In 2019, a young animator from Brazil spent three years trying to secure a 20-minute conversation with a DreamWorks creative director. She sent 47 emails, attended five industry events, and even waited outside a studio gate—unsuccessfully. Then she went to Turin. By day three of View Conference, she’d spent six hours with that same director, portfolio in hand, receiving feedback that would reshape her entire approach. Today, she’s a lead character designer at Netflix.
This isn’t an anomaly—it’s the design. While most industry conferences operate on the transactional model of brief panel appearances and rushed handshakes, View Conference has quietly become Hollywood’s best-kept secret by solving what director Maria Elena Gutierrez calls “the 15-minute problem.” In an industry where access to expertise is increasingly gatekept, this week-long Alpine gathering offers something revolutionary: time. Real, unhurried, transformative time with 135 of the world’s most accomplished creatives, including 14 Academy Award winners.
Running October 12-17 against the dramatic backdrop of Turin’s Alpine skyline, View Conference 2025 represents something far more significant than another industry event. It’s a radical experiment in democratizing access to an entertainment industry that has become increasingly insular, where emerging talent finds themselves locked out by invisible barriers of geography, connection, and opportunity.
The Architecture of Access
The traditional conference model is fundamentally transactional. A keynote speaker arrives, delivers a 45-minute presentation, participates in a brief Q&A, then disappears into a green room or waiting car. Attendees might secure a hurried selfie or manage to thrust a business card into someone’s hand. The entire interaction, from arrival to departure, rarely exceeds two hours. This is the 15-minute problem writ large: the illusion of access without its substance.
View Conference dismantles this model entirely. Speakers don’t fly in for a day—they commit to the week. They attend each other’s sessions. They eat breakfast in the same cafes as attendees. They participate in the 20-plus workshops that run throughout the week. The result is an environment where a conversation that begins during a morning panel on virtual production techniques can continue over lunch, deepen during an afternoon portfolio review, and culminate in a genuine mentorship relationship that extends far beyond Turin’s ancient streets.
This year’s roster reads like a masterclass in contemporary entertainment: Doug Chiang, Lucasfilm’s SVP and Executive Design Director, receives the View Visionary Award, bringing decades of design wisdom from Star Wars to eager audiences. Creative teams from Disney’s “Tron: Ares” and “Lilo & Stitch,” Warner Bros.’ “Superman,” and Marvel’s “Fantastic Four: First Steps” will walk attendees through their processes. The streaming television revolution is represented through artists from “Wednesday,” “The Sandman,” and “The Penguin.” Apple’s “F1” team brings insights from bleeding-edge production technology.
But the true luxury here isn’t the prestige of the names—it’s the architecture that makes them genuinely accessible.
The Geography of Inspiration
Turin isn’t Los Angeles, and that’s precisely the point. There are no studio meetings to rush to, no agents calling with urgent matters, no industry politics hovering over every interaction. The Alpine setting creates what psychologists call a “liminal space”—removed from normal professional contexts, allowing for more authentic connection and creative risk-taking.
The city itself becomes part of the experience. Baroque architecture meets cutting-edge cinema. Historic cafes serve as impromptu brainstorming sessions. The Mole Antonelliana, Turin’s iconic tower and home to the National Cinema Museum, stands as a daily reminder of cinema’s rich history even as conversations push toward its future. This isn’t networking—it’s creative immersion in an environment designed to inspire rather than transact.
The week-long format allows for something increasingly rare in our attention-fractured industry: sustained focus. When Netflix’s “KPop Demon Hunters” screens with filmmaker introductions, the conversation doesn’t end when the lights come up. It continues through workshops, informal gatherings, and chance encounters that span days rather than minutes. When DreamWorks presents its live-action “How to Train Your Dragon,” the discussion evolves as attendees and creators process, question, and build upon initial impressions together.
The Mentorship Economy
What View Conference has quietly created is an alternative economy—one that trades in knowledge, feedback, and genuine career development rather than business cards and LinkedIn connections. For established professionals, the value proposition is equally compelling. They gain a week away from the grind, surrounded by passionate emerging talent whose fresh perspectives and unbridled enthusiasm can reinvigorate even the most seasoned creative.
Doug Chiang’s recognition with the Visionary Award exemplifies this exchange. His design work spans from the Star Wars prequels to “Rogue One” and beyond, representing decades of visual storytelling at the highest level. At a traditional industry event, his appearance might mean a one-hour keynote and carefully managed photo opportunities. At View Conference, it means a week of workshops, portfolio reviews, and conversations that allow his design philosophy to genuinely influence the next generation of visual storytellers.
