Vendor predictions for 2024: AI, CTV, FAST and Niche Sports

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It’s no surprise that uses of AI are top of the agenda for media organisations in the next 12 months but so too is a drive to enhanced monetisation over Connected TV, mining niche sports, warnings of job ‘replacements’ and, notably, fewer calls for sustainability. Here are a selection of vendor responses for what to look for in 2024.

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Copyright protections required

Tony Jones, Principal Technologist, MediaKind

In 2024, a potential concern is the role and rights of creative talent, as well as the need to ensure that the creative intellectual property of humans is protected. Generative AI, despite the concerns over how copyright works, can create new content that would have been too costly to perform any other way. This also adds the ability to improve captioning, translations, and region-specific signing for the hearing-impaired, which could improve the accessibility of content. There are many potential opportunities where Gen-AI can make a difference. We’ll continue to be surprised with the new capabilities it offers.

AI delivers content creation value

Richard Wormwell, Head of Innovation, dock10

2024 is the year when all the frenzied AI hype ends - and AI really delivers on its promise! For us, we’ll definitely be using generative AI to create things like pitch decks, storyboards and concept art. But we’ll also use AI to harness together virtual production, motion capture and real time graphics to create AI-driven synthetic humans that move, speak and react within a virtual studio - including using generative AI to answer viewer questions for themselves. The television industry should brace itself for fundamental changes: creatives will be getting even more creative and more productive too.

AI enters live streaming

Vinayak Shrivastav, CEO, Magnifi

In this fiercely competitive landscape, brands will continue to leverage AI to foster personal connections with audiences, transforming live streams into hubs of engagement and profitability. For viewers, AI’s evolution delivers personalised experiences, suggesting content based on preferences and enabling real-time interactions. Its applications span content recommendation, real-time moderation, video quality enhancement, and content analytics for strategic refinement.   

AI automates production roles 

Robert Szabo-Rowe, SVP, Engineering & Product Management at The Switch  

2024 will see the rising impact of deep learning and AI across live production and delivery – and we see it affecting staffing at some point not too far into the future. We’ve already seen DL/AI used for close captioning and near-real-time highlight generation, and it is poised to be applied way beyond that. Some companies are trialling multi-camera systems that automate the show-cutting process. It may be scary to consider, but jobs such as Technical Director may not be needed for lower tier live productions soon. The appeal is simple: the biggest cost of most live productions is staff. 

AI embedded in broadcast 

John Riley, VP Sales Engineering, Telestream 

European media and broadcasting organisations, eyeing operational efficiency and increased scalability, embraced SMPTE ST2110 standards, cloud migrations, and UHD content in 2023. Now, they’re diving into the AI/ML mix to transform their workflows. We’ve already seen this year how AI/ML improves customer service through AI-powered virtual assistants, as well as how it facilitates workflow generation and advances media processing, content management, and quality monitoring.  It’s just the beginning; we believe that more organisations will start leaning into AI/ML use cases for producing, managing, and analysing content in 2024. 

Niche sports take-off 

Andy Rayner, CTO at Appear 

Although ‘shoulder content’ is growing in importance, live sports action is still the MVP for broadcasters and streamers looking to win customers and increase monetisation and viewer engagement. We believe that 2024 will see the high-quality coverage of niche and lower-league sports really take-off, driven by the operators need for live sports, and the changing production economics enabled by deploying SRT over the public internet. SRT and the internet reduces the cost of contributing video from the stadium to the studio, so that for the first time, operators can match live contribution costs to content value. 

