Config 2025: Designing dystopia: the creative vision behind Severance | Figma

[Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] I'm here because uh this lovely gentleman, Tom. Where's Tom? Here's Tom right here with my wife.

So Tom, who I don't know, you're from Nashville. Tom uh tweeted this and for some they reached out to my agent and called me and said, "Would you like to come do a talk? " And I don't do this, but I said absolutely.

So I just we changed a little bit, Tom. And uh I'm going to give a just kind of take a random access tour through my head and through the show. The show is so long.

You know, there's 19 hours really. So 20 minutes I'd need about two maybe 2,000 hours to talk about everything. But I'll take you through kind of how we work.

Um as you already know, I've done Top Gun and uh Zerdoc 30. And I think the thing I I love is I did the commercials for a long time. Coca-Cola.

I did the first Facebook commercial, the chairs commercial. I've done so much advertising all over the world that there's a the detail that you put into a commercial. Every frame is so important that you have to really every image is this is a story in the story.

And I kind of just took that to the next level. And severance, you know, with Ben, I really had the opportunity. He really he really went for it with us.

and he backed kind of how we would approach a show that I don't think's ever been done on television. We we decided we wanted to make cinema on TV and we wanted to do a real, you know, a 10-hour film each season and it takes us, you know, good two two and a half years to make a season, which isn't normal and no one has ever done it. So, we're quite proud of it.

Um, there's so many details we meticulously construct that I'm so proud of. um the desk, milkchicks, the mamalians, gemas. Each each episode really is a movie on its own.

So, we kind of um I kind of didn't know how to do this when I had so many images. So, we thought, well, let's let's just see the how many images. And there's a lot of images, like a lot of images.

And that was my life until last night. And there's thousands more. So instead of trying to tell some kind of perfect narrative, I just wanted to highlight six kind of things and see, you know, show you guys kind of behind the scenes.

And I know a lot of people here are, you know, aren't in film. They're more in design or archite, you know, anything. But actually, before I go forward, I just want to say I feel really welcome here.

I feel like a misfit being a designer and I feel like I'm in a room of misfits. So, I really I'm super s I've met some amazing people here in the last few days that I I didn't know existed. I really didn't.

I've met some incredible artists. So, I'll move on, but I I'm really I'm super feel comfortable here. Um when I first read the script for Severance, it read like um The Office.

It really not not the show, but the tone of it. It didn't really have any style. It was um it was it could have been it was like a parks and wreck kind of show.

It was funny. It is really intelligent, but it didn't have any tone or style. And when Ben asked me if I wanted to do it, I I read it and I really didn't want to do it.

I didn't know what I would do. It wasn't it wasn't I didn't see it. And um he said, "Well, why don't you think about it?

" And I said, "Well, give me two days and I'll if I can come up with a lookbook that I feel comfortable with. I'll let's meet and I'll share it with you and see how you feel about it. " So, I'm just going to take it through the first, you know, few images that no one's ever seen.

This is this is just William Macy from Fargo. And it was my first image I showed him and I said, I really think that Mark's Audi is is he should always look tiny in the frame. It should be winter always.

It should always be emotionally real. like it wasn't in the script. None of this was in the script.

It was the outside world should be really emotionally cold and then when we go inside, you know, it's we get into a different planet. But so these were just kind of the first kind of thoughts. Also, you know, the architecture had to be somewhat cold and once again market everyone need to be little like we're ants like all of us and how we feel in the world.

And so the next thing was designing offices, which is really not fun because they're they're all about, you know, this we we joked, Jessica, the DP, and I joked it was the se going to become the ceiling show because how do you make it interesting? So we really really dove deep into lighting and ceilings, like how do you make these environments kind of have nice shadows and textures and and be attractive to look at? And then I this this image to me is one of the greatest places in the world.

It's the John Deere building which is a tractor company who has the most incredible offices. And um it was it's designed by Eros Sarin and Kevin Ro who I'm huge fans of. And this desk is the severance desk.

