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Hi, everyone. Welcome to the A6 and Z podcast.

I'm Sonal.

Today's episode is continuing our new medium storytelling series.

This episode in particular is focusing on virtual worlds and more broadly, filmmaking techniques

and the evolution of narrative.

Joining this conversation, we have two-time Academy Award winner Robert Stromberg. He won Oscars

for production design on Avatar and Alice in Wonderland. He was also the director of Disney's

Maleficent, and he directed the Martian VR experience, which received the Can Silver Lion Award.

Also joining this conversation, our deal-in-investing team partner Kyle Russell, an editorial partner Hannah Tidnam. But we began the conversation with Robert telling us about his career, which went from being a mat artist to visual effects to art direction to production, directing, and now co-founder of the virtual reality company, a studio for this new era. So we're really excited to have you. And I think what's really especially unique about your background is, A, the immense variety of things and the range of things that you've done,

but also because you bring such a unique perspective that sort of stitches it all together

from starting with your own career, which maybe we should start off as sort of your background

and how you sort of got here. It's been an extremely interesting ride. I seem to change careers about every five years,

it seems. But I started off my father was a low-budget filmmaker, and I grew up watching my dad make

monster films in our garage. He was a big fan of Ray Harryhausen and Willis O'Brien. So I was,

you know, immediately struck with the fascination of not just film, but the world creation.

And it was like magic to me at the time.

That led me into sort of creating the backgrounds for some of the stuff he was doing.

And that led to an 18-year career as a mat artist and

...