HBO Europe Gothic Horror Series 30 Coins Finished in DaVinci Resolve

written for Blackmagic Design

Directed and co-written by acclaimed horror master, Álex de la Iglesia, (The Day of the Beast, The Last Circus), 30 Coins takes viewers into a world where nothing is as it seems, and nobody can be trusted.

https://britishcinematographer.co.uk/hbo-europe-gothic-horror-series-30-coins-finished-in-davinci-resolve/

HBO Europe’s eight-episode drama series follows Father Vergara (Eduard Fernández), an exorcist, boxer and ex-convict, who is exiled by the church to be the priest of a remote town in Spain. As past enemies come back to haunt him, strange things begin to happen. The town’s ambitious mayor Paco (Miguel Ángel Silvestre) teams with local veterinarian Elena (Megan Montaner) to unearth the secrets of Vergara’s past. The three find themselves in the middle of a global conspiracy to control the 30 pieces of silver paid to Judas Iscariot when he betrayed Jesus of Nazareth. The coins are, as one might imagine, cursed, and contain supernatural powers.

Lending the story its distinct and unsettling visual style is director of photography, Pablo Rosso, ([Rec], Veronica) working closely with regular collaborator, Chema Alba, senior colourist at Deluxe Madrid.

“Pablo is a wonderful person to create with,” begins Chema. “Our starting point was discussing texture more than colour. In pre-production we did a lot of lens tests to get the best anamorphic ‘feel’ with a special interest in flares, blurred corners and chromatic aberrations.

“I’ve also worked with Alex before and I know that he likes a lot of contrast, but you have to give him the possibility of seeing into the blacks and the shadows.”

When principal photography ended after a six month shoot in December 2019 and Chema had receipt of the first raw edit of the pilot, he and Pablo asked the production company if they could take a week out to prep the show together.

“Just before Christmas, we spent a week together brainstorming without being under pressure to commit ideas immediately to screen. This really helped us to hit the ground running when colour correction began properly in February.”

The pair had already curated a colour bible of looks and moods, which really helped to keep the series on track when the pandemic enforced lockdown in March, as Chema was able to complete a lot of the work on his own.

30 Coins is acquired on the Sony Venice, mounted with anamorphic Hawk Vintage ’74 lenses. Rosso shot 6K framed for 2.1 aspect ratio for a 4K UHD deliverable. Aside from a few scenes filmed in New York, Jerusalem and Rome, the bulk of the show was shot on location in a small town near Madrid.

“The lenses themselves generated a natural blur around the edge of the frame, which helped with texture. For large parts of the show we enhanced and accentuating the soft blur of the image. The action stays central to the image, but the surrounding area has a lot of blue tones, grain and textures.”

Chema explains that the overall look of the show harks back to the classic horror films of the ‘70s which featured soft imagery and a deathly green colour palette.

“We are set in a Spanish town so there is a lot of yellow and orange in there, but we pushed the greens every time we could, especially in the shadows. We avoided blues at night and instead opted for grey hues, with black and white contrast for skin tone.”

Chema partnered with colourist Charlie Villafuerte, and together the pair made a huge number of shot composites in DaVinci Resolve.

In one episode, Chema and Charlie were tasked with including different layers within 300 shots, most of which contained complex VFX (DMP or 3D integrations). But there were no plates of the layers shot in-camera; they were all created in Resolve.

“VFX gave us different plates and we just played around with the image, depending on the type of shot, angle of the lens and the size of the flies, and we composited layer upon layer,” Alba explains. “Alex always wanted the ability to change things in the last moment. I had 5 to 10 different plates of animated flies and we’d move them closer or further from the camera in real-time. Some shots have seven layers of image composited in Resolve. We have the source camera, then VFX and now we have half a dozen different layers – all combining together in 4K. We were exploring the limits of the Resolve software and the hardware.”

Chema performed a significant amount of the compositing with the Curves Editor. “I used curves to make two different contrasts, one for about 80 percent of the image and a lower contrast, about 20 percent outside this curve, in the same image. This allows me to put a lot of contrast in that main curve, while retaining the raw image for the shadows. This technique allows you to get a lot of detail.

“We had a lot of texture and contrast across the show but if you push too much texture it works for the male characters, because they are rough or tattooed, but was too harsh for the skin tone on the female characters. So, for 10 or 20 shots across the show we removed the extra texture to soften some of the skin.”

In the final episode the director wanted a really dense atmospheric look which drew on all the colourists’ skill. Resolve combined VFX, multiple layers of atmospheric elements and blur, with the actors rotoscoped in the middle.

“Thanks to FX simulations or 2D/3D creative assets, our VFX department provided us with 30 different layers with diverse speeds, movements and density. We used a combination of layer blending modes in the editing page, plus extra alpha outputs to isolate people or buildings. We used up to 3 or 4 layers of elements for each shot, played with contrast and tuned with Lens Blur FX get the final texture. It was pretty challenging.”

The biggest challenge grading this show was simply time. “Since every episode has about 2000 shots because of the fast-paced nature of the edit, and because there are a lot of layers to craft, so trying to get this amount of work done in three of four days per episode you have to go really fast.

“I’ve been working with Resolve for three years so I am very familiar with it. Resolve is really easy to use, it is so intuitive and really helped us manage the demand.”

 30 Coins is co-written by Iglesia and Jorge Guerricaechevarría. Executive producers for HBO Europe are Steve Matthews, Miguel Salvat, and Antony Root. Iglesia and Carolina Bang are executive producers for Pokeepsie Films. The series was produced with participation from HBO Latin America.

OnLine Editors at Deluxe Madrid are Mario Martínez Duque and Juan Ugarriza and postproduction producers are Yolanda Hurtado and Paula Lidón.

 

Episodic Content Continues to Grow and Virtual Production Meets the Demand

copywritten for Sohonet

Chuck Parker, CEO, Sohonet – looks ahead to 2021 and the top trends the Film, TV and Ad industry should expect to see. Blog 1 in this series zones in on the continued investment in episodic content, and how C19 has given virtual production a material boost in financial viability.