You can kind of see where it came from. And we kind of took it to the next stage like again walking through like offices in the 60s were so beautiful and now I don't find them very they have so much you know human resources took over in the 80s and you could bring your family to work so you could work 16our days. I' I'd like to go back to the 8our day so you have a pencil and a rolodex and a phone and you just work and then you go home.

So we thought let's take it back to that look. These people really just work. It's created an environment that's that's stunning to look at in its simplicity.

Um, the retro thing came to me right away when I saw this image. I couldn't stop laughing because I remember these days. And I thought, well, what about if all the computers in the show are they have to be old like if if the Audi's ever explained to you what they were doing when they when they come up and they said, you know, I'm working at this computer.

It has a track ball and it has a CRTC screen. it wouldn't make any sense to anyone. They think you were nuts.

So, it kind of the story started to dictate its design. Um, this image is always, you know, if anyone knows, it's just a classic. And what I fell in love with was it was the easy way to show Ben that I wanted to do green.

I love the carpet because the MDR to me was it's it's kind of the core of the show that the main set and it they're children and I kind of it felt like it needed to be like a playground. This is like grass. Then there's the the table which is another play area.

And then I stumbled upon this film Playtime which is Jaci which is probably one of the greatest design movies of all time that was a huge flop. No one's really ever watched it ever and it's becoming really popular now. He went bankrupt when he made it.

Copela is going to do the same from Metropolis. It you know maybe Metropolis will be 30 years from now. But there's a when someone takes the passion to do something this interesting, it's it's wild that it gets missed for so many years.

And it's design was stunning. It's all on stage. I highly recommend everybody watch it.

It's it's incredible. Um it's also what's kind of funny. If you notice in the back there's three women standing there.

They're just cardboard cutouts and they were intentional. Like if you watch the scenes, there's it's what makes things eerie is some people just never move and the scene's 5 minutes long and you're you're trying to figure out why they're static and because they're not real. Like he was always playing with with our lives and kind of how artificial it can be.

And this was my last image that I showed Ben and I thought this is just what the world looks like for the outside world in our show. It's always misty, cold, mysterious, spooky, and Twin Peaks. really it was that's how kind of how I saw it.

uh world building. Um before I start designing anything on a show, especially as large as this, it's kind of like I have to cast who the who are my main crew people, who are the people that I can actually build this world with, who understand what I want and can work the way I want. And I'm very specific, but I'm also I am so love someone to take it and do their own thing and not wait for me to tell them to do it.

Like surprise me, surprise me, surprise me. It's it's everything. Um, this image, this is one of the early concepts of the boardroom.

And it's really funny because when I asked Dan like, "What's the boardroom? " He said, "It's it's the birthplace of the office. It's basically the womb.

It's where it's where you're born into work. " Which I thought was so bizarre and it made me really just enjoy the show even more. So, when I got really into it, I my first person I always worked with is my researcher.

And um, Lauren Sandival, I've worked with her on four or five projects now. when I am really specific. I give her a million ideas and she just filters me back.

And we honestly go through thousands of images. There's it's it's looking for lighting and textures and and products and things that you there's a lot of things that I do love already, but it was finding the ones that I'd never seen before so that everyone in this show could see things they've never seen before because this is a world that you shouldn't know. It's familiar, but you shouldn't know it.

So, we work really, really closely. She's kind of the helps me build the DNA of of what it looks like. Then I work with um three to four five sometimes five concept artists and um Freddy who I've worked with for 20 years always works in SketchUp and then Unreal.

We kind of build all the environments. He really understands scale. Like I can we can we work really really fast.

Within a two or three days we had the MDR kind of roughly its size. I wanted it to be big with a very low ceiling. And you start to really see it really quickly.

And then I work with another guy, Eric, who's an incredible industrial designer who helps me do all the products, the tables. This table was one of my favorites because it was written that she was, you know, being kind of interrogated. And I was I came up with this table.

I really wanted the images to be projected onto her face. Like I wanted it's like it needed to be burned into her mind. like it was no way that she was not going to understand this.

