TikTok May Have Won the Streaming Wars. Here’s How.

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Elon Musk’s Twitter spree has distracted us from what is the ascendant tech firm of 2022. TikTok now commands more attention per user than Facebook and Instagram combined. What is the secret of its success?

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“TikTok eliminates the burden of consumer choice with a continuous stream of videos curated for you,” says Scott Galloway, professor of marketing at NYU Stern, blogging at Medium.

Downloaded more often than any other app for each of the past five quarters, it was the world’s most visited site in 2021, according to figures reported by the Wall Street Journal. TikTok has 1.6 billion monthly active users — more than Twitter, Snapchat, and LinkedIn combined.

“The biggest mistake we make in marketing is believing choice is a benefit. No, it’s a tax,” Galloway argues. “Consumers don’t want more choices, they want more confidence in the choices presented. TikTok content is a continuous stream of videos where the decisions are made for you. Your only choice: what not to watch.”

This creates a spiraling effect that drives young people especially to flock to the platform for hours.

“Compare the TikTok doomscroll to the Netflix experience, where you skim infinite thumbnails trying to figure out what to watch. Then you have to focus for 40 minutes. A big commitment these days.”

TikTok may bill itself as a social media company, but it is really all about video streaming and to that extent it is not just Meta but all SVODs who are threatened by it.

Investors know this. Six months ago, Netflix was worth more than $300 billion — today it’s at $80 billion. And at its last valuation event, according to Forbes, ByteDance (TikTok’s parent company), was valued at $360 billion.

TikTok’s ascent to the top of the streaming wars was financed not with monthly subscriptions or cable packages, but attention. Specifically, the attention of Gen Z, says Galloway.

On TikTok, the average session lasts 11 minutes and the video length is around 25 seconds. Galloway points out that this generates huge amounts of data, and way more than cable broadcasts or even Netflix can pull in. The platform’s “video-based social media,” with the ability for users to interact with the content (generating more and more data), is the killer app.

Aside from data, Galloway highlights the platform’s unique and personalized content serving content you didn’t know you liked.

“Watching Netflix is like going to Universal Studios Florida because you loved Disney. Watching TikTok is going on Safari.”

TikTok’s content production model upends everything we thought we knew about how making content that audiences want gets made. The film and TV industry still employs relatively few people in relatively few locations (London, Atlanta, Mumbai, LA) compared to TikTok, where over half of users create and post their own videos.

“The world’s largest reserve of talent also has a near-zero cost of extraction,” says Galloway. “The top eight US media firms will spend $115 billion on original content this year. TikTok produces its content for almost nothing.”

The company’s payout to top creators “is a rounding error,” Engadget notes, at $200 million per year.

“The primary incentive for content creation is social expression. The company’s A&R team is the app itself. On YouTube and Netflix, there are creators and consumers. On TikTok, they are the same person.”

And when your total addressable market is 1.6 billion users, your 15 seconds of fame on TikTok can be lucrative. Galloway calculates that 9.6 trillion minutes were watched on Netflix in 2021. Impressive, until compared to the 22.5 trillion minutes viewed on TikTok.

“For creators who are in it for more than just expressing themselves, the real TikTok money comes from brand endorsements. The top creators make as much money as a Fortune 500 CEO or an iconic Hollywood actor.”

Can TikTok be Dethroned?

Is there anything that could stop the juggernaut?

A few things, perhaps.

The competition from Netflix to Snapchat is making copycat moves, or “rip-off products,” says Galloway. Of these, he thinks, Facebook and Instagram are best positioned to compete, “thanks to Meta’s massive coffers of data and captive audience.”

But TikTok has something that Mark Zuckerberg can’t seem to buy: Kids think TikTok is cool.

Another risk is China, specifically the threat that the Chinese state could “weaponize the platform” — by turning it into a propaganda machine. It’s the Manchurian Candidate as an app, with all the hysteria that entails.

And then there’s regulation. Galloways notes that the app appears to be linked with eating disorders and depression, and it may even cause motor and verbal tics among teens. He points to a series of Wall Street Journal articles with headlines like “TikTok Floods Teens With Eating-Disorder Videos” as evidence.

It’s unlikely “a threat to the well-being of our youth” will lead to any major curtailing of TikTok’s power – but Chinese ownership just might.

“[It] may be the siren America’s regulatory bodies need to register a real threat,” says Galloway. “So far, Uncle Sam hasn’t done his job.”

Instead, TikTok will continue on its charge to become one of the most valuable companies in the world and “another tech firm whose profits and addictive qualities outpace our ability to govern it.”

 

“Minority Report” and Our Paranoid Panopticon

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The robotic Spyders that swarm over an apartment block in Minority Report are the sinister and most direct invasion of privacy in a movie all about the horrific effects of ultimate surveillance. It is these themes and this imagery that resonates 20 years after the film’s release.

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The story is from Philip K. Dick, famously paranoid acid-induced writer of the 1950s and 1960s when the Cold War and deep state conspiracies were at fever pitch. It was also made by Steven Spielberg shortly after 9/11, and can be read as an oblique response to the fall of the World Trade Center.

“Pre-Crime feels attuned to the unconstitutional policies of the George W Bush era,” Jesse Hassenger writes in The Guardian.

The Spyders creep up and scan people’s eyeballs to check their identities — hardly a million miles from where we stand today with fingerprint device recognition and, more insidiously, the data-scraping by anonymous corporations of increasing amounts of our physical and digital activity.

They are also just one part of the police surveillance in Minority Report, an apparatus that extends to a twist on Orwell’s 1984-style thought crime.

Set in 2054, there are eye-scanning machines mounted all around the city, in public transit and in street billboards that “know” who is passing and shout out personalized advertising slogans the film portrays as invasive. Despite GDPR and other data privacy laws, the momentum toward algorithm-driven individualized perusing and pursuing of our every move is unstoppable.

“That tracking system is the most mundanely frightening part of the film’s surveillance-state future, in which you might be arrested for a crime you haven’t yet committed,” says David Sims of The Atlantic in one of a plethora of articles commemorating the film’s anniversary.

Even the autonomous vehicle, a sleekly designed Lexus, diverts course to take detective on the run John Anderton (Tom Cruise) straight to jail.

“The forward-thinking technology in the film was cooked up by experts whom Spielberg asked to envision life five decades hence, and in almost every case, advances in

The film may not have the bleak ending that other filmmakers like David Fincher, for example, may have employed, but it is still a dark depiction of a not-so-distant future

“The result is a striking cinematic portrayal of the ways that the severe intrusion of privacy have become an irredeemable, inescapable facet of American society,” AV Club’s Mustafa Yasar II finds.