Content has always been king but it has never been more important to own a larger, higher quality and exclusive library than your competitors than it is this year. As content providers have doubled down on direct to consumer strategies, it is episodic content that continues to surge in volume. In contrast to single features, episodic productions provide a sustained wave of fresh content with which to engage subscribers for longer, generating higher perceived subscriber value.

https://www.sohonet.com/our-resources/blogs/episodic-content-continues-to-grow-and-virtual-production-meets-the-demand/

Market leader Netflix, which ended 2020 with over 195 million paid customers worldwide, spent $17.3 billion on content last year – two and a half times more than Amazon Studios. By 2028, analyst BMO Capital Markets predicts Netflix will spend $26 billion per year on content. Amazon and Netflix have to spend considerably more on originals than rivals, in part because companies like Disney, NBCUniversal, CBSViacom and Warner Media Group have deep content catalogues they can pull from to enrich their services. Nonetheless, Disney+ and HBO Max have also unveiled huge investments at their investor days in their episodic slates building on franchises from Marvel, Star Wars, Pixar and DC. 

In early 2020, there were analyst concerns that the lengthy lull in content production would negatively affect streaming business models in 2021. Netflix, however, said it still expects to launch more originals in each quarter of 2021 than in 2020. And with 73% of its subscribers coming from North America, Netflix has to pursue growth overseas with local content commissioned to attract customers in territories like India, Brazil and Spain.

As a result, the 2015 industry average of 1,400 annual TV and film productions (with material budgets) will soar well beyond 2,000 a year as competition intensifies. Even at such stratospheric multi-billion content budgets, each provider is aiming to strip costs out of production and still retain top tier value on screen. In parallel, the biggest challenge beyond the health and safety constraints of the pandemic are the real estate constraints created by the surge in volume of productions, which is driving more and more productions to shoot their content “off-lot” in empty warehouses and other large structures.

 

Virtual production offers an answer 

Combining live-action footage with computer graphics in real time was still relatively nascent for TV and film production when Covid-19 crashed into our industry, but the key benefit of reducing the need to travel for on location shooting has given virtual production a material boost in financial viability. While the pandemic persists, virtual stages are both a means to continue production safely and to reduce the cost of on location work (ie associated travel and accommodation costs).  If the practical effects delivered via virtual production can reduce the overall VFX budget for productions as promised, then this trend will accelerate rapidly.

The upfront capital cost of the technology remains expensive and the techniques are not yet embedded throughout the workflow, so expect growth to be gradual in 2021. When LucasFilm and Disney made The Mandalorian Season 1, each 40-minute episode reportedly cost $15m – the same as the per-episode budget of Game of Thrones’ finale. From their investor day, we learned that Disney’s long-term goal in pioneering virtual production at scale is to produce episodic series with all the production value of its blockbuster features with a step order reduction in costs and a faster turnaround. 

 

The underlying technology, such as fine pixel-pitch LEDs and hyper-performance graphics cards, will advance in performance and reduce in price as the industry scales up (aided by Moore’s Law), making virtual production more accessible. The surge of real estate investment for purpose-built production studios will certainly give it a boost as well.  Directors and actors will gain creatively by being able to work in real-time with CG assets on set. Practical effects – like miniature models and explosions – will increasingly be done more efficiently in software on the virtual production stage. Greater use of the techniques and technologies will lead to better results and more streamlined production.

This has implications for the VFX industry and in particular for the titans of the sector. We will see VFX houses rapidly pivot to offer workflows and talent which marry virtual production with practical effects and the specialist creation of creatures and digital humans. It is not a given that those companies which were powerhouses prior to the pandemic will win this work. The VFX sector has suffered disproportionately during the halting of production; revenue streams were stunted; thousands of staff laid off. The winners in the race to virtual production will be the businesses that can perform at scale with the available capital to invest in the resources required to support this industry pivot while re-invigorating their core VFX business.

 

Real-time streaming takes live sports to next level

Copywritten for Net Insight

Led by the rescheduled Tokyo Olympics, 2021 will be a massive year for live sport hopefully accompanied by the return of crowds to stadia. But the pandemic has permanently scarred club and league finances.

https://netinsight.net/resource-center/blogs/kenth-innovation-blog-3-streaming-live-sport/

According to figures quoted by Deloitte in its end of year report, the NFL lost U$5.5 billion of stadium revenue last year. The NBA was set to lose half a billion. Multiple sports in Europe from the elite to the grassroots are surviving off government bailouts.

Even eSports were not immune with spectator events halted. Consequently, analyst NewZoo cut its growth forecast for the industry in 2020.

With reduced household incomes and intense competition from SVOD entertainment services, pay-TV broadcasters are under pressure to revitalize interest in the sports rights they own – or risk losing them entirely when the next round of tenders is up for grabs.

Discovery will be looking to further recoup the $1.45 billion investment it made in rights to the Olympics on Eurosport TV channels, Eurosport online and on new streaming platform Discovery+ beginning with the 2020 Tokyo Games.

Broadcasters and leagues need to rethink their approach to live sports by investing in the infrastructure to power digital channels, streaming platforms, and augmented and virtual reality solutions.

Fan interaction

Most importantly, they need to start interacting directly with fans, a growing number of whom no longer want to passively consume content. Whether that’s with AR/VR or a ‘watch party’ with friends, a live chat with athletes and pundits, fans or selectable audio options, today’s sports fan expects to interact with the video.

Esports and live-streamed gaming platforms have been leading this trend for a while. Indeed, lockdown resulted in particularly explosive growth. Twitch grew 101% year on year to April 2020, YouTube’s gaming service grew 65% and Facebook Gaming was up 238%.

The immediacy and intimacy of the interaction with friends, fans, and players create a social community that traditional broadcast will increasingly look to adapt to its own.

The promise of IP streaming and video has always been about the interactivity and enhanced user experience and that means more pressure to reduce latency. Low latency content delivery allows the consumer to become their own producer.