It's when you see it on her face, you know that it's it's it's impeding her and it's impeding us. It's quite torturous to watch, but also really beautiful and it's kind of the core of severance is we do that and it's beautiful. Like it's it was it's making everything in the story more three two more three-dimensional and trying to infer the story more other than beyond just the dialogue or what they've written.

This is a classic Eric moment and this is this is where Der Realms comes in because Eric said we should do Der and I was like this look at it. It is Der and it has you know it's really cutting edge and it's it's beautiful and simple and dangerous and violent but really honestly stunning too. I could eat on it.

Um yeah, I love this. I It's when he comes out of the elevator does he go left and right and where do you go? And he comes out of basically at the elevator.

I wanted it to be so small. Like it had to feel like a cage. Like I remember I was telling Ben it's just the width of his shoulders.

And everyone's like why? And I'm like well because there's nowhere for them to go. They don't even know where they're going.

Like they have to be contained. And then they get into the miles of hallways which we really do have so many hallways on stage. We have a lot of stages and every actor gets lost on.

We all get lost in them all the time. I mean actually John Chichurro and Christopher Walkin did get lost. Um, the low ceiling was the trickiest.

I'd never done something this low and something this big that was going to be shot so much. It's really became a really powerful set. And we fought a lot about the height and we came into 79.

I wanted 76. I I I went to 79. Um, and even John Turo hated it cuz he could he could he could touch it, but it's really really claustrophobic when you're in the set.

But I think you see that in them. It's there's something odd about it. It really there is a claustrophobia in this set.

It's very very low. And then I'm just going to kind of randomly just take you through a few things. Um, obviously our computer I I we fell in love with making this computer and how it was going to work and what keys would be blank and there's no escape key and do we have it do we not have one and there's cat my props master and Ben like all of us had so much fun coming up with this.

Like I love the track ball. I it's a lot of them are tropes that I remember as a kid and how do we make something that you know I had to be interactive. The actors had to be able to use the program.

They had to believe in the math so they could all We built a real program, a software program that they literally could move through and they could do as much as you understand about the show. Adam is doing it. Adam like really hit carpal tender and his wrist was so beat up from this track full.

I feel bad, but I but I don't. This is um Cobal and Milicks, which we loved, but I also made a 50% version for for Miss Juan. We just we it's so tiny in her desk.

It's hysterical. Like we really play with scale a lot and it's really because it's fun because honestly we can and I think it's good to just do it because you can. Um this is another example of another illustrator I use.

So this is a this is a museum in the Bronx that has that house, but I was like, what if it's underground? So we shoot there practically and then in visual effects we make it look like it's underground. And I started to do that a lot on this show where we'd find environments you can't ever afford to build and you wouldn't need to.

So we started to combine them in underground sets which was really fun. Um honestly one of my favorites was Dan wrote this scene where it was going to um the wellness center and he wrote there's an in and out door. I'm like but Dan there's only one room and he's like but that's the best part.

You go in one and then you I don't I still don't get it but visually I love it. Um, this was an early concept of um, O&D where I really had a lot of art that I wanted to swing in and out and a lot of it just changes over time and it just gets better and better and better. But I love showing the kind of early stages.

This was their their hallway which I you know the escape staircase something like this was when we did the goat slaughter room. I think it was written I think she was just holding it and I was like I wanted to make some weird contraption that it was that the goat was in that made it like clinical and safe and beautiful and sterile and I came up with this crazy idea but we don't know when we're going to have baby goats. It's really hard.

So we kind of have to schedule when it's going to be ready. But we have baby goats are only have a two week window and they grow too much. So, I had to design this thing that any goat would fit that fit a window of I don't think I think we waited weeks to shoot it because they have to fit in this damn little thing.

Um, another great of my favorites. This is the control room for anyone who's seen the show. When you're upstairs, this is the below.

This is underneath, which is it's just a very it's basically opposites. I love doing opposites. Upstairs, everyone's facing in.