“The fact that Spielberg has historically leaned into sentimentality makes him especially prescient in depicting next-generation technology; because as Anderton demonstrates, it’s the intimacy — and power — of emotion which ultimately may mark the right (or wrong) choice between seemingly predestined futures.”

Minority Report has a lot to answer for, not least the stimulus given to a million articles like this one about the future of the human-machine interface. Elsewhere in the film, Anderton controls the pre-cog “memory” sequence using a slick air interface and virtual monitors.

Voice and gesture commands are the likely evolution of the way we connect to the internet — and just one jump away from controlling our interaction with the digital world by thought alone. Elon Musk is putting chips into chimpanzee brains as a precursor to jacking us all into the Matrix.

One thing the film didn’t get right is its use of still photos. As Sharon Knolle points out in The Wrap, Anderton is convinced that Leo Crow is the man who abducted his son when he finds a trove of photos of children. Colin Farrell’s character is rightly suspicious of the planted pics, but we’re also doubtful that print photos will still be as much of a thing in 2054. In 2022, most people — even police looking for victims or suspects — carry those photos on their phones.

 

“The Old Man:” Measured, Methodical and Jeff Bridges Punches Everybody

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The main interest in new FX drama series The Old Man is the old man playing the lead. It’s the Jeff Bridges baggage from his youth in features like The Last Picture Show to his cult Dude for the Coens and grizzled Hollywood veteran in Hell or High Water combined with his brush with Covid and Cancer which seems to enrich the onscreen story.

The Old Man centers on Dan Chase (Bridges) who absconded from the CIA decades ago and has been living off the grid since.  When an assassin arrives and tries to take Chase out, the old operative learns that to ensure his future he now must reconcile his past.

John Lithgow and Amy Brenneman also star in the original created for television by Jonathan Steinberg and Robert Levine.

“What was interesting about this conceit is what happens when you were Jason Bourne 30 years ago,” Steinberg tells The Wrap. “It’s a story that is really about these guys confronting their mortality, especially in the case of Dan Chase. He’s a person who has dodged mortality and felt immune to it in some respect to get through all of the things he’s gotten through and now it’s about what happens when you can’t dodge it anymore and your body is failing you and you’re living alone and your children are grown.”

Littlefield and Steinberg presented the 72-year old Bridges with an undeniably appealing pitch. According to an article at Emmys.com they saw expanding author Thomas Perry's novel into a series as a chance to riff on the themes Clint Eastwood pondered in The Unforgiven, his 1992 Western about a gang of aging outlaws.

“Stylistically, they envisioned something akin to '70s nailbiters like Francis Ford Coppola's The Conversation and Alan J. Pakula's The Parallax View. Framed in this manner, The Old Man begged for an actor of Bridges's stature. "You don't make Unforgiven with an unknown," Steinberg reasoned. "It immediately felt like a movie-star role.”

Adding to Bridges’ iconic status as a fan-favorite is his lazurus-like come-back from the double whammy of dual disease.

As Margy Rochlin details for Emmys.com the original plan was to shoot the first half of the series on location in LA, then move the production to Morocco to shoot the rest of the episodes. But in March 2020 — four days before leaving for northern Africa, where a unit had already been dispatched and sets were being built — production was forced to shut down due to the pandemic.

Then seven months later, just as filming was about to resume, Bridges, announced he had been diagnosed with lymphoma, and wouldn't be returning until he completed chemotherapy.

After receiving chemotherapy, the actor contracted COVID-19 and spent nearly six weeks in the hospital. “I surrendered to the idea that I might die — that it might be the end of the race,” Bridges said at the show’s premiere, reported in THR. “That’s what’s going to happen to all of us at some point, and maybe this was my time to go through that.”

The show’s premise mines a profitable genre in recent years. Sylvester Stallone, Bruce Willis, Liam Neeson and Bob Odenkirk have all played characters retired from the fray and brought reluctantly back to action (with all their spycraft and martial arts nous intact).

For that reason and also because – well, it’s Jeff Bridges – The Old Man gets decent reviews.

“[The show] offers the reliable entertainment value of seeing a silver-haired professional bring his deadly skills to bear against younger opponents,” finds the New York Times. The seriousness of the show’s approach to Chase, and Bridges’s excellence in the role, are what set The Old Man apart, but it’s also a well-above-average if unusually pensive and introspective spy thriller.

Collider thinks the closest reference point of what the series feels like it is going for is the 2010 George Clooney film The American, a work that was essentially an arthouse take on the spy film.  

“This show is often as conflicted as its central figure, grasping at being more character-driven while also dipping into expected action fare. It does this with recurrent fight sequences that, while competently directed and staged, are nowhere near as interesting as the more deliberate moments built around the gravitas of Bridges.”

Rolling Stone agrees. “Even if FX had opted to change the title from to maybe The Dude Abides Murder —The Old Man would still feel somewhat generic,” it found. “The story feels like an afterthought, and the energy level tends to droop whenever Bridges is not getting his homicide on.”

 

 

 

 

Preparing To Broadcast ​Commonwealth Games Birmingham

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The 2022 Commonwealth Games will be the biggest sports event on UK shores since London 2012 with around 1.5 billion global audience expected to watch over the 11 day event beginning July 28. Bidding for the host broadcast contract began in summer of 2019 with the award announced for Sunset + Vine in April 2020. Here’s what S+V plan with a special focus on one of its OB partners, Gravity Media.

“The bidding process is really the start of planning for the event,” explains David Tippett, Managing Director, Sunset + Vine. “During 2021 we shifted from planning to delivery. All the plans we had at the outset are still essentially the same. Our approach is to build-in flexibility and adaptation.”

S+V has the advantage when it comes to this project of having seen the uncertainties around the pandemic come and go. Surprisingly perhaps, given the recent drive to remote live, all production of the host broadcast will be on site in largely conventional OB.

“Everything is very traditional,” says Mark Dennis, Director of Technical Operations, S+V. “Sports will be switched in the trucks on site for the basic world feed which comes back to the IBC for onward distribution.”

There are a number of reasons for this. Firstly, planning began pre-Covid. Secondly the economies of scale that usually work in favor of remote producing a series of matches for one sport don’t necessarily work with multiple different events to produce. The Commonwealth Games Federation doesn’t own a remote production facility and the venues themselves lack the connectivity required to route dozens of feeds back to a central hub. In addition, the UK is blessed with OB facility providers and with no need to fly any additional crew or facilities in, it simply made sense to use the resources at hand.

