Behind the Scenes: No Time to Die with Cinematographer Linus Sandgren

IBC

Bond is back but wounded. Cinematographer Linus Sandgren delivers the emotional punch with 35mm, 65mm and IMAX film. 

https://www.ibc.org/no-time-to-die-behind-the-scenes-with-cinematographer-linus-sandgren/7951.article

Daniel Craig’s 007 has not been afraid to reveal vulnerability under his tuxedoed machismo. Unlike the previous twenty films in the series this mental scarring has bled across the four Craig storylines. Notably, it is Bond’s mourning for Vesper Lynd whom he encountered and lost in Casino Royale (2006) which has coloured the spy’s revenge vendetta and relationships to this point.  

“We want to combine the legacy of action, glamour and escapade at the heart of Bond with the more intimate and emotional version played by Daniel in our storytelling,” says No Time To Die’s cinematographer Linus Sandgren FSF ASC. 

The extent of this concept can be felt in the pre-credits sequence filmed in Matera, south Italy which features 007 back in the classic Aston Martin DB5 first seen in Goldfinger. 

“It’s a romantic picture postcard location that turns into an action inferno,” says Sandgren. “The whole scene feels violent but intimate and immediate, shot with handheld IMAX cameras [and aerial work]. Everything that goes on in this scene is so intense. You can feel how hard it hurts Bond.” 

This is the Swedish cinematographer’s largest production to date by some margin. A regular for directors David O Russell (American Hustle) and Damien Chazelle (La La Land, for which Sandgren won an Academy Award) he was hired by director Cary Joji Fukunaga (Beasts of No Nation, True Detective) and producer Barbara Broccoli following a private screening of First Man, the moon landing feature he made with Chazelle. 

“That was in 2018. I spoke with Cary on Skype initially and found we very much aligned in how we would present Bond and in particular his desire to shoot on large format film.” 

Fukunaga has also served as cinematographer notably on Beasts of No Nation. He would been intrigued that Sandgren filmed the lunar sequences in First Man with IMAX cameras. 

Bond films are 35mm stalwarts. Only Skyfall has gone fully digital (shot by Roger Deakins BSC with Arri Alexa, for which he was Oscar nominated). In keeping with the classic tone of No Time To Die Fukunaga and Sandgren agreed from the outset to shoot 35mm (on Panavision Panaflex Millennium XL2 using G series Panavision lenses) and also to feature extensive sequences on 65mm (using the Panavision Panaflex System 65 Studio with some scenes using IMAX cameras – including the iconic down the gun barrel sequence). Drone shots were captured from an Arriflex 435. 

“Film is much more colourful [than digital] and it always gives me joy to get the negative back slightly enhanced by the processing of the film itself,” the DP says. “When you watch this film in IMAX you don’t see the edge of the frame. There’s more of the picture above your head, below your feet as if you’re inside the helicopter, inside the movie.” 

He’s pleased that many of these sequences are left uninterrupted in the finished picture. “Cary very much cut the film he intended to. Sometimes you find a film being reedited a lot but here, when we decided to shoot single immersive takes, he let them run in the film entirely. It just shows that what we intended on set worked.” 

Working from Fukunaga’ story outline (co-scripted by Bond regulars Neal Purvis and Robert Wade with acid touches from Phoebe Waller-Bridge) Sandgren designed storyboards to represent his thoughts on colour and lighting scheme and fleshed this out with production designer Mark Tildesley (Phantom Thread) and concept artist Tim Browning (Spectre). 

“Cary wanted the story to take place in as dramatically changing environments as possible. You expect a Bond film to have exotic locations but they exist in a realistic way. There’s a romance to them. So, we have Bond retire to a small Jamaican fishing village. We found the most beautiful beach there and built him a house. It doesn’t exist, but it could.” 

Similarly, the production scouted locations in Norway for a fjord side retreat. They found the perfect lake near Oslo but it lacked any suitable buildings for the scene. So they built one in London and shipped it across. 

“In Matera, the idea was to take this picturesque rural town and turn into a jaw dropping action sequence. Nothing in the town is supposed to look modern. The backdrop for the scene was rock, stone, cave – materials that it makes it so much harder to crash into.” 

The gritty nature of the scene in which the Aston Martin rotates in the town square with machine guns receding into its headlamp well relied on in-camera FX coordinated by the legendary special effects expert Chris Corbould.  

They avoided green screen as much as possible across the film but still required 1300 VFX shots split between Cinesite, Dneg and ILM. 

Part of Sandgren’s job was to find a consistent look for scenes set in the burning sun of Cuba and Italy with the snow and ice of Scandinavia, Scotland and the Faroe Islands. His solution was to push the differences further by contrasting darkness with heat for “a visual tonality that is a little more expressionistic.” 

Dailies colorist Matt Wallach worked with Sandgren at Company 3 London. He says, “We got to spend hours in the theatre together really digging in and finessing continuity and issues related to shifting weather conditions and coming up with solutions for some of the particularly complicated sequences.” 

An injury to Craig paused filming and prompted rescheduling. That impacted a major sequence set in Havana between Bond and an army of Spectre agents. Elements of the sequence were shot with certain actors at one point, other actors at another, alongside second unit footage. All of that evolved over months.  

“So much depends on Daniel,” Sandgren says. “A lot of scenes take place around him. We had an outdoor set built and painted on the backlot at Pinewood but heading into Winter 2019 we knew that wasn’t going to last forever. Once Daniel was fit again [by October 2019] we had it repainted and relit.” 

No Time To Die is inextricably linked to Craig’s final performance in the role. His parting shot has him running away down an alley and disappearing from view around a corner. 

“Daniel really has so much emotion invested in the character that it really shows,” Sandgren says. “I view my job as cinematographer to connect the audience to the emotion of the moment. I care about what the image looks like visually but only to the extent that it influences what we should be feeling. The picture doesn’t need to literally describe what is going on but it should evoke an emotional response for what you want the audience to feel.” 

How Sci-Fi Has Achieved Streaming Lift-Off

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https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/how-sci-fi-has-achieved-streaming-lift-off/

Science fiction has often needed the giant canvas and big budgets of cinema to deliver outlandish spectacle but that could be changing as a new wave of stories open the genre up to the small screen.

It’s not just that production values can now stretch to world building space operas. Politically, culturally and technology we are at a point where reaching for the stars is increasingly attainable – and urgent.

The streamers are leading the charge. AppleTV+ has run two seasons of For All Mankind, dramatizing an alternate history depicting what would have happened if the Soviet Union succeeded in the first crewed Moon landing ahead of the US. A third season is in the works.