 

Monetise ‘niche’ genres  

Jonathan Smith, Solution Area Expert, Net Insight   

In 2024 we will see media organisations facing a strategic opportunity to scale their content, monetise ‘niche’ genres, and tap into more audiences than ever before. To be successful, more industry players will be adopting a consistent operational approach to the traditional managed and unmanaged networks supporting the plethora of streams required to drive enriched events and consumer engagement.   We will also see a greater transition to software-defined media networks that prioritise media-specific requirements and deliver observability, scalability, flexibility, and quality. This shift offers media companies unprecedented control and efficiency in media delivery; it’s a strategic necessity to stay competitive in a rapidly evolving landscape 

Power of BTS content 

Rick Allen, CEO, ViewLift 

The first global sports stars emerged around 1970, with Muhammed Ali and Pelé leading the way. This has rocketed in the last 50 years. The level of interest in Lionel Messi’s move to America, David Beckham’s biography series, and F1’s Drive to Survive, shows that today’s sports fans are interested in more than just their home country heroes and the live action. ViewLift’s work with major sports teams and leagues has proved to me the power of behind-the-scenes content. 2024 will see almost every team and league exploring how to grow their global fanbase by making the most of star power and with immersive storytelling complementing the live action. 

FAST aggregates and goes niche 

Greg Morrow, GM, Streaming Media Group, Bitcentral 

FAST is poised for growth, driven by content aggregators. Notably, FAST Channel Content Aggregators, particularly in news, act as expert curators, unifying diverse content. This fosters a viewer community, encouraging collaboration and deepening engagement in current events. The approach enhances creators’ reach through cross-promotion which benefits viewers, creators, and advertisers alike. Niche sports is another market segment for FAST channels responding to the rising demand for diverse content. Alongside traditional sports networks, FAST channels feature unconventional sports like cornhole, pickleball, and billiards. They cater to enthusiasts seeking niche coverage often unavailable through traditional methods. 

T-commerce boosts CTV  

Roger Franklin, Chief Strategy Officer, LTN 

The way we watch TV is constantly evolving and yet despite all these innovations, we still have to pick up a remote control. It’s mind-boggling that this hasn’t changed despite the fact our smartphones are supercomputers.  Switching to a mobile app can truly revolutionise the TV experience, particularly around T-commerce (purchases via Connected TV). Powerful signalling enables media companies and advertisers to use metadata and audio watermarks to share real-time information, targeted advertising, and new online shopping opportunities to the user. I expect 2024 to be the catalyst for the remote control to become redundant and mobile apps and T-commerce to take things to the next level. 

Optimisation for Connected TV 

Ben Tatta, CCO at Operative 

In 2024, people will continue to embrace FAST content, creating a lot of new CTV inventory for media companies. Advertisers will lean into CTV and will be looking for advertising that helps them reach audiences in ways that are coordinated across channels, delivers TV level quality and digital-level data. Media companies will need to focus on centralising their product catalogue across these channels to create bundled offerings that deliver scale, targeting and multichannel experiences. They’ll have to have a system for coordinating media buying, offering self-service and automation, and deliver transparent reporting.  

Complexity rising for post 

Venugopal Iyengar, COO, Digital, Planetcast 

Media organisations are finding it increasingly cumbersome and costly to navigate the various stages of postproduction, content delivery and monetisation – and will continue to do so through 2024 and beyond. This ‘complexity challenge’ will lead them to seek more efficient ways to maximise their media assets, such as leveraging unified service offerings and cloud-based technologies that simplify the entire content management and distribution process. 

Death of billing systems 

Vijay Sajja, Founder & CEO, Evergent 

Traditional billing systems will be dead in a decade. Streaming businesses are under immense, constant pressure to monetise and retain their existing subscribers. And, they must achieve this in the face of changing consumer preferences, increased competition and the added constant pressure to manage costs. An increasing number of streaming businesses will start by looking inward and checking whether their current billing, monetisation and retention infrastructure is capable of scaling them to the next million subscribers. 

Unreal graphics for sports 

Jeff Clark, Managing Director, Verso Live 

Embracing video game technology, like Unreal Engine, is no longer a matter of option for sports broadcasters – it is becoming a matter of survival. The audience’s preferences have changed and shorter attention spans have increased the demand for new usages for graphics in broadcast. One of the ways we see them responding to this is with graphics that deliver more predictive statistics to live sports, adding another layer of engagement and allowing fans to see matches at a more strategic level. On the production side, this technology will optimise workflows, requiring less of everything: power, cabling, lighter kits, and, ultimately, cost and footprint. 

