Where is Strangeloop Studios based? Are you all localized there?

Ian: At first we had an office in Culver City for a while. Since the pandemic, we've become fully remote. The core team is primarily based in Los Angeles, California and a couple of people are out in New York. We've also got collaborators that we work with on projects that are based all over the world, so we're spread across the states and then there’s a wider team that exists globally.

How many people make up Strangeloop Studios?

The core team is around a dozen people. As we move from different projects it's always an evolving group of artists depending on the project that we bring in from one to the next. That's how we like it. A lot of the different projects call for different configurations of creatives. There’s a certain core group of people that tend to be involved in almost everything we work in.

How did it start out? Was it you and Dave Wexler at the beginning?

Ian: It was. Dave had the Strangeloop moniker initially. Before we started working together, he was working on music and visuals in LA, and one of his first collaborators was Flying Lotus. They went to film school together before Flylo was even working on music. Dave was working on music stuff, but also working on visual stuff so when Flying Lotus moved into that realm, Dave was kind of right there for that, and they started collaborating very early.

Dave also put out music on Flying Lotus's label and was working on Flying Lotus's visual show, which became our first flagship show as a studio. It was called ‘Layer Three’. It had two layers of projection, one in front of Flylo and one behind, and it was a cool visual canvas for VJs and visual artists to show off. That show was in progress when Dave and I met.

He and I met while working on music stuff. At that time, around 2010 and 2012 in LA there this fusion of jazz and electronic music, and hip-hop was happening and he was starting to do visuals. I was an LA Jazz kid and we knew some of the same people in the scene.

He'd also just started doing visuals for Skrillex at that point in 2012, and he came back from one tour and told me that he had gotten me a VJ gig working with these guys Zed’s Dead that he'd met on tour with Skrillex, who are a Canadian electronic music duo. I remember looking at him and saying, “But I don't know how to do visuals.” and he simply said, “That's not the important part. You'll be fine.”

He taught me how to use Resolume, he gave me content, and I went out with the group and that was that. When I came back we had the first conversations and had a little bit of thesis around finding people who loved music or had worked in music to be VJs and kind of teaching them the visual side and equipping them with content. At that time it seemed like there was an increased demand for VJs and visual content in the music space, so that's kind of where Strangeloop Studios started.

From there, within the next year in 2013, I started working with Flying Lotus, and then got on the Kendrick Lamar tour. That was when it started feeling like more of a studio and more of a business than just the two of us working on visuals.

Thats really great that you and Dave were able to connect through the SoCal music scene. The trinity of jazz, electronic, and hip hop at that time sounds like a really special time.

Can you tell me about some of the ideals or values behind Strangeloop Studios?

Ian: Early on, I think our initial approach was really finding people who had an interest in supporting other musicians on the road. A lot of the intent was trying to pair our creatives with other creatives, and finding like-minded artists across the audiovisual continuum.

One of the ways that happened very organically was by having authentic creative expression. In some of our early shows, like with the Flying Lotus show, it felt like if a musician or their team and artists and management saw that show and were like, “I want the people who design that show to work on my stuff” there was already some aesthetic alignment kind of right from the very beginning. By putting really authentic art out there, stuff that’s really close to our hearts, it attracted the kinds of collaborators and people who would hire us that would want us to do what we're good at anyway.

I think a lot of our values were present from the jump, and Dave and I had a bit of a dynamic too which helped us. I tend to like a much wider breadth of music, almost to my detriment, where there's a lot of really corny music that I like that Dave and I don't always agree on. But what that did was allow us to expand the breadth of projects that we worked on. This allowed us to build out the studio more, and still maintain from a values perspective the intention of really trying to only deliver art that we were proud of. We wanted to collaborate with people that we thought we could make something that we'd want to show other people, outside of the actual context of the concert or whatever the gig was.

Seems to be the balancing act with freelance work. Appealing to clients and spreading your net, which is great that you have that perspective of just more openness to a lot of things, but also at the same time, as you said, being authentic from the beginning and creating kind of a distinct thing that's your own, you're going to attract people who want that.

That’s the best thing I suppose; clients that don't want to stifle you, but encourage you to do your thing because that’s what they want.

Yes, absolutely.

