Sheffield Documentary Festival: “We need to be more weird”

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Funding remains a puzzle but the documentary and fact-ent genres are thriving at Sheffield Documentary Festival.

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Sheffield DocFest is one of the world’s most influential markets for documentary projects and this year’s edition proved the breadth health of the genre despite funding issues.

With Netflix and other premium streamers prioritising celebrity led promos and traditional broadcaster funding squeezed financially and politically, especially in the US where investigative and diversity programming is being shelved, YouTube has emerged as a saviour of sorts.

One question that repeatedly cropped up at the event in Sheffield (June 10-13) is what happens to truth when we rely on platforms built for engagement?

YouTube’s growing force as doc platform

 Julian Carrington, Executive Director of the Documentary Organisation of Canada, said,  “Commissioning models are changing, public institutions are under pressure, audiences are fragmenting,” he said. “At the same time, broadcasters are making YouTube a much more significant pillar of their strategy. That raises questions about discoverability, sustainability, rights and public‑service media.”

For some producers, YouTube has become a core creative and commercial engine. Josh Reynolds, executive producer at UK studio Zandland, said the platform is “in our DNA,” with the company now averaging 10 million monthly impressions and over half a million deep‑watch views. “We know what our audience wants because the data is instantaneous,” he said. “Speed is the biggest opportunity. If we have a strong idea, we can act immediately.”

Docs were Channel 4’s most successful genre on YouTube in the last year. In 2025 it recorded 22.6 billion minutes viewed, “which sounds like ridiculously big number, but it is, and that's because we're prioritising long-form content,” explained Alex Morris, Managing Director of Channel 4’s social-first division, 4Studio (speaking at  Creative Cities Convention last month).

The broadcaster is now building communities around docs on social platforms Instagram, Facebook and TikTok. In January, its launch month, C4’s docs Facebook page garnered 69 million views and 144,000 followers.

“There seems to be real audience demand coalescing around that factual content slightly on the spicier, edgier side of things,” he added.

Reynolds described YouTube as the foundation of a circular development strategy. “Everything we make on YouTube has to have a second life — something we can pitch to the BBC, Netflix, Amazon or Hulu,” he said. “It’s where we build community. That’s where our future is.”

But others warned that the shift to YouTube is being driven less by opportunity and more by crisis. Debra Zimmerman, Executive Director of Women Make Movies, said the US public‑broadcasting landscape has been destabilised by government cuts. “Right now, it’s a response to an emergency,” she said. “PBS is turning to YouTube and asking for worldwide rights. That wipes out filmmakers’ ability to earn revenue elsewhere.”

Zimmerman cited two Women Make Movies titles licensed to US public service broadcaster  ITVS that later appeared on YouTube without the filmmakers’ involvement. “One film even had its title changed,” she said. “There was no revenue, no access to audience data, and no control over how the work was presented.”

She warned that while YouTube can deliver large audiences, it risks undermining the ecosystem that sustains independent documentary. “Festivals build careers. Awards build careers. Rights matter,” she said. “If everything moves to YouTube without safeguards, we risk losing the structures that allow filmmakers to make their next film.”

Behind the scenes on 70Up.

Asif Kapadia likened being asked to direct 70UP to “taking on The Godfather Part 4 with all the original cast”.

He is stepping into the role held for decades by the late Michael Apted and guiding the landmark documentary series to its final chapter. “It is one of the most influential factual franchises in television history,” he said. “My challenge was to make something that didn’t mess it up but also to make it feel like we were closing a circle.”

The Up series began in 1964, when Granada Television set out to film a group of seven‑year‑olds from sharply contrasting backgrounds across Britain, never intending to revisit them again. But the filmmakers returned to the children at 14, establishing a  seven‑year cycle.

Series producer Claire Lewis has been involved in the project for 47 years. She explained that it was built around the Jesuit maxim ‘Give me the child until he is seven and I will show you the man’.”

“It evolved into a unique social document,” she said. “A study of who we become, and why.”

They were joined on stage by Jo Clinton Davis, Controller of Factual, ITV, Mike Blair (Creative Director, Multistory Media) and two cast members (Sue Fitzgerald and Bruce Balden).

For the final chapter, Kapadia pushed deeper into the archive than before, digitising and syncing original 16mm rushes to uncover unseen material. He retained the franchise’s signature absence of score, adding music only to the opening sequence to help new audiences understand the scale and emotional sweep of the project.

“Young people who’ve seen that opening (which shows cast members at different ages of their life) say they’ve never seen anything like it,” he said. “They thought it was done by AI.”

He believes the Up films remain a profound study of parenting, environment and the nature‑versus‑nurture debate. “The first seven years of a child’s life are the most important,” he said. “Two children can grow up in the same home and be completely different. It’s the most human thing I’ve ever worked on.”

Katie Price: “I let them film everything”

There’s a strange parallel between Up and a new Sky documentary charting the trials and tribulations of Katie Price, the first episode of which was premiered in Sheffield. From a working class background her highs and lows have been lived out almost daily in front of our eyes for four decades.

“The media has always shown her through the lens of tabloids, reality TV or social media each with its own agenda,” said series producer Phelan Glen. “What fascinated me was her combination of resilience and vulnerability. I wanted to understand where that fortitude comes from.”

Katie Price: Nothing to Hide charts the emergence of Price’s alter ego ‘Jordan’ on Page 3 of The Sun in 1996, her marriages, motherhood and multi-million pound contracts to cosmetic surgery and bankruptcy.  Originally commissioned as three parts, the series expanded to four to accommodate the material.

“When we first assembled it, we realised there was too much story,” said director Paddy Wivell. “We had to make tough choices and prioritised stories where we had access, contributors, and emotional depth.”

Price herself said she had only seen the first two episodes and that the production team refused to tell her who had contributed or what they had said.

 “When they asked if there were any areas I didn’t want them to go, I said no. They could talk to anyone,” she said.