Put sustainability front and centre 

Bevan Gibson, COO, EMG 

To effectively implement advancements and prevent obsolescence, sustainability must be at the centre of broadcaster decision-making. We need to take a strategic and holistic approach. We can’t use technology just for the sake of it. Implementation can only happen when longevity is balanced against the immediate commercial gains. Sustainability should also extend to the people that integrate and propel innovation, as their role is central to the success of any broadcast. To ensure a thriving sector, we need to address these realities in 2024. 

Archive for Profitability 

Lance Podell, SVP at Iron Mountain Entertainment Services  

For the third time in the past three years production has come to a halt in entertainment. We’ve now seen the impact that the pandemic, and the strikes have placed on the production process. In 2024, I’m predicting that the most forward-thinking companies will begin to prepare for unexpected shutdowns to avoid massive losses - and that’s going to be centered around archiving.  Archiving is entertainment’s unspoken emergency preparedness plan that’s going to be key in filling gaps during halted production periods. It’s often been approached as a postproduction discussion, long after projects have debuted, but that will change. The most successful companies will adopt a new approach that examines both asset preservation and monetisation earlier on as new content is being developed. 

 

Steps towards solar-made fuels

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An emerging water-splitting technology called solar thermochemical hydrogen (STCH) promises a more energy-efficient and carbon zero method for producing H2 as a green fuel.

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Hydrogen (H2) is considered one of the most promising sources of clean energy to tackle climate change but producing it economically and carbon free from end to end is a huge challenge. “We’re thinking of hydrogen as the fuel of the future and there’s a need to generate it cheaply and at scale,” said Ahmed Ghoniem, a Professor of Mechanical Engineering at MIT.

Hydrogen energy sources are being promoted as part of a mixed economy of green power options by governments. In 2020, the European Commission published A hydrogen strategy for a climate-neutral Europe, aiming to accelerate widespread H2 use and achieve a carbon-neutral European Union.

In its Combined Heat and Power Act, the German government requires new gas power plants to be H2-ready.  States in Australia are investing in hydrogen refuelling stations along the country’s busiest freight highway between Sydney and Melbourne in a push to see more zero-emissions technology used in the heavy-vehicle industry. In the US, the Department of Energy’s Hydrogen Energy Earthshot set a target to cut the cost of clean hydrogen by 80% to USD 1/kg in a decade (and to USD 2/kg by 2025 as an interim step).

As it stands though, more than 90% of the world’s H2 is produced from fossil fuels through processes such as steam methane reforming, methane partial oxidation and coal gasification. This alone generates emissions of around 830 million tons of CO2 per year, which accounts for over 2% of global annual CO2 emissions.

That’s hardly a sustainable way forward. An alternative is to substitute methane and coal with a carbon-free source such as water (H2O). Using a process called electrolysis, electricity is used to split water into hydrogen and oxygen and in theory produce H2 with zero greenhouse gas emissions. The catch is that this depends on the electricity source also being carbon free and, in many regions of the world, the infrastructure is simply not yet suitable or economically viable for this pathway. In addition, different types of electrolysers required for the process make use of metals such as nickel and platinum group metals (PGMs) that are associated with high cost, environmental impact and supply chain concerns.

Solar thermochemical hydrogen

Attention has turned to an emerging technology which offers a completely emissions-free solution. This is solar thermochemical hydrogen (STCH), which relies on heat, rather than water, generated from renewable solar energy to drive H2 production.

In this method, the power to drive STCH hydrogen production comes from concentrating solar power (CSP). These are typically arrays of hundreds of mirrors that gather and reflect sunlight to a central receiving point. The heat from the receiver is then absorbed by a STCH system, which directs it to split water and generate hydrogen. Temperatures greater than 1 400 °C can be used to boil water for steam to run a turbine, which in turn can generate electricity.

But there’s another catch. To date, STCH designs have had limited efficiency: Only about 7% of incoming sunlight is used to make hydrogen, rendering such systems low-yield and high-cost.

In October, a team at MIT claimed a breakthrough. Their concept for a system of reactors could harness up to 40% of the sun’s heat. According to MIT researchers, this increase in efficiency could drive down the system’s overall cost, making STCH a potentially scalable and affordable option to help decarbonize industries like transportation.