But we can go further. To translate Tier 1 sports like F1 or multi-sport events like the Olympics into a real time interactive broadcast you don’t just need ultra-low latency. You need to transport multi-camera environments and highly rich metadata all of which needs to be synchronized, end-to-end, glass to glass and securely managed across the whole production workflow.

The sports and live event experience is being recreated before our very eyes. The revolution is here and this time it’s personal.

Behind The Scenes: This Is The Night Mail

IBC

A number of feature films have been completed under coronavirus guidelines but among the first in the UK, possibly anywhere in the world, was This Is The Night Mail. 

https://www.ibc.org/trends/behind-the-scenes-this-is-the-night-mail/7204.article

The micro-budget British feature was written and produced by filmmaking team Joanne Reay and Andrew Goth who run production outfit Unquiet Skills.  

Reay is a former writer and producer in the BBC’s film department for eight years and head of Red Bull’s cinema division with feature writing credits including Bring Me the Head of Mavis Davis, Gallowwalkers and Mindgamers, the latter two directed by Goth and starring Wesley Snipes and Sam Neil. 

Quarantined at home like everyone else last March, Reay took the opportunity to revisit a long-cherished idea for a screenplay. 

“As a writer you are often torn between spending time writing passion projects with no certainty that anybody will want to read or those writing scripts that already have some kind of finance and that may be optioned by a distributor. The need to make a living is often the driving force.  

“When everything closed down suddenly there was no-one chasing me. No-one banging at the door. I needed to scratch the itch and get it done.” 

The itch was an idea that Reay had had in several months earlier when walking to a meeting in Belgravia. She had passed a row of five classic red telephone boxes. “I don’t know how to explain it but something lodged in my brain. I couldn’t shake this striking visual.” 

From that germ, under lockdown, emerged This Is The Night Mail, a story she describes as a love letter to London, and a satire on the gig economy with a supernatural twist.  

Greenlighting production 
She hadn’t scripted with Covid shooting conditions in mind, assuming like many of us that lockdown would be a temporary affair. As restrictions dragged on and Pact released its first return to production guidelines she and Goth decided to direct Mail and to fund it themselves. 

“Pact guidelines knocked out a number of the projects we had in train but of all the ideas we were juggling it was Night Mail which seemed most suitable,” she says. “Since I’m perpetually spending my time asking investors to invest in scripts I’ve written I also thought it would be appropriate at this time, if we’re asking other people for their time and effort, to put our money in. The minute you get financially comfortable you stop being creative.” 

Serendipitously, the interaction between characters in the film was mostly between an actor and a ghost. In other words, with actors acting with themselves – a perfectly Covid-safe scenario. The story also takes place over 24 hours meaning the actors could start and finish in the same costume. 

“I can’t imagine how a period drama could be done, certainly at that time when we were all figuring out safety protocols,” she says. 

Zoom casting 
Plans to shoot in several locations around London were shelved in pre-production. Instead they found a make-shift sound stage at a disused abattoir at King’s Cross which studio hub Tileyard plans to develop into a fully functioning production space.   

Casting for the film’s 34 actors was completed over Zoom.  “We couldn’t risk any last-minute casting so we worked incredibly fast with Zoom auditions and fully cast a month before shooting, including all the minor roles,” Reay says. “Everybody signed Covid safety procedures and undertook to report any sign of infection to our dedicated Covid officer.  

A team of runners was enlisted to ensure hand sanitisation, regular face mask changes and to clean the surfaces of all kit, props and craft stations.  

“That’s an entire tier of work we’ve never had to have before,” she says. “Working in a bubble and maintaining social distancing on set was, initially, very daunting. Filmmaking is a very social and intimate experience especially on set but it did turn out to be achievable as long as the processes are in place. For instance, nobody could share a walkie talkie as you would normally. Each handset was assigned to each individual, there was no sharing.”   

Social distancing measures and limits to the numbers of people on set at any time restricted the usual flow of communication. That was not necessarily a negative. 

“We had to choose what to say and who to interact with and to make sure every single interaction counted,” Reay says. 

There was no budget to have actors and crew isolate in a bubble – for which read hotel. Instead, everyone was responsible for travelling to and from set. The actors had to take care of their own hair and make-up. At the end of a day’s shoot they would put their costume in a bag to be sanitised overnight ready for pick up the next day.  

Shooting on Alexa 
Stylistically, the film’s grammar changed too. Cinematographer Beatriz Sastre essayed what Reay calls a “extremely photographic style” rather than the raw, handheld look typical of stories with a younger target audience.  

“We decided to deliberately go for something more formal; far closer to something director Wes Anderson might conceive,” Reay explains. “This allowed us to have a very composed frame. For instance, we could position actors symmetrically either side of a doorway whilst at the same time giving them social distance.” 

The film was shot on Arri Alexa Minis paired with Cooke S4i lenses, a package that would be normally outside the boundaries of the film’s small budget. Rental company VMI stepped in with a discounted deal.  

“We had absolutely no hope we would shoot on Alexa. We were prepared to borrow cameras from friends and colleagues until we met with VMI.” 

A few sequences involving hand to hand fighting required the actors to choreograph separately with stunt coordinators. 

“When the actors arrived on set, we put the two of them together, like two sides of a dance,” Reay explains. “On the few scenes which necessitated actors and crew to be really close to each other we shot quickly for the least amount of contact time.”  

Shooting in parallel 
With all the PPE and health safety procedures in place, Reay chose to squeeze the picture’s normal 18-day shooting schedule into nine days by shooting A and B units in parallel.  

“Once we’d brought our team together the onus was on me to go forward. Everybody gave of themselves to make it happen come hell or high water but there comes a moment where you can’t exploit people’s goodwill any longer. It was not possible to shift our schedule back.”  

The intense timeframe was extremely stressful for her, she admits. “You get no downtime because you’re constantly running between one unit and another but it’s the only way we could maintain Covid standards. I’m not sure we could sustain this over an eight-week shoot simply because everyone’s vigilance would naturally begin to flag.” 

The film’s editor, Steven Forrester, also directed B camera, partly because he was keen to expand his experience in that area but also as a smart means for him to keep in touch what was being shot.  