Amazon’s The Expanse has run five series, with a sixth and final in the works. It takes place hundred of years in the future when the solar system has been colonized by humanity.

Raised by Wolves created by Aaron Guzikowski with a helping hand from Ridley Scott who directed the show’s first two episodes is about saving mankind. That task is handed to a pair of androids charged with protecting a colony of human children after Earth is destroyed by a great war. It has performed well enough for HBO Max to order a second season.

Just debuted on AppleTV+ is Foundation, adapted from the epoch leaping novels of Isaac Azimov and starring Jared Harris.

It’s taken a while for the golden age of TV to catch up with telling expansive science fiction drama.

One reason perhaps is that sci-fi stories were perceived to require lavish budgets in order to sell futuristic space technology and landscapes that are literally out of this world.

Now new technology and larger streaming budgets mean production values have taken a quantum leap.

The Mandalorian used location photography as a background to the action rendered in front of LED screens to create and augment the Star Wars universe for streaming.

“From a technical perspective, you can do things today you couldn’t five or 10 years ago,” The Expanse showrunner Naren Shankar told The Guardian. “And when you uncork that – when you understand that this storytelling is not just a guy in a rubber suit wiggling tentacles at you – suddenly you can express things that the genre has done for 50 years, but couldn’t get on screen.”

The economics of the industry is one reason why sci-fi makes good business. The future of Star Wars is definitely TV. The slate outlined by Disney includes no less than ten new TV series including an Obi-Wan Kenobi spin-off and two animated shows.

Might a galactic saga that takes place over several centuries succeed in doing for science fiction what Game of Thrones did for fantasy?

“I wasn’t trying to make the next Game of Thrones,” says Foundation showrunner David S Goyer tells The Guardian. “But I was trying to depict an epic, and a story that would unfold over generations. What’s nice about telling a story over a long period of time is that characters grow and change – monsters can redeem themselves, and good people fall from grace.”

The hope of finding new life or a new home in the stars while Earth dies has long been a sci-fi trope that has gained new urgency with climate change. Since the best science fiction writing is also a critique of contemporary society these themes can be explored more thoroughly over a ten hour series or multiple series than a 2 hour feature.

“There are deep concepts in the show,” says Shankar. “It’s about tribalism, it’s about cycles of history and economics and resource constraints and colonisation. These are big ideas.”

Moreover, as space is being commercialised and as NASA sets out on manned (peopled?) missions back to the Moon and to Mars this decade, interest in space exploration has perhaps never been higher – nor more tangible.

The producers of The Expanse use real physics to create drama. According to Shankar, there’s a sequence in the first season where the ships are turning their engines on and off so you’re shifting from having weight to weightlessness. Two characters suddenly lose gravity and can’t get back to where they need to be, and the solution is conservation of momentum.”

This commitment to accuracy is shared by the team behind For All Mankind who have an astronaut advising on the show.  “He’ll tell us when we come up with ideas that are against the laws of physics,” explains co-creator Matt Wolpert.

NASA’s mission to Mars could be the dominant world news story of the late 2020’s with the Agency saying that video is essential to its technical and scientific success as well as mankind’s ability to experience an entirely new world.

“Most of our astronauts are very interested in imagery,” said Kelly O Humphries, News Chief - Johnson Space Station/NASA. He was also the voice of mission control for more than 50 shuttle missions. “It’s like when you go on vacation you want to come back and share what you’ve seen. Astronauts are the same.”

Astronaut training even includes the build of 4K camcorders from a series of component parts in orbit. “We write procedures for them to build the rig, mount a lens, put a cage around the body,” explained Humphries.

The live coverage of the Perseverance landing in February was part of NASA’s PR effort to justify the $2.4 billion it took to build and launch it. The estimate to land and operate the rover during its prime mission alone is $300 million. 

Space watching via channels like NASA TV is already routine but it’s going to become a cinematic event over the next decade as the number of missions and the ambition of them rockets upwards.  

Aside from NASA, ExoMars a Russian and European Space Agency program plans to land a rover on Mars in 2023. China has plans to drive a rover on the red planet by 2030; There are also probes due to launch to Jupiter and Saturn’s moon Titan in the late 2020s and space tourism has lift off courtesy Bezos, Branson, Musk and Russian agency Roscosmos. 

Tom Cruise announced plans to make an actual blockbuster in orbit on board the ISS, in a film to be funded by NASA. 

But ratings will go into stellar overdrive with manned missions back to the lunar surface and to Mars which should lift off by 2030.  

Even if you think it’s all being filmed on a lot in Burbank these seat-of-the-pants thrill rides will be must-watch moments.

 

Weird Science: The Connection Between NFTs and… Human Nature?

NAB

With our future increasingly set to be lived online, the battle for control of our personal data will intensify. Some of us will continue to trade private details (ranging from our location to our shopping habits) for the convenience of mobile internet communication and digital experiences.

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/human-nature-science-the-connection-to-nfts/

But what price should you put on your own DNA?

This is the logical outcome of being able to lock a record of our individual genetic code into a one-of-a-kind NFT authenticated on the blockchain.

What’s more, it is already happening.

All of us are composed of millions of cells each with their own complete set of instructions for (re)making us, called the genome.

Earlier this year, Harvard University geneticist George Church and a company he co-founded, Nebula Genomics in San Francisco, advertised their intention to sell an NFT of Church’s genome.

As reported in science journal Nature, Church was forced to walk back on his initial plan, instead auctioning NFTs featuring an artwork based on his likeness.

The stated reason, Nebula Genomics told Nature, was because the NFT and crypto markets declined in value. Some fellow scientists thought it was is a PR stunt as it so happens that Church’s Genome is sequenced and freely available as part of the Human Genome Project he helped to launch.

Church has history in whipping up the sector, having previously proposed creating a dating app based on DNA and currently intent on resurrecting the woolly mammoth.

The journal speculates that in fact Church’s NFT Genome idea was testing the waters.

“Nebula Genomics already uses blockchain technology to allow 15,000 people whose entire genomes it has sequenced to grant temporary access to their data to specific users (such as pharmaceutical companies searching for links between genes and diseases). NFTs could in future provide a handy system to let customers make money from those exchanges.”

Nature reports other companies similarly experimenting with ways for customers to sell genomic data on blockchain marketplaces.

 

“The idea is to give users more control of their data and to direct profits straight to the individuals, thereby encouraging more people to get their genomes sequenced.”