“We have to think of every bit of energy in the system, and how to use it, to minimize the cost,” Ghoniem said. “And with this design, we found that everything can be powered by heat coming from the sun. It is able to use 40% of the sun’s heat to produce hydrogen.”

“It could drastically change our energy future – namely enabling hydrogen production 24/7,” said Christopher Muhich, Assistant Professor of Chemical Engineering at Arizona State University. “The ability to make hydrogen is the linchpin to producing liquid fuels from sunlight.” The next stage is to build a prototype which will be tested in concentrated solar power facilities.

A number of IEC Technical Committees prepare international standards for solar systems and installations. IEC TC 117 works on international standards for systems of Solar Thermal Electric (STE) plants for the conversion of solar thermal energy into electrical energy. One of its standards, published in 2022, IEC 62862-3-1 specifies the requirements for the design of parabolic-trough solar thermal power plants. Future standards would also address issues of connectivity and interoperability with the power grid related to connections, bi-directional communicates and centralized control (Smart Grid) and environmental aspects.

IEC TC 82 prepares standards for solar PV energy systems, and TC 105 for fuel cell technologies.

Other approaches also being developed

Another approach to improving thermochemical technology comes from a team of engineers at ETH Zurich, funded by the Swiss Federal Office of Energy. They tackled the challenge of maximising the transfer of heat from a CSP system to the interior of the reactor.

At the heart of its production process is a solar reactor that is exposed to concentrated sunlight delivered by a CSP array and reaches temperatures of up to 1 500 °C. Inside this reactor, a thermochemical cycle takes place for splitting water and CO2 captured previously from the air. The product is synthesis gas or syngas: a mixture of hydrogen and carbon monoxide, which can be further processed into liquid hydrocarbon fuels such as kerosene (jet fuel) for powering aviation.

Two ETH spin-​off companies (Climeworks and Synhelion), are further developing and commercialising the technologies. “This technology has the potential to boost the solar reactor’s energy efficiency and thus to significantly improve the economic viability of sustainable aviation fuels,” said Aldo Steinfeld, ETH Professor of Renewable Energy Carriers.

Hydrogen-producing solar panels 

Researchers at KU Leuven in Belgium have developed rooftop panels that capture both solar power and water from the air. Hydrogen panels are like conventional PV modules, but instead of an electric cable, they are connected via gas tubes. The researchers claim one panel produces 250 litres of H2 per day, at an efficiency of 15% and are now preparing to bring the tech to the mass market via a spinoff company.

Project researcher Jan Rongé explained, “The hydrogen panels themselves do not store hydrogen and work at very low pressure. This has several safety and cost benefits. The hydrogen is collected centrally from the hydrogen panel plant, and then compressed if needed.” It is expected that the product will be commercially available from 2026 and that prices will drop in line with that of PV modules today.

Piece of a bigger puzzle

While hydrogen produced by solar shows promise, development remains at its early stages, and it should not be considered a silver bullet green energy solution. Dr Kim Beasy of Australia’s Swinburne University Hydrogen Hub said, “We’re coming to understand that hydrogen is going to be one piece of the puzzle. What we really need is more government support and subsidies in bringing down the cost of getting this technology on the ground.”

It is a view echoed by the International Energy Agency. In its Global Hydrogen Review 2023 it concludes that “low-emission hydrogen production can grow massively by 2030 but cost challenges are hampering deployment”. It also stresses that “governments need to urgently implement these programmes and make funding available to enable a scale-up compatible with their decarbonisation ambitions”.

What to Expect in 2024: Womens Sport Bid Wars, AI and the Olympics

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Soccer leads women’s sports into bidding wars, AI driven by the market, an Olympics in front of crowds and opportunities for the neurodiverse – all trends to spot in the new year.

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The 2023 FIFA Women’s World Cup final in August attracted record viewing figures pretty much everywhere, underlining a breakthrough year for women’s sport.

Spain defeated England 1-0 in the final in Sydney, with a record 12 million viewers watching in the UK on BBC One (higher than the men’s Wimbledon final last July which peaked at 11.3 million).