Timeline are the IBC service provider. Other OBs are from NEP, Cloudbass, Gravity Media and the EMG group (including CTV, Telegenic, Eurolink, Broadcast RF and ASC). Hawk-eye is supplying kit for sports adjudication.

Right Sized Production

More than 370 cameras will be deployed across 19 different sports and 22 OBs, with the additional trucks needed for events like road cycling and time trials. Live coverage alone will tally 1500 hours with additional material including a best of games channel and a highlights package for clipping taking the total production output to 3300 hours. Some 34 feeds will be switched at the IBC (some sports like badminton and table tennis have two games playing simultaneously and require two separate feeds) with 22 the maximum number of feeds required at peak.

It is a far smaller scale event than an Olympics and requires the host to cut its cloth accordingly. The phrase used to describe this is ‘right sized’.

“We were always tasked with coming up with a right sized host for the Commonwealth Games – something that makes it sustainable and secures its long-term future,” Tippett says.

That’s about being relevant to generations not bred on the concept of the Commonwealth and for which an inaugural Esports championships is being piloted with separate branding, medals and organisation. It also means addressing the soaring costs of hosting such an event.

The Commonwealth Games Federation claim that the £967m spent on the Gold Coast 2018 delivered a £1.3bn boost to the Queensland economy while also saying of Birmingham’s £778m budget that “an important element is the significant decrease in direct Games delivery costs compared to Gold Coast." The 2026 event is in Melbourne (the Victoria CWG).

“The honest truth is that we won’t have the bells and whistles of an Olympics, or the level of specialist cameras or 3D animated replays,” Tippett says. “It will have really high quality, well directed and well produced broadcast coverage which will stack up against any world championship.

“We’re not saying ‘look at these new innovations’. Sometimes host broadcasts are a numbers game where there’s this demand to increase the number of cameras or specialist coverage from the previous event.”

The opening ceremony from Birmingham will be produced in UHD HDR but all other coverage will be in 1080p SDR. Again, this is down to demand. There was an appetite for UHD HDR for the opening ceremony from the BBC, the CGF and also the games organising committee.

Broadcast tests have been staged at Alexander Stadium in Perry Barr and at Sandwell home of the aquatic events. The Alex test was actually a Diamond League athletics event broadcast on 21 May for which S+V was the producer.

Birmingham’s famous NEC is home to the OB compound for trucks producing all sports (the boxing, table tennis, badminton, netball etc). The NEC is also home to the IBC including the host broadcast with MCR and logging area, and EVS server system as well as space for major rights holders like the BBC and Channel 7 Australia.

Connectivity For Rights Holders

What has changed, accelerated by Covid, is that more rights holders want to cover the games from a distance, sending fewer crew and facilities to venues.

“This is the first CWG in a truly remote world,” says Tippett. “Pre-Tokyo 2020, the concept for every multi-sport event was that the RHBs are responsible for their own distribution of feeds from the event IBC. The new world means that is not as clear cut any more so we have looked at being more involved in that distribution to suit downstream workflows.

“We’ve made a basic package of feeds available as streams as opposed to broadcast circuits. Lower rez streams are being distributed by the organising committee themselves for use via IPTV around Birmingham or for individual federations to access and analysts to watch performances.

“It is down to the host to ensure that rights holder needs are catered for. This includes producing more content than ever before for broadcasters to tailor coverage as well as making it all accessible to remote production.

“We’ve had lots of discussion about connectivity and distribution of feeds whether live, delayed or on-demand,” Tippett adds. “There’s huge complexity. One broadcaster might want to produce using one remote model and another will have a different version. It’s finding the common ground that works for everybody based on how technology has changed.”

Gravity Media At CWG

Formerly the site of Birmingham’s Wholesale Markets, Smithfield will be the home of the Basketball 3x3 and Beach Volleyball competitions during the Games, expected to seat 2,500 and 4,000 spectators respectively.

Gravity Media are tasked with designing, supplying and operating the OB for these events which run in parallel.

“The idea for our tech solution is to service both events separately – treating them as two independent OBs,” explains Andrew Goodman, Project account manager, who is overseeing the technical build.

Gravity runs a flypack operation for all its events, giving it the ability to quickly scale as required. Here, two flypacks are built each containing the following:

Pro-Bel Sirius router with 128 x SDI inputs; an Aurora control system and TallyMan; Evertz VIP x 324 input; sound embedded with Lawo V__pros channel processing and Imagine Communications glue with Riedel communications frame with 18 talkback panels.

Each is outfitted for 12 cameras including Sony HDCU-2500s and a HDCU-4300 supports for slo-motion. There are 3 x EVS on each event with a fourth on the basketball for video adjudication.

Audio mixing is on Lawo mc² 36 consoles with Lawo A__mic 8 as the interface boxes to bring audio back from the commentary and field of play and also standup positions.

Gravity Media has developed a system that allows them to connect field cameras over single SMPTE cable back to a Field Box. They call it SCAMPI. Cameras are connected over 1x singlemode fibre cable with the SCAMPI Truck Box in the Compound, where it interacts with RCPs and Controllers.

“This is essentially a way to transit video, data and power for multicams down one single cable. The signal is broken out in the box at the OB compound for the router and for iris, color control and any pan tilt and focus control via multi-cam shading control CyanView RCP.

“The reasons we’re using this transit system is because on the Basketball we need to mount a mini-cam behind the basketball board to look through to the net. We’re using a second system on the beach volley,” Goodman says.

The camera connected to SCAMPI on the Beach Volleyball is a Dreamchip ATOM one SSM500, a high-speed camera that can be operated in standalone or in EVS modes with iris and PTZF control over a CyanView network. In standalone mode, replay and trigger is done via Stream Deck or shuttle connected to the RCP. Replays are then stored in the camera's internal storage. In EVS mode (as here) the RCP acts as a bridge between the EVS system and the camera. It can playback at 500fps and has a 50fps output for cutting into the programme.

The second reason is that Gravity have been asked by S+V to provide a red indication light for the Beach Volleyball umpire to tell them when the host production is showing a replay. The umpire can restart the match when the light goes off.

“Because the OB compound is 350m of cable away from the field of play the signal needed to go over fibre. Usually, you’d take a GPO from the cable from the vision mixer but our development engineer was able to find a way to use the Cyanview across Scampi to trigger the GPO from the Scampi box and create a small circuit to power the light on and off meaning the signal can be transported over fibre.”