This one, everyone's facing out. Just some nice little details. Like we we really we love the details.

So this kind of explains the upstairs downstairs and the umbilical cord that goes down and just how they sort of are viewing these people as you know when we're enjoying them playing at the top, you know, up up above. The boardroom was interesting because I didn't know how much we were going to see here. I didn't know we were going to see upstairs or lumen.

And we um so we built this boardroom and actually turned out I wanted to mirror it. I wanted it to be glass all the way around, but half inside, half outside. But it always feels like everywhere you look, everyone's reflected.

It's It's a nightmare to shoot. It's a nightmare for everyone, but I love it and we do it. And we do a lot of visual effects cleanup.

We just shoot it and clean it up later. Another one was the Ether Factory. Um, we shot this in Newfoundland.

So, we do a lot of visual effects on that on all the all the episodes really. But we find this one, we just found a nice building that worked and then I just build on to it later. Uh the hallways, Gemma's world was very different for us because it's one floor below MDR.

And what's nice is that we get we can do anything we want. So I was like, let's make the ceilings higher and let's make everything a different angle. Let's just really honestly I'm just going to say let's really with everybody because you just can.

And it's it's just it starts to get so much more fun. This I think is everybody's favorite because of the Dar Rams, the stereo. I think it'll probably be worth a million dollars on an auction any day now.

Um, and but a lot of the design things that I love, like we design the sofa and the chair and the kitchen, and we try to design as much as we can and we put in these little tiny tidbits of the most stunning design. And I feel like it's what helps us solidify its design that we are not only we're borrowing it from a little bit, but we're also doing our own new thing to it, which is which is really fun. And I feel really lucky that we get to actually do it.

And I love this kitchen. Not one in my house. Gemma's suite.

I love this table. Like, what is she going to sit at in her prison-like room that feels violent? That feels like she could sit with somebody else, but there's nobody else there.

If she's isolated, she's lonely. Like, it's And how do you make that? It's how do you create that emotionally?

And I think this was a violent enough. The Christmas room was a favorite. It was a really fun set to do.

Um, a lot of times in the illustrations, we tend to keep drawing them. I keep drawing them and drawing them until the the shoppers and the decorator and everybody's kind of showing me the best of everything. We we kind of keep filling it in as much as we can.

So, the sets are what we want them to be. This was probably the saddest moment I think on the show. This this set is such a sad set, but it's a good ending.

And um it's it's very Kubric. It's it definitely shows you that less is more is very powerful. The dentist, no one likes the dentist.

The goat slaughter room once again was was about being My monitor went out up front. Hi everybody. They're dark.

Stephanie I'll I'll turn around and look. This is a great example. So, when we were shooting uh in Jess's episode 207, we um we had to figure out how to do the cable shot and we tried to do everything practically.

We built every element to go down through the desk. We built this huge set to come down through all the cables and across the floor. So, we were talking about building it in like huge overscale.

This is this is how much work we do. We figure out every system like should we build an oversized you know this set was you know it's 80 ft long just for one shot. We didn't end up doing it, but we have to figure it out sometimes.

Um, I'm going to talk about the deskness. So, this to me is the core of the show is this desk. And this one is weird because it's the threeperson desk.

And when when I came back to season 2, I didn't know there was going to be a threeperson desk. And when I read it, I was like heartbroken. I was so I was so sad.

I'm like, how is this going to work? Emotionally, it was like our baby and it's going to up all the angles cuz I didn't think about all this stuff. And it really just got better and better and better.

And it's kind of what severance does is just get better and better. I'm just going to take you through some images because it what was nice about it. And Ben calls it the set that keeps on giving is that you just have so many angles and it's so playful that every the amount of things that we can do in this set.

It's I kind of treated it like Star Trek. Like you need to design the console, the control room, and then after that you can kind of go anywhere you want. And once I realized that this set was working, people believe it.

You can kind of do whatever you want after that. The the rules are you can you can kind of just keep growing. Yeah, the three desk was really scary.