In Spain, 5.6 million watched the final, and it peaked at 7.4 million viewers, with data published by Barlovento Comunicacion saying that 56.2% of the Spanish television audience were male.

The tournament contributed to an increase in women’s sport viewing figures this year, according to data from the Women’s Sport Trust (WST). International women’s sporting events were watched by viewers for nine hours 58 minutes on average, the WST found. including Golf’s Solheim Cup, England women’s cricket team and the Netball World Cup.

Led by football, women’s elite sports are expected to break through the billion-dollar revenue mark for the first time in 2024, according to Deloitte.

“There is still more to be done in translating international success into [regular] viewing,” the WST said. Which is why broadcast rights for women’s sports are reaching all-time highs.

The new deal for the National Women’s Soccer League is a case in point. The NWSL secured US$60m per season for 118 live matches from CBS Sports, ESPN, Amazon and Scripps Sports - forty times the $1.5m previously paid for women’s soccer.

This will be a template for a bidding war beginning January 2024 for a fresh round of rights to the WSL.

The current deal for £8 million per season was signed in 2021 and shared between Sky and the BBC. The number of WSL games televised will likely increase and could lead to Sky and TNT Sports (formerly BT Sport) sharing live rights, as they do for the Premier League.

TNT Sports meanwhile is doubling down on women’s sports coverage. It has licenced rights from DAZN to co-broadcast UEFA Women’s Champions League games, including the final, announced a new deal to broadcast 20 games from Women’s Premiership Rugby each season and continues to cover cycling’s women’s World Tour (via Eurosport) and the Tour de France Femmes.

Ahead of Olympic year the International Olympic Committee also wants to get ahead of the curve. “Historically, televised sports have predominantly focused on male athletes, and the teams working behind the scenes have often been dominated by men as well. While some progress has been made in getting women into producer-type roles, there remains a glaring underrepresentation of women in technical positions, particularly as camera operators.”

It’s a challenge that Olympic broadcast unit OBS is OBS is determined to address with a training initiative aimed at increasing the number of women in venue production teams.

Neurodiversity breaks concrete ceiling

The film and TV industry’s treatment of disability was slammed this year by His Dark Materials screenwriter Jack Thorne. In the MacTaggart Lecture at Edinburgh TV Festival he accused the industry of “utterly and totally” failing disabled people and called for new quotas to improve representation.

“The TV world is stacked against the telling of disabled stories with disabled talent,” he said.

Line of Duty star Tommy Jessop and his film-maker brother shone a light on just how hard it is to break into Hollywood when they pitched producers with a Down’s syndrome superhero movie. Their efforts were recorded in a BBC documentary. Voices like his and Thorne’s are changing the inclusion debate.

“I am starting to see that cultural shift slowly begin to open up more opportunities to deaf actors…I am seeing more doors being opened,” said Troy Kotsur, the Oscar winning star of Coda (2022) at a recent Variety conference on the topic.

UK indie Making Space Media, struck a production deal with Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine for unscripted content centred on “the largest and most overlooked a misrepresented community on the planet.” Making Space co-founder, the Bafta nominated wheelchair enabled presenter Sophie Morgan also formed disabled-led talent management agency C Talent.

Over and above on-screen and BTS roles, businesses see benefits in widening their employment net. By 2027, a quarter of Fortune 500 companies will actively recruit neurodiverse talent with conditions like autism, ADHD and dyslexia to improve business performance, according to a report by analysts Gartner.

“Neurodiversity and cognitive diversity are superpowers for organisations,” said Gartner’s Leigh McMullen. “When you have cognitively diverse people, they see problems in different ways. They see opportunities in different ways.”

Female editors clean sweep Oscar

The Best Editing Oscar race could be dominated by female talent. The shortlist is likely to include three-time Academy Award winner Thelma Schoonmaker who’s latest and 22nd film with Martin Scorsese, Killers of the Flower Moon, confronts the mythology of How The West Was Won. The 83-year old will be no sentimental pick. She deserves to be rewarded but will face stiff competition from Jennifer Lame who propelled the ticking time bomb tension of Christopher Nolan’s Oppenheimer from scenes heavily with dialogue and light on action.