Graphics, as across the entire Games, is by Swiss Timing.

“Our flypacks are designed to accommodate 12 camera OBs so that means I take a template of that flypack and adapt it to the production need,” Goodman says.

The flypack racks are wired ready to go so I can just configure it as required.”

For instance, its OB for the 2021 I’m A Celebrity Get Me Out of Here was a 124 camera solution. For the US Open, another contract, the build is even bigger.

“It’s similar to a truck solution except that our kit arrives in boxes and housed in portacabins.”

In this case, eight portacabins arrived on site on 21 June before technical rig and rehearsals. Gravity itself is sending 12 crew, split between the two events.

 

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M&A in Media and Telecoms Hits Record $469 Billion in Teeth of Recession

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Despite increasing interest rates, the stock market decline in the tech sector and a potential recession, M&A business among media and telcos is heating up.

The multi-billion dollar high profile deals for Twitter (Elon Musk’s intent to acquire for $44bn) and Activision Blizzard (Microsoft in for $68.7bn) aside, there have been 1,014 deals during the past 12 months, a 28% year-over-year increase, according to figures in a new PwC Mid-Year Deals Outlook report.

Taken together the value of those deals is worth a record $469 billion in which private equity acquisitions dominate, increasing from 24% of deals in 2018 to 42% in the past 12 months or $194 billion of the total. PwC notes that 75% of private equity activity is concentrated in the internet and software space.

“Despite the challenges big tech is facing in the stock market, small to mid-size tech deals continue to dominate private deal volumes.”

The headwinds of potential recession haven’t dampened demand which has been pent up since 2020 with deal momentum continues at a vigorous pace in the second half of this year.

“A significant amount of cash is in the system to get deals done,” PwC reports. “Further, businesses are under pressure to transform; the fastest way to do that is through M&A.”

Bart Spiegel, Media and Telecom deals partner at the consultancy, gives his perspective in a statement. “With buzz around metaverse technologies, M&A in media and telecom is still deeply rooted in the fundamental theses that have driven the sector for several years: building brands around owned Intellectual Property and creating ecosystems to directly market to consumers.”

Expanding on that, acquiring IP that can be monetized across a multitude of platforms in a variety of geographies continues to drive investment for players in the media space.

Following the merger of WarnerMedia with Discovery and Amazon’s purchase of MGM assets, there is a widespread view that further M&A will happen in media. There can be no room for the amount of premium streamers that are in the market now and something will have to give. The smart money is on Apple buying an independent studio like Lionsgate in order to bolster its current lean content library.

The report picks up on three areas of potential further M&A activity. It thinks the recent spate of music artists selling their catalogs to investment funds and record labels will continue, and that private equity is also circling the sports industry.

Private equity firms have recently been allowed to buy into sports teams, a privilege previously limited to individuals and family trusts. The cap on demand has been lifted while the supply remains fixed, driving up valuations.

“This combination of additional cash flow opportunities, limited supply and booming demand has primed the sports industry for continuing growth in the foreseeable future.”

The shift to digital advertising is the third macro trend and likely to continue with a strong emphasis on “sophisticated” audience targeting and engagement tracking that uses high-quality data to underpin user experience personalization.

PwC says that recent in M&A activity brands are looking toward consolidation as a means to achieve operational scalability in the increasingly complex regulatory landscape. Meanwhile, ad tech providers are seeking opportunities for capability expansion.

 

A Model for Making Money in the Metaverse: How It Works at Decentraland

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Curious about why anyone would buy real estate in a 3D world and how they can make money from it? Here are your answers, filtered through the example of one leading virtual world: Decentraland, which is a good proxy for other metaverse economies.

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Decentraland was created by Argentinians Ari Meilich and Esteban Ordano and has been in development since 2015 and is run as a non-profit by the Decentraland Foundation. It launched in 2017 but took off in 2020 when the metaverse craze began.

Decentraland is powered by the Ethereum blockchain. Users can create, experiment, and monetize content and applications.

Brands including Samsung, Atari, Miller Lite and PwC have bought digital properties on the site. In March of this year, Decentraland hosted Metaverse Fashion Week in which major fashion brands appeared, including Dolce & Gabbana, Tommy Hilfiger, and Estée Lauder. Musicians Deadmau5 and Grimes have held concerts on the platform.

“One of the coolest things about Decentraland is that it’s not just a virtual world, but a virtual economy as well,” says Nico Nobili, CEO of Sybershel, who acts as our guide. “In addition to buying and selling land, users can also buy and sell goods and services within Decentraland.”

So what are the earning opportunities?

Own Some Pixel Real-Estate

The most obvious income opportunity for landowners is to buy and then sell their land in a property speculation akin to the real world.

Each 10m x 10m square plot of LAND in Decentraland is an indivisible and permanent asset stored in a smart contract.

That means that every piece of land purchased is permanent and can’t be altered. The value of each LAND is determined by market demand.

LAND is actually a non-fungible token ERC-721 minted on the Ethereum blockchain. Non-fungible means that it is not replicable and it is unique.

In April 2021, during a surge in popularity for NFTs plots parcels sold for between $6,000 and $100,000.

“Decentraland is still in its infancy, so land and property prices are relatively low,” Nobili says. “But as the platform grows, prices are expected to rise.”

Sell Services on Your Property

In addition to buying and holding LAND, users can also develop their own applications and experiences (known as “dapps”) on their lots.

“A bit like a physical store,” says Nobili, “but in these dapps you have an experience as if you were entering a museum or a playground.”

He reports that Decentraland plans to launch a marketplace where users can buy and sell goods and services. The market will be powered by the same smart contracts that power the property system.

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Speculate with Native Currency

Another way to generate income in Decentraland is to simply hold the platform’s native currency, MANA.

MANA is an ERC-20 token, which means it can be bought and sold on cryptocurrency exchanges.

Dapps on Decentraland can only by visited by other users who own MANA.

The price of MANA is expected to rise as the platform grows and as more people use it.

Soon it may be possible for users to convert conventional dollars and sterling into MANA, a move that is thought necessary to populate Decentraland and create more demand.

Mint and Sell Tokens

Another possibility is to create a market for non-fungible tokens (NFTs) such as digital art, collectibles, and game items.

According to Nobili, Decentraland is working on a way to allow users to create their own NFT markets.

“You will then be able to sell the products you created on the Decentraland Metaverse to other avatar users who frequent this world.”

Speaking of avatars, you can also create and sell virtual clothing and other avatar accessories and earn income that way.

Once again the Decentraland team is working on a way to allow users to also create and sell their own avatar clothing.

