have a point-based system in Turkey. I was easily accepted by a aerospace university because it was ranked lower.

I thought that we would learn to build airplanes. I liked modeling and I wanted to construct planes. I had to study physics and maths a lot. It’s a miracle that I finished the university. This was real rocket science. We had design-related subjects that I really enjoyed. We would draw two-engine war planes.

I struggled a lot with strength of material and other physics-based subjects. As you’re getting older people have certain expectations from you. You’ve finished a university and they think you know something. I didn’t know anything when I finished the university. This is pretty common. I thought ‘What’s next?’. I didn’t know what to do.

So what did you do? It’s quite funny..When I switched the university I stayed in Turkey for over four years. I was asked to move out from my flat because I wasn’t paying rent. I had no money and no flat. I found a job in a cybercafe.

I just worked at the desk. I played Counter Strike for a month.. I’m still quite a decent CS player. They were paying me some money until I finish my studies. I lived in this cybercafe. Twenty years ago we used to have these thick monitors..

These monitors came in huge boxes. I slept on these boxes. My life was gradually going downhill. I had a diploma, I could speak a few languages.. However, I didn’t know what to do in life. You were in your twenties.. I was 24. I started studying Flash. Everyone was obsessed with Flash animation.

I was working in the cybercafe and I had Internet access all day long. I texted my friend in Istanbul. He was working in a company issuing visas for South Africans. They needed an administrator for their website. I knew a little about html and they hired me.

I realized two things: first of all, I liked this work. And the second, I didn’t have a goal to make some money from it. I would work really hard because I enjoyed this job. This is how I got better. I would create animation and then I started using Photoshop.

And then my Turkish visa expired. I had to come back to Tajikistan. To work for your brother’s agency. Not yet. I was hired by a small company that paid me 200 dollars. I was making websites in this company. What was this company selling? They were providing Internet services.

In 2000s such companies would do anything. Scan documents.. Multi-profile companies.. At some point I got a call from my mate. He said they started a company in Turkey.. I didn’t even ask him where.

He offered me to become the art director. I accepted the offer and asked him to buy me a plane ticket. It turned out that the company was located in an industrial area. Close to Syrian border. The city is called Kahramanmaras. Why was the company located there? Industrial companies would be their customers.

They were producing pans, teapots. All kinds of stuff. They were also producing clothes.. All these companies would buy your services.. They would all need rebranding, business cards, websites.. I never considered myself a graphic designer. My job is different from graphic design. I had to do graphic design, too. I was an illustrator.

I was asked to draw the products..It’s a funny story. Turkish people never say no. If come to a kebab cafe and ask them to cook you liver they would run to another restaurant to buy you liver. They never say no. This approach has its pros and cons.

My boss never said no to his customers. I would tell him that we could not do what he promised to do. This customer was producing frying pans that looked like Tefal. He showed us a German catalogue with amazing images.

These images were shot in a studio with expensive cameras. This was a pre-digital era. He asked us if we could create a similar catalogue. My boss said we would do it. I asked my boss how we would do it. He pet me on the shoulder and said ‘Jama, you can do it’

I’ve heard this so many times. We had a very simple camera. I took pictures of these pans on our kitchen. There were lots of reflections.. Including the bottom of the pan. Including the bottom! I cropped the pan in Photoshop.. I didn’t even have a tablet. I would draw everything manually..

This illustration took me a lot of time but the result was great. The pan looked absolutely perfect. Turkish pans have some flaws, they are inaccurate. I drew everything perfectly. Zero gaps, zero defects. The resolution of the image was huge. Nine or ten thousand pixels. They could print it on A0 size paper.

They loved what I did and I was so mad. I’m an aerospace engineer. I wanted to draw spacecrafts. I had to draw pans. They were so happy that they brought a thick catalogue of their products. They had pans with a mat pattern. They had a glass lid..

They had a mat surface on their pans.. I had to learn how to draw glass. I didn’t know how to draw in 3D. I didn’t know how to render in 3D Max. Nowadays rendering metal is so easy.. I had to do everything manually. I learnt to draw mat surfaces..

The lid wasn’t smooth because it would be to slippery. I learnt to draw all these nuances. There was a guy from Kyrgyzstan. He would tell me ‘Good job. Drawing pans after six years of rocket science’ I was so mad at him. People ask me where I learnt to draw metal surfaces.

I think of these pans that I drew.. If you can draw a metal surface you can do it in 3D. You know what to twitch..You twitch roughness and reflections.. I had to do it all manually. I made my boss buy me a tablet. I didn’t have enough money to buy one.

I was drawing all the time. So it all started from pans? It all started from pans. Are you printing out your characters? At some point my characters become one of two things: These are either created in real life like they did with the dinosaur.. They used its head for the animatronic.

Or they would build a castle that I created on the set. Alternatively they would use my drawings for CG. It is important to print out the character to get to know it better. When you see this dinosaur as a director you have a certain vision of how you would film it.

I have smaller copies of these models while they have huge models on the set. I’m the first Tajikistani who got to visit a Hollywood set. I was walking around these hangars..I saw the set of 007.. It was so interesting..It doesn’t really matter where I’m coming from..

I was so curious. I wanted to visit every set. Admission pass allows you to enter any set. I saw a hundred prisoners on the set..I didn’t know what they were filming there until I watched Paddington. When I came to Aladdin set there was camel poo everywhere. It was stinking.

I came to a pavilion where they were constructing animatronics. I created a concept and they created an impression of it. They used plasticine to build a full-scale impression. The head was this big. I’d seen animatronics before and I thought that these were hard. In fact, they were pretty soft.

There are joints inside that you need access to. They have ‘do not touch’ stickers everywhere. You can break the animatronic with your nails. They’re building animatronics.. They built a full sized t-rex. It was big as a KAMAZ truck. Was it standing? It was lying down in the movie. I was so amazed..

This dinosaur would attack Chris Pratt, the leading actor.. They only built the head of the dinosaur. It was too heavy to run with. They also had a balloon with a picture of a dinosaur head. It looked so silly. A stunt man had a belt with two metal.. Metal sticks.

Two metal sticks of specific height. The acting was so good. I saw that these actors were really special. There are forty people on the set. Lights, cameras, reflecting ball.. Some of them had kids on set.. When the director says ‘action’ they are always ready to go.

They’ve got to act like they are scared when they are clearly not. This looks pretty funny. This guy with a dinosaur head balloon.. He’s trying to carry this balloon around.. Actors turn on their acting mode in a split second.