Maestro, another biopic, of conductor/composer Leonard Bernstein starring and directed by Bradley Cooper, has scenes cut to Bernstein’s music by editor Michelle Tesoro while period epic, Napoleon, was cut by Ridley Scott’s regular editor (and Oscar winner for Platoon) Claire Simpson (she is also editing Gladiator 2) with Sam Restivo.

A full hand of five female nominees could be completed by Hilda Rasula who worked with Cord Jefferson to make idiosyncratic and well received indie drama American Fiction. Spamming this possibility are strong contenders like Nick Houy who cut billion-dollar box office hit Barbie and Greek editor Yorgos Mavropsaridis for Yargos Lanthimos’ Poor Things, described as a twisted ‘Frankenstein’ gender-bender.

Either way, after decades of going under the radar, female editors are very much top of the game in this category.

In AI, the market now rules the science

One year on from the release by OpenAI of ChatGPT and it’s clear that AI was the big story of 2023 and will be the big story next year and then some. ChatGPT itself has done many things including raising mainstream awareness of AI itself, but arguably its biggest impact has been in creating a market, essentially from scratch, for Generative AI tools.

“Before ChatGPT there was no AI market,” observed Alberto Romero. “No startup was founded to build AI tools or built on top of AI tools. AI was purely a R&D discipline. Now, it’s the opposite: AI is an industry first and then a science.”

OpenAI is now going further and it launching a platform for creating and discovering custom versions of ChatGPT.

The company says it will offer “custom versions” of ChatGPT that you can create for a specific purpose.” These ‘GPTs’ can be made with no coding experience, and can be as simple or complex as you like.

It is an ambitious vision for expanding OpenAI’s business by selling its technology directly to consumers. On the flipside, users will get paid for making chatbots sold on the company’s marketplace.

As Gerrit De Vynck of the Washington Post pointed out, “Paying users for the best chatbots evokes the way YouTube built its multibillion-dollar empire by sharing ad and subscription revenue to incentivize people to make videos on its site. Open AI envisions people spending more time directly in its own app, building their own tools and using those made by others.”

It is also an indication that OpenAI intends to compete with Big Tech companies, rather than serve as a provider of back-end technology for them. The wrinkle there is that Microsoft has a multibillion-dollar deal for access to OpenAI’s tech and the OpenAI store neatly circumvents Apple’s app store.

More than 2 million developers are using OpenAI’s tools to build their own AI products and businesses, and more than 92 percent of Fortune 500 companies are using OpenAI, the company said. About 100 million people used ChatGPT every week.

More than one commentator observed that the public presentation, in a giant venue in San Francisco, fronted by (once ousted then returned) OpenAI CEO Sam Altman, had more than a little of the Steve Jobs’ fanaticism about it.

“If you give people better tools they can change the world,” Altman said, explaining how people without technical backgrounds could make their own niche AI assistants. He continued: “We will all have superpowers on demand.”

Said Romero, “ChatGPT wasn’t a technical achievement but a jump in usability, accessibility, and user experience. It proved, like no other tool in history that AI was no longer a feature embedded in larger software products, but an entire industry. In turn, this started a gold rush like we haven’t seen since smartphone apps or the dot-com bubble. Until now, science was in charge, now the rules of the market govern the advancement of AI.”

A battleground for 2024 is where the market comes up against the regulators, with the key legislation in GDPR and AI Act going through the EU and a likely benchmark for protecting or curtailing the risks of AI misuse worldwide.

Excitement Ahead of Olympics 2024

After the last Summer Games was played in solitary confinement thanks to the pandemic, we should be excited for atmosphere of an Olympics on European soil. The French authorities though will be on red alert for security scares in the capital.

Paris’ most iconic locations and landmarks will serve as the stage for the XXXIII Olympiad, with OBS, the host broadcaster, planning to produce more hours than ever - some 11,000 –- including more athlete-centric coverage, behind-the-scenes material, pre-and post-competition.