“I’ve put a lot of trust in this team. When I saw the scene with Gareth [Gates], I was shocked. There are revelations about what we both thought 25 years ago and Paddy kept it all from me until I watched it.”

The production made more than 100 initial approaches to contributors with the biggest challenge persuading those people who had been burned by past media coverage.

“Gareth’s’ relationship with Katie Price had been heavily sensationalised,” executive producer Arron Fellows said. “We went back and forth for seven months. But once he understood that we were being honest not salacious, he agreed.”

Sky Documentaries’ head of commissioning Hayley Reynolds said the series also charts how attitudes to women, class and fame have shifted over three decades. “Katie has always been at the intersection of classism and sexism. She was a trailblazer in monetising her life long before social media made it normal.”

Price admitted that some filming days were “overwhelming” and that reliving certain moments was hard.

“But that’s what makes a good documentary,” she added. “I’m not polished. I’m not manufactured. I let them film everything.”

The need for weird

Andrea Arnold, the director of Red Road, Fish Tank and American Honey urged first time filmmakers to be more weird.

“If a film is only 50% on Rotten Tomatoes I’m more likely to watch that than one at 90% because it means some people really didn’t like it and that interests me,” she said on stage giving a retrospective of her career.

“We need to be more weird don’t we? What seems to be happening is that [filmmakers] are meant to fit an algorithm, into a box. I think filmmaking should be as unique and original and as weird as you can be. That’s what I love. Someone’s unique perspective.”

Arnold described herself as a visual filmmaker and that the conception of projects like Cow or Wuthering Heights begin with an image.

“I never set out thinking, ‘I’m going to write a film about X’. It usually starts with an image that I can’t shake. With Fish Tank, it was an image of a girl peeing on the carpet in a living room — really hard, like she meant it.

That image forces questions. I start writing to answer them. ‘Whose living room is that? Why is she doing that? Thow the story grows.”

She is not beholden to her scripts, preferring to work spontaneously with what happens on set.

“The script is a beginning. Then you have the people, the place, the day. I love being open to what’s happening right in front of me. If the sun doesn’t show up, or something unexpected happens, that becomes part of the film. There’s always a bit of chaos.”

 

BBC embraces home-based production for World Cup coverage

Streaming Media

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Last December, the BBC caught some flack when it announced that it would be presenting coverage of the World Cup 2026 from studios in the UK. While hybrid production models that combine on-site reporting with centralised studio operations are an increasing feature of broadcaster approaches to major sports events (NBC retains huge editorial teams in the US for coverage of recent Olympics, for example), such is the interest in the UK’s national sport at its most prestigious tournament that eyebrows were raised when it was claimed yesterday that pundits would be remotely commentating on matches from a “green box” at BBC Sport HQ near Manchester.

That the BBC has previously been criticised for sending too many staff and talent to cover overseas events seems lost on media reporting on the Corporation’s cost cutting decision.

Not only will the move save “a few million” pounds but it is being framed as environmentally friendly by reducing carbon waste by 19% compared with the Qatar World Cup 2022, according to the BBC.

Furthermore, with matches kicking off local time throughout the early morning (12am-03am) there are editorial arguments that being shown to be present at the ground is of less importance than it would be for extended daytime schedules.

The sheer scale of this World Cup, even were it to be hosted in the US alone, makes travel between venues and accommodation a logistical and budget stretch for any broadcaster.

In any case, the BBC is not grounding its coverage against green screen. That technology is outmoded and replace by virtual sets which can deliver a far greater sense of immersive presence at an event even one over 4000km distant.

For the upcoming tournament, the BBC is adopting a fully LED-powered virtual production environment at Dock10 in MediaCity, Salford.

“We’re still delivering hybrid coverage,” explains BBC Sport Design Director John Murphy. “But given the scale of the tournament, along with the practical realities of travel and sustainability, this approach makes far more operational sense.”

The strategy builds on experience gained during Euro 2024, when the BBC successfully blended XR graphics with live scenery from Berlin, including views of the Brandenburg Gate. However, Murphy acknowledges that creating the same sense of authenticity within a fully virtual environment presents a new challenge.

“In Berlin, we were working with a real location and enhancing it with XR elements,” he explains. “This time we’re starting with a blank canvas, so the challenge is how to create a space that still feels genuine and connected to the tournament.”

To achieve this, the BBC is combining LED volume technology, physical set elements, real-world imagery, AI-assisted workflows, and game-engine-generated environments. Rather than attempting to recreate host cities through photorealistic video alone, the production team is developing stylised virtual spaces inspired by the architecture, culture, and atmosphere of the World Cup’s host nations.

According to Murphy, the aim is to create “a space and a feeling” that captures the identity of the 16 host cities in the US, Mexico and Canada. The digital backdrop will be tweaked to reflect the weather and time of day at each venue.

Technically, the setup will include four cameras, a jib, Mo-Sys camera tracking, LED walls and flooring, and end-to-end HDR production workflows. The transition to HDR has been one of the project’s more complex aspects, prompting the BBC to draw on specialist expertise and technologies already established in the US sports broadcasting market.

Dock10 and Pixotope play key roles in the production pipeline, while graphics specialist AE Live and several other vendors contribute to the wider workflow. One of the project’s biggest lessons has been recognising the additional complexity that full LED virtual production introduces compared with traditional green-screen operations.

“We probably went into it a little naively,” Murphy admits. “It quickly became clear that this isn’t simply an extension of green-screen production. There are many more technologies, partners, and interdependencies involved.”

Extensive testing has also influenced the creative direction. Early plans to use real camera footage as virtual backgrounds proved challenging due to the level of precision required to maintain accurate perspective and parallax. As a result, the production team has shifted towards more flexible game-engine-generated environments built from processed still imagery and AI-enhanced assets.

Importantly, the BBC sees the investment as more than a single-tournament solution. The LED infrastructure is expected to become part of future football production workflows, providing a long-term foundation for programmes such as Match of the Day and other studio-based sports coverage.