Selling personal genomes opens up ethical issues. Bioethicist Vardit Ravitsky, at the University of Montreal in Canada, asks whether any individual truly owns their genome, given that much of it is shared with family members. She also notes there are already debates about whether people should be allowed to make money from their biological resources, for example through sperm donation. The problem of selling data, she says, “will be the next generation of these issues.”

So there may be a market for selling your Genome into the scientific community. A financial incentive would boost the amount of Genome sequences for research, the goal of which in some cases is to find cures for diseases like cancer.

Since an NFT retains the IP of its original creator in perpetuity no matter how many times it is traded, sliced and diced, it would gift the IP owner royalties in return.

There’s an obvious dystopian scenario here too, one that would no doubt interest a Hollywood script writer. If Church can rebuild a woolly mammoth using genetic editing then, in time, someone can surely reanimate a human.

What happens if someone owns our genome NFT and wants to meddle with it, whether we agree to it or not? What happens if we’re still alive and meet an identikit version of our younger selves, Gemini Man-style?

The factory scale minting of billions of genome NFTs, or even a black market exchange of our personal code, strips what is left of our privacy down to the bone.

It’s a digital Soylent Green.

 

Calls for the Industry To Act on Video Coding

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More efficient codecs are needed to keep pace with the onslaught of video, but rollout is being buried under inertia, red tape and vested interest.

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/calls-for-the-industry-to-act-on-video-coding/

That’s the view of Micky Minhas, SVP at Marconi and a Professor of Intellectual Property at UNH Franklin Pierce School of Law. He calls out the streaming and cloud giants as culprits.

As recent surveys have shown, the industry is entrenched in outmoded compression technologies such as Advanced Video Coding (AVC or H.264). Despite the availability of new and better compression schemes like Versatile Video Coding (VVC / H.266) deployment is sluggish.

This will not only impact negatively on the ability to get new higher resolution data demanding services to market but will actively harm the planet.

“Enabling more video streaming to use hyper-efficient VVC could save billions of tonnes of carbon each year,” Minhas writes in IP business media platform IAM. “Better compression will mean lower demands on cloud computing data centers, which mostly rely on fossil fuel power to ensure reliability. It could also reduce the need for semiconductors, which have overtaken auto as one of the world’s worst polluting industries.”

There is a solution. Next-gen codecs like VVC are proven to be twice as efficient as AVC. So why isn’t it happening? The ubiquity of AVC is partly because billions of older devices for streaming video can only support AVC decoding, but that doesn’t explain it all.

“The truth is that intellectual property and licensing failures are holding back the adoption of newer, better codecs,” argues Minhas. “Current patent pools are disaggregated and generally license one standard at a time, meaning that any device or service needing to work across multiple standards will need several licenses.”

They also tend to focus all licensing efforts on the consumer product manufacturers, so that the cost is not borne fairly across the ecosystem, he says. Cloud and streaming services are big beneficiaries of codec technologies. Newer, better codecs dramatically reduce their storage requirements and provide ultra-high resolution videos without buffering or latency issues, enhancing the services that they charge users to watch or sell advertisements around.

“At present, these companies are not contributing to the cost of the codec technologies they rely on,” Minhas says.

Many or most existing IP licensing organizations and pools also have an impartiality problem, he insists. “A heritage of being owned by or closer to licensees or licensors, or simply having one side more in control of revenues and rules of engagement, makes it impossible to agree on the impartial, balanced terms that the industry needs to move forward.”

Minhas calls for a new approach to video licensing, one which more accurately reflects how codecs are used now, rather than how they were used twenty years ago.

“It should have the potential to encompass multiple standards and avoid stacking multiple royalties. It should license at multiple points in the video encoding, decoding and transcoding ecosystem that are realizing value from video coding standards, including streaming and cloud-based services, and not just end user devices. It should also be independently managed, open to companies from across the video ecosystem, and balance the needs of licensees and licensors.”

It may already be too late. The codec market is fragmenting with adoption of the VVC standard at risk even before it enters the marketplace. The evidence from the HEVC experience is clear — continued fragmentation in licensing will likely be a significant barrier to wide acceptance of the VVC standard.

 

NFT Creation Requires Some Serious Know-How

NAB News

The talk surrounding the future of art is often focused on how digital technology like the iPhone and YouTube have democratized access and made it easier to be an artist. But there’s a gap — in order to make money off their work, artists need buyers. And until now, individual content creators haven’t had much luck getting those buyers through the internet alone.

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/nft-creation-requires-some-serious-know-how/

True, YouTube cuts artists a share of the proceeds for hosting on its platform, but the platform owns all of the data about subscribers and has all the power to monetize it.

As Denis Quaid’s character Remy McSwain says in The Big Easy, “Your luck about to change.”

NFTs are being seized by creators as a tool to control ownership and sale of their work without needing a middleman to facilitate transactions.

“NFTs allow for more transparency and direct relationships with fans on the blockchain rather than traditional social media websites,” says Joan Westenberg, founder of the PR firm, Studio Self. “For creators like me, NFTs help build communities that support our work financially while also bringing us closer to our fans by making it easy for us to collaborate on projects together.”

NFTs are stored on the blockchain and have many benefits over traditional media because they are cryptographically secure and decentralized. Importantly, they cannot be deleted or changed by anyone other than the creator, making them scarce and immutable.

The basic technical details of creating an NFT follows the same pattern. Westenberg details them:

First, a user must generate a private key and public address. This is done through a wallet interface that allows users to store their data privately on the blockchain.

Next, they use their private key to hide parts of an image file. The user then stores the confidential data on the blockchain. Once the confidential data is stored, it becomes public and can be accessed anytime, like any other transaction or data stored by a public address.

She admits that NFTs can be challenging to grow as a creator tool because they come with the technical challenges of working on the blockchain. For example, NFTs don’t work well on mobile and wallets need to be compatible with regular and dApps (decentralized applications).

And since NFTs require the same infrastructure as other blockchain technologies, this means “running full nodes, downloading and syncing with blockchains, and potentially costly transactions due to gas fees,” — none of which Westenberg clarifies.

There is also an environmental cost to bitcoin mining which is not considered here.

The lack of documentation and tutorials for artists wanting to create NFTs are no help to the less technically minded artist, she says, but that’s not necessarily a bad thing.

“The ability for artists to take complete control of their careers through a mastery of the technical infrastructure that enables it is incredibly empowering and represents a barrier to entry that will block out scammers and poseurs.”

Perhaps NFTs should be part of the education curriculum, certainly at art schools and film schools.

 

Are NFTs for Real? A Crypto Trader and Leading Fintech Advisor Believe They’re Viable… and Inevitable

NAB 

Last month, the NFT platform OpenSea.io processed more than $3 billion in NFT-related transitions on its platform.