“Since we were filming in parallel it made sense to work with someone who was closely involved with the footage,” Reay says. “It meant Steven could collect dailies from (digital technicians Notorious DIT) and then load into his laptop and watch rushes to make selects while on set. We’ve worked together before and I trust that his instinct of what I want in a good take is the same as mine.”  

With offline complete, the production is in the latter stages of finishing by Michael Pentney, co-founder at Fantomeline Pictures. Like the grade, the final sound mix is being conducted remotely. Reay hopes to have the trailer ready by earlier February and the film ready to show to buyers by the end of March. 

Meanwhile, Reay is already embarked on another feature production that, similarly to This Is The Night Mail, can be shot in a contained environment and with multiple crews in parallel. 

“If all goes well, I’d look to shoot in the summer, if restrictions have been sufficiently lifted,” she says. “This Is The Night Mail is proof of concept to show financiers that there is a way to shoot safely.”  

Tech + Media Predictions 2021 - Part 1

The Broadcast Bridge

The industry experienced futureshock head-on in 2020. The impact will take a long time to unwind but it’s already clear that some changes will be profound and not all of them bad. These changes include remote workflow permanency, virtual production shifts from exotic to routine and genuine efforts to save the planet. Here’s hoping.

https://www.thebroadcastbridge.com/content/entry/16283/tech-media-predictions-2021-part-1

A Hybrid Future

The future of post is not going to be back to pre-2020 normal, but it won’t be the full remote situation enforced by health lockdowns either. The reality is that clients need a hybrid solution, that allows them to have some edits locally, some remote and others splitting their week between the facility and home. It is up to facilities to offer this flexibility which will also benefit their own staff’s work / life choices.

If you’re in LA or London, having to commute across town for a client / artist session just amounted to lost time. Many of those journeys can now be rendered unnecessary given the experience of remote review and approval and realtime screen sharing tools like Sohonet ClearView Flex, Moxion and Evercast.

Several facilities have developed their own content management production, planning and communication tools. Envy for example launched Envy Remote and Technicolor has its own branded Pulse and Techstream. Warner Brothers’ De Lane Lea has Alfred which is intended to support production workflows from camera to conform. Being able to manage content and track progress in this way is essential as post and production evolve into a distributed (international) workforce.

The legacy of Covid-19 will therefore be a ‘mixed economy’ of remote and on-premise working which will ideally be led by the individuals working on each project, rather corporate diktat.

The store and compute resources of many facilities will remain on-premises, perhaps shared into a private cloud, for several years. Ultimately, everything will be on the cloud. The reason it won’t be switched sooner is largely because of cost. The media industry let alone the post production sector is not sufficiently large for AWS or Azure to start striking meaningful discounts. Moving data in and out of a public cloud is probably cost prohibitive for all but the largest and constantly running projects.

Just as more postproduction workflows are going to be maintained remotely the need for face to face collaborative editing and craft finishing may never go away. That’s one reason why city centre facilities in hubs like London, Paris or Montreal will remain important. The human interaction of peers is part of the act of creation. If you stay remote permanently there’s a risk of losing that.

There are those that think the heightened focus on creating efficiencies means a shift to the ‘sharing economy’. This de-emphasizes the need for ownership where access to tools and equipment looks more like renting. For media technology, services in the cloud may replace hardware, experts might be hired ‘as needed,’ and unused space like a sound studio will not sit idle for as long as it had before this new economy.

Virtual Production Rises

LED stage installations have expanded around the world during the pandemic, which makes virtual production poised to expand significantly in 2021 and beyond. This supercharged growth is due to the control over the environment, time and location; as well as having the ability to provide a safe area by bringing the set to the talent where they are located, rather than flying crew around the world for a production shoot. Virtual set production is within reach of lower budgets, allowing for million dollar sets and locations without spending the million dollars.

There’s no reason why indies can't consider virtual production as a replacement for green screen or location work where travel becomes an issue.

The ability to do much more work remotely has streamlined the way film and TV drama production teams work in prep, as well as in postproduction. Virtual location scouting, monitoring camera feeds over iPads on set or in in another city, cameras operated from small remote heads, and remote lighting controls will be an essential part of the cinematographer’s toolkit going forward.

No Greenwashing On Sustainability

Virtual production is not to all tastes. Many filmmakers will prefer shooting with available light on real world sets in actual locations but a major benefit of virtual production is that it reduces carbon footprint.

2021 should be the year when carbon neutral goals jump front and centre of all industry decisions, alongside that of employee, staff, crew wellbeing. There is already momentum from the likes of the DPP’s ‘committed to sustainability’ initiative and BAFTA’s Albert along with new EU-wide energy ratings for appliances including TVs (that A* rated 48-inch panel you bought in April is probably now a ‘F’ in the new stricter labelling).

According to Albert, an hour of TV typically generates about 14 tonnes of CO2. That’s just production: it doesn’t include transmission or distribution. To put that into some context, an hour of TV has the same impact as running three homes for one year. Sustainability is fundamental to how media organisations should operate going forward.

Improvement in videoconferencing and telepresence can reduce the carbon-heavy cost of corporate travel. Remote distributed anywhere production is not a nice to have concept but an essential business continuity and environmentally conscious workflow for any content producer.

Every Bend in the River Filmed For Posterity

copywritten for RED

The desert, river, canyons and teaming wildlife along the U.S.-Mexican border are filmed as spectacularly as in any blue-chip travelogue, but the scenic beauty of The River and the Wall belies an urgent political message. The 1,200-mile journey undertaken by filmmaker and conservationist Ben Masters explores how a border wall would affect wildlife, immigration, security, landowners, and public lands.

https://www.red.com/stories/ben-masters-the-river

With four friends, including ornithologist Heather Mackey, river guide Austin Alvarado, conservationist Jay Kleberg, and NatGeo explorer Filipe DeAndrade, Masters spent three months (late 2017 to early 2018) following the Rio Grande from El Paso to the Gulf of Mexico with the intent of capturing the landscape for posterity.