In the UK the BBC historically splits rights to the World Cup with rival ITV. The commercial broadcaster has 50 matches and the BBC will air 54. Both will show the final live. 

For the first time, BBC Sport will deliver World Cup coverage across YouTube, TikTok and social channels - from live match streaming, alternative second screen watch-alongs and instant post-match reaction. Fans are also promised immersive VR experiences following every England and Scotland match.

FIFA World Cup 2026: The 104‑Super Bowl Broadcast Machine

Streaming Media

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On the eve of kick-off the scale of FIFA World Cup 2026 still staggers. FIFA president Gianni Infantino has compared the undertaking to “104 Super Bowls,” with a global audience of six billion predicted to watch some of the 104 matches packed into 39 days from 16 venues across the United States, Canada, and Mexico.

This ambition has prompted a shift to a fully centralised production model anchored at the International Broadcast Centre (IBC) in Dallas. Centralisation saves a lot of money in travel and logistics but the bigger factor is editorial consistency.

Lessons from last summer’s FIFA Club World Cup in the US proved invaluable, particularly around staffing, logistics, and assessing new directors. Working with local crews gave FIFA and Host Broadcast Services (HBS) a clearer picture of available talent, from replay operators to camera teams.

For 2026, FIFA is deploying 16 dedicated venue crews — one per stadium — rather than rotating a smaller pool. They will be supported by seven centralised replay teams based in Dallas.

The IBC is the operational hub for replay, graphics, camera shading, VAR (the official Video Assistant Referee), data processing, and stadium IPTV. More than 2,000 personnel from media partners will work onsite alongside FIFA’s production and tech teams.

Each stadium will host around 50 commentary positions and a routing infrastructure capable of serving roughly 50 media partners per match. While the core world‑feed philosophy remains unchanged (football is still directed primarily from Camera One, center and high in the stand) digital demands have transformed the scale of content creation.

Each match will be host produced in six dedicated camera feeds offered to rights holders, plus ISO feeds per match. On top of which more than 10,000 hours of shoulder content is being programmed.

Matchday directors and crew have been hired in from across Europe, South America, Australia, and beyond. To maintain quality, FIFA and HBS will rely on detailed editorial guidelines and a robust QC operation that provides live feedback and match reports.

Camera plan

All 104 matches will receive premium coverage with 45 cameras, including Polecams, Cablecams, ultra‑motion and super‑slow‑motion units, cine‑style cameras, 360° systems, and aerial/drone coverage (subject to US/Canada/Mexico regulations). FPV drones remain under evaluation due to regulatory and insurance hurdles.

For the Round of 32, additional ultra‑motion and isolated player cameras will be added. The plan is designed not just for broadcast but for every platform — a nod to the fact that the most downloaded shot of Qatar 2022 was a Lionel Messi celebration captured on an iPhone.

EVS’ AI‑powered XtraMotion will be used to generate super slow‑motion from any camera, including a new Cinematic mode that simulates shallow depth of field. Two replay specialists are producing a guide to ensure consistent application.

A Referee View camera mounted on the official’s chest will see action. This was developed by FIFA’s Football Technology & Innovation team, was considered a success at the Club World Cup 2025. It will be used sparingly to preserve impact and features AI‑enabled stabilisation.

Lenovo, which is FIFA’s official tech sponors, claim that its AI tech is being used to stabilize Referee Views and ”deliver first-person perspectives with up to 50% less motion distortion.”

Signal workflow

All camera feeds travel via Verizon’s contribution network to the IBC for graphics overlay (produced by AE Live) and onward distribution. Replay operators will also work from the IBC rather than stadiums, with onsite backups for redundancy.

Distribution uses IP (via SRT) and satellite, and for the first time remote partners can access the same router as those onsite.

FIFA’s post‑production hub for production of non-live programming, however, is not in Dallas — or even in the US. It is based in London to tap into the UK’s deep pool of editing talent and also to reduce travel costs.

3D VAR avatars & AI tools

As Official Technology Partner, Lenovo is supplying AI‑generated 3D player avatars for semi‑automated offside replays. Each player was scanned in a one‑second process before the tournament, producing unique models that improve visual accuracy for VAR and fans.

Lenovo has also developed Football AI Pro, an analytics tool available to all 48 teams. Trained on “hundreds of millions” of FIFA data points, it generates insights in text, video, graphs, and 3D visualisations — a levelling tool for emerging nations such as Curaçao and Cabo Verde.

Lenovo is also claiming to have helped reduce the delay in the live feed for FIFA’s official in-stadia screens to under 5 seconds. It is providing servers and other ‘technology’ to ingest and process “massive volumes of live video data” to distribute that content “in close to real-time via ten channels to over 1,000 screens” throughout FIFA venues. This is said to enable near real-time access to live match action and more synchronized viewing experiences.

 

FIFA World Cup: A cyber criminal’s cash cow

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Alongside financially motivated cyber crime, politically motivated hacktivists are also likely to target organisations linked to the tournament through distributed denial-of-service attacks, website defacements and disinformation campaigns.

The FIFA World Cup will be the largest, most digitally connected sporting event ever staged. Billions of viewers, millions of devices, sprawling broadcast infrastructure, and a three‑nation footprint create a perfect storm of opportunity for cyber-attack.

“This tournament will face more sophisticated, more automated, and more politically charged cyber-attacks than any event before it,” warns Darren Anstee, CTO for security at Netscout.

The scale of the tournament across the U.S, Canada and Mexico dramatically increases the potential attack surface for criminals and hacktivists alike.

Matt Hull, VP of Cyber Intelligence and Response at Manchester-headquartered global cyber security firm, NCC Group says the 2026 World Cup will present cyber criminals with “the biggest opportunity to make money this year”, as threat actors increasingly exploit global sporting events for fraud, disruption and political activism.