Actors always have printouts of the characters on set. Chris Pratt has to know who he’s fighting. Your story reminded me of Andrey Doronichev’s story. He reached out to Google and they offered him a job. You got a similar offer from Microsoft.

I was working at my brother’s ad agency. He helped me a lot. I’d like to pay him my respect. He allowed me to have some personal projects. If you met me ten years ago I would be as obsessed with my job as I am now.

I thought that everyone in the world had to be an artist. I’d tell you to start drawing. I wanted other people to be as obsessed as I was. You were preaching. I was full of energy and I couldn’t control it.

I was wrong when I expected everyone to be as passionate as I was. We were drawing a lot. We had our drafts on the walls in our office. We took part in a contest by CG Society. We shot a video even though we didn’t know how to make videos.

We looked at how others did it and tried to do the same. The spacecraft was falling down in our video and I needed to draw two visual effects. The first one was the jet stream during the launch..

We put an aerosol on fire and shot it on camera. Then we sped the video up and changed the color from red to blue. This scene looks fine. It’s not bad. And we were also supposed to draw the crash. We were struggling a lot with this scene.

I set a sock on fire and threw it from a balcony. We overlayed the fire onto the spacecraft. I have a very talented nephew. He was playing in a nu metal band back then.. He was a singer. I asked him to do a voiceover for our video.

His English was quite good. If you know how to sing you’re usually good at languages. I had a friend who lived in the US. I asked him to record the voiceover reference for my nephew. Nowadays this sounds funny..People in the comments thought that this was the future of English language.

They were really positive about his accent. We managed to finish the video. We didn’t have snow.. It was a short video that included some acting.. The contest had a topic called dreamscape. Some contestants shot comedy videos.. We made a video about life after death. Was this a global contest? It was.

We won the best visual effects award. Flying socks and aerosol. Exactly. We were beginners. This is what I do in life. I try and learn new stuff. We uploaded this video in the last moment. And then we won the award..Our leading actor was a local DJ.

There was a scene inside the cockpit where the pilot pulled some levers.. In fact, it was a box with a screwdriver in it. It makes me cringe now. Our effort is what mattered the most. We wanted to make something cool..

I gained a lot of experience from this project. I would get new projects after it. Who were your customers in Tajikistan? It all started on the Internet. We had forums where we shared our works. I think I uploaded my first work somewhere around 2008.

At some point I felt like I didn’t know how to draw. I took a break to learn drawing. I was bad at drawing in different colors. Black and white were fine but other colors were too hard for me. I felt like I wasn’t good enough. I thought about switching back to graphic design.

I was uploading my works on forums. CG Society was the biggest forum. It was as big as YouTube. This forum got closed recently, which is sad. It was a community. Apart from being talented you had to be a part of the community.

How can you break through in a country with no such industry? There is no gaming or film industry in Tajikistan. This is why I took part in such contests. We won the contest in 2010 and in early 2011 I received a letter from Microsoft.

When you’re receiving a letter from Microsoft you think that this is some sort of spam. You said you thought that your subscription expired. Yes. There was an offer in this letter. Nicolas Bouvier is one of the greatest sci-fi artists. He worked for Microsoft.. He saw you on this video contest..

Yes, they said they wanted to invite me to work on some project. This project was Halo 4. This is a video game franchise. They were previously made by Bungie and then Microsoft bought the franchise. They opened a new studio called 343 Industries. Can you imagine what I felt? I could not sleep.

They mentioned that there was a cap for talent visas.. These are limited. They said they would try to do something because they were big. However, they failed to get me a visa. They invited you to come next year.

Preproduction usually takes around six months. It might take three years if you are also working on production and postproduction. These projects don’t last long. The project would be over next year. So you didn’t get to work in Microsoft. Yes. And how did you get to England?

I received another letter in September, six months later. There was a website called DeviantArt..It still exists. I uploaded my works to DeviantArt..This site is similar to Behance.. Everyone shared their works on this website. I received a letter on DeviantArt.. It was a message from a new user who represented Moving Picture Company.

He said that someone recommended my works to them. One great Swedish artist called Andre Wallace. Currently we’re working together on a Star Wars movie. I texted him a couple of times saying I was a fan of his. He was a big inspiration for me. He still is.

He was offered to work on a project. He rejected the offer and he recommended a guy from Tajikistan.. The producer said that they wanted to work with me. My first question is always about the visa. A person from post-Soviet country thinks that he’s never getting a visa.

He got a little confused. He told me not to worry about it. I said I was ready to apply for a visa to work on this two-month long project. They wanted me to come to London for two months. Eventually they wrote a letter of recommendation..

I don’t remember if you remember getting emails from a Nigerian prince.. One of your family members died in Nigeria and you are eligible for inheritance. Send me some money and I’ll help you get your two million.. This letter started with ‘Jama’s global talent..’ They called me one of the most talented artists..

This looked like bullshit.. It looked like the letter from Nigeria. They sent the letter of recommendation to the embassy. Dushanbe is a small town and my brother knew someone who knew the ambassador.. A week later there was no reply.. MPC asked me if there were any news from the embassy.

I was about to go to England. My brother helped me call the embassy and they said they didn’t believe the letter. Can you imagine? They asked me to come over. I got published in a couple of local magazines. Like, Vogue for concept artists..Sounds pretentious.. I got published in a couple of magazines..

English-speaking magazines? Yes. I received my copies. I took these magazines and went to the embassy. They looked at me and approved the visa. They gave me a business trip visa. In 2011 I flew to England. I felt like Borat. Diving into this industry with zero background..

People in industry went to a film school.. I have zero professional education. I was drawing pans.. And I was also making some videos in Tajikistan while other guys were working out doing pull-ups. I was so nervous..I was scared they would realize I wasn’t a real artist. You felt like an impostor. I did.

I sat next to Felix..I asked him where he was coming from. He said he was Spanish and he had lived in New Zealand for ten years. He worked for Lord of the Rings. I was a kid when these movies came out.

I googled Felix Balbas and saw so many movies that he had worked on.. I looked it up on IMDb.. IMDb is a global Kinopoisk. Now I have a page on IMDb, too. Back then it felt surreal.. Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter.. I was so inspired by him..I was working with these people..

I had two rivals, a German and a Japanese guy. Japanese and German are hard workers. I didn’t want to fall behind and worked with them. Our company would pay for the cab when we were staying late. We would stay in the office until 12 pm.