It was really loose and unofficial for the first couple of years. Dave and I started working together in 2012, and I think by 2015 we had enough going on. We brought on a couple of people on the administrative and operations side. We were dealing with enough projects that we fired our old business manager because they were not properly prepared to handle all the stuff we had going on as we expanded. We decided to do it all ourselves and incorporated the business. That's around when we got the office space, too.

Did you all have a physical studio set for the LA or southern Cali locals?

Yeah until 2021. We had kept it for the first year of the pandemic, and then we all realized not having to commute in LA was a big draw for a lot of people who. It just was a massive lifestyle improvement. Especially amongst animators and a lot of the creatives we work with I found that sometimes having your own space and being able to dictate your own terms of when you can get your work done is a lot more conducive to having a good work-life balance and putting your best work forward. We'll come together now and again on projects or for rehearsals, or meet up to work together on personal projects, but we've been fully remote since 2021.

That’s the nature of creative work, a lot of creative people are particular about what kind of environment they need to create their best work and stuff.

What was the studio like? Was it futuristic or techy at all?

Ian: What was funny about the office was it was not the most inherently techy. It was a converted garage that had room for about twelve of us that would get really hot when the GPUs were running. It also didn't have sufficient air conditioning and on the surface, wasn't that futuristic necessarily.

However, there was often wacky, weird Research & Development happening right in front of you if you walked into the Strangeloop office. Sometimes you would walk in there and there would be like four people in VR modeling something for WavexR. Or maybe we'd have a little MIDI controller keyboard set up that was controlling real time Notch visuals that you could walk up to and have like a depth camera that was videoing you and play something on the keyboard and particles would emit. But other than that, yeah it was pretty conventional. You were just as likely to walk in and find four people playing Will or Super Smash Brothers on the tv as you would finding someone in VR.

As the team develops, can you give me a breakdown of what the roster kind of looks like? Not in names, but more in roles. I'm sure there's animators, 3d render. I think Juice said his specialty was like, 3d animation and some environmental stuff.

Ian: As our team grew, we had some people who had worked in VFX and more traditional pipelines come through our studio. A lot more emphasis on self-taught people, and our approach to the pipeline ended up being pretty reliant on generalists. People who could take a scene from start to finish on their own. This is distinct from a more traditional studio pipeline, where there might be someone who's handling lighting, someone who's handling texturing, someone who's handling modeling, and they pass off the same scene in the same exact order every time. Given how quick our timelines were in the music industry, how varied the budgets would be and how much creative input we wanted our artists and collaborators to have, we ended up gravitating towards the generalist approach - people who could look at a deck, get an idea from David myself that was translated from our conversations with the artist, and help bring that vision to life pretty much on their own.

From there, everyone would be talking about sorting, troubleshooting, different things that might be going on in the scenes, sharing knowledge, sharing assets. But the general pipeline was you start with nothing on your computer and you end up delivering us a rendered file, which is pretty different from traditional VFX pipelines, but goes back to our values that we were talking about earlier. The big component of why generalists made sense is it allows us to get a sense of their artistic voice and let that be part of both deciding who we bring onto a project, and it makes Dave and my job a lot easier to not have to creative direct people who are just technical hands. It's pretty common in concert visuals, I'd say.

Really giving people some leeway to be able to confidently say, “Here's what we were thinking, but take it into your world and re-envision it in a way that makes sense, both for your workflow so you can get it done quickly and for whatever the brief is.” rather than having to handhold everybody through every set, rather than all of the creative decision making coming from the top, allowing the person who's actually making it to have some creative say in the details, which

I think it is not only good for efficiency and not having to go back and forth a bunch, but I think just creates a much more collaborative vibe at the studio itself.

Of course, then when we get feedback from the artists or clients, sometimes all of that falls apart and all of the little decisions that we made, suddenly we don't get to make anymore. However at least for the decisions that we get to make internally, it kind of goes back to wanting to put forth the art that feels most authentic and that we're most proud of.

I'm sure working with the same staff over time, as a creative director, you can tell which people on the team would be best suited for what project.

