Visualizing flows of ideas between curious minds

Connections was initiated as a project exploring collaboration between people as a connective tissue of our social dimension and a power that creates a special space filled with curiosity, openness, and inspiration.

A dialogue between people is a gate that opens into the celebrated state of Flow, where ideas collide and transform, resulting in deeper revelations than achieved by a single person.

Transfer of knowledge

Knowledge and ideas are always shared in professional communities to some extent, but some industries see more value in open dialogue between different organizations and individuals than others. An example of the former is the scientific community — the primary reason for this is the complexity of the problems that scientists deal with.

Some issues like health and climate crises are urgent and hold great significance for humanity, and others are simply too multifaceted to be explored by individual researchers.

In art and design, an open approach accepted by scientists is propagated by Pixar. With a background in research and sincere interest in the possibilities of computer graphics, the company’s co-founder Ed Catmull treats honesty and openness as important principles of his work.

He did not consider his work in developing tools for CG to be a trade secret, while others did that, and decided to share his findings to accelerate the entire industry. According to his book ‘Creativity, Inc.’, this approach helped him get a position at Lucasfilm that led to the creation of Pixar.

Catmull implemented the same atmosphere of transparency and knowledge exchange in the company. Everyone shares their experience with people who were not involved in the project at post-mortem meetings; each project regularly gets reviewed by a group of advisors called The Braintrust; and all of the employees create together during ‘extracurricular’ lessons provided by the company.

Besides scientific transparency, Pixar’s openness is related to open-source ideology. Influenced by hacker culture, it started to develop actively in the 1980s and the 1990s, and currently, open-source software like Linux and WordPress are included in standard pipelines of companies, as it is considered to be more safe and reliable than proprietary software.

Global networks of ideas

When put into perspective with the scale of our world, holding back knowledge or ideas seems short-sighted. Some even believe that we are not just billions of individual minds — but rather are connected by collective consciousness.

This thought is present in the influential book ‘The Creative Act’ by legendary producer Rick Rubin. According to him, all ideas circulate between people and originate in a shared ‘Source’, so there is no point in hiding them. For Rubin, this is proof that cooperation is the way to go — working together, creators can compare their ideas and combine their unique approaches to come up with something bigger than what they could create working alone.

Aside from more mystical approaches, there are practical initiatives aimed at creating a global network of consciousness. Affiliated with MIT Project Supermind came up with a framework of ‘collective intelligence’ — its goal is to combine humans and AI agents via technology into collective minds that can make better decisions and have more information together.

The platform suggests specific ways to create these ‘superminds’ and provides multiple examples of collaborative effort powered by digital tools. Different in their scale and structure, they show that cooperation can result from various techniques, and the right mindset is the most important foundation for it.

About project

Starting this project, we had the intention of connecting the worlds of simplistic 2D animation and 3D graphics. At first, we experimented with the theme of connections and interactions with a group of 2D animators, who found the animation core of the project during the extensive RnD process.

Then, the selected directions were treated by our 3D designers who turned two-dimensional stories into a series of 3D films. Lively and dynamic, the animations were combined with detailed materials and lighting to create a unique combination of different points of view.

Credits

Creative Direction: 
Maxim Zhestkov

Art Direction:
Vladimir Zhirnov

3D Design and Animation:
Vladimir Zhirnov, Vladimir Marychev, Anastasia Podkorytova, Maxim Tleubaev

Graphic Design:
Anastasia Suryaninova 

Sound:
Artyom Markaryan

2D Design and Animation:
Maxim Tleubaev, Lora Buchatskaia, Alexey Rovkov

Producer, Copywriting:
Anna Gulyaeva

Year:
2024