This is all a very rosy picture of the metaverse and how everyone can be involved and make money from participation, but it strikes me that it’s also not telling the full story. It would seem that most of the money-making schemes here are like the stock market — where you buy low, bet that demand will rise and cash out on a profit. The stock market IRL is dominated by venture capital — i.e., those with existing capital can absorb the risk.

Like many metaverse idealists, Nobili doesn’t point out that the site is dominated by brands — that is, advertisers hoping to extend their marketing into the 3D internet. To my mind, that’s just old capitalism and it’s not creator led.

More significantly, metaverse visionaries make much of the idea that avatars and currency or assets can be exported seamlessly between multiple virtual worlds that make up the metaverse. While Decentraland is making moves to be transparent (ie enabling MANA to be traded as standard cryptocurrency), it’s not clear if NFTs minted in other worlds are able to be traded on its site.

As Nobili says, this is a work in progress: much like the metaverse.

Sybershel, by the way, is attempting to combine technology and artificial intelligence with human beings. “Creating technological products that adapt, blend, and merge with man,” Nobili states. “Making him more bionic.”

 

Moving at the Speed of the Metaverse

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While we are at the early days of the metaverse, it will advance so quickly that if companies don’t act now, they’ll find themselves operating in worlds designed by, and for, someone else, warns consultancy Accenture.

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In its research report, “Meet Me in the Metaverse,” Accenture explores how the metaverse will impact business.

“Many dismiss it as a consideration for the future,” say technology group chief executive Paul Daugherty and CEO Julie Sweet. “The metaverse is actionable today, and leaders must be ready.”

Accenture’s big idea is to see the metaverse as a continuum — one that “spans the spectrum of digitally enhanced worlds, realities and business models.”

It applies across all aspects of business, from consumer to worker and across the entire enterprise; from reality to virtual and back; from 2D to 3D; and from cloud and AI to extended reality, blockchain, digital twins, edge technologies and beyond.

“As the next evolution of the internet, the metaverse will be a continuum of rapidly emerging capabilities, use cases, technologies and experiences,” the report urges.

The building blocks of the “Metaverse Continuum” are taking shape today but will coalesce over the next decade “to create an entirely new enterprise landscape,” Accenture finds.

The 2020s will see ambitious enterprises bringing shape to these new physical and digital realities, as well as worlds co-populated by people and AI, industries made possible by new computers, and more.

From these words you can see that Accenture’s analysts have no real concrete idea of how the metaverse will look. It expands 97 pages of a PDF report stressing ad infinitum that in its view the metaverse is coming fast and that businesses need to prep for it — ideally by hooking up with a consultancy like Accenture.

“Just as the internet evolved beyond simple websites to underpin the majority of today’s businesses, it would be wrong to think the experience of the metaverse will be constrained to digital space,” Accenture states.

It explains that the “Metaverse Continuum is an evolving and expanding continuum on multiple dimensions. These include the convergence and advance of technologies like extended reality, blockchain, artificial intelligence, digital twins, and smart objects — including cars and factories, and edge computing.

It encompasses the “virt-real” — a range of experiences, from purely virtual to a blend of virtual and physical. And the ‘Continuum’ describes the spectrum of emerging consumer experiences and the business applications and models across the enterprise “that will be reimagined and transformed.”

For 2022 Accenture spotlights four trends that businesses need to get a grip on as the metaverse evolves.

What it calls “WebMe” is how the internet is being reimagined with new modes of digital experience. “The underlying efforts to reimagine how data shapes our digital experiences, will challenge businesses to rethink their presence online and become a part of shaping the next platform revolution as they build new ways to connect to customers, partners, and their digital workforce.”

Another trend, the Programmable World, projects how the convergence of 5G, ambient computing, AR and “smart materials” are paving the way for businesses to reshape how they interact with the physical world.

“As technology becomes part of the fabric of our environment, it allows us to treat our environment more like technology — unlocking an unprecedented fidelity of control, automation, and personalization.”

Accenture also notes the emergence of The Unreal — a trend where our environments and businesses are increasingly filled with machines that are passably human. This can be benign and even intrinsic to the AI that enterprises aspire to integrate into their processes; but at the same time businesses need to beware the pitfalls of deepfakes and bots. Accenture feels that this growing concern may turn into the biggest hurdle for enterprises.

“Like it or not, enterprises have been thrust into the forefront of a world questioning what’s real, what isn’t, and if the line between those two really matters.”

The fourth trend in the metaverse continuum that business leaders should be cognizant of is the emergence of super computing.

“Quantum, biologically-inspired, and high-performance computers are each allowing companies to tackle grand challenges that once defined and shaped the very core of their industries. As problems once considered impossible become ever more solvable, business leaders will be pushed to reimagine some of the most basic assumptions about their enterprise.”

The consultant considers that we stand at a unique precipice in time. Not because there are new technologies to master, but rather that competing in this next decade will require something more than just increasing technology and innovation skills.

“Recall that 20 years ago many enterprises were wondering if they needed a presence on the web — a question that seems quaint now that every public company has augmented its sales, operations, or products with digital technology in some form. With the future on the horizon, we are hearing echoes of that question again: Is remote work here to stay? Do physical environments really need to be smart? Do I need to care about the Metaverse? The answer to these questions and others is a resounding ‘yes’.”

 

Why the Creator Economy Hinges on the Success of Web3

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Are we really in the midst of a profound shift in the centuries-old power dynamic between employee and employer? Could reward for labor finally be equitable and not dominated by capital? It’s the Marxist fantasy re-introduced by venture capitalists, hailing the promised land of Web3.

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Another such argument comes from Nobu Iguchi, cofounder and managing partner at Agya Ventures — a VC operating in real estate (virtual and real).

Writing at VentureBeat, Iguchi says, “Web3 will enable a world where people can make a living by producing work that they have direct ownership over without the dependency on centralized third-party organizations that exists today.”

This is the rise of the “creator economy,” a reforming of the traditional grossly uneven relationship between worker and capital.

As essayed by Iguchi, most work today means working for a larger organization where employees retain little autonomy over the type of labor they do and how they execute it.

The recently emerged gig economy “enables employees to complete smaller, more manageable tasks on an ad-hoc basis — like working in food delivery.” While this model of work improved flexibility and employee autonomy, Iguchi rightly points out that most workers are still heavily dependent on their employers (and workers have also traded away rights like holiday, pension, salary, health benefits).

In the utopian scheme of the creator economy, “creators do not require a parent company to act as an employer; they are able to work when they want, produce whatever content they please, and have full autonomy over how they monetize their content.