We would also get a free diner. It felt like paradise. I finally met people who were as passionate as me. They were both 3D artists. One of them was a compositing artist.. I enjoyed working with them. At the end of the project they gave us a trip around Themes in a speedy boat.

You should try it but not in winter. You’re sailing from the London Eye to the Queen Mary reservoir. It’s a great experience. We had to draw a huge background for Sky. They had this big panorama and the camera was flying around this panorama.

The boys worked on the foreground and I worked on the background. It was extremely hard but I did it. I didn’t get to see the city. I only saw a local pub and some Thai cafe.. I worked all the time because this was a big opportunity for me.

You said it was hard to receive some honest critique from your colleagues. Definitely. There is a theory called peaches and coconuts.. Hard on the outside and soft on the inside.. Soft on the outside and hard on the inside.. Germans, Eastern Europeans, Austrians, Swiss..These are all coconuts. They look pretty grumpy.

As soon as you get to know them better you can go to a pub with them on the same day. It’s quite the opposite case here. Americans, Australians, English people are soft on the outside.. You can be really honest in a pub.. But at some point they get very private.

At some point they just say ‘see you tomorrow’ and head home. Why is this good at work? If you’re working with coconuts you’ve got to tell them the truth right away. When I went to Poland everyone was pretty straight there. I worked at CD Projekt studio, who made the Witcher..

Art director told the artist that his work sucked. And the artist agreed. What else can you say? If you worked in an English-speaking community the art director would say ‘wow, yeah..’ Looks promising! And then they give you an honest opinion.

They tell you what you need to fix and then they say good job once again. There is no right or wrong way here. People are different. It depends on the people, not their ethnicity or something else.. I’m not judging any of the approaches..

How can understand what they really mean? It’s a whole new language of communication. I’m Tajik, we’re stuck in between. We can adjust to both types of people. I lived in both cultures and I know how it works. I know their skills and their attitude.

Can you help me? Imagine that we’re presenting something in an English-speaking culture. What if the person says ‘It’s promising’? Does it mean that I suck? It doesn’t. You should pay attention to what they say next. What comes next? Promising..What’s next? And then they give you a feedback. A bit too boring?

You can fix lighting..Acting is a little off.. Your episodes are too long, nobody is going to watch them for three hours.. So it means that I actually suck.. Really bad. And then.. And then he’d tell you ‘But it’s promising’ With a little bit of work..

I don’t need to tell you what Russians would say. They’d tell you that you suck straight away. Your interviews are too long! Wow, it would be really hard for me.. Keep in mind that artists are different from everyone else. There is a psychological aspect to it.. Artists are introverts.

Some artists can take any criticism. They are too protective. You’d ask him why did he do that.. And he’d say he liked it that way. It’s hard to explain. Art directors should learn to communicate and to explain that you should paint the grass red because the director wants it.

If you manage to explain this to your artists it works. I didn’t think about being a manager. I am seeking for criticism.. I want to have easy access to criticism. Do you an opinion what works better: peach or coconut approach?

Both of these are good. I don’t care who I work with. I don’t care about their background. I can adjust my approach to their personality. As an art director I care about getting the best result. I want my colleagues to be inspired by our work.

If you’re being too soft with a guy from Kyiv he’d tell you to stop this bullshit and be straight. We had an artist coming from a post-Soviet country who liked telling other artists what to do. English people could not answer back. They wouldn’t understand why he was giving them this feedback.

He was wrong. What was the first Hollywood movie you worked on? MPC has two branches, MPC Advertising and MPC Film. One branch produces advertising and another – film. Exactly. There are two branches. I worked in MPC Advertising, however, we worked in the same hub with MPC Film.

I had access to MPC Film branch. This is how I saw their daily’s report. They were workin on Prometheus. I didn’t see the screenplay but I saw what they were doing.. This spacecraft was initially called Magellan. And they would upload Magellan Shot #31.

This is what I had dreamt of. However, I was working for another branch. I could also see the list of employees. I could see Soviet last names..There was one guy called Andrey. I wrote him a letter saying my name was Jama, I was coming from Tajikistan and I wanted to chat.

Andrey invited me to go for a walk in Soho Square. We took our sandwiches and went for a lunch in the park. He asked me if I came to London from the US. I said I came from Tajikistan. He asked me three times if I got an offer in Tajikistan.

He said this had never happened before. And then I came back home. MPC liked working with me and I worked for them as a freelancer. They’d send me briefs and I’d work from Tajikistan. We had power supply issues. By that time I moved to a better neighborhood that had hot water supply..

However, there was a lot of power supply issues. In Tajikistan we are getting energy from hydroelectric power plants. In winter water level falls because the glaciers are not melting. And they are shutting down power supply. You’re working on a project and then your power supply turns off.

Your files are saved but you get a letter from MPC asking you to send your current status. And I tell them there is a power cut in my home. Naive English people tell me to work from some other location.. And I tell them that there is a power cut in the whole area.

I’ve never experienced any power cuts here in England. I’ve only faced one-second power cut. This issue is still present in Tajikistan. I don’t know if it’s getting better or not.. This was fucked up. I worked from Tajikistan for some time until they sent me a contract.

They gave me a visa and invited me and my family to move to London. I worked for MPC Advertising for one more year. I worked in art department where I only did art. I can do 3D or some animation.. But I mostly worked on visual art. We worked together with MPC Film.

A couple of times I was invited to work on their projects. My first movie was Percy Jackson..I don’t remember which one.. And also X-Men. I got to work on a movie when I was sitting in front of the director.. The lights turned off and he told us about the movie..

This was a video chat. It was. We were creating sentinels, these huge robots.. This was my first Hollywood project, it took place in 2012. I used to make these Michael Bay movies jokes.. He’s got this epic music and so on.. I’ve changed my opinion about his movies when I worked in ILM.

I didn’t have to go to a museum to do my research.. I liked watching their daily reports. I could see what they were working on. Would they post these reports every day? They would. Every artist would post what they did. They would post their work in progress.

Modellers would post a couple of cubes which would later turn into something else.. Most of these shots have a blue screen in the background. They would draw the background for the movies. It’s very interesting. When I saw Michael Bay’s live action I promised not to be ignorant about his movies.

What exactly did you see there? This was his fifth Transformers movie. They were shooting from a helicopter. They were shooting a chase scene. There were two Hammers, I guess.. One of the transformers would appear from the underground and these jeeps would come flying around. I’d think that this was all done in CGI.