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/are-nfts-for-real-a-crypto-trader-and-leading-fintech-advisor-believe-theyre-viable-and-inevitable/

Despite the complaining, mostly from those who don’t understand the technology, crypto backed assets like NFT are soaring in demand and making some people real money.

Nonetheless, the trade in NFTs — which can see single JPEGs sell for half a million dollars — is considered a vastly inflated market, a casino for high stakes crypto rich gamblers.

There are those with strong track records in finance who should be able to discern a turkey when they see one. Coinbase co-founder Fred Ehrsam (also co-founder and managing partner of cryptocurrency investment firm Paradigm) is interviewed in depth by Vanity Fair, and NAB Amplify talks with Nigel Green, the CEO and founder of deVere Group, one of the world’s largest independent financial advisory and fintech organizations.

We’ve edited the Vanity Fair interview for highlights, followed by NAB Amplify’s talk with Green below. Both believe NFT and crypto are right on the money.

Is the NFT bubble about to burst?

Ehrsam: Digital ownership is a long-term trend that is here to stay. Kids today will eventually own more digital items that look like NFTs than physical items. At some point, they’ll also stop opening bank accounts and just have crypto wallets that are free to download and work interoperably with everything on the internet.

My partner, Matt Huang, likes to say the speculative casino aspect of crypto is actually a Trojan horse with a new financial system inside. Even if some of the behavior seems silly at the start, the paradigm shift in infrastructure isn’t.

There’s lots of talk [of] “this won’t last,” indignant questions of “why does this have any value?,” or people from the traditional art world rejecting it or trying to make it fit within their framing of art. But it will work, and it’s about so much more.

What happened last month that drove NFT sales into the billions of dollars?

Like any powerful new technology, there comes a point where the mainstream glimpses importance for the first time, and that has happened this summer for NFTs.

Concretely, people are loving profile picture NFTs like CryptoPunks, which have driven a lot of the volume. Another factor was the invention of fractionalization of NFTs, splitting them into little pieces of ownership. This allows a bunch of people to participate instead of an NFT selling to one person with deep pockets. This is not only driving sales, it’s also creating new social groups amongst owners. To visualize this, imagine if the Mona Lisa was digital and then auctioned on the internet where anyone could buy a small slice, and everyone who bought a piece was now part of a big group chat.

What comes next after NFTs?

We think about crypto developing in three stages: first as a new digital money, second as a new financial system, and third as a new internet app platform. As a new digital money, crypto has gone from zero to over $1 trillion over the last 10 years. As a new financial system, decentralized finance (or DeFi) came on the scene about three years ago and already has almost $100 billion of user assets. As a new internet app platform, NFTs are a glimpse into the third stage: a next generation of mainstream consumer apps built on crypto rails — the social networks, games, and more of the future.

The Hype is Real

Now here’s Nigel Green, the CEO and founder of deVere Group. He runs business in more than 100 countries worldwide with $12 billion under advice.

Aside from digital collectibles, what other ways do you see NFT as the basis for new revenue streams/business models?

Nigel Green: NFTs allow companies to engage in new business models, further the proposition of existing products and services, as well as to enter into new markets. They also offer fresh methods to invest in projects and new digital trade and commerce opportunities.

For example, NFTs can be used to create a virtual retail experience for shoppers; they can be used to collaborate with other brands; and they be used to heighten awareness on social media, therefore driving up revenue.

It’s hard to overplay the impact that NFTs will have on business models in the future as our digital lives and real lives increasingly overlap. 

NFT and crypto is said to be key to democratizing the media value chain and disintermediating conventional distributors like studios. Do you believe the hype around this?

All major businesses will move into this space including major entertainment and media brands. They know this is the inevitable future and are moving apace to be early adopters. The hype is real, and they see the value in it.

With NFTs, we are experiencing the meeting of an internet of information with an internet of value, which is drawing in large investments coming from multinationals, funds, and VC firms, amongst  others, into the market. 

However, the market remains young and highly speculative and caution should be exercised. It can be expected that some of the NFTs on the market now will have little value in a few years. But some will be worth a fortune. It’s a similar situation to websites in the early days of the internet.

As with any kind of investment, the key is being able to pick the winners and avoid the losers in what is a volatile market driven by fast-changing trends and tastes.

Will NFTs create a space for new forms of content to be created?

Without question, NFTs and cryptos will create new forms of content, in fact they already are doing so. The major areas that will be impacted moving forward will include gaming, advertising, music, art, fashion sport and social media.

Do you have any advice for content creators looking to engage in this field?

Content producers need to apply the fundamentals of all content creation when it comes to NFTs. These include creating a compelling hook, providing something that will engage and chime with the core market, something that is different from the rest on the market, and using your unique brand values. If content creators stick to these rules, most pitfalls should be avoided.

 

How Social Media and TV Advertising Boosts Content Discovery

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https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/how-social-media-and-tv-advertising-boosts-content-discovery/

How viewers discover content can be a mystery, even to them, but advertising is key as are recommendations from friends and family or within the streaming service itself while smarter use of social media is a must.

It’s the complexity of the streaming content and device landscape a challenge for the discovery of new, quality content and an even bigger challenge for content providers.

A new report from Conviva, “State of Streaming: Content Discovery,” suggests that 38% viewers find a new show “by chance.”

It also gives some tactical advice for what content providers can do about it.

First up: advertising remains critical, provided the mix of advertising, targeting techniques, and creative units is adjusted to maximize streaming engagement.

Get it right and content providers can tap a $30 billion upside that exists in streaming advertising while better engaging their viewers.

When it comes to which medium to invest in for the most successful advertising, most respondents to the Conviva survey reported seeing an ad on TV, followed by 20% saying they saw the ad on social media. Up to 65% of long-form video is still consumed on the big screen. This suggests 30-second ads remain viable. Conversely, five- to 10-second ad units are better for smaller devices where 42% of shorter content is consumed on mobile phones.

Next, the report illustrates a direct correlation between high social media usage and high streaming video consumption, showing social platforms are key to new content discovery.

The average number of social media platforms used by a typical consumer is 3.4 while this number jumps to 3.9 for heavy streamers (and plummets to 2.3 for non-streamers). What’s more, high social media users are more than twice as likely to spend more than eight hours per day streaming.

The report further broke down word of mouth, the top overall source for streaming discovery, to reveal significant social media influence including friends talking about content on social media (20%), recommendations by a friend on social media (18%) and recommendations by a celebrity or influencer on social media (11%). In person word of mouth, including friend or family recommendations (34%) and friends talking about content in person (27%), was important also.