OBS will also deploy cinematic lenses for the first time, with shallower depths of field to help convey the athletes’ emotions. It will increase its use of data including the number of multi-camera replay systems as well as dynamic graphics such as live biometrics data and augmented reality overlays.

Cloud-based tools enabling live signal distribution and remote production will enable OBS to achieve “more with less”, it says. Cloud will offer broadcasters “smarter, more agile, and highly efficient solutions” while reducing physical space and power demands at the venues and the International Broadcast Centre. As a result, Paris 2024 stands to benefit from substantial cost and carbon savings, the IOC claim.

With Australia deciding the host of the Commonwealth Games too expensive and with Winter Olympics increasingly devoid of actual winter conditions (will the Italians need to pump artificial snow into the Alps when it hosts the next Games in 2026?), we should all hold them to account.

Hollywood Green Lights Gaming IP

The success in 2023 of The Last of Us and feature animation The Super Mario Bros. Movie not to mention the reality show Squid Game on Netflix has convinced Hollywood that games can finally be adapted in a way that speaks to both fans of the original and lean back newbie viewers alike.

“Hollywood is looking to games for new IP that they can expand and monetise, and game companies are eyeing TV and film collaborations to help make their IP work harder and offset soaring game development costs,” notes Deloitte TMT.

It’s not just about capitalising on IP though; it’s about creating a new form of entertainment that captivates audiences across multiple platforms. High-performing gaming IPs are expanding across media formats, reaching broader audiences and increasing their overall franchise value.

“Gaming platforms are giving users the tools to create their own games, which could lead to a boom in quality content, but could be a threat to their own business longer term,” noted Jana Arbanas, vice chair of Deloitte, in a statement. “And fans of top franchises will see their favourite characters and stories in both games and movies. It’s a crucial time as the industry finds new and profitable ways to keep audiences engaged.”

The eagerly awaited Squid Game 2 could also be released by this time next year having started a ten month shoot in July 2023. A third outing is already in the works. Green light. Let the games begin.

 

What do streamers want? Sitcoms, police drama and reality shows

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With streamers under pressure from investors to slash costs and turn a profit the decade of rampant content spend is over. Appetite for new shows remains high however if producers can find the right project to sell them.

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“The word is out that streamers want comedies and police procedurals – formats that work with new ad supported models,” said Sam Sokolow, Executive Producer at Stage 32 a US-based social network for film and TV professionals. “Programming that fits with patterns we might have seen on TV ten years ago.”

Sokolow was speaking at the Focus conference in London earlier this week.

“The industry is in a significant period of change,” said Tom Sherry, MD, Headline Pictures (co-producer of Amazon Prime’s The Man in the High Castle), also on the panel. “This is a time when we cannot predict what a production will cost. Crew rates have changed [under new Bectu and Pact rules introduced at the beginning of the year]. Travel, accommodation and the basic cost of fuel have gone up. We’ve seen a spike in the cost of production and those spikes are increasingly difficult to sustain.”

The biggest reason for cutbacks in spending is due to the Writers Guild of America and SAG-AFTRA strikes, which have caused some productions to be delayed or cancelled.

At the same time, the likes of Disney and Warner Bros are aggregating different DTC streamers and content divisions into one super-app in a move which is also intended to streamline production spend.

Disney will spend $25 billion on content (including sports) next year which is $2 billion less than 2023 and considerably less than the $33bn it spent in 2022. This reduction also fits with Disney CEO Bob Iger’s plan to create less content and focus on a more curated original programming lineup.

Warner Bros. has spent the year cancelling seasons or axing features it has already completed in a bid to slash the overhead of marketing and distribution.

However, it is not as if the all taps have been turned off. Paramount is still on track to spend the $6bn in 2024 it previously budgeted for content while Netflix will actually increase its pot from $13bn to $17bn at the same as cutting back on the number of original features it produces.

Instead, Netflix’ focus going forward will be unscripted, local language television and animated films.  Squid Game: The Challenge and reality series Physical 100 (like Squid Game, from South Korea) are examples. Another example of this trend is a new dating series in the works from Sex and the City creator Candace Bushnell.