However, this was all filmed on set. Everything but the dinosaur.. But the transformer. Yes. Cars were flying, there were sparks everywhere.. Michael Bay is a master of action scenes. I have a silly question..Are they still using helicopters and not drones to film? Oh, they were filming a helicopter.

I don’t remember how they were filming.. They were also filming a helicopter. This was so cool. This is his signature move. There are hardly any sparks when there is an explosion. I know what an explosion looks like. Michael Bay likes having a lot of sparks in his explosions.

Does this mean that the explosion is real? This is how he sees these explosions.. He’s putting more effort. He’s making these explosions more expressive. How often do you talk to Hollywood directors when you’re working on movies? It depends on the project. I’m mostly working with the production designer.

This person is responsible for designing the whole movie. The production designer is hiring a team for their needs. As far as I know, you’re signing a lot of NDA.. Can you name any big names that you’ve worked with? Can you tell me anything about Guy Ritchie? I’m really curious.

Guy Ritchie is a tough guy. He likes martial arts and there is a rumor that he broke somebody’s hand.. This happened accidentally. He’s quite tough. He doesn’t like sketches. He doesn’t get them. If you draw him and old-school sketch he would freak out. He would get mad. In front of you?

This is why Aladdin looked realistic. I couldn’t just draw a blue Will Smith. I first met a celebrity in a MPC restroom. I opened the door and saw Danny Boyle. The man who directed Trainspotting. As well as Slumdog Millionaire and Sunshine. He said sorry and moved. I could not believe my eyes.

I met Ridley Scott when they were working on Prometheus. I really wanted them to sign something for me or to take a picture.. You can’t do it at work. When I saw Will Smith my jaw dropped but I had to stand straight. I worked a lot with Adam Stockhausen, Steven Spielberg’s production designer.

He got the Academy Award for The Grand Budapest Hotel. As a production designer? Yes. This movie is all about the visuals.. Well deserved. He’s working on most of Spielberg’s movies. He is such a humble person. Such a pro.. Of course, we didn’t go to eat kebab together..

But he was really humble and down-to-earth. I’ve only seen Steven Spielberg on a video chat. We were having a feedback call..He was in Italy on some.. On a beach? No, on this boat.. On a yacht? Yes, on a yacht.. Jurassic World is produced by Spielberg’s studio. Spielberg must approve all the dinosaurs.

I have pictures of my dinosaurs approved by Spielberg. He would leave a stamp ‘Approved’ One day he even sent us a letter saying ‘Looking awesome, approved’ Your dad is showing this letter to everyone in Dushanbe, even to electricians.. He’s bragging all the time. He’s old and it’s hard to explain..

How old is he? He’s 84. The last time I saw him we released Ahsoka.. I showed him what I did for this movie. He told me that he saw a poster on a bus. He wasn’t impressed when I showed him the pictures. When he saw double-deck buses with Ahsoka ads he was impressed.

You lived in Tajikistan during the civil war. I did. What was it like? It was fucked up. Let’s explain what happened there. The war happened in early 1990s. Yes. One side was supporting the government and the other was protesting. It was complicated. We didn’t have YouTube back then..

I didn’t know what was going on back then. We know how this war ended. I might be wrong..This wasn’t the best period of my life.. After the Soviet Union collapsed we were located close to Afghanistan. There was no Taliban yet. There was a Wahhabis movement. They wanted to invade Tajikistan.

They invaded a couple of cities.. It all started with protests. I was eleven years old and I was scared. There were huge crowds in the streets..I liked taking pictures.. I had pieces of glass that I put on photo paper.. Someone looked into my bag and asked why I needed the glass for.

I was so scared..I was a young guy. They let me go. Someone was firing shots in the streets. They were building.. Barricades.. Yes, barricades. My dad help to defend the city. At the checkpoints? Yes, at the checkpoints. My brother was a fencer. We were also fans of kung fu.

So my brother made a Samurai sword out of his rapier. We gave this sword to our dad during the war. I have no idea how we would use this sword.. Against a gun.. We lived in this war and it affected our mental state. Were there any fights in Dushanbe?

There were. We found a corpse in a trash bin.. It was really scary. We saw two jet pilots flying above us. We heard this roar and got really scared. I can’t imagine what people in Ukraine are feeling today. This is horrible. There is nothing good about it.

Russia supported one of the sides of the conflict and the war eventually ended. There were no more fights in Dushanbe but there were still some fights until 1997. I went to Turkish school from 1993 to 1997. It was pretty bad. We had no food.

Our family was struggling. Nobody cared about theaters during the civil war. My mom would grate me some carrot and add some sugar. I liked this dish a lot. I would also add apples.. Everyone loved it. We didn’t have money to buy apples..

She would bring it to my school. She would cry every time she would tell me this story. Later? Yes. I forgot about it.. This was important for her. Parents can’t do anything about it. My mom knew that I went to a good school and she still struggled.

This school reminded me of a prison. We had local rules. I had to share my food with everyone. We didn’t have heating at home. We had power cuts and we had no heating at all. We had really cold winters. In continental climate we had hot summer and cold winter.

My mom said that my hands had frostbites all over them. I had a lot of cracks on my skin. I lacked vitamins..We didn’t have towels when I was washing my hands.. I had cracks all over my hands.

My mom said that I could not eat alone and I had to share my food with my mates. They swallowed it like piranhas. They took all of my bread. However, we all felt like brothers. We were sleeping in double-deck beds and I always had a mate..

I would sleep on the top deck because I liked jumping up my bed. I felt down so many times.. We had computers, we were learning languages, English, Turkish.. We were all brothers. I like Aisultan because he went to a similar school. He’s one of us.

There was no power supply or heating but the computers were working? There were issues with power supply. You don’t have such issues if you’re rich. We always had power supply at schools. They would let us go home if there were power cuts. We could not use the bathroom during the power cuts.

We would wake up at five in the morning. The first class started at six. This was Turkish system. We would be doing our homework at six. This was called etudes. We would have the first class from six to seven.. Then we would have breakfast and have the next class at eight o’clock.

We would have eight classes a day and then we would do our homework for three hours. We would study all the time. Can you imagine waking up at five in the morning during winters? One day somebody just turned the power switch off and we all overslept.

We pretended that it was a power cut. We liked having fun. And somehow we managed to succeed in life. They send me a brief ‘a planet covered with sand’ In Star Wars 80% of the world looks real and 20% is imaginary.

