Meet Ivery Chen | Filmmaker, Tech Artist, AR/VR/Unity Engineer

We had the good fortune of connecting with Ivery Chen and we’ve shared our conversation below.

Hi Ivery, what do you want your legacy to be?
I am an artist interested in revisiting memory and experience through film. Ever since I stole my dad’s Canon 5D and took it away to school with me, I fell in love with the immediacy of photography and the sequentiality and spatiality of film. While photography captures a moment in an experience, film has the ability to construct an entire experience.

I grew up across four countries – Australia, China, UK and US. Always a traveller, spending years afar, yearning to return, I developed interest as a filmmaker to explore the question of what it’s like to revisit a place or experience from an altered lens. This altered lens comes from age, experience, time. The unreliability of feelings is also fascinating to me. We’re constantly changing, a thought/feeling could change between mere moments. I want to find ways to show these changes of our wavering hearts and the temporality of feelings.

My biological father built and designed furniture for his own company, was a writer and musician. My grandpa was the lead mechanical engineer for the first hospital built in ShenZhen. My grandma and mum both worked with numbers as a maths professor and a banker. In high school, I pursued engineering projects, built generators, kit cars etc. I’m an engineer at heart. I love finding and solving problems through building – apps, prototypes and designs. I’ve always been in awe of Pixar’s approach where they build in-new tools for every new film, and it was an eye-opening experience to be part of the intern class of 2023 to observe first-hand how the engineers and artists worked together. The amount of self-sufficiency is important to me – to have the ability to execute my own imagination. In my artistic career I invest in the collection of skills, expanding my tool box so I’m prepared when the idea strikes me one day and have the ability to realize it, whether it is software, games or films.

The process of building a tool or an app is care and love and art. The slow process of debugging has many similarities with the repetitive process of animating a scene. But what often makes one art but the other not is how much the creator is embodied in the outcome. My explorations into blending 2D and 3D techniques happened when I realized my 3D animation, Elevated, looked like it could have been made by anyone. Since then, I made a pact to myself to only make films that looked like my films. I created pencil sketches, gouache paintings, and made shaders in Blender that would create a 3D world that looks like my 2D art. At the same time, the industry is seeing a change. The animation industry is bridging the gap between traditional and contemporary art forms, through films like Spider-Man: Into the Spider-Verse, Puss and Boots 2, and adult animated TV show Love Death + Robots. These works inspire me to continue creating stylized artwork that transcends hyperrealism, embracing the fantastical and endless possibilities of animation as a medium.

They push me to consider animation as a medium capable of complex storytelling, akin to live-action cinema. I aspire to be part of a movement that pushes the boundaries of animation, to bridge the gap between traditional and contemporary art forms. As such a young medium, there is so much in 3D that hasn’t been explored. , inspiring me to delve deeper into its potential for complex narratives.

My recent work, My World Was The Distance Between Two Bus Stops is a surrealist portrayal and reinterpretation of my childhood in China, with Beijing as its focal point. Through its blend of 3D rendering and 2D aesthetics, the film encapsulates the essence of returning home and reevaluating one’s past in light of new perspectives. I explore my childhood memories of China, dreary, monotonous in their rigidity, and injects them with a new sense of life and colour in the pursuit of sharing what it is like to return to a place or memory having changed. The textural quality of the shaders add to the nostalgia quality of my film, and Blender allows me to create anything from the physically-impossible to the absurd, allowing me to blend memories with its dream-like interpretations.

As animation continues to evolve with AI tools, powerful game engines, and AR/VR technology, I anticipate the emergence of more groundbreaking projects. Ultimately, I aspire to be part of a movement that defies conventional expectations, resonates with audiences of all ages, and pushes what is currently possible for animation as a medium.

Can you open up a bit about your work and career? We’re big fans and we’d love for our community to learn more about your work.
I blend 3D art with traditional artforms. I make films about memory. I’m a student in college and I’ve previously worked for Pixar, Bayer and NASA as a technical artist and developer. I’m excited about continuing to make animations for music videos or independent work, while maintaining a technical job on the side. I’m an international student and it’s a little tough to pursue art full on from the start.

The most important thing to my brand or story is that self-sufficiency is really important to me. Having the ability to execute your vision is powerful, and that is for any medium. I also want to continue to make things that people haven’t really seen before, whether that is stylised work or novel concepts.

Any places to eat or things to do that you can share with our readers? If they have a friend visiting town, what are some spots they could take them to?
I only know about the touristy things, but hey, they’re touristy for a reason! Grand Central Market, LACMA, thrifting. When I was in LA with my mum, her favourite thing to do was going to Trader Joes (I get it, who wouldn’t love a trip to TJs?)

Who else deserves some credit and recognition?
I would like to dedicate my shoutout to the RISD FAV department for reminding me of putting myself in my art, the folks I met at Pixar, Brown CS (Barbara Meier, Brown HCI lab), my loving partner, friends and family.

Website: https://iverychen.com

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/iverychen/

Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ivery-chen/

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCeXIwH-MXGbimN7CASlyYFg/videos

Image Credits
1. Still from Messenger 2. Brooklyn 3-7. Still from My World was the distance between two bus stops 8. Still from Elevated