I have to wing it now because I don't have any monitors. But you can start to see how you can fragment like Jess and I and Ben, we really wanted to break everything and play with 2D and 3D. It's not, you know, a lot of things are just shot very threedimensional and it serves the dialogue, but this is about how to tell the story and how to make it uncomfortable, how to make you, you know, kinetically feel things, emotionally feel things through through images like this where he's not going to say anything, but you you feel you feel his pain.

I love how they could look through to each other. I remember when we were drawing this, I was just like so fascinated by how many different angles we could have, you know, and then you get someone like Bob Baliban and that's what you get. It's like he's the best.

I mean, that's honestly I think that's how tall he is. He's so cute. I'm just going to show co times.

This is how we shot a lot of the show. It's not fun. And then the thing is the desk started to become more things.

And Dan wrote this dream sequence for Irving. And and then I I it was I think it was all it was a retreat. But this one I was like I asked my location.

I said, "Can you find me a burnt forest of miniature trees? " And he did. He found on the top of Sam's Point in upstate New York, there was a controlled burn where they burned all these trees to kill all the brush.

And they were miniature black pines. And we ended up shooting this whole sequence live. We built the desk up in the forest in this miniature.

It was incredible. But then we, you know, the desk we get, it just keeps living and growing and growing and you get moments like this. And then you have Christopher Walkin doing it.

like it's like my dream. I mean, he's the greatest. And then the end one is is the the sinister dudes.

His little like who would have thought he'd have the tiniest office, the tiniest desk, but this he has his own little elevator and he steps out and this is where he watches them get tortured. Beyond the desk, this is Lumen. This is Bell Labs in um in New Jersey.

I don't know if anyone knows where Homeell and what Bow Labs is, but they invented the first microchip. They invented the satellite. They invented the phone, the cell, all your phones, everything that went through this this building.

It's amazing. It doesn't look like this. It has a bunch of houses around it now.

And it's very uh it's very lived in. So, we took it back to its basics and we we've augmented a lot in post and added mountains around it. And just classic.

You know, the hallways are amazing. like it's amazing how simplicity really is to me so beautiful and that you can add one color and how much you feel from an image like this. Um probably one of my other favorite sets is the break room.

It's like designing sets that are unsettling that have you know the caned walls that just the strangeness of them. They're really even though it's just like it's just basic walls. It's not even expensive looking.

It's the simplicity and the lighting of it is so um powerful and where they stand and how it kind of breaks up your mind. I think it's as much as I can fracture someone's mind when they're watching something, I think it really does get you into a totally different zone that you've than you've been in ever before. I mean, look at that.

He's looking at a watermelon. It's, you know, it's it's an amazing show because it's not the design is amazing. I because they have so many amazing people and but it's Jess and Ben and the wardrobe and these actors.

It's it's like the whole combination of everyone. It's everyone's on their agame like on like it's it's you can't show up and it's not perfect. We don't shoot it ever.

Like it has to be perfect. And then you have like epic shots like this which was really cinematic. Like this is for real.

This is all live. No CG in a forest upstate. I I was trying to find Montana and we found it after about 60 days of scouting and it worked.

This was my second season version of what do I do about how to build a really big set for one or two scenes that it's not possible. I can't build this on stage. I can't build grass.

I've done it. It looks like Teletubbies. um it had to be really real.

So, we started scouting um Storm King, the art space, and uh and I went for golf courses. And I have this amazing set designer, illustrator that I love who is a LAR genius, and he has a drone that he started. I started sending him to different places, and we would scan the the area, and then we would build the set to see if it worked.

And then we did that at probably five or six locations till we found one that was the right size. And that's so this is all shot on a golf course but tented over and and the ceiling and walls are all CG. There's part of the walls we build but it's trying to like once again play with how you can really work in this world by not you know using nature is really tough to is really hard to replicate.

Milchic. This is a great one because I love Trel. He's an amazing actor and he had the idea.