This is why the Star Wars are so relevant. The empire is similar to Nazis Germany. They have a similar uniform.. Rebels are protesters. Star Wars are quite realistic and that is why so many people like this franchise. You drew this on Photoshop. I did. This is VR plus 3D plus Photoshop.

How does it look like in the movie? This is how it looks like. They added some room here.. If you look at it closely.. Your building looked more modern and they made it a little ruined. It looks older in the movie. They also added some corral.

My goal is to inspire other people. This is what impressionism is about. Every artist is adding something at his stage of production. This is great. It all starts with a simple concept. I like drawing black and white sketches that might take a couple of hours..

I had to draw an image of them driving through dunes. The director liked the sketch and asked me to crop it a little bit. I made this picture and realized that it reminded me of Tajikistan. I used the same 80/20 formula. I used real mountains and drew them in a surreal shape.

You didn’t create these animals, did you? These animals were already created. So you already knew how these animals would look like. I did. This is what it looked like in the movie. It’s quite similar. Wow. It’s fun. The director asked you to crop the image.. So you kind of played director’s role, too.

Yes. You drew this frame and the director used it in the movie. This is a collaborative work. We are working together as a team. They are introducing ideas that I’m drawing and sending back to them. Team work as it is. I never say that I did everything here.

This would be too cocky. I drew this picture alone. I still remember drawing this lenswear.. I drew it manually and got paid for it. You said that people who lived in the Soviet Union were good at drawing post-apocalyptic landscape. It’s true. We grew up in such landscape.

When we were kids we were throwing bricks at each other. This was how we played. English people can’t understand it. There was a ditch in our area and we were throwing bricks at each other. I have a scar on my forehead. What was the goal of the game?

You had to hit someone with a brick. Not dodge? It made no sense. Some guy threw a stone at me.. I thought that this was a sponge. I wanted to kick it with my head and it turned out to be a brick.

We lived in this landscape. A lot of mud in the streets.. I don’t like when people are praising the Soviet Union. I’m happy with the childhood that I had.. However, there is nothing to praise about it. Guys from Ukraine and Russia all know how to draw a dirty entrance.

We all know what it looks like. This huge piece of plaster falling in front of you.. I’m using this experience in my work. If they ask me to draw 1930s New York I don’t know what it looked like. I’ve only seen it in some movies.

Every artist has got to have a visual library. This is why I like traveling. I respect our traditions..I respect our past.. However, there is a lot of stuff that we can learn from each other. Instead of saying that we had the best food and the best language..

I really like Tajik food. Every time I come to Moscow I visit a Tajik restaurant. I won’t say that it is the best food in the world. It makes no sense. There’s so much delicious food out there. You’re getting so much experience from traveling and meeting new people.

I am usually not familiar with the screenplay. They would only send us some scenes.. It’s pretty annoying. They sent me the screenplay when I was working on Ready Player One. They sent me a book that had my name written on every page. If it leaks everyone would find out who leaked it.

I can easily be distracted. I was so nervous about this copy.. You were scared of leaving it somewhere.. What if I just accidentally leave it somewhere? This would be the last day of your career. Did you burn the screenplay after you finished working? I just gave it back to them.

They gave it to me to introduce me to the movie. I didn’t have the screenplay of Mandalorian. People asked me about this show a lot but I didn’t know the plot. They told us that there would a small Yoda. They didn’t tell us how old it would be.

And you thought it would be around five or six years old. Five or six, you guessed it. I created this series of sketches. It was reaching for this gun.. This picture on the right is called ‘Baby Yoda finding out about English taxes’ And here it is sleeping on Mandalorian’s chest.

They didn’t pick my sketch. They picked a better one. They picked Christian Alzmann’s Baby Yoda. He created an amazing Baby Yoda. It was a real baby. It couldn’t talk yet. It was a great idea. It doesn’t mean that I didn’t contribute anything.

There is no character design on this picture. So I created this perspective to introduce the character.. I showed his flying egg from the inside. When I was hired by ILM they asked me if I was a Star Wars fan.

I watched Star Wars in Oktyabr movie theater in Dushanbe sitting on my friends shoulders. We had no money to buy tickets so we would lift each other to watch the movie for five minutes. You were watching the movie from outside the theater? We had no money to buy the tickets.

How could you see the screen? It was an open-air movie theater. So you are a fan. I told them I wasn’t a Star Wars fan. There was a civil war in our country. There was no time for me to be a Star Wars fan.

I liked this franchise but I wasn’t a big fan. When I started working on this project I had to do my research. I wanted to create something convincing. You had to be in the context. This rule always works. Some people say that I can’t create anything new for this universe.

This is wrong because this universe is expanding. Mandalorian planet had never been shown before. I told them to hire me because I wasn’t a fan! I told them I would bring something new to the project. They hired me and then we worked on Star Wars movies.

When was the first time you visited Russia? My mom is Russian. She’s Siberian. We would come to see our family in Siberia. We even lived in Siberia for some time.. Is your mom Tatar? Her mom was Tatar and her dad was Russian. We would often go to Raduga (Rainbow) village.

What region was that? Novosibirsk region. Have you ever faced any xenophobia? This is a sensitive topic. There is a myth that there was no xenophobia in the Soviet Union. I absolutely disagree with this myth. Where did this xenophobia come from in 1991? It was always there. The Soviet Government tried to fight it.

People in Russia didn’t like other ethnicities. I was a kid and I didn’t face any xenophobia in Siberia. I knew that my skin color was different. I’m much darker than my brother. I always get tan under the sun. I would go to Russia with my brother’s agency. We decided to enter..

To enter the market. Yes. We already worked in Russia, we worked with Beeline.. We would go to Russia to gain some experience. There were workshops that we would visit. You were around 25-27 years old. I was 27-28. We participated in two BDU workshops.

To find out what xenophobia is about you should fly from Dushanbe to Moscow. Your plane would be mostly filled by workers who can’t speak Russian. There’s nothing wrong with not speaking Russian. You’ve got to see how these people are treated in Russia. Any customs officers can be rude..

But you’ll never experience anything similar to this. Customs officers are looking down on Tajiks? These people have power over you. They can refuse to let you into the country. This is a demo-version of authoritarian state. There is a flight that arrives in Moscow at the same time as another flight from Uzbekistan.