Summing up Keith Zubchevich, CEO, Conviva, said: “By leveraging advertising, recommendations and social media to curate and promote their offerings, publishers can expose viewers to new, quality content while simultaneously increasing their reach and brand loyalty.”

 

What the Next Few Months Will Tell Us About “the Movies”

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Bond is back – but will audiences follow? That’s the multi-million dollar question to which no-one in Hollywood knows the answer. Or perhaps even cares, since the studios first priority is no longer theatrical but streaming.

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/what-the-next-few-months-will-tell-us-about-the-movies/

After a year and more starved of the opportunity to visit the cinema, during which feature productions were forced to postpone principal photography and / or had their release dates delayed, the schedule is unwinding in a flurry of Awards season releases.

Hot on the heels of Daniel Craig’s final bow as 007, comes Denis Villeneuve’s already acclaimed adaptation of Dune and Steven Spielberg’s remake of West Side Story. Lin Manuel Miranda debuts another musical, Tick, Tick…Boom!, this time on Netflix. The streamer also has one of the early hot Awards prospects in Jane Campion’s The Power of the Dog.

Other big name properties include Ridley Scott’s House of Gucci, Cannes Palme d’Or winner Titane, Edgar Wright’s trippy Last Night in Soho, Joel Cohen’s Shakespearean take The Tragedy of Macbeth (shot in black and white) starring Denzel Washington for AppleTV+; Will Smith as the father and coach of famed tennis players Venus and Serena Williams in King Richard; and Guillermo del Toro’s follow up to Best Picture winner The Shape of Water called Nightmare Alley starring Bradley Cooper. Plus, before Christmas, a new PT Anderson drama Licorice Pizza with another Bradley Cooper performance – to list a few.

The big question is whether people will rush to see these movies in theaters or, their curiosity piqued, just wait until they’re available to stream. Some like Dune will have a dual release in theaters and on HBO Max, some like The Tragedy of Macbeth have no plans for theaters at all.

As Stephanie Zacharek, the film critic for Time points out, it’s not like the box office numbers for recent releases give us a clue.

Box-office returns for Disney’s Black Widow, released simultaneously in theaters and via streaming, were ultimately disappointing. But the Ryan Reynolds comedy Free Guy and the Aretha Franklin biopic Respect – which both launched only in theaters before being made available via streaming—"lured a respectable number of moviegoers from their pandemic-era lairs,” she reports.

“People who want to go back to the movies really want to go back; their idea of what movies can and should be hinges on a vision writ large in their imagination. Other, more indifferent viewers are happy to welcome the new delivery methods, depending on what’s most convenient for them. Either way, studios will find ways to make money off their products—and evidence suggests that most of them don’t care where or how you watch, as long as they make their money.”

We should also be careful about who is telling us—even indirectly—that streaming is the new and ideal model. All the studios have a vested interest in promoting their own streaming subscription platform.

“The companies that used to make big-screen movies now have a great deal invested in feeding you a steady diet of small-screen ones,” Zacharek says.

The pandemic induced convenience is no longer an excuse, she thinks. “All the better if [the studios] can make it look like it was our idea in the first place—that way they can pretend they’re merely offering us a wonderful service (for a price), rather than killing off movies as we know them.”

Zacharek doesn’t however think the die is cast for big-screen movie watching. It won’t be the big studios that will keep movie-going alive, she thinks.

“Movies will be kept alive by people who care about them as artistry first and a means of making big bucks second. Streaming just may become the major delivery system for what we used to think of as big-studio theatrical releases. But smaller, smarter films aimed at grown-ups may be the ones that save the movies.”

She’s talking here of films by Pedro Almodóvar, Pablo Larraín or Claire Denis—on the big screen and argues that the streaming revolution might strengthen, rather than chip away at, people’s desire to see this kind of movie on the big screen.

I’d like to believe her - I’m a cinefile too. That also means the romantic view of experiencing a film for the first time on the big screen in a darkened room in the company of strangers is something to cherish – but may no longer be a basis for a mass market business model.

Theatrical will likely survive, probably for the IMAX and multi-sensory overload luxury giant screens for playing occasional mega-budget blockbusters (also available online) and at the other end of the market, for the ‘analogue’ romance of going out to enjoy an arthouse classic projected.

“Stranger things have happened: in music, vinyl has been kept alive by boutique enthusiasts of all ages, while CDs—though still beloved by some—are as quaint as gramophone records.”

 

“1899” and How Netflix is Viewing Virtual Production

NAB

The wraps have been lifted off Europe’s largest virtual production stage and we should be excited about it. Netflix certainly is.

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/1899-and-how-netflix-is-viewing-virtual-production/

Dark Bay is a new Volume stage built at Studio Babelsberg in Berlin with new Netflix episodic drama 1899 the first to use it.

It seems important for several reasons. For Netflix, which need no longer play catch up to Disney and ILM’s headline grabbing Mandalorian virtual stage; for the German film and TV production industry which can claim one-up on anything the UK has (to date); and for the filmmaking community as a whole since 1899’s creative team seem intent on sharing what they’ve learned on taking a drama originally planned for conventional location work into one completely photographed against LEDs.

Visiting the set, Netflix chief Reed Hastings hailed the show as a new benchmark for series production. “Right now, the most advanced production technology in the world is here [in Berlin], it’s really cutting edge and amazing.”

First, the Tech

The facility is operated by Dark Bay, a sister company to Dark Ways, the production company outfit behind 1899. According to Deadline, it cost “a significant amount of money, with backing coming from sources including the Investment Bank of Brandenburg and Netflix.

Raising that funding was possible because Netflix has also committed to house multiple series on the stage, over the coming years, Netflix told Deadline.

The volume is 55 meters (75 feet) -wide and seven meters (23 feet) -high, making a shooting space of 4,500 square feet, and surrounded by an LED wall composed of 1,470 ROE LED panels. It also features a claimed industry-first revolving stage — a motor-driven 360-degree turntable which allows filming of real sets from different angles without conversion times. The virtual studio is controlled via the “Brain Bar,” which provides 13 high-performance workstations. Rendering is by Unreal Engine, with additional tech supplied by ARRI Solutions Group and Faber AV.

Studio Babelsberg itself is now owned by US real estate firm TPG Real Estate Partners.

Producing 1899

1899 is the new project from Baran bo Odar and Jantje Friese, German creators of supernatural drama Dark, which aired in 2017 and ran for two seasons.