“In 2016, when Donald Trump was talking about building this wall, we didn’t know how much border wall would be built,” Masters explains. “We wanted the film to be a historical archive of what the border looked like at that time and to show what building a continuous wall would actually have to go through and over. The wall is controversial and our idea was to contribute to the discussion. People’s understanding has changed over time as they realized that building a wall across these massive canyons was not only crazy, it wouldn’t achieve what they wanted it to.”

Masters is producer, director and cinematographer on documentary shorts including 5,000 Miles of Wild and Horse Rich & Dirt Poor through his company Fin & Fur Films.

“I always shoot with RED cameras but in this case what we wanted to do was capture the landscape in a format that would stand the test of time,” the filmmaker explains. “That’s why we chose the HELIUM sensor and the DSMC2 brain. We were going to film landscapes that might not be possible to film in 10 years because there’s a wall built through it.

“I wanted to shoot 8K to futureproof the visuals. I’m not looking 5 to 10 years ahead but 50 to 100 years down the line. We had historical archive in mind knowing that some of the images might never look the same again.”

Masters was joined on the journey by a rotating crew of cinematographers including Phillip Baribeau and John Aldrich. With DSMC2 HELIUM as the A camera paired with Sigma Art primes, they traveled by canoe, horse, and bicycle.

“I’d like to say we didn’t abuse the camera … but we pretty much abused it,” he says. “We ran rapids. We got them wet. We played with them in the snow. They got covered in ice and all sorts of dust. Those cameras are pretty tough.

“We also mounted the RED in a helicopter and shot some aerial sequences stabilized in DaVinci Resolve. It looks like it was shot with Cineflex, but we didn’t have to pay $500,000 to do it.”

The native Texan native had explored dozens of miles of the border area before, but says he was shocked to find how quite dramatic the landscape was even in his home state. He notes, “I’ve spent a lot of my life on the U.S.-Mexico border, but it is just astonishing how remote and rugged and steep the canyons are. Hundreds of miles of vertical cliffs and magical rock formations populated with diverse wildlife species.”

Masters continues, “The border itself follows the Rio Grande. At the beginning of our journey, much of the region through which the river flow is rugged, arid, and desolate. Isolated mountain ranges soar 6,000 feet out of the desert floor with sides covered with trees. Once you leave canyon country and head closer to the gulf, the desert starts to get more tropical. The ecosystem is characterized by extremely dense trees, brush and palm with an incredible diversity of birdlife.”

The trip was followed by b-roll and interviews with politicians and border law enforcement – both Republican and Democrat – over the following six months. Some 60TB of REDCODE RAW was edited in Resolve and finished at 4K for a feature length documentary that premiered at the SXSW Film Festival where it earned the award for Best Texan Film.

“The HELIUM sensor delivers such a beautiful image and 8K gives you so much to work with in post,” says Masters. “You can punch in and stabilize shots and it’s just a really handy camera to have when you only have one. For example, you can shoot interviews then punch into the 8K and generate another angle from that single shot.”

He adds, “I would love to have made this film just about the beauty of the landscape and the wildlife but our politics has an impact on the natural world. Unfortunately, it’s kind of hard to separate the human impact from the world we live in so we have to incorporate people and current events.

“I felt The River and the Wall was a new way to look at a controversial topic.”

Masters is currently shooting a feature-length wildlife documentary that is a love letter to Texas. “Deep in the Heart interweaves the human component of wildlife conservation more than a traditional blue-chip natural history film,” says Masters. “Some of the species included are bears, mountain lions, alligators, bison, and never before seen footage of ocelots.” 

Deep in the Heart will be completed in 2022. 

Let’s hear it for the Legendary Martell Sound – Mixing trailers remotely with ClearView Flex

copywritten for Sohonet

Sound mixer and company owner Marcus Zalewski on mixing trailers remotely and providing real-time review for clients using ClearView Flex.

https://www.sohonet.com/our-resources/blogs/lets-hear-it-for-the-legendary-martell-sound-mixing-trailers-remotely-with-clearview-flex/

In Hollywood, if you want a theatrical trailer mixed,  Martell Sound is the place to call. Over the three decades since Eric Martell inaugurated the business, the full-size soundstage at the historical Lot Studios on Formosa Avenue and Santa Monica Boulevard has become a staple of motion picture advertising. Since Martell’s retirement, the brand’s reputation for excellence has been carried forward by sound mixer and company owner Marcus Zalewski.

“Everyone in town who has ever mixed a trailer knows Martell Sound,” Zalewski says. “Over the last 30 years, every major studio and a good number of the independent studios have taken their work here. Our main business remains mixing theatrical movie trailers in 5.1 , Dolby Atmos and IMAX for theatres and TV but we’ve evolved to also mix for digital platforms whether that’s iTunes or other streaming distribution services.”

Along with the rest of the industry, Martell Sound was forced to shut down in the second week of March in 2020. With movies theatres closed and theatrical releases suspended or pushed back, it didn’t reopen again for two months.  

“By the end of May, some work started to return but understandably no one wanted to come to the mix stage,” he recalls. “I tried remote working on a couple of projects by sending QuickTime files along with stereo audio to clients. I’d have to wait a day to receive sound mix notes. Then I’d make the adjustments and resend the file. It was a three-day process just to get anything done and was effectively unworkable.”

That’s where Sohonet’s ClearView Flex came in.

“It was Disney who recommended it to me,” Zalewski says. Disney is one of Martell Sound’s main clients. “They had already started using it and let me check it out. Immediately, I could see that this was a game changer. All of a sudden, we could review mixes in real time and bring everyone in on ClearView to look at material at the same time as if they were in the room.”

He explains that he typically hosts between three and 10 people on the mixing stage for approvals. “I continue to have three to 10 people watching and listening during approvals, but they are all in their own homes.”

He says, “It’s so important to give people the sense of what they need to see and hear in order to get product to market. I’m lucky to have a great relationship with my clients who also all have tremendous experience in working with sound. They know how consistently I mix between 5.1 and stereo and they were confident that what they heard via ClearView Flex would be a great representation of the theatrical presentation.” 