This is so fucked up. I was flying from Dushanbe to London through Moscow. Our plane lands in Moscow..Some passengers don’t speak Russian. Do you remember Balu throwing red and black dogs to the sides in Mowgli? This Russian guy was standing there..I’m an artist, I tend to exaggerate.

There were signs saying ‘transit flights’ and ‘luggage claim’ I started turning to transit flights because I was flying to London. He checked my documents because people would be confused by these signs. I walked up to him and he said stop.

He looked at my ticket and said ‘Wow, London. What are you doing in London?’ I told him I worked there. He said respect and let me go. I felt sorry for my compatriots. They don’t deserve to be treated this way. Sometimes they don’t know what to do..

I feel like nobody is trying to solve this problem in post-Soviet countries. We are just fighting the symptoms. Tajik people don’t know where to go in the airport. Shall we make some guy yell at them? Can you change your signs? Can you add Tajik language?

We need to be working on the roots of this problem. This is my opinion. What is going on here, Jama? You saw my digital working station with my computer. And this is my non-digital working station. I have some plane models here..They are unfinished.

I’m sitting here with no computer and it helps me relax. Sometimes it’s much faster to do something with your hands than to do it on the computer. Faster than drawing? Yes. I’m creating 3D models here. You start with fittings. Imagine that we’re making a Star Wars robot.

These would be his legs. And the head would be on top of it. Holding it in your hands helps you understand the proportions better. I made this model recently. Its head fell off. There was a head here.. This man was fighting someone. This is great but there are some issues with this model.

It is not digital. If you balance if right it would stand straight. Here it is. Do you see it? You can feel the weight of the character. You won’t feel it on your computer. Okay.. Your character never falls down when you’re drawing. There is no gravity.

I like it. If you want to change its skin or add some tattoos.. You can scan this model. I’m using this approach in VR. I’m doing the same stuff without getting my hands dirty. There are more possibilities to adjust the model in VR.

I put his head back on. It looks too small, I agree. I need to spend some time to make a new head. VR allows me to make it bigger in a second. What are we doing now? We created a basic model made of plasticine.

However, I can’t transfer this model to my computer quickly. I can’t add details or change the proportions. I can’t make its head bigger quickly. I can do it all on my computer. When I’m working with my mouse I’m not working in 3D. When I’m using VR I can do it all in 3D.

You can look at your model from different angles. Yes. This is an illustration that I did. I started from making a plasticine model. I changed his head a little bit. I also created this sculpture on VR. Apart from wearing this bucket on my head it feels like a real world model.

There is a platform and the character. I can now move it. It can hang in any position which would be much harder with plasticine. There are much more features with VR. I can sculpt on my computer but I prefer using VR because it’s more gestural and dynamic.

I can rotate the model and do whatever I want. I drew a chain here and I can make it flying. This is a big choice of tools. Any method can be good for you. Some artists only do sculpting, like Simon Lee. Some artists only do drawing.

I like all methods. We were also talking about several screens. I can place my references here around me. I have unlimited space here. I can hang one sculpture here and another there. The only problem is wearing this heavy thing on my head. Is it too heavy?

It is too heavy. You can’t wear it for eight hours straight. I am promoting this technology and I think that it will be used by all artists once it gets better. Apple is doing something incredible now.. What are they doing? They’re making a new headset. You won’t need these controllers to use it.

You will only need your fingers to control it. When I started doing my VR experiments I was making YouTube videos about them. Most of my friends are concept artists and one of them told me that they showed my videos to Jim. By Jim he meant James Cameron. They showed him my videos..

Showed Jim.. They were working on Avatar and Cameron bought VR headsets to all of his artists. I didn’t know what they were working on. When I watched the movie I understood why they did it. They had a lot of handmade villages in Avatar. They had wicker houses.

You can tie a knot on your computer so easily. You can do it on VR. Imagine that this is a chain that is attached to this guy. You can’t do it as quickly on your computer. I realized why they all used VR for this movie. How do you save this project?

How do you transfer this knot to your computer? Well.. This is sketchy. You can add color.. And now you can make a real chain out of it. It would take some time. Wow.. I’m doing this in 3D. I’m drawing this chain now. Let’s come back to the initial sketch.

Now I can put it on another layer. This is called preliminary drawing. Preliminary. I can make this layer more transparent and fix it. Now I create a new layer and choose black color. I can start drawing the chain. It’s enough for me to draw only one..what is it called? One link.

Now I can copy and paste this link. This is a 3D brush. You can rotate it how you want. I can draw this little.. Little bush? And now I can group this little bush and multiply it. This is fun! Kids like it. Do you know who suffers the most? Pro artists.

This is a new tool for them. Artists are very conservative. I’m Tajik and I don’t care. Kids are great at VR. They are not used to other methods. Kids have natural talent at VR. They are good at it. We were looking at this model with no lighting.

I added some lighting and it looks better now. You can finish your work here on your computer. great! Then you create a zombie. I love it. Are you religious? I’m spiritual. Do you remember when I told you about Turkish religious movement? I do. They were preaching their religion and I followed their religion.

Are they Shiites or Sunnis? They are Sunnis. Every religious branch consider themselves right. I didn’t see anything bad in their views. I was surprised when they started a coup in Turkey. They gave us education. They taught us skills.

We were assholes when we entered this school. I’m not saying that I’m not an asshole today. We would do absolutely dumb stuff. And then all of us became really good people. They are fighting for good. I didn’t see anything bad in this religious movement.

I’ve lost my passion in religion. I’ve seen that religion can be used to manipulate people. You can justify some bad stuff by religion. Did you see any examples of it? I’ve seen many examples. Religion and it’s attitude towards homosexuals.. It’s a sensitive topic for me. I was conservative when I came here.

I’m ashamed by it now but back then I was making jokes about tolerance. Were you a homophobe when you moved to London? I grew up in a patriarchy. My dad would tell me that I was special and women had to chase me. When I got older I realized that it was all crazy.

Muslim religions are very strict. My friends would no longer invite me to have diner with them. I like them a lot and they are still religious. Every time someone mentions transgender people or homosexual people they go crazy. They want to gather all these people and do something to them..

I’d rather live among trans people and homosexuals than listen to this nonsense. Did you say this in Dushanbe? I did. You are pretty brave. After the Soviet Union collapse there was a lot of patriarchy and antisemitism. We grew up with it and never even noticed. It was in the air.