I brought him in and I'm like, "How do you want to turn over this set? " And he said, "Do you know the duck? What is it again?

A duck and a rabbit. " I didn't know this. And I And then I loved it.

And then he asked for the he asked for the iceberg, which was really funny cuz I already knew we were going to shoot in Newf Finland, which he didn't even know, which is there's icebergs in the whole episode. But it was amazing cuz he's like, you know, I want I'm like 5% known. you don't know who I am.

And that became kind of Milchic's story. This is her little 50% computer, which I actually would really love. This is an example of one of our renderings.

Like this is a the bottom is an illustration and then the top is the final. Um, but we really do we don't veer that far off really. And it's it's there's so much control in the show.

I'm really lucky like we get a lot of support to be able to work like this because it's not cheap and it's takes a lot of time and a lot of effort. Uh my favorite set is probably the birthing cabin this season. There was two sculptures which I loved and I knew I wanted to make sculptures in front of the fireplace but I had no idea what they would be and I knew I wanted them um ceramic and colorful and very strange.

And I called Dan the writer and said you know if I was going to do two sculptures in front of the fireplace what would they be? And he said Mr. cure pregnant.

Mr Kier pregnant with industry and I hung up. That was it. And I made them.

I didn't tell Banner anyone. And they walked Patricia walked on set and she literally just could Everyone was like, "What the are these? " They were blown away.

Like Patricia was literally hugging it. It was so cute. And it's those things that we bring to the show.

Like that's the all those little bonuses. Like the more that we can infer and make these playful ideas, they give actors, they give everyone, you know, whoever loves the show, it's what you you can see the effort we go to. I mean, this is our little miniature plane.

You can see I I never thought I would build a plane that's only three rows deep. And then but we do every detail, every logo, every seat, like we do every detail, even if we don't see it, cuz I think for the actors and and for everyone, it should feel as real as possible when you're in it. You should walk in and just be like, it's there.

It's all there. It's not half there. It's It's perfect.

I love this. I don't know why, but I do. And then Gemma's World, which was this whole this set was really big.

And Jessica, the director, she's amazing. This is her first episode she ever directed in her career. She's a cinematographer who did the most emotional episode of Severance.

Gemma's story. This this is a great one of it's a great set because I love it because it has a lot of 2D 3D space play which I always love. Like I really think there should be always things that feel really close to you but really open up and you can really look around and you're not just look you're like you're wandering and it's you need a big screen and I hope people have big TVs at home now.

I think they do. The Christmas room was funny because our rule for Lumen is that they make everything. They manufacture everything underground.

So that they no one would ever know what they're doing. Like so everything's 3D printed or however they manufacture. So everything here is um is looks like it's 3D printed.

Like it's all we we made everything to kind of feel like it's so artificial and not real, but it is real. She doesn't even know what real is. She's 5 years old.

our status set. The paintings, we have a lot of paintings. Dan writes them all.

They're they're all from Dan's head. We I spend a lot of time with the concept artist coming up with how they look and how they're lit and how they feel like real paintings. Somebody's waving at me.

I can't tell. [Music] Um yeah, there's this is probably the weirdest one we did. I love it.

I think it's amazing. And then this is classic Ben and Dan, you know, milk chicken. This guy can dance like nobody.

So, it's always nice way to end before it becomes really violent. The marching band. This is a great overhead shot.

This is all This is, you know, half CG. It's not It's We shot as much as we can, but we we can't get this high on our stages, so it's it's a lot of work to pull off a shot like this. It's a great ending.

I love this. It's just like so nice the way they end. And who knows where season 3 will be.

I don't know. We build a lot of products. We design a lot of products.

We try to make them feel as real as possible. We do a lot of research. They're quite scientific.

Um, thankfully, we don't have to save anyone because they really don't work. And then I'm just going to show you some shots how we shoot. We shoot with a lot of robotic arms.

A lot of the best technology you can get. These are high-speed robotic arms. Adam is amazing at dancing with them.