Yes. And there's sometimes when an artist will come to us for a vision, and we'll just be like “Oh, this is right up Juice's alley, or Andre would be a great fit for this.” And sometimes something comes in, we'll be like, “Juice might not love this, but we're going to ask him if he'll help out on it anyway.”

A lot of readers might not understand what the creative pipeline for a studio looks like, can you give us a bit of a breakdown?

Our projects start in a myriad of ways. In the early days, a lot of it was Dave and I being out on the road, physically touring these shows. Festivals were a huge source of meeting people who we ended up working with. At that time, we might not even be at the top of a lineup, but we'd go in with a pretty well-polished visual show, and then we'd meet people there who would either want to work with us on the VJ side or on the content side.

When we were working on some bigger acts like The Weeknd, for example. Lots of people would contact The Weeknd’s team asking who did that show, or would kind of do the Instagram forensics of trying to see who was tagged in the visuals, who was the lighting person, who was the visual person, and then try to reach out directly.

A fair amount happens just through Instagram, through people seeing the art that we post or shows that we've worked on, or art from individual artists like Juice, or Steve Teeps, who works for us, or Dave posting stuff to his Instagram.

As an artist gets bigger, it becomes more likely that it’s someone on their team that comes and finds us, versus earlier on, a lot of it was just artists directly reaching out. It always funnels to some sort of conversation with the artist or with the creative team to figure out what the vision for the show is going to be.

Were there any challenging times during your startup as a studio? What were you and Dave up to beforehand?

Ian: Dave had studied film and is pretty much self-taught animation-wise. He had already been working on music stuff. By the time we started the studio he was living in LA, primarily making his living as an artist already. I came back to town after college and was work and began making music with him in the summer. I played Low End Theory as an artist that summer, and I remember making $300 for a gig and being like, “How the hell does anyone make a living as a creative?” So I took a job at the end of 2012 for six months at a tech gaming company in Silicon Valley. And then that's when Dave hit me with the Zed's Dead tour. I looked at the dates, it was ten days, $200 a day so we would make $2,000 in ten days. We decided to do it and figure it out from there.

The backbone of the business at the time really was the touring, which is weird. It's a weird way to make money because it's very lumpy. You'll get a big chunk, and then you might not have anything for a while and it's also freelance work. So if you're not diligent about knowing how much you set aside for taxes, there's all sorts of those considerations that I think hit a lot of us. The first time we had a good year and then saw our tax bill, we were like, “What? We need to give away half of my money now?”

I think the beginning of the studio was a pretty steep ramp up. It went pretty quickly from us feeling like we were just working on a couple of gigs to. We had to scale up to accommodate the work that was coming in. I've identified two things to do with timing with have been really lucky for our development. That’s the rise of electronic music at that time, where we were talking to more people who needed visuals because there's less going on conventionally on stage. Then also festival culture, people were just loading in giant LED walls to these festivals, and nobody had content. No one was thinking about visuals.

There was kind of an arms race of who can have the biggest LED wall. As a consequence, our first gigs started on a pretty steep and rapid trajectory of clients needing visuals for these big LED walls.

When Covid hit, we had another moment of rebuilding the business almost back to being a startup, because we didn't know if or when shows were coming back. That was kind of another snap back to us having to rebuild again in 2020. That was unexpected, but luckily we had enough other stuff going on that we were able to make it through that.

That's great, because that sounds like you can choose your product. Initially, you were seeking at a bit, but after a while you came to a point where you could be selective and choose your projects.

How did you come back post-COVID? Do you feel you came back stronger in any way, or was seeing the vulnerability of the industry insightful at all?

Ian: Definitely. One of the biggest takeaways that I had and one of the biggest moves that we made during that time was moving to Unreal Engine - that was a smart move at the time. We were doing a lot of immersive and interactive projects because everyone was remote, so we needed to figure out ways to reach people without being in the same physical space as them. Some of those were running Unreal at the time, so even having experience in a Unreal Engine at that point felt smart. Then we quickly realized that it was also just an incredible production tool for any of the work we were doing, including conventional stuff.

Juice: I think switching to Unreal was the best decision we ever made. You guys were just like, “Okay, this month is slower. We're building up Spirit Bomb. Take the month to learn Unreal on company time.” It seemed like a risk but it paid off for Strangeloop in the longrun. Giving your employees the freedom to do that quadrupled our output even more.