I never judge people. I might disagree with them.. It’s hard to escape from this bubble that you grew up in. It was hard for me to escape it even though I’m an artist. I can’t become tolerant in one day in Tajikistan. It comes with experience.

If you live here and meet different people you realize that it is not about having sex. Some people think that pride is all about sex. It’s about love. My favorite episode of The Last of Us show is the third one. This gay couple.. A homosexual couple. I like it! It’s all about love.

Homophobes have never met a trans person in their lives. They saw it on TV or heard it from someone.. You know how propaganda works in Russia. This topic is being used to distract people. This topic has always been controversial in Russia. My dad came to London and he didn’t face any problems here.

He was grumpy at first and I told them that trans people would not touch him. We never faced any of them. We saw one old man wearing a skirt and blue hair.. My dad asked me what the hell was that. I told him I didn’t know him. It’s a neighbor. A neighbor, right.

This makes no sense. We’ve got to move on. We’re about to face serious problems. Climate change. AI. People are still arguing over sexuality. This is bullshit. You can’t draw people if you’re Muslim.. You can’t. This is why they are drawing patterns in mosques. You might have seen it in Istanbul.

They are not drawing humans. This is why they don’t have icons in Islam. Unlike Orthodox or Catholic Christianity. Isn’t this a problem for you? What am I drawing? I was drawing a green man with huge ears.. Is it a human or an alien? This is why I distanced myself from religion.

There is no consensus on what is allowed. These rules are too general. You can always interpret these rules in your favor. Can they explain why drawing Baby Yoda was a sin? It makes no sense. They would say that I was acting like God. I didn’t create anything real. I just used my imagination.

Same as stand up comedians make jokes about real life situations. What if I’m a cartoonist? I like drawing funny versions of Dud or Boris Johnson. Would I really burn in hell because of it? This is bullshit. I disagree with it. In 2019 you said you were apolitical. I did.

You were never interested in politics. On March 3, 2022, a week after the war in Ukraine started you wrote: I’ve been trying hard to explain my position in two words. Putin is a redneck, just like Lukashenko. I hope that all dictators disappear.

Russian soldiers are now not only destroying Ukrainian cities but also the future of millions of Russians, Ukrainians, and Belorussians. I stand against this war. Did you stop being apolitical when the war began? I didn’t. The events in Belarus made me interested in politics. This triggered me. I used to be apolitical.

For many years I was told not to vote. It all started in the Soviet Union when I was a kid. I was told not to get involved. I was also told to stay out of politics because I was an artist. I’m an artist but I’m also a civilian. I have an opinion.

People are made apolitical to get rid of their opinion. If you are stating your opinion they say that you are getting involved in politics. While my mom was alive I was flying to Dushanbe every year. I would fly there twice a year. My parents were sitting at home watching TV.

Sometimes they were watching some shows about England. They said that English people were so hungry that they started eating squirrels. Were they watching Russian channels? They were. My mom was Russian. My dad watches these shows, too. Many people in post-Soviet countries are watching Russian news channels. They have no choice.

When I watched these shows they made me laugh. I didn’t want to even argue with them. It made no sense. Who really thinks that people in England are eating squirrels? They are very good at propaganda. They’re picking some event and distorting it.. It’s scary. They’re pretending to be democratic.

They want to look democratic. I found out that some English restaurant was serving squirrels. It was some sort of delicacy. They used this headline.. It is similar to the game of thimbles. Their goal is to fool you. They don’t want you to win. You get confused and you can’t find the ball.

An elderly person can’t find the truth in the news. I’m not a politician. I want to draw but I got so mad.. It’s happening in front of me. My parents are getting dumb because of it. My father has read so many books. My mom was a rally nice person.

However, she believed that there were Nazis in Ukraine. I went to Kyiv and Kharkiv so many times.. Same with homosexuals. You’ve got to meet homosexuals to understand that there is nothing wrong with them. People in Ukraine are not Nazis. This is bullshit. Russia is not my country and Putin is not my president.

I’ve been to Belarus a few times. Two or three times. I was invited there by Wargaming. I like Belarusian people so much. There is no competition here.. I like Kazakhs, too. People in Belarus are very kind. They are very talented. Wargaming is a great business.

In 2013 they told me that Lukashenko wasn’t so good. In 2019 and 2020 I realized that everyone was sick of him. They were all sick of him. We all know what happened in 2020. He lost the elections and didn’t leave. He refused to leave.

He attacked the protesters and could no longer stay out of politics. I had a lot of friends in Belarus. I kind of knew what was going on. You had a lot of guests who are much better at politics than me. I’m good at drawing shadow in 3D.

I can’t prove you why dictators are wrong. I can tell you one thing. I never liked people who were leading us to slough. Leading us to the past. Telling us some this bullshit that the Soviet Union was good. They’re telling us that we should try again.

They are taking our future away from us. I’m almost 44..I’m sorry for all the young guys. These guys are suffering from the collateral damage. It all affects them and their future. Two years ago I wrote that the dictators were taking our future away from us. People had to leave their country.

They didn’t want to leave. They liked living in Russia. Others liked living in Belarus. Why did they have to leave? It makes me mad. I don’t like bringing back the past. It’s pretty common in post-Soviet countries. We can learn so much from each other. I refuse to understand this.

I know why they are doing it. These dictators don’t want to leave. It’s the same in Tajikistan. It is. Do you want them to put me in prison? If you’re still visiting Tajikistan I wouldn’t like to frame you.. I am still visiting Tajikistan.

They would likely call me to ask me what I meant. In Belarus they say ‘You didn’t say it but you thought about it.’ I’m rooting for the future. Knowledge is future. We’ve got to invest in knowledge. Russia has great IT specialists. We have talented people in Tajikistan, too.

Give us a chance. Give us a chance to invest in our country. Let us build new schools. There is a problem. When you get educated, you start asking questions. You’re having too many questions. The president of Tajikistan hasn’t changed in thirty years. I haven’t said that. I said that. Okay.

Let’s talk about money. I’ve read an article about you on Forbes Russia. They claimed that your online school brings you half of your income.. How true is that? It depends. Sometimes I have only one course, and sometimes I do two or three courses. Forbes is making their own assumptions about my income.

I know that well. They let my friend from Kyrgyzstan down. He’s trying to know if this was true or not. He texted me on Facebook..And last year he asked me in person. He said he could not sleep at night..

Forbes claimed that a concept artist of your level would make 400 thousand dollars a year. It’s true. Easily. Easily? Is this close to the real numbers? It is. Can you make the same amount from online school? Yes, online school and side projects can generate a similar amount.