Having inked a production deal with Netflix, they embarked on 1899, a period mystery set on a migrant boat sailing from Europe to the United States.

The series had been in prep since 2018 and planned to shoot in Spain, Poland and Scotland. When the pandemic hit, these plans were derailed and the show pivoted wholesale to making it using virtual production techniques.

As Odar explains to Deadline: “We are very old school filmmakers. We’re used to going on real locations, using real sounds and stuff like that, that was the plan for this show. The pandemic really hit us, and we had to discuss how we could do a pan-European show during this time — it was really the worst idea. Quite quickly we realized it would not be possible in the near future.”

Netflix arranged a test shoot for the showrunners at a virtual stage housed in Shepperton Studios near London. They spoke with the team behind The Mandalorian, including DP Barry Baz Idoine to better understand the technology.

“It’s like if you’re used to driving a car and now you suddenly have to fly a plane. It’s a big, big difference,” Odar said of the experience.

Background plates for 1899 were shot on location and on the ocean for rendering in Unreal and playback on set.

“You don’t shoot a 360 of a landscape and project it onto LED walls, because you would move in with the camera and the projection would stay 2D,” he added. “It’s about scanning landscapes and turning them into 3D models so you can actually walk through them. If I push the camera towards the wall, the landscape moves with us. It’s about creating 3D worlds in camera that can move and change with you.”

The team also constructed a significant physical set for their crucial location — the ship — at the Babelsberg facility.

“You literally take post-production and make it pre-production,” Odar continues. “Everything has to be decided beforehand, you have to create it, build it, so it’s all ready to shoot in camera. Having [the location] already on set is a big benefit. And then in the editing you already have it all there.”

Friese adds that the experience will help filmmakers to think of stories differently. “Once you start working with it, it makes you write scenes differently, it allows you to explore things you might not be able to explore on a natural set.”

VFX by Framestore

Framestore, the UK-based international VFX powerhouse, is also intimately involved. It is not only helped design the volume but will take a lead role creating 1899’s visual effects.

According to Little Black Book, Framestore’s work on this major episodic project is led by VFX supervisor Christian Kaestner (Captain Marvel; Gravity), who oversees the company’s integrated visualization, virtual production and VFX teams. This includes a team of 19 artists, technicians and producers embedded in Babelsberg. The team working alongside Kaestner includes on-set supervisor Andrew Scrase; virtual production supervisor Alyssa Mello; and volume supervisor Jack Banks and Freddy Salazar as head of virtual art department. The show’s virtual production producer is Manon Hartzuiker, and VAD/VFX producer is Martina Chakarova.

Fiona Walkinshaw, Framestore’s global MD, Film, is quoted: “There’s a tremendous buzz about 1899 here at Framestore thanks to a rich vein of Dark fandom and the knowledge that this is a prestige title by storytellers with a distinct and utterly unique take on their craft.”

Multilingual as Story and Strategy

That Netflix has gone early in showboating the technology (the show isn’t due to finish shooting until November) is a sign in the confidence it has in the filmmakers, in the tech itself, and in its German production base.

The facility is the first major initiative from Netflix R&D division NLAB. Part of its mandate is to determine practical applications for virtual production that can apply back to Netflix’s core production offerings.

Hastings was in town to open a new local Netflix HQ. The streamer is investing €500 million ($590 million) on German-language titles from Germany, Austria, and Switzerland over the next couple of years. The DACH region counts for close to 11 million of the streamer’s global subscriber base.

Netflix wants to base more productions at the facility. “I envision that Germany can become a European leader in virtual production,” Netflix’s director of International Originals, Rachel Eggebeen, tells Deadline.

The themes of 1899 itself are instructive. In a joint statement, Friese and Odar said that what “really made us connect to this idea was the concept of having a truly European show with a mixed cast from different countries.”

“The whole European angle was very important for us, not only story wise but also the way we were going to produce it,” Friese said to Deadline. “It really had to be a European collaboration, not just cast but also crew. We felt that with the past years of Europe being on the decline, we wanted to give a counterpoint to Brexit, and to nationalism rising in different countries, to go back to that idea of Europe and Europeans working and creating together.”

That endeavor sparked the idea behind one of the intriguing creative decisions taken by the duo for this series — to shoot it entirely multilingual, with each actor speaking their native tongue on set. That is also how it will be shown on Netflix and fits with Netflix’ own and international SVOD’s general need to open up to new markets, cultures and languages.

“Netflix and the other streamers really opened the door to different content from different languages,” says Friese. “That barrier that used to be there, where people didn’t want to read subtitles, that has really changed. There’s so much to discover out there apart from US and UK content, it’s great to hear different voices.”

1899 debuts in 2022.

 

 

ESL expands and upgrades Polish production facility for REMI with Blackmagic Design

SVG Europe

While the pandemic forced the shutter down on spectator attendance at esports events, unlike regular sports the live action continued unchecked.

https://www.svgeurope.org/blog/headlines/esl-expands-and-upgrades-polish-production-facility-for-remi-with-blackmagic-design/

For players, the shift to playing remotely was not a big adjustment as they were already used to playing online and from home. Most talent were also already outfitted for online streaming, as many had their own content channels and had already invested in the kit needed to broadcast online. It was up to esports producers to quickly pivot to this new reality.

Perhaps the world’s biggest is ESL Gaming, part of digital entertainment group MTG, which operates international leagues and tournaments under the ESL Pro Tour umbrella, including Intel Extreme Masters, ESL Pro League and other pre-eminent, stadium-size tournaments such as ESL One.

ESL Gaming also operates production facilities (Burbank, Sydney and Cologne among them) which host its own branded events as well as white label content for other tournaments or events.

The Katowice, Poland hub for ESL is among its most prestigious. In the past year it has quadrupled in size from one studio and control room to four new control rooms and three multipurpose halls, including ESL’s existing arena space. Design and specification began in March 2020 with the last studio/control room finished and operational in June of this year.

Head of engineering Krzysztof Pawlus explains that flexibility was the key element when designing the production workflow and control infrastructure.

“We produce a huge variety of live events, including ESL-branded formats,” he explains. “With that in mind, the entire workflow is reconfigurable to meet those needs and demands. Recently most of the talent has been remote and we also have to ensure the production teams continue to stay safe. We’ve made sure the studio infrastructure can bring in multiple external sources alongside signals from the studio floor, without any latency issues. It’s imperative that our streams are accurate.”

The entire facility – built at a new site just 100m away from the original studio – is now fibre connected. Each interconnected control room has a 288×288 router with 24 fibre in and out, as well as a bank of SDI cards for converting PC desktop signals to SDI. It enables the team to distribute any incoming source to anywhere in the facility, depending on the production’s requirements.