“This new ownership structure is symbolic of a greater power shift in the employer-employee dynamic,” Iguchi says. “The creator economy principles — ownership of work, decentralization, and flexibility — run in parallel with the emergence of Web3.”

As the world moves closer to the next generation of the internet over the next few years, we can expect to see increasing overlap between the creator economy and Web3.

In theory, Web3 will enable creators to not only own their content on existing social platforms, but also own a part of the platform they produce and distribute content on. Content can begin to be creator-owned and platform-agnostic through the use of NFTs, which act as proof of ownership and validate the content’s authenticity.

Creators will also play a key role in the metaverse. “In addition to participating in it, creators can develop parts of the metaverse with either no-code tools or technical background.”

What Iguchi calls “metaverse creators” will likely grow to become an active and profitable vertical of the creator economy in the years to come.

The VC caveats all of this Garden of Eden stuff by recognizing that “the intersection of the creator economy and Web3 is still nascent and its future is uncertain,” but holds to the view that “if executed well,” the Web3 ethos and emerging technologies could have massive implications — not just for creators but the future of work as a whole.

 

Live Production at Glastonbury for a World Stage

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If all of the world is a stage, then the world was watching Glastonbury this weekend. At least it felt that way in the UK, where public service broadcasters gave viewers and radio listeners wall-to-wall coverage of the three-day festival.

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The Glasto vibe has always been strong (the event is hosted on a farm near mystic ley lines, after all), but has been amped up in recent years to successfully encompass a broad swathe of popular music, from jazz and rap to metal and soul.

The demand for the communality of crowds has been back with a vengeance this summer with artists like Harry Styles, The Rolling Stones, Elton John, and Billie Eilish playing packed stadium gigs across the UK.

The zenith of this trend was the Glastonbury Festival, which played host to more than 80 acts to 200,000 people live and millions more at home.

Headline acts, including Billie Eilish and Paul McCartney, agreed to play the festival for a fraction of the fee they could command elsewhere. Emily Eavis, a co-organizer of the event, revealed that the festival’s performers are typically paid less than 10% of what they’d usually get elsewhere. At Coachella, for example, Beyonce was reputedly paid $4 million to appear in 2018. Beyonce played Glasto in 2011.

BBC presenter and DJ Jo Whiley described the experience to Variety’s Mark Sutherland: “Take Coachella, multiple it by a thousand, add several different dimensions and put it in multi-color… Then you might have a grasp of what Glastonbury is all about.”

Among the acts this year were Olivia Rodrigo, Diana Ross, Lorde, and Pet Shop Boys, with appearances by Led Zeppelin frontman Robert Plant and country and bluegrass star Alison Krauss. Dave Grohl and Bruce Springsteen also duetted with Macca.

You’d like to think the stars do this because they want to be part of a unique communal experience. There’s an element of that to be sure. Another reason is the boost BBC coverage can give to future sales of tour dates and streaming airplay.

“These days, artists sign up to be at Glastonbury with the BBC coverage at the back of their minds,” Alison Howe, executive producer for BBC Studios, says to Sutherland. “People want to be part of it.”

After the last pre-pandemic event in 2019, huge surges in sales and streams followed for the likes of The Killers, The Cure, Lizzo and Kylie Minogue.

Each year the broadcaster takes it upon itself to record or live stream more of the show than ever before. This year, BBC produced live coverage of the main Pyramid stage in 4K UHD HDR and a live stream of various acts that were performing on different stages at the same time through its iPlayer online service.

“We’re really hopeful that at night when you look out over the crowd when the headline act is on, [the UHD] will really define a bit more what people at the event are seeing,” explained Howe to Televisual’s Pippa Considine. “Not just the detail on stage, but also the detail in the environment.”

BBC plans for more stages to get the UHD treatment in future. In 2017, the corporation and Glastonbury announced a broadcast deal through 2022, with an announcement expected that this longstanding partnership will be extended.

It’s not just performers using Glastonbury as a world stage. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and 19-year-old climate change activist Greta Thunberg both addressed the televisual audience in unscheduled speeches, while several other artists chose to vocalize their anger and defiance against the US Supreme Court ruling on the right to abortion.

Kendrick Lamar, who headlined Sunday’s performance, was perhaps the most striking. He signed off the end of his set repeating the words, “They judge you, they judged Christ, Godspeed for women’s rights.”

 

The Is the Future of TV (Until Everything Changes Again)

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The US remains the largest single OTT market, generating $29 billion across transactional and SVOD last year — with double-digit growth in 2021 alone. Throughout the pandemic, many consumers who previously eschewed paid video entirely were finally convinced to take the plunge, and there’s new data to prove it.

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PwC‘s new “Global Entertainment & Media Outlook 2022-2026” explores these recent growth metrics in detail, and pinpoints how connected TV is shaping up to be an AVOD battleground.

On OTT Growth

In absolute terms, the US added $6.4 billion of OTT video revenue in 2020, and $4.8 billion in 2021, driven by a combination of new subscribers and subscription package price increases.

Over the next five years, PwC expects the market will increase at an average 6.8% compound annual growth rate (CAGR).

“While this represents a significant cooling compared to the recent past, in absolute terms the US will still be adding more revenue than any other single market.”

In total, by the end of 2026, OTT video revenue in the US is expected to reach $40.4 billion, an increase of $11.3 billion from 2021.

SVOD will increase its share of the total OTT video market over the next five years and is expected to represent 83%, or $33.6 billion, by the end of 2026.

However, now that traditional entertainment companies have SVOD platforms of their own, they are beginning to pull back content as they look to grow their OTT subscriber bases. As more and more SVOD services are launched, PwC finds “a contrasting state of negotiating power that any single SVOD holds,” as the consumer is able to choose from a far larger portfolio of services and platforms.

This loosening of SVOD’s grip on the streaming model is featured in a number of data points in the report. Let’s look at those:

FAST Channels Solidify

FAST channels are increasingly gaining attention from the gatekeepers in online advertising. Google has agreed a broad-ranging partnership with Pluto TV that will see the FAST channel distributed to Google TV devices. PwC thinks it likely that Google will also be using Pluto TV and other platforms to begin distributing its own content at some point in 2022.

While Pluto TV is perhaps the largest household name, it is joined by a range of other services which are increasingly widely distributed. Rakuten TV is now available across 12 countries in Europe. Tubi, Peacock, Roku and Crackle all feature some sort of FAST provision which is alongside paid in some instances, creating a hybrid service that can often be used to upsell more premium content to users once they are within the content ecosystem.