Making 800 thousand dollars that Forbes claimed was possible. It is possible. Now I have other sources of income. NFT.. Artists can now sell their works as NFT. This is a job. People think that drawing is easy. They think that I’m getting paid too much.

I know a lot. I know how to work with composition, lighting.. I’m good at design and history. I know how to make something that would meet the needs of the director. When I’m explaining this to people they start to understand.

You would ask me why I don’t do NFT. I don’t have time for it. It takes a lot of time. People think that you draw something and then you sell it. You need to promote your art. Mike Beeple is a friend of mine.. He’s buying our assets to use them in his collections.

Our assets are much cheaper than his works. This is the guy who’s making the most money on NFT market. It’s Beeple. I’ve known him before he became an NFT celebrity. It takes a lot of effort. Posting a picture every day. Drawing something every day!

I don’t have time for it and I don’t have enough energy for it. Sometimes I’m so exhausted and he’s drawing every day. Every dollar is followed by hard work. Have you ever made a million dollars in a year? I probably have. AI. You said that this one of the problems of humanity.

You mentioned it along with climate change.. Do you think that AI is a problem? It is a huge problem. If we simplify it..Think of a horse industry.. In early 20 century horse industry was huge. There were carriages..There were horse keepers.

In London they have these mews buildings with high ceilings. These used to be stables. Now these are super expensive houses. There was an industry..They would produce horse feed, heal them.. A multi-million market. And then this industry disappeared when the cars were invented. This was a technological leap.

People could now travel faster. They no longer needed horses. I have just realized that artists are similar to horses.. AI is going to replace so many jobs. It’s a technological leap. To draw a bunch of grass you had to know how grass looked. It’s not so easy to draw grass. Grass is half-transparent.

Light comes through the glass like it does with the soft box. Now you can just ask AI to draw grass for you. Are you using AI? I am. I can’t stop the progress. AI is already here. I don’t like the way they trained their models.

I know how to use AI. AI developers uploaded a billion images to train AI. They didn’t ask anyone’s permission to do it. They trained their models that they are selling now. They used my works and many other works to train AI. Imagine using all the music from Spotify and not paying any royalties.

This is unfair. There are suing each other already. Currently it’s a black box and it’s hard to regulate. Are they suing? Because of royalties? Concept artists started a campaign on gofundme and filed a case in US Senate to protect our copyrights. This is a class action. We have united to protect our rights.

If you can’t speak out you lose all of your rights. We have some tools to influence this situation. What are you trying to achieve? They are suing Stable Diffusion to protect artists’ copyright. They have already uploaded your images to their database.

Do you want them to delete them? Or do you want to get your royalties? I think that we should get royalties. They can’t untrain their models. You can’t put the toothpaste back.. You can put ground meat back into the grinder. There was a writer’s strike in Hollywood. They also required to regulate AI.

They succeeded. They also suffered from AI. You can ask ChatGPT to write a screenplay. I can’t stop the progress. I’m bad at law. Our lawyers are working at this class action. I hope that they succeed. There are positive sides of AI, too.

Some aspects of my work take too much time. I have to do these manually. This would substitute so many jobs.. Some artists are doing a lot of work drawing background. You can now draw a background in AI. In five years I might think that I was wrong.

My impression is that AI is great at imitating. AI can make Dud look Tajik. They have both of these features in their dataset. AI is great at imitating. However, AI cannot produce anything new. You can add something new to their database.. It’s similar to egg and chicken problem.

I think that we’re going to limit AI in using our new images. They’ll buy a license. They’ll buy a license to use our new images. There is also a 3D scanner in this room. You’re scanning your characters with this scanner. I am. You’re doing it to create a 3D character. Yes.

Can we scan me? Sure. I have a turntable here. I’m not only scanning my characters..I might need a character wearing muddy boots.. I can model these boots but it would take a lot of time. I can buy these boots, go for a walk in a park.. Get them dirty.

I’ll make them muddy and then scan them. They would look very natural. I don’t have to draw something from scratch. My goal is to make the final product. My final product is the character. It doesn’t matter what tools you use to create it.

It’s pretty simple. You should stand on this turntable. I have a remote controller. I have to ask you if you have.. Is this a steamer? This is an iron. Do you have any special reaction to flashing images? I don’t. I can close my eyes.

It’s important. I don’t want you to have an epilepsy attack. Let’s press the button. This is a preview. You are turning into 3D. Now you are rotating. You are being scanned. I need to see what is happening. I like spinning. I’m not doing anything. Let’s see what we got here.

It joined all the missing pieces.. There’s a lot of floating stuff. It is going to get rid of those. It might take some time. It is now converting the point cloud to real geometry. We can then export it and adjust lighting.

How much time would it take you to create a character from this model? You can do it later. We can turn you into an alien. I really like this tiny Babu Frik from the Star Wars. We can do anything. It’s going to take some time.

It’s not about the tools. I need to know you better. I need to know your reactions. I need to draw some sketches. I’ve noticed some of your features already. Your teeth, for example. Don’t get offended. I’m fine. I’m looking at you as an artist.

When people ask me how I created such monsters I tell them that I had this neighbor in Tajikistan.. Here you are. Jama decided to turn Dud into an elf. He sent us the result: And the final question: what is power? Respect is power.

If you respect other people you would communicate to them differently. Nobody would try to cut the line..Nobody would try to promote themselves illegally. Why was I so lucky to have such a job? I’ve never had to offend anyone to move up the hierarchy.

I have always treated people with respect. I think that respecting people is power. Can we respect everyone? Well, respecting others make us a better person. Are there any people who don’t deserve our respect? It depends on what they do. It’s hard for me to put it together.. Can we disrespect cannibals?

We can definitely disrespect them. I’m not talking about them now. I thought that we were talking about making the world a better place. There are cannibals out there. This is scary. When they get to power they never want to leave. They are exploiting us. This is not good.

I don’t want to be judged by God or Constitution.. I want to respect other people’s rights. My attitude towards trans people has changed since I moved to London. I’ve never cut the line in my life. I can’t stand it. People in post-Soviet countries always cut the line.

You’re standing in a line and someone just stand in front of you. All my arguments start with someone cutting the line. Same at work. As an artist I never had to cut the line. People ask me why I left Tajikistan. First of all, there is no industry in Tajikistan..

And second, I was scared of having to grovel at someone. I can’t do that.