This extended mentorship model addresses a crisis that the industry rarely discusses openly: the collapse of traditional pathways into creative careers. Studio apprenticeship programs have diminished. The rise of remote work has eliminated casual office learning. Meanwhile, prestigious film schools create their own access barriers through cost and competition. For talented creatives from underrepresented regions or economic backgrounds, the path to industry opportunity has never been more opaque.
View Conference offers a different route. The week-long format means that talent reveals itself naturally through sustained interaction rather than the artifice of a perfect portfolio presentation or a well-rehearsed pitch. An animator’s problem-solving approach during a workshop. A concept artist’s questions during a panel. A writer’s insights during a screening discussion. These moments, accumulating across days, provide a far more accurate picture of professional potential than any resume.
The Future of Industry Gathering
As the entertainment industry grapples with massive technological disruption—from AI tools reshaping animation pipelines to virtual production revolutionizing cinematography—the need for spaces that facilitate genuine knowledge transfer has never been more critical. The “Wicked: For Good” creative team’s presentation isn’t just about one production; it’s about understanding how major theatrical releases navigate an evolving media landscape. The conversations that follow illuminate challenges and solutions that won’t appear in trade publications for months.
This year’s conference comes at a particularly pivotal moment. The inclusion of projects like “KPop Demon Hunters” signals animation’s expanding cultural reach, while the presence of teams from both traditional animation powerhouses like DreamWorks and streaming giants like Netflix illustrates the industry’s ongoing platform evolution. The workshops and panels become laboratories for discussing not just how things are made, but what gets made and why—questions that require time, trust, and sustained dialogue to explore meaningfully.
The conference’s model also challenges the industry’s increasing centralization. While Los Angeles, London, and Vancouver dominate production, talent exists globally. By creating a European hub that major productions take seriously, View Conference demonstrates that industry excellence isn’t geography-dependent. The young Brazilian animator who found her breakthrough in Turin represents thousands of creatives for whom physical proximity to Hollywood will never be an option.
The Luxury of Time
Perhaps View Conference’s most subversive element is its implicit critique of how the entertainment industry values time. In an ecosystem obsessed with efficiency, where meetings are triple-booked and every interaction is scrutinized for ROI, dedicating an entire week to creative community feels almost transgressive. Yet this is precisely what makes it effective.
The conference’s 135-plus speakers and 14 Academy Award winners aren’t here to make cameo appearances—they’re here to be present. That presence creates permission for depth over breadth, for meaningful exchange over mere exposure. When attendees describe View Conference as “career-changing,” they’re not referring to a single breakthrough moment but to the cumulative impact of sustained immersion in excellence.
For emerging creatives, the message is profound: you belong in these conversations. Not as supplicants seeking 15 minutes of attention, but as colleagues whose voices and visions matter. For established professionals, it’s a reminder that mentorship isn’t charity—it’s an investment in the art form’s future, one that requires genuine time and attention to yield meaningful returns.
A Blueprint for Change
As View Conference 2025 prepares to welcome its community to Turin’s Alpine embrace, it poses uncomfortable questions for the broader industry. If access to expertise is essential for developing talent—and it undeniably is—why do most industry structures make that access so difficult to obtain? If sustained mentorship yields better results than transactional networking—and evidence suggests it does—why do we continue privileging the latter?
The answers, of course, involve economics, logistics, and entrenched systems. But View Conference proves that alternatives exist. Its model isn’t infinitely scalable, nor should it be—the intimacy is part of the value. But it demonstrates what becomes possible when an industry gathering prioritizes genuine development over optics, when it trades the prestige of exclusive access for the impact of inclusive opportunity.
The Brazilian animator’s story—from gate-crasher to Netflix designer—isn’t a fairy tale. It’s a testament to what happens when talent meets opportunity, when expertise is shared rather than hoarded, when time is given rather than grudgingly allotted. As Hollywood grapples with questions of access, diversity, and sustainable creative development, View Conference offers not just inspiration but a working model.
Against the backdrop of the Italian Alps, surrounded by Oscar winners and emerging artists alike, the 15-minute problem finds its solution: don’t give people 15 minutes. Give them a week. Give them community. Give them the time and space to transform not just their portfolios, but their entire understanding of what’s possible in this remarkable, maddening, essential industry we call entertainment.
That’s not a conference. That’s a revolution, elegantly disguised as a gathering in Turin.