CTV, the AVOD Battleground

Connected TV (CTV) is a varied term, which applies not just to the TV set itself but to any device that connects to it, turning it into a device capable of streaming content OTT. Examples include Roku and Amazon’s stick-based devices. But the term also extends to games consoles and smart TVs like Sky Glass and OS-based solutions like Google TV.

“CTV is a driving force behind the changing nature of OTT thanks to AVOD and ad-insertion and more specifically the hardware companies in control of hardware manufacture,” says PwC.

Rather than ads sold at the point of broadcast, ads can be served in a variety of dynamic ways. This could mean all the way up to being completely dynamic across unrelated channels and aggregated through the platform rather than the broadcaster.

“While this does not directly affect SVOD and TVOD players, there are several reasons why this will affect them as services are carried across the range of CTV options available to consumers. Hardware manufactures are ceasing to be content agnostic.

“In the past, a set was primarily designed to provide the best image (for the cost), with other UX components like sound and user interface (UI) coming second. Because CTV represents an increasingly important battleground and revenue-generation stream, the UI is significant. Carriage and prominence within a platform will be affected by the relationship of that player to the hardware manufacturer, not just the popularity of the app with the general viewership.”

Pay-TV Continued to Decline

The US saw a revenue decline of 7.4% across 2021, seeing a loss of over US $6.6 billion, decreasing from $89.4 billion in 2020. By comparison, the global decline in traditional TV revenue was just 1.5%, with regions like Asia Pacific and EMEA showing slight growth.

Cable, which represents 63% of the US market, previously used to best retain its customer base by bundling telco services with pay-TV; however, this has changed in recent years and now Internet access is being bundled along with SVOD and OTT services, as well as access to linear OTT such as Comcast Xfinity and Spectrum.

The analysts at PwC note that this has contributed to the fast growth in SVOD and OTT services but has slowed growth in pay-TV. Even so, pay-TV has slowly been growing its market share (in terms of subscriptions), with an increase from 56% in 2017 to 63% in 2021.

Pay TV Finally Gains a Foothold in OTT Distribution

Cable companies are at the center of consumer video, says PwC. Cable allows customers to sign up to OTT services through a single package and allows integration of these services through pay-TV STBs and platforms.

“This is important because it allows cable to weather the storm of cable-cutting and cord-trimming as users move to using more stand-alone TV providers. Retaining these now lower-paying subs means that as the re-bundling of third-party services occurs, cable TV will be able to recoup these losses.”

To be specific, this proposition states that while SVOD has unbundled pay-TV and caused a huge degree of chaos in the industry, to a major extent this model only works where there are one or two major SVOD services to choose from.

“When there are more, competition between each of these services takes its toll on the performance of all of them. In order to grow revenue across all of these competing companies, it is necessary for a neutral aggregator to play the role of the consumer gatekeeper.”

Replicating this kind of model in the SVOD space is expected to be increasingly prominent over the next five years. A light form of pay-TV is expected to be bundled with a data subscription, while premium sports and movies will remain as a core pillar of pay-TV.

TV and Home Entertainment Outlook

Over the next five years, pay-TV is expected to continue to decline in the US, both in terms of subscriptions and, at a slightly slower rate, in terms of revenue.

By 2026 North America as a whole, with the US making up 90% of its revenue, will have seen a significant decline in global market share, decreasing from 44% in 2017 to just 33% in 2026.

The US will be worth $65.6 billion in 2026, slightly smaller than the EMEA market, which is expected to bring in $72.4 billion.

Satellite is expected to continue to be the worst affected platform experiencing the fastest decline due to extensive cord-cutting and an industry shift towards OTT services. Over the next five years, satellite will churn around one-third of its total base (at a -8.0% CAGR), or around 6.7 million subscribers, falling from almost 20 million in 2021 to 13 million in 2026.

Cable is expected to lose 4.5 million subscribers over the next five years, with losses slowly decreasing and expecting to stabilize, from -3.9% year-on-year in 2021 to just -0.8% in 2026, shrinking at a -2.1% CAGR.

“By this point, cable distribution is expected to be nearly synonymous with broadband double-play, meaning that for many of these households there will be little difference between a cable and an effective IPTV home. Indeed, the underlying technologies driving cable and IPTV television continue to move closer together.”

VOD usage in particular means that an increasing amount of viewing by cable subscribers is of content delivered through IP — in essence the end product that consumers use is rapidly becoming “an indistinguishable proposition.”

Performance of these two platforms is therefore driven more by the proposition than the technology behind the platform.

Internet Ad Revenues Accelerate

The US Internet ad market enjoyed an acceleration in growth in 2021, expanding year-on-year by 35.4% after the uncertainties in 2020. The market will continue to increase at an 8% CAGR between 2021 and 2026 to reach a value of US $278 billion, still the largest market globally.

Contributing to the rapid expansion in US Internet ad revenue is the shift towards ad-funded online video (such as the ad-supported options from Discovery+, Paramount+ and HBO Max), and E-commerce with market leader Amazon capitalizing significantly alongside other prominent retailers that launched their own retail media services.

Internet advertising is expected to evolve over the next 10 years into a broader category of Web 3.0 and “metaverse advertising” which will encompass online 3D advertising (three dimensional ads expected to run soon on Facebook and Instagram platforms), VR ads and perhaps other IOT advertising channels and spaces, along with new ad formats such as branded NFTs.

“The business cases for these technologies remain unclear and uncertainty about adoption makes category forecasting challenging,” PwC finds.

Meanwhile, regulatory attention continues to be a thorny subject in the US for the market’s top-10 leading tech players — which together combine to take 78.6% of US digital Internet advertising revenue, according to an April report by the IAB.

The regulatory environment is set to become more stringent from 2022. PwC says: “This will be a critical aspect of protecting the open Internet, which is being threatened by increasing shifts towards privacy protection, some of which could potentially strengthen the hand of big tech and its first-party data-rich walled gardens while heavily impacting the open programmatic market.”

 

Streamers Shift to Hybrid Models

The bounce in video consumption during the pandemic continued in 2021, when the online video market also shifted greater attention to ad-supported monetization strategies. As a result, total online video advertising revenue grew by 50.9% during 2021 to reach $39.5 billion. PwC expects rapid expansion to continue, forecasting that in five years from now online video ad revenue will reach $66.6 billion. By that point, it will represent 44.2% of total Internet display advertising revenue in the US and 25.2% of the country’s total Internet advertising market value, up from 40.5% and 22.0% in 2021, respectively.