Before if you had to render just a 1080p video, it could take 6 hours. We went from that to taking 30 seconds - 1 minute at 4k resolution. Pretty much the same quality. The new high level of output possible and the creativity along the ability to make more and less time and revisions were less scary. We could do so much more. It ended up being funny because it gave us so many new options. “Oh yeah, we could make everything audio reactive for the entire song” which we couldn’t realistically do before. The whole switch over to Unreal I guess worked out as a better business model. It allowed for us to put in more work into our projects, and made our shows better because of it.

It was a great thing to do. It's hard to go back to non Unreal engine now.

Can you tell me some of the software you guys were using before that? Can you say how Unreal helped so much?

Juice: Previously we were primarily using stuff like Cinema 4D, Octane, After Effects and Notch every once in a while too, or Touch Designer. A lot of stuff was like 3d animation. Or if it wasn't 3d, it'd be 2d and Aftereffects. We basically replaced the Cinema 4D and Octane. I mean, you still use C4D, but instead of rendering in Octane, you pretty much kind of render or build it in Unreal Engine it's just exponentially faster and pretty much same quality.

There's certain things you can't do the same in both, but for the most part, I would say 90% to 95% of it is easily replaced by Unreal Engine. It just allows for faster rendering. I mean, we do the Coachella mainstage and that resolution is what, 8000 by 1000 pixels? You know what I mean? I was saying a 1080 render could take 8 hours. Imagine trying to render 8000 pixels. It's not possible. It's not even a thing you can do. It would take weeks. Having Unreal allows us to render full res at these huge LED sizes, and it only takes maybe a half hour an hour for rendering out three minutes of content.

It's pretty powerful and incredible what you could do with it.

It seems like a divine alignment of opportunities with the fortuity of the timing. Having festival culture on the rise along with your personal connections with certain artists, and just being at a period of time where you're ready to jump into it and these new technologies emerging

How did the music industry come to be the focus of Strangeloop? With your visual talents, skillset, and aesthetic I could envision you immersed in the field of concept art, game design, or even film animations.

Ian: I think partially that ladders down from Dave and I both being getting our start as musicians and working in the music industry. I remember feeling most confident walking into a room with an artist when we could talk about the musicality of our visuals. As much as I was new to a lot of the visual side of the creative industry, I felt very confident talking about music with musicians.

It also manifested in our approach to visuals, we distinguished ourselves early by being very punchy with the visuals and very intentional with timing, stuff that feels common now. At the time due to the nascent state of graphics and visuals, often it would just be loops running one after another behind an artist while they performed, not even changing in time to the music. It felt like easy, low-hanging fruit. It almost just fed our OCD too, where it was like the drop happened. You must change it *laughs* I can't just watch the same loop happen and not be affected through a clear transitional moment in the music. A large part of why we focused our efforts on music initially is because there was a degree of confidence in those projects.

We ended up expanding more into gaming with Metaverse and XR stuff eventually, but music has been pretty fundamental to the Strangeloop approach to animation since the beginning.

That's great that you came at it from your own direction. It seems like with the rise of tech, festivals and DJ productions; the industry had the need for someone to give the visuals the attention they deserved to elevate the performance.

And don't get me wrong, we were certainly not the first people to do it.

Who else was doing cool visuals at ths time? Any peers or early inspirations?

Ian: Absolutely. Anti VJ were a group of vjs that we saw early that were doing amazing work. Weirdcore, who works with Aphex Twin, always had an eye for both cool tech, great artistic direction, and was very musical. There are also people that we worked with like Sussboy who did some early Skrillex visuals, was very much on the same page at the same time as us creating stuff that was visually super impactful, but also very musical. Imminent VJ is another group that came up a bit before us that I remember seeing have similar approach where they were definitely musical in their approach to visuals in a way that felt like felt right. There was definitely room for many of us to take advantage of that space, and people that we look up to that felt like they were doing it right or that we were learning from. I’m pretty sure all these people are still doing stuff and are definitely worth checking out.

Right on! What a list of shoutouts, I can’t wait to dig into some of these.

Thanks for the convo and introduction. Let's pick this up in part 2 of our interview!