Blackmagic Design sits at the heart of the complex, which relies on multiple ATEM Constellation switchers and Universal Videohub for content production.

A new green screen virtual production set has camera tracking from RedSpy, chroma keying courtesy of Ultimatte (part of the Blackmagic Design stable) and rendering in Unreal Engine.

The halls are equipped to host a wide range of events, including space to accommodate up to 64 PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds mobile players.

Content is vision mixed on a variety of ATEM switchers. The largest control room has been furnished with an ATEM Constellation 8K switcher, which has been deployed across several high-profile events, including the Gamers without Borders charity tournament, where dual language programs were delivered simultaneously. All productions are delivered in 1080p 59.94 and streamed to Twitch and YouTube or via live video cloud to other platforms.

Other gear includes EVS replay machines and the Dyvi vision mixer, AJA signal conversion cards and Sony FS7 and Sony 4000 series studio cameras. All video equipment was delivered by local distributor Wamm Video Solutions.

 

“Communications can be an issue, and making sure everybody is on the same page is a lot more problematic in a decentralised production,” says Pawlus. “The amount of communication, split-second decisions, and the speed at which the in-game production takes place makes remote operation a challenge, for sure, especially when we aim to improve on last year’s event, not go down in production value.”

Intel Extreme Masters Katowice 2020 tournament had to be played without fans in attendance at the 11,500-seat Spodek Arena as the Polish government forced the country into quarantine. That may have helped the final of Counter-Strike: Global Offensive IEM Katowice 2020 set a viewership record.

Esports Charts pegged the final’s peak viewership at 1,002,132, which it says is a new record for the IEM series.

Earlier this year, the 2021 tournament was also forced to play behind closed doors. With more than 20,500,000 hours watched across multiple distribution platforms, IEM Katowice saw hundreds of thousands of fans tuning in to catch the action with peak concurrent viewers (digital platforms, excluding China) surpassing 580,000, according to ESL figures.

ESL Gaming is now selling in person stadium tickets for the February 2022 IEM Katowice event but, even if fans are permitted back to the arena, many of the remote workflows implemented during the past couple years are here to stay.

“Many more production personnel who would have been involved in an outside broadcast at the studio prior to the pandemic can now operate remotely. These include observers (in-game camera operators). Also, we’re just starting to expand the features for our virtual studio. We want to introduce more video feeds, for example,” reveals Pawlus.

“The availability of Blackmagic’s SDK allows us a high level of workflow customisation, while the ability to automate complex processes through custom macros is a real advantage and helps us to diversify our streams.”

The new studio facilities will allow ESL to expand its range of events and enable the team to innovate further in its content production.

Canal+ called on the facility to produce a FIFA 20 esports tournament production in the absence of traditional sports during the pandemic.

“We can now go to air with four to five productions at the same time,” Pawlus says.

 

Streaming Consumers May Appreciate Quality… But They’re Also Adamant About Quantity

NAB Show

If five streaming video services is the limit for most consumers, then which of the major platforms stand to lose out? AppleTV+, it could be you, if a new survey is to be believed.

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/streaming-consumers-may-appreciate-quality-but-theyre-adamant-about-quantity/

That’s partly because while original content scores highly across the board — and that includes AppleTV+ — it is quantity, not just quality, that counts.

None of the current top five — ranked in a new survey from Whip Media as Netflix, Amazon, Hulu, Disney+ and HBO Max — should be complacent.

“Staying in that group will depend on having an abundance of both compelling original content and evergreen library content to satisfy users when certain originals inevitably decline in popularity,” the company reported after polling almost 4,000 users of its TV Time app in the US.

Among the key findings was that while streaming was fundamentally popular, 70% of respondents felt that there were too many subscription services on the market. The primary reasons for this were cost, annoyance at switching back and forth between services to view content, and difficulties in managing the services and choices. When asked if they could only keep one streaming service, 41% of consumers said Netflix would be their choice if they could only keep one; followed by Hulu (21%), HBO Max (13%), Disney+ (9%), and Amazon (6%).

Churn is inevitable, but the top four services are pretty similar in terms of respondents’ strong intentions to keep them, per the report.

That includes Amazon Prime Video, despite the fact that user satisfaction for the service is not as high as the others. This likely indicates that Amazon subscribers are as if not more interested in accessing rapid shopping deliveries than blockbuster content. The purchase of the MGM library should help maintain its competitiveness, Whip Media notes.

Apple TV+ is in the most precarious position, the survey suggests. That backs up a MoffettNathanson survey in January that found 62% of Apple TV+ subscribers reporting that they are on a promotional offer, many of which are approaching their expiration and leading to churn.

“Given the importance consumers place on having an adequate library, it’s clear Apple’s deficiency in this area is limiting its appeal.”

Among the remaining services, Paramount+ and Peacock are currently the most intriguing among the challengers, Whip Media finds.

“They have the libraries to compete with the big boys, and a few originals, but they need more and are planning to make them.”

Discovery+ occupies a narrower niche with lower production cost programming, and is less expensive than the others’ ad-free tiers, so it may not need to be in the top five, the company states. The recent merger with Warner Media also clouds its future: Does it continue in its current form, or integrate into HBO Max?

Concluding, Whip Media, said that given the importance of library content to the consumer, all of the platforms should be on the hunt for evergreen shows and films to ensure they maintain market share while creating their next original hit.

 

How the Limits of Filming “The Guilty” Expanded the Tension

NAB Show

Every so often filmmakers throw themselves a formal problem. Tell a suspense story where the main characters can’t see, or can’t make a sound, or are buried in a coffin with time running out. Stage a murder investigation using 10-minute film reels, make a war movie using a single tracking shot, choreograph the whole drama as a ‘oner’, tell the story backwards, have the jury reach a verdict in realtime, film it in a lifeboat.

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/how-the-limits-of-filming-the-guilty-expanded-the-tension/

The Guilty has a couple of such conceits going on. It is set in the confines of two rooms

featuring one main actor whose actions are driven entirely by the dialogue and audio we hear played out as it happens.

Director Antoine Fuqua’s remake of Gustav Möller’s Den Skyldige (Denmark’s foreign language Academy Awards submission in 2018) is an exercise in filmmaking discipline and all the better for it. This is a story stripped down to essentials, concentrating on Jake Gyllenhaal’s lead performance and letting the drama intensify because, like James Stewart in Rear Window, he (as the audience) tries frantically to prevent murder from a distance.

