Talking Creativity With Evan Spiridellis

Show Notes

Wow, did we cover a lot of ground in this interview! We cover some of the backstory of Evan from his time in art school through starting JibJab with his brother Gregg to self-funding the start of Storybots and then getting bought by Netflix. And ultimately that lead to them starting their third studio, Spiridellis Bros. Studios where they’re working on producing their first animated feature film based on characters in songs by Parry Gripp.

It’s a helluva ride! Evan’s an interesting character because it seems like he and his brother are always there to find ways to connect new technology to art. Whether they were cramming funny animations in less than a megabyte with Flash or leveraging YouTube and streaming to distribute the content they wanted to make, they seem to have this infectious optimism and curiosity behind everything they do.

And now they’re bringing that energy to the Blender ecosystem with the feature film that they’re working to produce. It’s still early days; they’re heavily amid pre-production, but they’re already starting to explore custom tools. And the fact that Blender is open source is a specific advantage for them because they can update it and modify it all they want.

And yes, we do touch a little bit on the topic of AI… not quite to the degree that I did back in episode 59, but we did give the topic a fair shake.

Oh… and because this is the Open Source Creative, it wouldn’t be fair if kept the links to those SIGGRAPH papers on in-betweening to myself. So I’m sharing them here. These are the specific talks and papers I was talking about:

• LayerInbetween: Occlusion-Aware Stroke Correspondence and Inbetweening with Automatic Layering - This is about building/generating layered in-betweens for the particularly difficult challenge of handling when one part of an object moves behind another part of the same object (think about an arm moving in front of a 2D character’s body).
• Adaptive Interpolation-Synthesis for Motion In-Betweening on Keyframe-Based Animation - This one is about generating “correct” in-between keyframes in 3D animation to match the interpolated style defined by a character’s previous movements. Also, they use Pocoyo in their examples, which has such a great and distinctive movement style.

And, one more reminder that I’m going to be at BCON 2026! If you’re going to be there, too, make sure you say hi! If you’re not going to be there, but you want me to attend a session or ask someone a question, just let me know!

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