All the host nations recorded an increase in the weekly average number of cyber-attacks  in April 2026 compared to both March 2026 and April 2025.

A history of attacks

Cyber-attacks targeting major sporting events are nothing new. “Pretty much every single one of them over the last 20 years has seen attack activity,” Anstee explains. The severity varies depending on geopolitics, the host nation, and even the sponsors involved.

During the 2022 World Cup in Qatar, a China-linked crime group reportedly hacked into a major telecommunications provider, syphoning customer data and with potential to blackout live streaming of the games. Cybercriminals stole personal data from 15000 Uefa customers during Euros 2024; the French authorities recorded over 500 cybersecurity events during the Paris Olympics and earlier this year, Russian hackers targeted foreign ministry offices and Winter Olympics sites, including hotels in Cortina.

Anstee explains that attackers begin probing infrastructure six months before the event and ramp up again three months out.

“During the event, attacks spike around opening ceremonies, closing ceremonies, and high‑profile matches,” he says. “Some attackers aim for real disruption like taking services offline and keeping them down. Others simply want attention, using the global spotlight to amplify their political or ideological message.”

What makes 2026 different is the combination of geopolitical tension, automation, and scale. The last five years have seen a surge in activist‑driven cyberattacks linked to conflicts in Ukraine, the Middle East, and other flashpoints.

“This is a great opportunity for activists to get out their messages,” Hull says. “Being able to take down services that are associated with this event to impact the reputation of North America in general.”

DDoS

A major concern are Distributed Denial of Service (DDoS) attacks where the aim is to disrupt or take down the live stream. Netscout has identified over 100 groups actively using DDoS as a tool. Their attack campaigns, which can last days or many weeks, fall into three major categories.

Anstee explains, “The ones grabbing the headlines happen when the network is flooded by 20-30 terabits designed to overwhelm connectivity. If you fill the pipe everything behind it is unreachable.”

So-called ‘state‑exhaustion’ attacks target firewalls and load balancers with extremely high packet rates, overwhelming their ability to track connections.

The most sophisticated, and the hardest to detect, are application‑layer attacks. In this type of attack, bots behave like real users. They connect over TLS, even logging in and issuing queries.

“They are mimicking normal behaviour but at scale, they crush the application’s ability to serve legitimate users,” Anstee says. “There are also more supply‑chain dependencies and more legitimate traffic sources making geolocation filtering harder. It makes the threat surface bigger and it makes simple things harder.”

Every digital service associated with the tournament represents a potential target for DDoS. Not just for financially motivated attackers, but also for politically and ideologically driven actors looking to make a statement on the world stage “in the most-viewed country-versus-country competition.”

Streaming and broadcast platforms

Rights‑holders worldwide are on high alert. They’ve paid enormous sums for exclusive distribution rights and attackers know that knocking out a national broadcaster during a key match would cause chaos.

“You might not even need to hit the media itself,” Anstee says. “If you can’t log into your TV service, you can’t watch the match.”

Attackers increasingly target secondary vendors upstream of major services which are likely to be less defended. Anstee explains, “If I knock one of them over, what’s the downstream impact? Does it slow things down? Stop things in certain regions?”

With the World Cup spread across three countries, the supply chain is larger and more complex than ever.

Rather than directly targeting FIFA infrastructure, many attacks are expected to focus on the wider ecosystem supporting the event, including airlines, transport operators, hotels, payment systems and ticketing providers.

“All of the things that are critical to making the event a success are likely to be targeted,” Hull says. “How bad would it be if you can’t fly over to North America because one of your flights has been cancelled because of some activist activity? Or you’re over there and you can’t buy your tickets?”

Criminals are already using the World Cup as bait in phishing campaigns and fake online stores.

“We’re starting to see through some of our research phishing links being used with the World Cup as context, fake merchandise sites being spun up to buy kits.”

Automated attack

The rise of artificial intelligence has also made cyber fraud more convincing and easier to scale.

“Gone are the days of the dodgy phishing email that’s badly written,” Hull says. “AI-generated websites, deepfake videos, fraudulent betting platforms, and fake social media content could all be used to support scams or spread disinformation during the tournament.”

For consumers, the primary risks are likely to be ticket scams, fake merchandise websites and payment fraud. But Hull also warns that successful cyber attacks on infrastructure providers could create wider disruption for travellers and fans.

“It’s going to be scams essentially. Or they’re going to be losing money because they bought a dodgy ticket or they’ve purchased from a website that isn’t legitimate.”

More alarming is the rise of AI‑driven attack tools using chatbots.

“A novice can now orchestrate a complex, multi‑stage attack with a single instruction: ‘Disrupt this service tomorrow during business hours’,” Anstee says

Chatbots can automatically run reconnaissance to select the most vulnerable points of attacks. They can be programmed to launch attacks at scheduled times, monitor the ‘success’ or otherwise and adjust tactics on the fly.

Botnets like Mirai variants (a range of malware), and the AISURU botnet (reportedly the most powerful ever), and others now include millions of compromised devices. “You don’t need high‑rate traffic anymore,” Anstee explains. “If you’ve got a million and a half devices, each doing a tiny amount, you can generate enormous impact.”

Parking the bus

The role of cybersecurity specialists is to support the service providers, broadcasters, and sponsors who form the digital backbone of the tournament.

“No single layer can stop every attack,” says Anstee. “A 30‑terabit flood must be handled by the service provider, not the enterprise. But small, stealthy application‑layer attacks must be caught at the enterprise edge.

Over 540 service providers feed data to Netscout every hour, generating intelligence on 16 million attacks per year. This allows the company to identify active botnets, track attack infrastructure and feed intelligence back to customers in realtime.

Coordination is important too. For events like the World Cup, service providers, vendors, sponsors, and governments are sharing information. “It’s one of the reasons you haven’t seen major outages so far,” Anstee notes.