Zalewski himself went into the soundstage to work on the final mix and to stream sessions from there to clients using ClearView Flex including trailers for the second season of The Mandalorian for Disney+.

“Because of continued lockdowns, most of my clients are stuck at home and we’ve been doing everything over ClearView,” Zalewski says. “ClearView is now my ‘go to’ equipment. Trailers are always against the wall when it comes to timeframes and release dates and a three-day turnaround was making it exceptionally tough.  It would have been extremely difficult to get work done without ClearView Flex.”

 

What Streamland’s Technicolor deal tells us about post-production

IBC

What does the decision by Technicolor, arguably the motion picture industry’s best-known brand, to let go of its dailies, grading, sound and picture editing services tell us about the health of the post-production industry? 

https://www.ibc.org/trends/what-streamlands-technicolor-deal-tells-us-about-post-production/7197.article

The pending sale by Technicolor of its post-production assets to Streamland Media may be an unavoidable result of Covid-19 and the drastic shutdown of film and TV production in 2020. Arguably, its predicament signifies a more fundamental problem with the business model of post-production, namely that scale no longer equates to efficiency.

Taken together with the Deluxe bankruptcy of October 2019, Devoncroft Partners is in no doubt.  The inescapable conclusion, wrote analyst Josh Stinehour ““is that the business model of post-production writ-large – is broken.”

While both Technicolor and Deluxe have a hundred-year history servicing motion pictures, in the last two decades they have targeted growth by acquisition. They accumulated post-production businesses principally in the global production hubs of LA and London to enhance existing dailies expertise with grading, sound, picture editing and VFX.

Corporate behemoth
Offering a full raft of facilities spanning geographies and staffed by thousands of artists, producers and technicians (Technicolor employed over 14,000 last September), combined with the gold-plated service guarantees of a Hollywood insider, was meant to entice studios to place their biggest productions onboard.

And Hollywood complied. Dozens of blockbusters passed through the Deluxe and Technicolor machine. Only last year Technicolor had a hand in posting projects like Bridgerton (Netflix), The Good Lord Bird (Showtime), Perry Mason (HBO), and Borat Subsequent Moviefilm (Amazon) winning two Emmies for its Sound Mixing of HBO’s Watchmen.

Yet neither company could rid itself of long-term debt. Deluxe was forced to restructure after its debt burden went above $1 billion. Technicolor began 2020 with a debt of nearly $1.6 billion – ironically some $250 million more than French group Thomson Multimedia paid Carlton Communications for the original Technicolor business (which included then, as now, a DVD distribution arm) in 2000. It completed Chapter 15 proceeding in a US bankruptcy court by September.

To the outsider, it seems that Deluxe and Technicolor were too slow to adapt their business to digital after a century of monopolising film processing. Did the attempt to iron out efficiencies detract from local facility culture too?

Pandemic exposed weakness
Certainly, Technicolor’s production services activities were seriously affected by the halting of live action shooting. Some 50 sets of dailies stopped overnight in March. In this it was far from alone and in truth its problems predate the pandemic which only served to exacerbate weaknesses in its existing business.

As Stinehour emphasises, “All the current disruption has done is accelerate Technicolor restructuring and amplify its magnitude. Covid is exposing structural issues.”

Toward the end of last year, Christian Roberton, who joined MPC in 2003, was promoted to president of the Production Services division and tasked with streamlining the operation. 

As head of Technicolor’s Film & Episodic VFX department, Roberton had “built organically one of the largest and most effective VFX agencies in the world.” During his tenure not only did the division win several Oscars (including for MPC’s work on Disney’s The Jungle Book) but grew sales from $60 million to $1bn.

His new mission, in Technicolor jargon, was “to drive growth and margin enhancement by cross fertilizing all current Production Services creative knowledge and by adapting our client servicing to the post-Covid era, marked by an increased need for technological solutions and digital production expertise.”

That has resulted quickly in the division’s sale netting Technicolor $36.5 million and allowing the firm to concentrate on VFX and animation which are less dependent on live production shoots. It retains well regarded brands The Mill, Mikros and MPC.

Streaming content demands scale
The sale comes at a time of unprecedented demand for post-production services, particularly in episodic TV. In its strategic plan 2020-2022 Technicolor claimed its Production Services, were “well placed to benefit from the burgeoning growth of streaming platforms and the unprecedented demand for original content”. It was also “well positioned to capture outsized market share in Film & Episodic, Advertising, and Animation.”

Netflix spent $17.3 billion on content last year – two and a half times more than Amazon Prime Video. Netflix is even confident it will launch more originals in each quarter of 2021 than in 2020.  By 2028, analyst BMO Capital Markets predicts the streamer will be spending $26 billion a year on content. And with 73% of total subscribers from North America, Netflix has to pursue growth overseas with local content commissioned to attract customers in territories like India, Brazil and Spain. 

What’s more, Disney and Warner Brothers are among studios poised to invest heavily in content, recently unveiling huge episodic slates building on franchises from Marvel, Star Wars, and DC for Disney+ and HBO Max.

Sohonet CEO Chuck Parker thinks the recent industry average of 1400 large annual TV and film productions will soar beyond 2000 a year as competition intensifies.

“Even at such stratospheric multi-billion content budgets, each provider is aiming to strip costs out of production and yet retain Tier 1 value on screen,” he says. “They are all figuring out how to do that.”

At this volume, Netflix and the studios don’t necessarily want to be placing piecemeal work with smaller facilities but large orders with groups that can deliver the high and consistent quality to deadline.

As Sherri Potter, Technicolor’s explained to IBC, the rationale for the macro-post-production businesses is far from broken. In fact, it needs doubling down.

Fundamental flaw
“Schedules across TV and features are becoming more compressed as demand for content ramps up,” Potter said.

“What’s more the creative process now continues throughout the whole post process so that where creatives request changes to their vision we can respond and deliver at any point. The reason why Studios come to us is that they entrust we won’t fail and that we will throw whatever resources we need at the problem to ensure that even the most complicated production delivers.”