“Antoine advised me take a look at the Danish film and to tell him what I think,” says cinematographer Maz Makhani. “I’d never seen anything like it before. Formally there are other movies like Phone Booth (Joel Schumacher, 2002) and Locke (Steven Knight, 2013 – set in a car driven by Tom Hardy) but it’s a rare skill if you can keep an audience’s attention on one space for 90 minutes.”

Makhani has worked with Fuqua multiple times before, lensing the director’s Emmy-winning documentary What’s My Name: Muhammad Ali, and Quibi series #FreeRayshawn, operating second unit on The Equalizer 2 and is currently filming the director’s untitled LA Lakers docuseries for Hulu.

“So much of the script for The Guilty (by True Detective scribe Nic Pizzolatto) was dialogue, the suspense is driven entirely by what Jake’s character is hearing and saying. It’s pretty unique and I wanted the challenge of making it our own and still keeping the DNA of the original film.”

In the film, Gyllenhaal’s LAPD detective is on duty at an emergency call center and scrambles desperately to save an abducted woman while also reconciling his own guilty conscience.

Before the sets were built, Makhani had something in mind for how the film should look but couldn’t quite put his finger on it. The movies that stood out for him were Tony Scott films of the 1990s like Crimson Tide and Enemy of the State as well as Michael Mann’s Heat. It was another of Scott’s surveillance thrillers, Deja Vu from 2006, that had most impact.

“I was particularly drawn to scenes set in the investigation control room with banks of computer monitors and displays. I knew this would play a big part of our design for The Guilty.”

All these films, though, were shot 35mm, a media that DP and director discussed and discarded.

“The camera in these films is always moving, often shot with a long lens with dolly tracking. That’s not the film we were making. Plus, Antoine wanted to be able to shoot long takes of 20 minutes at a time and to roll three cameras. Having to change film mags every ten minutes wouldn’t work and we’d need to bring in film lighting for our dark sets which would have detracted from the realism we needed to make the story work.”

On top of that, Fuqua had to spend most of principal photography self-isolating in a van parked across the street from Manhattan Beach Studios on account of coming into contact with someone who was Covid-positive.

“The video tap on a film camera is nowhere near the resolution of seeing an actual 1080 - 4K image straight from a digital camera,” says Makhani.

To lend the story a filmic look, Makhani knew he wanted to work with anamorphic and with ARRI Alexa as his digital preference. Since the resolution of the Alexa Mini doesn’t meet Netflix criteria, he went with the Alexa LF paired with large format Hawk 65 Anamorphic lenses from Vantage.

“The lens had a real clarity and sharpness but without flaring easily which is what I wanted.”

Having the audience believe in Jake as a 911 operator in a call center environment was essential.

“I wanted the space to feel almost ambient so that the monitors, the ceiling lights light the space he is in. In close ups the monitor lights his eyes. I didn’t want to do film lighting. I come from 20 years of shooting music videos which is very theatrical and high contrast and it felt important here that less is more.”

In an editorial switch from the colder tones of the Danish original, Fuqua uses the backdrop of wild fires raging through LA to create an immediate feeling of heat and impending loss of control.

“The film opens at dusk and moves into night, so I was able to juxtapose different looks. The first part is little lighter when the sun is about to drop, it gets darker as night falls and work with

the ambient blue tones of the monitor. Then when Jake moves into a smaller office and he shuts the blinds we get darker still while gradually increasing the levels of red light.”

The red call light illuminates when a 911 call is answered. When he hangs up, the red light goes off.

In keeping with the disciplined storytelling, Makhani keeps camera moves to a minimum. “I was racking my brain to come up with a way to move the camera to match the main plot twist. We did shoot a few versions of that but we ended up staying on Jake and not doing any overheads or pushing it elaborately. There wasn’t a lot of room for three cameras either so that also restricted us to some slight lateral moves. I tended to live on a macro lens to be really close in on Jake.”

Complex audio arrangements

Produced by Gyllenhaal’s Nine Stories Productions alongside Bold Films, the film shot for 11 days last November in the middle of the pandemic. That threw a huge curveball to the production management and sound recording teams. While none of the principal characters with whom G’s detective interacts were going to be onscreen, conventionally the actors would be giving their performance on or adjacent to set.

That wasn’t possible here. Instead, actors Riley Keough, Christina Vidal, Ethan Hawke, Paul Dano and Peter Sarsgaard voiced their parts from their own homes with rehearsals conducted over Zoom two weeks prior to shooting. Since they were in various time zones in the States, Canada and in one case, London, the logistics of scheduling each actor’s performance was one challenge.

The actors were issued with identical portable sound recording kits to record their vocal performance locally with production sound mixer Ed Novick responsible for ensuring Gyllenhaal heard the right cues at the right time.

“I need to make sure Jake can always hear what he needs whether that’s the live actor or a pre-record or a surrogate standing in,” Novick says. “That includes cues that were essential for him to hear, like answering machines. I monitored the phone calls, the boom, the actor lavaliers, and my laptop, busily switching solo between them. I was very much the switchboard operator with all the audio coming in and out of me.”

To make the workflow more complex, Jake’s character was switching back and forth between two communications devices: a cell phone and a Bluetooth headset.

“I knew I’d have to coordinate with props and set decoration to make sure the devices worn by the officer would be practical and functioning.  With that in place, patching the actor’s phone or computer into my mixing panel would be straightforward.

Novick adds, “Jake’s performance is never filtered through a phone because we always see him. His sounds belongs not through a phone system but to the room he is in. On the other hand most of the other people in the movie who he talks to are not seen. Their audio of their performances is filtered and manipulated through a phone.

“Admittedly, day one of shooting was buggy. The issues we encountered were too many Zoom users, not enough bandwidth, as well as a lag that proved to be inconsistent, causing a varying offset between real time and ‘phone call time.  I pivoted quickly to a cellular-based system, where everyone phoned into a conference call and remained muted until their turn. I had two cell phones in the conference, one for output (I captured the aggregate phone call on an isolated track) and one for input so I could provide sound effects and vocal cues to the actors in the conference.”

Multiple audio sends had to be used as well.  For example, the lighting dimmer board operator, who needed to coordinate the illuminated call signal at Gyllenhaal’s desk with the calls occurring in the story, wore a Lectrosonics M4R receiver with pre-fade boom mic in his left ear, post-fade phone call track in his right ear, and channel one of the walkie-talkie in both, all routed through Novick’s Sonosax mixer.

“It’s not a workflow I want to ever repeat. I think we told our story well and in a way that no-one need know what went on under the hood.”