For major organisations involved in the tournament, Hull advises cyber preparedness should focus on “doing the basics right”, including password security, resilience testing and incident response planning. But he also stressed the importance of preparing staff for increasingly sophisticated social engineering attacks.

Hull says, “Major sporting events like this combine huge digital dependency with emotional public engagement and that creates ideal conditions for cyber-attacks and online scams.”

BTS Spider-Noir

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The Marvel universe series is designed to work both as a gritty monochrome detective story and as a stylised, visually saturated comic book world. 

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The familiar webbed crusader is given an adjacent character and origins story as a world weary gumshoe in between-the-wars New York for Amazon MGM’s series expansion of the Spider-verse.

Nicolas Cage plays Ben Reilly, aka The Spider, whose characterisation as “70% Humphrey Bogart and 30% Bugs Bunny” is about as accurate as you can get.

He arrives, in the pre-credit sequence, with a backstory that makes clear he is knackered and basically wants to hang his mask up for good. It’s this version of Spidey rather than as invincible superhero that sold editors Jennifer Barbot and Eric Kissack.

 “When [showrunner] Oren Uziel pitched to me, he said it was his chance to deal with his fears and insecurities about getting older,” recalls Kissack, who cut episodes xx and xx. “I immediately connected with that. My issue with superhero stories is the lack of vulnerability. It puts me at a distance. My favourite action movie is Die Hard because when John McClane is taking a punch or walking barefoot across glass, you feel his pain. Nick did such a great job being weary — someone who’s ‘over this’ but still feels responsible because he has this power he doesn’t want.”

Fellow editor Jennifer Barbot agrees. “I didn’t come in with years of attachment to Spider‑Man, so I could approach it purely as a story. I loved that we see Ben Reilly ageing, struggling, imperfect. I relate to that. I struggle in my own life, so I like seeing characters I can identify with represented on screen.”

Editorially, this meant amplifying moments of awkwardness and strain during action sequences. “We spent a lot of time amping up his pain in the action scenes — the grunts, the awkward landings, his physical exhaustion,” says Kissack. “He doesn’t fly effortlessly. He flies and then crashes. That was my way into the character.”

Stylistically, the show is remarkable for being presented in identical cuts with a genre-homage monochrome and a Looney Tunes Technicolor.

“It’s never been done before to have something that simultaneously would be in black and white and in colour,” Barbot says. Early in post-production, the team debated numerous approaches to monitoring dailies. “At one point we talked about just desaturating our TV and then we could see it in black and white,’” she recalls.

Irish cinematographer Darran Tiernan established the look shooting the pilot plus episodes 2-4, 7 and 8. He says, “Film noir cinematography is really about the psychology of what’s going on, telling the story in a visual and graphic sense. It was clear to me that we needed to go back to using older fixtures and rewire my brain accordingly.”

He chose to limit the use of softer light LED sources for older lighting equipment such as  Mole-Richardsons, Fresnels and other hard-light sources for deep contrast and sculpted shadows. He shot on Sony Venice 2 in RAW format to which one monochrome and one colour lookup table (LUT), devised with Picture Shop colourist Pankaj Bajpai, was applied on set.

To ensure consistency, they built a miniature studio where costume, production design and other departments could preview fabrics, textures and set elements under the exact lighting conditions and colour palette used on set.  

“Once we discovered the recipe, everyone was moving in the same direction,” Tiernan says. “We would monitor in black and white, except for focus pullers who required colour. Even before we'd do a take, I'd be flicking between them to see. Within a few days, you get very used to that because this is the way we are creating this world.”

Visual effects were created in colour because colour imagery contains more detail for compositing and effects work.

“When I edited, I only edited in black and white,” Barbot explains. “Sometimes we would go in for VFX reviews and that would be the first time I would see it in colour.. Suddenly the alcove is blue and orange! Then we’d apply the black‑and‑white LUT for the noir version and bring it into the Avid.”

This distinction began to affect the pacing of scenes. Barbot notes that certain shots simply “played better” in black and white. Wide atmospheric compositions featuring shadows, steam, silhouettes, and dramatic lighting often lingered longer in the monochrome version because noir imagery thrives on texture and visual contrast. In colour, those same shots could feel different - sometimes more like a Dick Tracy styled comic-book.

Barbot says she prefers the monochrome presentation because of how it intensified the noir atmosphere. “I hope everybody watches it in black and white first, then colour. The black-and-white imagery heightens the cynicism, darkness, and ambiguity, particularly during the introduction of arch villain Silvermane (Brendan Gleeson). All the shadows are in the background of that shot. It’s a very strong feeling.”

Kissack agrees that the two formats almost felt like separate shows. “The colour version feels trippier to me,” he says. “It was Influenced by early colour photography and [Alfred Hitchcock's 1958] Vertigo to become deliberately bold and psychologically expressive. It feels like something you haven’t quite seen before.”

While he admired the vivid costumes and production design visible in colour, he found the black-and-white version more emotionally immersive. “The black and white allows me to settle a little bit more into the story and the performance. I find it more engrossing.”

The film noir canon from the 1940s and ‘50s were an obvious source of editorial inspiration - The Third Man (1949) being one of the project’s key references. However, both editors quickly realised that simply copying classic noir pacing wouldn’t work for a modern audience.

“We did a lot of experimenting in terms of whether a 1930s style pacing would work in a modern piece,” Barbot explains. Early cuts that leaned too heavily into slow noir rhythms felt dated. “We settled on an blend where there’s some ’30s pacing that’s a little bit slower, but then there’s the rat-tat-tat of modern movies as well.”

Kissack cites romcom His Girl Friday (1940) as a major influence, particularly for dialogue scenes between Cage and Karen Rodriguez, who plays Reilly’s secretary and sidekick. “That kind of quick rat-a-tat dialogue was something we really tried to emulate,” he explains. “The hardest part was figuring out how much was pure noir and how much was modern. We weren’t making a slavish copy.”