Much of this will remain dominated by mobile-first social platforms — like YouTube, Facebook, Instagram and, increasingly, TikTok — but opportunities for premium ad-funded platforms are growing rapidly in the US as more viewers shift from linear TV to Internet-delivered alternatives.

“In the medium term, shifts towards hybrid monetization methods, connected TV and FAST channels will cement video’s role as the main driver of revenue between 2021 and 2026.”

As uptake of ad-supported subscriptions and FAST channels increase, and advertiser appetite for premium, brand-safe, addressable messaging on connected TVs grows. The connected TV advertising segment will enjoy substantial growth over the forecast period when it expands from $8.1 billion in 2021 to $17.5 billion in 2026, representing an increase at a 16.8% CAGR.

Additionally, while online TV advertising is occasionally seen to be competing with other forms of online advertising, the reality is most experts consider that online TV advertising is in fact additive in this space. The net result is that the impact of online TV advertising over the next five years will be net positive both for TV advertising and for the advertising industry as a whole.

In total, broadcast networks will increase their share of total terrestrial advertising revenue from 48% in 2021 to 50.9% in 2026.

 

Lighting the dark side of the moon

British Cinematographer

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Director Roland Emmerich is no stranger to putting earth-shattering events on screen. The director of Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow and 2012 teams up with DP Robby Baumgartner and returns with another blockbuster disaster movie in which the moon is sent hurtling on a collision course to Earth with catastrophic consequences. 

Like Moonfall director Roland Emmerich, cinematographer Robby Baumgartner is no stranger to state-of-the-art action movies. With experience gained over three decades working on films like, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, The Hunger Games and Ant-Man and the Wasp, Baumgartner was additional photographer for Emmerich on Independence Day: Resurgence and cinematographer for the director’s period war epic Midway.  

“I’ve worked on a number of large-scale movies with the scope of Moonfall and I knew that Roland and I would form a great team,” he says.  

Selecting RED cameras to shoot the $140 million sci-fi epic was an easy and early decision stemming from successful experiences with RED Epic Dragon on Independence Day: Resurgence and with the RED Monstro sensor on Midway.  

 “We both wanted the RED Monstro VistaVision chip, and there was no need to test it. Firstly, this was clearly a movie with a lot of action-driven VFX, so having an 8K platform shooting 5:1 REDCODE RAW would make it easier for VFX to rotoscope and build VFX starting from a higher per-pixel resolution.”  

The film features approximately 1,705 VFX shots supplied by DNEG, Scanline VFX, and Framestore, with additional work from Lola VFX and Polmont.  

“Also, Roland loved our use of large-format lenses combined with MONSTRO 8K VV on Midway and wanted to repeat that sense of scale. This time I paired the Monstro with a full set of ARRI DNA Primes. We typically carried three bodies with one setup for Steadicam and the other two for handheld, dolly or crane. We also had a RED Ranger, which is the first time I’ve used this camera. It’s a fantastic platform – I was very impressed.”  

The Lionsgate release stars Halle Berry and Patrick Wilson as astronauts and John Bradley as a conspiracy theorist as unlikely heroes uniting to mount a last-ditch mission into space, only to find out that our moon is not what we think it is.  

“Roland’s big concern was the scope of the interactive lighting,” explains Baumgartner. “With a lot of big set pieces and scenes being shot on huge stages in Montreal against 360-degree blue screen, we knew we had to carefully balance the practical lighting of our actors with the virtual lighting from elements like the moon crashing into earth, asteroids, explosions and lots of fireworks. The tricky part with interactive lighting is achieving the right balance that works for VFX.”  

One scene had the characters walking at night in the mountains of Colorado while meteors rained down. Baumgartner and his team were tasked with creating the interactive lighting of multiple meteor fireballs traveling the entire length of a 200ft stage. The quality, colour, intensity, speed, and timing of these effects had to be coordinated with the action of actors and match what VFX was going to build in post. It was a daunting challenge.  

“LEDs give you full RGB+W capability and wireless control which you don’t get with tungsten or conventional theatrical light, but we needed a variety of sources to make this work. We rigged the whole length of the stage with Par Cans (more familiar for use in lighting rock concerts), and instead of moving the fixtures, which would have gotten too complex and expensive to rig, we chased the lights to give the illusion of traveling objects. 

“The Par Cans were our hard sources that we rigged on either side to create sharp moving shadows, and we added into the mix ARRI SkyPanels. rigged in an array overhead to give us a softer ambient light source. Both sources were in sync to chase the length of the stage. 

“The combination of new and old lighting fixtures was a very effective interactive lighting source that mimicked meteors streaking across the sky. Add on to that the effects of numerous explosions as they crashed into the ground, and you can imagine my crew and I had our hands full!”  

Baumgartner also utilised large LED walls in combination with conventional film lights to create the complex interactive lighting of the various capsules and spacecraft used in Moonfall.  

The laws of physics 

The DP worked closely with VFX supervisor Pete Travers, who compiled astronomy images from NASA and researched the laws of light in physics to anchor the film’s design to reality. “We started from the basis of what the actual physics would be and worked out how that would change given the scenarios presented in the film. As the moon gets closer and closer to the Earth then it would naturally look bigger but it’s colour would change too, the closer it got to the earth’s atmosphere. 

“In testing we found a range of colour temperatures that were based on the physics of a rising near-Earth moon around 2400K to a direct overhead moon at 5700K, but for our purposes I felt we needed to go a bit bluer overall on the night scenes so screw the physics!”  

They ramped up the kelvin in the night scenes to a range of 6500-8000K. On the other hand, scenes set inside the moon presented “a whole other world we could create.”  

“It’s an alien world to which we added a bit of green to the baseline steely blue,” Baumgartner says. “For one particular scene inside of a chamber we went for a deep blue and Roland really loved it.”  

This element of photography was crucial to informing VFX about the correct colour palette. “VFX used the same LUT and colour temps that we used on set,” he adds. “All the plates were applied with the same calibration as well, so we all came to the same place at the same time. 

 “The biggest compliment was when we came to colour timing and Walter Volpatto, senior colourist at Company 3, told me it was phenomenal that live action, plates and VFX all virtually matched in the same range.”  

“A big plus with RED is that the colour space is fantastic. You can be really accurate making creative decisions and confident that those decisions are going to be consistent throughout the DI.  

“This was the most complex interactive lighting I’ve had to do and being able to pull it off with our team of grips, electric, camera and VFX was incredibly satisfying.”