Yet Technicolor couldn’t find the efficiencies in marketing, R&D, round-the-clock workflows, technology investment or management to insulate it from the ravages of the pandemic.

Devoncroft suggest that those efficiencies may not exist. “Covid is no so much causing issues in the media technology sector, as it is revealing long-present structural issues,” it states. “The fundamental flaw with the post-production business model is every incremental $1 of revenue is matched by an equal and opposite $1 (at least) of cost.” 

The move to cloud infrastructure and remote distributed (more flexible, less capital intensive) collaboration offers a technological solution. The pandemic has highlighted some of the existing strengths of cloud hosted workflows, not least putting to bed many executive fears over content protection, but it has also shown that it is not not yet financially viable for the industry to make a wholesale jump.

“Cloud economics will be solved sooner rather than later but it is still more expensive to launch your favourite tool into the cloud and use it for six months than to rent it (in more traditional fashion),” says Parker.

“Major studio facilities providers with banks of Avid hardware, Baselight or Resolve seats will continue to deploy those in their own machine room or downtown data centres and sweat the investment in a hybrid architecture until cloud economics justify the switch.”

VFX face squeeze
There are similar pressures in the VFX sector. Here, the use of Virtual Production technologies to reduce the cost of location work has been given serious impetus during the pandemic. While growth will be gradual as technology costs come down, VFX facilities are in a race to capitalise on pending high demand.

“VFX houses need to rapidly pivot to marry Virtual Production techniques and technologies with their expertise in creating CG creatures, digital humans and other specialist animation,” says Parker.

It is not a given that those VFX companies which were powerhouses prior to the pandemic will win this work. The sector has suffered disproportionately during the halting of production; revenue streams were severed; multiple staff laid off.

“The winners in the race to VP will be the business that can perform virtual production at scale and with the available capital to invest in resources,” Parker says.

A management issue
The failure or success of any post-production business has to be attributed, at least in part, to its management. It is notable that two of the longest serving and most successful post-production executive teams of the last two decades, at Framestore and The Farm, are integral to new super-sized facility groups.

William Sargent co-founded Framestore in 1986 as a VFX shop for commercials. He recently led the takeover of the post-production assets of Deluxe (including Company 3 and Encore), employs 6,000 people and oversees a company with multiple locations including Mumbai, Montreal and Melbourne. A stated intent is to work on studio projects across all media from mobile to Imax and theme parks.

“Working with the same assets for a TV spin-off and a ride is definitely more efficient under one roof,” Fiona Walkinshaw, global managing director, Film, Framestore told IBC. “Efficiency is what a lot of clients are looking for.” https://www.ibc.org/trends/analysis-why-framestore-snapped-up-company-3/method/6994.article

Vikki Dunn and Nicky Sargent (no relation to the Framestore co-founder) founded broadcast post facility The Farm in Soho in 1998 with the backing of ad agency WPP. Under their stewardship The Farm Group grew outposts across London, Manchester and LA regularly winning plaudits for its work in what is a notoriously cut throat and low margin business.

When WPP sold its 75% stake to LA’s Streamland Media (formerly Picture Head Holdings) in June 2019, Dunn and Sargent reinvested their 25% stake (worth about £17m) in the venture, which collectively runs LA-based Picture Shop and Picture Head, West Hollywood audio post facility Formosa Group, Ghost VFX locations in LA and Copenhagen and Vancouver’s Finalé Post.

To that portfolio of “exceptional family of boutique businesses” (in the words of Streamland CEO Bill Romeo) can now be added Technicolor’s post division. Dunn and Sargent remain directors of The Farm and involved in decision making as shareholders in Streamland which is backed by Trive Capital and Five Crowns Capital.

If anyone can knit together a series of ‘boutiques’ into a corporate powerhouse without sacrificing the client-focussed touches and local market knowledge that built the individual facilities in the first place it would be the management skills of Dunn and Sargent.

Jeffrey Schaffer, founder and managing partner of Five Crowns, certainly believes there’s profit to be made in the sector at scale: “We envision a bright future for the evolution of post-production upon the completion of this deal.”

 

Re-wiring the future

InBroadcast p36-37 January 2021

Given the move to cloud, is it time to redefine what we mean by systems integration or does the job become something different when no longer working exclusively with cables and bits of physical kit? 

http://europe.nxtbook.com/nxteu/lesommet/inbroadcast_202101/index.php#/p/36

“There are connotations that systems integrators pull SDI cables across the floor,” Tim Burton, MD, 7fivefive. “We take systems and integrate them together to create pipelines and workflows for broadcast and media companies. This could be cloud systems, it could be software, and it could equally be hardware. The basics haven’t changed.” 

Modern, IT-based media systems form the basis for entire value chains or represent the business model outright. “This is the reason why an SI is expected to deliver, above all, expertise in networking high-tech products and IT systems as well as in developing technology platforms,” according to Qvest Group. It recently acquired OnPrem Solution Partners, a US-based M&E supply chain consultancy.  

Qvest continue; “Solutions for content production and distribution, media networks and device management, IT layer systems, multi-channel contribution and distribution, media management and backend systems are not just ends in themselves. Each is part of an integrated system environment, which is why the optimum combination of this type of system makes such a significant contribution to business success.” 

The move from conventional broadcast into IT engineering systems means the complexity has risen. Suddenly SI’s need dual skillsets. “That knowledge also needs to be dovetailed together,” says Burton. “You’ve got to understand the requirements that broadcast has, coupled with the container and limitations that the IT systems provide and you’ve got to work with those two things to deliver the solutions together.” 

Among 7fivefive’s recent jobs was a remote edit solution for A+E Networks UK to enable its team to successfully work from home during the pandemic.  7fivefive deployed sixteen GPU accelerated virtual machines so that A+E Networks UK could access high-powered machines concurrently while working remotely. Subsequently­­, non-GPU accelerated virtual machines were deployed, which enabled non-edit users to access internal systems and assets from home. 