This challenge came to a head when conceiving the show’s score. Initially, the editors temp-scored scenes with classic noir compositions from the likes of Sunset Boulevard or Vertigo. “That didn’t quite fit, but neither did straightforward modern scoring,” Barbot says. “We were searching for a hybrid approach that might match the show’s fusion of genres.”

The breakthrough came when editing episode 1’s ‘Dream a Little Dream’ number sung by femme fatale Cat Hardy (Li Jun Lix) in a smoky night club. “There’s sequence drums to it and a more modern production and this became the tonal blueprint for the entire score,” says Kissack. “It was a nod to lushness of the music of the past, but with more modern elements.”

For Barbot, this became the emotional centrepiece of the series and her favourite scene to edit. “It was romantic and beautiful and slow. I particularly enjoyed the opportunity to make the scene feel dreamlike through less literal editing choices. It didn’t need to feel like a fast music video.”

Because much of the show depended on unfinished effects, editorial often had to construct sequences working closely with VFX.  The opening of the pilot, featuring The Spider swinging through Manhattan, required extensive storyboarding and collaboration between editorial and visual effects. Barbot worked with storyboard artist Jim Martin, gradually transforming static images into animatics.

The final fight in the pilot proved particularly difficult because temporary effects could only suggest the final imagery. “You have to use your imagination,” Barbot explains. “We had many conversations about how long to hold on shots. Long enough to appreciate the effects and understand the action, but not so long that it drags.”

One sequence in episode six was especially experimental. This is a surreal fever dream resulting from the drugged mind of Ben Reilly which Kissack built in the edit in collaboration with visual effects supervisor Nordin Rahhali.

“Nicolas was filmed on a green screen kind of waving his hands around, just being Cage,” according to Kissack. “We had no idea what it would be. We spent two months figuring out what he was looking at.” Salvador Dalí’s concoction for Alfred Hitchcock’s Spellbound was the major visual reference.

With fellow editors Geraud Brisson and Tirsa Hackshaw, Barbot and Kissack worked with showrunner Oren Uziel, executive producers Phil Lord and Christopher Miller. Although Lord and Miller were often busy with Project Hail Mary, their occasional visits to editorial provided valuable outside perspective. Kissack jokes that after spending months immersed in the material, editors sometimes become blind to obvious trims or improvements. “They would come in and be like, ‘Oh, just lift that line,’” he says. “And we’d be like, ‘Oh … of course!’”

BTS: FIFA World Cup 2026

IBC

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Time-zone differences, travel demands, and the geographic spread of host cities have forced FIFA’s host broadcast and rights holders the BBC to rethink traditional production approaches.

As the 2026 FIFA World Cup nears kick-off, FIFA’s Host Broadcast Production division is confronting what may be the most ambitious live sports production ever attempted. With 16 venues spread across the United States, Canada, and Mexico — and 104 matches across a 39-day tournament — the scale of the operation is forcing a fundamental rethink of traditional World Cup workflows. FIFA president Gianni Infantino has likened the endeavour to “104 Super Bowls” which six billion fans are expected to watch at home.

At the centre of that transformation is a highly centralised production model built around the International Broadcast Centre (IBC) in Dallas, which FIFA Host Broadcast Production Head Oscar Sanchez describes as the “17th venue” of the tournament.

“We’ve been working on this project for over two years,” Sanchez explained at NAB in April. “The FIFA World Cup 2026 is humongous. I genuinely haven’t found another adjective for it. This is the largest project we have ever tackled.”

Sanchez should know. He has produced over 10,000 football matches worldwide in a 25 year career which has seen him contributed to six FIFA World Cups as a broadcaster or as part of the host broadcast team and a decade at Concacaf’s overseeing the broadcast of tournaments such as the Copa América Centenario, for which he won a Sports Emmy.

“Obviously, cost matters,” he says. “Centralisation saves a lot of money in travel and logistics. The less we need to travel, the lower the operational risk. No flight delays, no weather disruptions, no logistical issues. But the bigger factor is consistency.”

Valuable insights were learned during the FIFA Club World Cup in the United States last summer especially around staffing, logistics, and evaluating new directors. Working in US venues with local crews gave FIFA and production partner Host Broadcast Services (HBS) a clearer understanding of available talent, including replay and camera operators.

This includes deploying 16 dedicated production teams, one for each venue across the three countries, rather than rotating a smaller number of crews around the tournament. They are supported by seven centralised replay operations teams working from Dallas.

Dallas works well because it’s one of the few locations from which you can reach virtually every World Cup venue within about three hours.

The IBC is the technical heart of the tournament and the operational backbone for replay, graphics, camera shading, VAR, data processing, and stadium entertainment workflows. More than 2,000 media partner personnel are expected onsite, alongside FIFA’s own production and technology teams.

At venue level, however, the production footprint remains substantial. Each stadium will support around 50 commentary positions alongside a complex routing infrastructure capable of serving approximately 50 media partners per match.

While the core world feed philosophy remains familiar - football is still primarily directed through the main Camera One - digital production demands have transformed the scale of content creation surrounding each game.

“We’re producing six feeds per match, plus isolated feeds and over 10,000 hours of additional content and shoulder programming,” Sanchez explains. “The greater challenge now is helping broadcasters efficiently locate and curate content quickly.”

 Crew composition and local integration

Historically, World Cups have used 6-8 core production teams, mostly European. FIFA intentionally broadened the talent pool to include directors and crews from South America, the US, Mexico, Australia, and beyond.

“We wanted to open more opportunities to people who live, breathe and enjoy football,” Sanchez explains. “Nobody can say that a country like Argentina, the world champion, doesn’t live and breathe football.”

The Club World Cup proved particularly valuable in evaluating how those newer directors handled the pressure of a FIFA event.

“Anybody can direct a football match,” Sanchez says. “But when you realise you are going to a FIFA World Cup with 50 cameras and an audience that could reach a billion people, we need to go beyond technical knowledge. We need to analyse who is mentally ready to take on this challenge.”