They're super fast. They're very dangerous, but they move like the whole opening sequence of season 2. A lot of it was shot on these robotic arms and we have to tear apart the sets to do it.

Took probably about six weeks to shoot that opening. This is a classic example of how we mirror. I I mirror a lot of sets.

We love to make everything a little bit duplicity and they casted people that look the same, which I thought was hysterical. Like everyone starting is doing it in the show. Here's our desk in the forest.

We had to build about a half mile bridge to get there cuz we couldn't walk in it. We had to build above it and walk in cuz we couldn't touch anything except for where we were allowed to put the desk. We build rocks.

Even the rock he's standing on isn't real. This is our our birthing cabin. This is kind of pretty much how we shoot on our stages.

This is Malia. So, this is how big that set was with a tent over it. It's 240 ft long with no supports, all lit and ready to shoot.

Um, in Oh, I'm back up. I can read again. Um, the break room becomes a playroom.

So, in season one, it was the torture room. In season two, it becomes a playroom. Dan wrote it as this room where now now it's all really fun.

Show up and we'll we'll play. And so, we made it very like a kindergarten classroom. And they were to kind of explain to you what happened in in season one.

They'd written this flashback, this videos that you'd seen of surveillance footage of the whole, you know, of everyone from last season, like what happens in the story. I'm like, well, we didn't shoot any of that that footage. Like, we don't have it.

And I'm like, what if we b it? What if we create our own video? What if we treat them like let's do a kindergarten classic like when I was a kid, they would have shown David and Goliath or, you know, the Burough Lives, you know, uh, Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer.

So, it's kind of in that vein. Let's do Stop Motion. And he's like, "I know Duke Johnson who, you know, did Rick and Morty and he did uh they did, you know, Amalisa.

" And I'm like, "That's that was it. " I boarded it, kind of created what it would look like, sent it to them, they loved it, and then Ben took it over and completely boarded it and worked with their director, and we did. Honestly, it was so much fun to see all of their of our sets in miniature like and to have the show made that we can watch on this vintage TV in this crazy room.

This amazing like Ben invented this. This idea is amazing. This is how they shot.

Like this is them doing the mirror gag. Like everything's in camera. There was no visual effects at all in this entire in the threeminute video.

And then Ben kind of topped it off by getting Keano to do the voice over, which was doesn't get much better. Here's a great example of force perspective. This is a miniature force perspective for the hallways that they used to shoot him running down the hallway.

And then kind of last for me, what's been amazing about severance is that there's what its life is. It's taken on beyond us now. And I'm getting blown away by what people like Lego.

people are making these digital Legos and they start to um there's a lot there's so many drawings and books and there's just so many things that are people are inventing based on severance it's become its its own entity which has been really fun and then I guess was probably about two months ago my daughter sent me this and apparently in Austria they made a severance desk and I had no idea and she my daughter's 25 she called me and she said dad you hit the big time you're on the cover of IKEA like this is amazing and I had had no idea. And apparently you can buy these in in a few countries now, which is kind of it's amazing. And then honestly, last was I didn't know that Apple was doing this.

I don't have like we make the show independent. Like I don't really there's Apple Studio, but I don't to do with Apple and they um I just saw this on their website. I didn't even know they did it that all of a sudden on their website you go to buy a new Mac.

I was going to buy a new Mac and there was our computer as the first one you could buy. And I I I was like this we've entered the zeitgeist. This is amazing.

Like now it's our art is is real life. Even though you click on it, you can't buy it. You watch a video of how we make the show.

But it's just amazing that people how they've responded to it. And I'm I'm super thankful and I um I I love that like a room full of designers like this love design. I think it's it's and I've learned a lot myself about how much people do appreciate it.

Um, that's it for me. I'm super excited. I I I'm super [Applause] nervous.

I um I have to say I'm super I'm coming back next year. I'm just coming to watch events cuz this was ter this was terrifying. And it's her in the yellow dress.

Nerra, I mean, honestly, it's um I'm really thankful. Thank you so much. Hi, Na.