“Even though we are not necessarily building out as many rack rooms and handling cables, there is the same amount of design work and project work and delivery considerations,” says Burton. “The difference is that it is done remotely from a keyboard and often scripted versus people with tools and flight cases cutting cables and screwing things in.” 

The take up of cloud computing and Infrastructure as a Service have grown rapidly in a bid to control business/premises costs and increase flexibility and accelerated during 2020 as a result of the pandemic. Some parts of the production process have embraced cloud more than others.  

“For a company moving a large volume of linear channels into a cloud environment, you can’t tell me there is not the same amount, of build, automation, testing, documentation, and disaster recovery planning as always,” Burton explains. “You are still delivering the same piece, but you have the complexity of delivering it in the cloud. SIs need to help customers do their cloud economics, to help them understand how much it will cost. The days of sending someone a bill for X number of boxes, cables etc have gone. With cloud economics, there is a need to understand how many hours of content will be hosted, the transcode cost, the storage costs and so on. There is more work than there has ever been in that space. 

“Infrastructure is now longer hand-crafted, it is scripted and self-deploying,” Burton argues. “One of the key drivers for this shift is product life. In a traditional setup, hardware would be implemented and stay in a rack for at least five years. In a cloud environment, where infrastructure could be spun up for one transcode, you cannot handcraft that infrastructure. SI’s need to stay up-to-date and be ready to respond to critical requests and the only way to do that is through automation.” 

dB Broadcast is still seeing strong demand for physical new-build projects and infrastructure installations, although these are increasingly inspired by IT-centric approaches rather than traditional broadcast technology. Next gen broadcast centre builds, like the one which dB Broadcast recently completed at BBC Central Square in Cardiff, are using IP rather than SDI as their core routing technology. According to Commercial Director, Daniel Hipkin, this requires extensive fast networking installations and detailed configuration, “just the type of services which dB has been providing more and more frequently in the past few years.”  

Of course, there are only so many greenfield projects on the scale of the BBC Wales, or Bloomberg Television’s new HQ in London, but some smaller facilities are being built and many existing ones are still to be refreshed and upgraded now that the standards are maturing and IP technology for broadcast is gradually becoming easier and more stable to deploy. This is just as true for vehicles - where the potential savings in space and weight are significant - as it is for fixed installs. 

“One of the challenges of the last few years has been the lack of commonly agreed standards and practices for building IP systems, requiring SIs to carry out additional detailed work to design systems and test equipment from multiple vendors,” informs Hipkin. “Configuration and testing can be extremely complex, and issues can reveal themselves only during extensive testing routines and often after many software iterations. The nature of the work brings about changes to the skill sets required, reducing need for traditional broadcast wiring technicians, but an increased demand for software specialists and networking engineers.” 

This drives changes to recruitment and training – the latter a field that dB Broadcast has always taken very seriously. One of its most recent graduate recruits, a database specialist, is already wrangling with the huge volumes of configuration data which IP/IT projects are tending to generate. 

“In some cases, a private cloud approach has been preferred, with clients opting for an on-premise data centre, driven by concerns over security and data recovery,” reports Hipkin. “But in others, huge public cloud services such as AWS and Microsoft Azure are proving to be reliable and cost effective. dB Broadcast is satisfying demand for expert consultancy in how best to deploy and navigate between these options, as large broadcasters tend to be highly risk averse when it comes to their content but sometimes the economics are hard to ignore.” 

ATG Danmon sees a strong demand for studios and production systems at new sites for systems that include both traditional technology and a growing number of VR solutions. “We are seeing how IP-based systems are becoming a viable option when deploying large greenfield new-builds or major system upgrades,” says MD Russell Peirson-Hagger. However, for smaller scale systems, IP infrastructure may not offer any operational edge over a traditional architecture, or a cost saving. It is a matter of choosing the right solution for the situation. Therefore, the traditional skillsets are still relevant, whilst ensuring that we keep up with new emerging technologies.” 

The company recently completed a 4K production and live streaming facility at the Lafayette London events centre. Commissioned by the Venue Group, the system allows for live relay of stage performances as well as studio-style recording. It includes robotic cameras, an audio/video production control room and a floor-to-ceiling rack of auxiliary equipment. 

Peirson-Hagger does not anticipate the demand for on-premises facilities changing any time soon. “With the knowledge and expertise available from across the Danmon Group we are well positioned to help customers with any level of hybrid mix that best works for them. Our role as a long-standing SI has always been to understand our customers’ requirements and to advise them on the solution that best fits in terms and functionality and cost.” 

NEP Group says it’s at a stage where for new broadcast facilities it is building, IP is a given. The company says it’s completely possible to build an entire IP system from camera to broadcaster. It’s why the Andrews Hubs in Australia have been so successful. 

“IP has made implementing large, more flexible and scalable systems easier,” says Joe Signorino VP, Systems Integration & Design, NEP US Mobile Units. “But, up to now, IP is harder to configure, monitor and trouble shoot. It requires training and really skilled engineers. Luckily, we have the best engineers at NEP and are dedicated to developing our talented team. 

In the three years since the Andrews Hub project launched network switches have doubled in processing power, port speeds have quadrupled from 100Gbs to 400Gbs ports – and all for less investment. In the next three years we will see 1Tbs ports. Europe is building a 400Gbs inter-capital network and NEP is already working with telcos in Australia on the next generation of the Hub WAN. 

“I am excited to see detailing and adherence to the SMPTE and AMWA standards,” says Signorino. “This will help us make great steps to interoperability so we can get to a more ‘plug-and-play’ environment and really help to reduce most of the issues around integration.” 

While the industry is definitely moving towards centralised and virtualised production platforms, OB trucks will still be around, in some form, for the foreseeable future. “First, we will still need to get cameras and audio to venues,” NEP says. “Additionally, while some regions of the world have the infrastructure and the connectivity required to move to these newer platforms, other regions are still working to get there. That said, we are definitely seeing a shift in how OB trucks are designed and built as IP technology has moved in and the emphasis is shifting from hardware to the software that powers it.”