Directors are encouraged to bring their trusted core team members (vision mixers, replay producers, etc.) with different editorial teams bringing slightly different directing styles. For example, South American directors often focus heavily on coaches, while European directors prioritise players. French directors may favour more artistic ultra‑slow‑motion shots.

To maintain consistency FIFA and HBS will continue using extensive editorial guidelines and a quality-control (QC) operation. The QC team provides live feedback for directors and produces reports for every match and every multi‑feed (training, press conferences, etc.).

EVS’ AI-enabled XtraMotion will also be used to create super slow-motion content from any camera. The latest version includes a Cinematic effect that simulates a shallow depth of field and again can be applied to any standard footage. Two replay specialists are producing a guide for HBS’ EVS ops as to how to consistently apply the techniques. Operators can trigger the application of the chosen effect directly from the LSM-VIA remote controller, with a single click on a shortcut button.

The camera plan

All 104 matches will receive premium coverage with 45 cameras, including Pole cams, Cable cams, Ultra‑motion and super‑slow‑motion, Cine‑style cameras, RefCam, 360° cameras and aerial/drone coverage (subject to strict US/Canada/Mexico regulations)

FPV drones were tested previously but face regulatory and insurance challenges. Their use remains under evaluation.

For the Round of 32, additional ultra‑motion cameras and isolated player cams will be added.

The camera plan is not designed solely around broadcast but to create content for every platform and every audience. Indeed, the most downloaded shot from Qatar 2022 was a Lionel Messi celebration which was shot on an iPhone.

The RefCam (called Referee View), developed internally by FIFA’s Football Technology & Innovation team, was considered a major success at the Club World Cup. It is not part of the ISO feeds for rights‑holders but is included in the host broadcast and will be used sparingly to maintain impact. It features AI-enabled image stabilisation to reduce motion blur.

Signal workflow

A clean world feed is produced from every stadium, sent back to Dallas where graphics are added and for onward distribution.

All camera feeds travel via Verizon’s contribution network to the IBC where centralised replay and graphics are produced.

Feeds are distributed via IP (using SRT) and satellite. For the first time, remote partners can access the same router as those physically at the IBC.

Fifa’s official post‑production hub which will handle editing for the tournament is not in Dallas, or Texas or even in the United States. It’s in London principally to leverage the large UK pool of talent experienced at fast turnaround matchday edits. It’s also another way for HBS to reduce travel costs.

Centralised replay & graphics

Replay operators will be based at the IBC, rather than stadiums (with on‑site backups for redundancy). This allows FIFA to assemble the world’s best operators in one location, improving consistency and quality. These teams are organised into language clusters (English, Spanish, French/German).

Graphics operations are also centralised and produced by specialists from AE Live.

Commentary strategy

With 104 matches, English‑language broadcasters will be stretched, increasing reliance on host commentary. FIFA is fielding 32 commentators (16 play‑by‑play, 16 analysts), with a more global, less English-centric mix than in past tournaments.

Their commentary is now used across highlights, clips, social media, and digital content not just live broadcasts.

3D Avatars for VAR

Lenovo’s sponsorship of the event as Official Technology Partner has yielded a number of innovations. These include AI-enabled 3D player avatars for integration into match broadcasts during semi-automated offside technology replays.

The system was tested at last year’s FIFA Intercontinental Cup staged in Qatar.  Before the start of World Cup 2026, each player’s body was scanned in process that took just 1 second. The scans form the basis of the avatars which are unique in appearance, dimensions and proportions which Lenovo says will provide a further data source for player tracking and VAR officiating.
Previously, VAR replays were generated solely using player tracking data. FIFA can use avatars to show a “visually matching” image of the player.

“The output will depict the player more accurately for fans watching in the stadium and around the globe,” Lenovo said.

The Chinese tech provider has also helped deliver an AI-powered data analytics tool. Football AI Pro is available to all coaches, players and analysts of all 48 teams at the World Cup and has been trained on “hundreds of millions” of FIFA-owned and -organised football data points to generate insights in text, video, graphs and 3D visualisations.

It is being pitched as a means to level the analytics playing field since it is available to newbie national sides Curaçao and Cabo Verde as well as the European and South American elite.

BBC opts for home advantage

The FIFA World Cup offers rights holders a chance to rethink how major tournaments are presented in an era shaped by sustainability, cost pressures, and increasingly sophisticated XR technologies.

The BBC is moving away from traditional green-screen presentation toward a fully LED-based virtual production environment at Dock10 in MediaCity. The project reflects wider industry trends toward hybrid production models.

While the BBC will still deploy teams on location, particularly for the latter stages of the tournament, much of the presentation output will originate from Salford.

“We’re still doing hybrid coverage,” explains BBC Sport design director John Murphy, “but the scale of the tournament and the realities of travel and sustainability mean this approach makes much more sense operationally.”

The broadcaster’s move builds on lessons learned during Euro 2024 coverage from Berlin, where the BBC successfully combined XR graphics with real-world scenery, including the iconic Brandenburg Gate backdrop. However, Murphy admitted that replicating that sense of realism inside a fully virtual studio presents a very different challenge.

“In Berlin, we had the advantage of a real location and were layering XR elements into it,” he explained. “This time we’re starting with a blank canvas, so the question becomes ‘how do you create something that still feels authentic?’”

The answer lies in a hybrid visual approach that combines LED volume technology, physical scenic elements, real-world imagery, AI-assisted processing, and Unreal Engine-style environments. Rather than attempting to recreate photorealistic cityscapes entirely through live-action video, the BBC is developing stylised virtual environments inspired by the architecture and atmosphere of World Cup host cities.

Murphy describes the goal as building “a space and a feeling” that reflects the cultural identity of the tournament’s host nations.

The production setup itself will feature four cameras, a jib, Mo-Sys camera tracking, LED walls, LED flooring, and HDR workflows throughout. The transition to HDR has proven particularly complex, with the BBC leaning on external expertise and technologies already proven in the American sports market.

Dock10 and Pixotope are central to the technical workflow, with the BBC also working alongside graphics provider AE Live and other specialist vendors. Perhaps the biggest lesson has been understanding just how many operational layers full LED virtual production introduces compared with traditional green-screen workflows.

“We probably went into it a little naively,” Murphy admits. “You quickly realise this is not just an extension of green-screen production. There are many more partnerships, technologies, and dependencies involved.”

Testing has reshaped key creative decisions. Early plans to use actual camera footage as virtual backgrounds proved problematic because of the precision required for parallax and perspective accuracy. The production pivoted toward more dynamic game-engine-generated environments built from processed still imagery and AI-enhanced assets.

 Importantly, the project is not being viewed internally as a one-off World Cup investment. The LED infrastructure is expected to be integrated into future football production workflows, creating a longer-term legacy for Match of the Day and other studio-based sports programming.

 

ends

 

Jean-Michel Jarre: treat artists as commercial partners not data suppliers

RedShark News

The French electronic music star evangelises use of AI in creative work but wants copyright rules in place

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Jean-Michel Jarre is perplexed at the creative industries’ luddite attitude to AI. Arguing that all technology is neutral until charged by human action, the electronic music pioneer claims AI is not a threat, or at least not only a threat.

“It can be one, especially regarding intellectual property, but above all, for me it’s the equivalent of a collaborator, a muse and an assistant,” he said at the World AI Film Festival (WAIFF) of which he is an ambassador. “AI can expand the boundaries of my imagination. That’s why I advocate so strongly for making people understand that we must not confuse the tool with its use. A paintbrush is neutral; it’s the person holding it who decides. And with AI, it’s exactly the same thing.”

The Rendez-Vous artist, now 77, has been using AI to create music and visuals for his concerts for a decade and prefers to think of AI as ‘augmented imagination’.

He expanded on this them at WAIFF in Cannes where his wife, the actor Gong Li, was president of the film festival.

“Ideas for a script or a film or music often appear mysteriously, from within us. But in reality our subconscious harvests from our analogue ‘big data,’ which is our memory, our culture, our environment, our family, even our children. All of that, gathered randomly, produces an idea. AI is not a category of creation in itself. It is simply an augmented way of using that source of inspiration.”

In which case, he acknowledged, all artists are thieves. “I steal everything I hear, everything I see, everything I watch. That’s what shapes an artist’s identity.”

Emotion in art comes from disobeying the rules he suggested. “Think of the greatest performers — Édith Piaf, David Bowie, Ray Charles. They often sing slightly out of tune or off the beat. That tiny deviation is what gives you goosebumps. It’s the creative power of disobedience.”

By extension he argued that creators can use AI to bend the rules. “Trying to extract something unexpected from it is our specificity. It allows us to give something back to [the machine] that is human and creative.”

The role of the creator becomes that of a curator of their own ideas, he contended. “Instead of choosing one path at a time, AI offers multiple possibilities simultaneously, which we can sort, combine, and prioritise. That fundamentally changes the creative process.”

Jarre claimed that music and cinema industries had grown conservative out of fear of innovation.

“Everyone stays in their lane and fears what might disturb them, which is paradoxical for creative work,” he said.

“When photography appeared, painters petitioned to have it banned, saying it would be the end of painting. When cinema appeared, it was seen as a threat to theatre.

“When I started in electronic music, I introduced it at the Paris Opera [in 1971], and the orchestra musicians unplugged the sound system in protest, saying electronic music would be the end of orchestras.

“I remember when people said synthesisers were cold and clinical and could never create music as well as acoustic instruments. But we forget the essential point that it’s not the orchestra or the tool that creates emotion. “It’s because we have invented the violin that Vivaldi existed. It’s because we invented electricity that we had Jimi Hendrix. And it’s because we are inventing a new learning AI model that new forms of art will be created in future.”

He was dismissive of the hyperbole around copyright theft saying that piracy has existed since the time of Rembrandt and Vermeer.

“We must not confuse the misuse of a tool with the tool itself. Fraudulent use of AI does not mean AI itself should be questioned.

“If you ask me whether the next Gainsbourg, or the next Tarantino is in danger, I would say no. What differentiates AI from an artist is that an artist transforms the past into something individual and unique. That cannot be replicated.”

On the other hand, Jarre - a former president of CISAC (the International Confederation of Societies of Authors and Composers) - called for regulation and artist renumeration.

“The value of Generative AI companies today relies largely on human created content. So at some point, we must stop being treated merely as data suppliers and instead become full commercial partners,” he said.

The need to establish rules for AI is urgent, he added. “We need to bring together cinema, music, books, video games, literature, journalism and reach global agreements. I don’t believe we can apply traditional copyright philosophy anymore, simply because most algorithms can no longer identify the exact origin of their sources. It will be difficult to demand traditional copyright remuneration. We need a new model. That’s the challenge.”

Characterising AI’s current state as a “Wild West”, Jarre said rules would enable greater freedom not weaken it. “The difference between chaos and democracy is precisely rules.

“AI means democratisation. Just as music production became accessible from a bedroom twenty years ago, AI will allow people to make films at low cost. This will have a profound impact on emerging countries. Many young creators in Africa, Asia, and elsewhere struggle to produce work; soon they will be able to do so almost independently. That changes everything.

“And if tomorrow an AI‑generated work produces emotion, then perfect — that’s great. As long as intellectual property issues are resolved, there is no problem.”

Provocatively, WAIFF was held in Cannes and in the same Palais just a few weeks before the auteur-led 79th Cannes Film Festival. Jarre thinks one will soon outride the other.

“What we are witnessing here is the equivalent of the Lumière brothers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat. Cannes began modestly with just a handful of people 79 years ago. WAIFF will take far less time to become a major global reference.”