“You will always see leveraging of high prized IP and chasing of big name talent but I do think there’s a seat at the table for any kind of creative,” said Sokolow. “Netflix and Disney will continue to spend many millions of dollars on single projects but they also want character driven ensemble pieces that are well acted and don’t cost an arm and a leg.”

The move toward AVOD, FAST channels and ad-supported premium subscription tiers is fuelling demand for content more familiar to broadcast TV.

“The move into advertising models means that news of the demise of the traditional programme format is premature,” Sokolow said. “There’s a need for commercials to be placed within the content. Procedural or case of the week type shows lend themselves to four to five acts for neat ad insertion.”

Sherry agreed that there is a “move towards populism within drama,” but added that trying to predict what streamers will want “is the wrong way of looking through the telescope.”

“It is about what you give to them,” he said. “You’ve got to find authenticity that connects with audiences and make the argument to the streamer or traditional terrestrial broadcaster why you are most qualified to tell that story.”

Sherry advised producers to focus on packaging a product “to make it feel more valuable beyond its initial premise. Package it with known onscreen talent. See if you can spin it in a way that allows you to make a documentary version alongside the drama. This creates more noise and more bites of the cherry around the same idea and helps create a brand identity around a title.

“Ultimately what any commissioner at a platform or broadcaster is looking for is how to make this content stand out from the rest.”

Streamers are also on the hunt for a global hit that resonates with its local market. “A way of telling story that feels special to its home territory but has a way of communicating to a global audience in its themes,” said Sokolow.

Squid Game is the classic example.  A global phenomenon produced in a local language which has at its heart “themes of greed, survival and fame that we can all emotionally tap into,” he said.

“If you’re telling story from an emotional standpoint that everyone can understand then it has a great chance of breaking through and being carried around world by these massive distribution platforms.”

The proliferation of platforms has also created a new complexity for funding content. Where once a producer would primarily talk to the handful of broadcasters in their market “you can now talk to the whole world,” said Sherry. “There are any number of funding models available for you to build a project in a way that financially suits your belief in its future value.”

As well as Ten Percent, Amazon Prime’s remake of French comedy Call My Agent!, London and Paris-based Headline Pictures’s output includes two series of Dublin-based drama Kin (RTE, AMC, Viaplay).

“The cost of money has increased which has changed the funding models,” Sherry said. “A year ago, models were based on post broadcaster licensing to pay back of a three-year period which is fine when the cost of money is small. It doesn’t stack up when the inflation rate is 6% over three years.

He said it was increasingly common to have to find multiple sources to finance a TV show in a model that replicates indie film funding. “You don’t go to one broadcaster and one streamer and get handed a whole series to make. You approach the broadcaster where your idea has its most natural home and then go to a streamer to build the funding in stages.”

He predicts some streaming platforms won’t survive while producers will struggle too unless they can find ways of making programming more cost efficiently.

“Making good programmes cost effectively is the core skill of a producer,” said Sokolow. “It’s great to be Steven Spielberg but it’s not so bad to be Roger Corman either if you can make content at a low budget that reaches an audience. If you know how to keep costs down and you have everything in a package so you can sell it forward for acquisition then this is still a good business.”

As for whether the current streaming landscape makes it easier or harder for start-up or newer producers to get their ideas made the answer was unequivocal.

“Streamers receive hundreds of unsolicited proposals,” Sherry said. “You need to find a way of getting on top of that pile to be the next thing they look at. Perhaps that’s by great packaging or somehow landing rights to a bestseller with a built-in audience but the reality is you do need to be repped [by an agent] and in association with a credible experienced production entity before you get in front of any commissioner.”

 

The Polarized Perceptions of Our AI Future

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Does the recent chaos at OpenAI shine a spotlight on the only debate about AI that matters: Its existential threat to humanity?

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Thom Waite explores this: Depending on who you ask, the future of humanity — in a world populated by extremely intelligent machines — looks very different. 

On one hand, you have techno-utopias, where AI has solved all of humanity’s most difficult problems, from the climate crisis, to interstellar travel, and disease. On the other, you have scenes from a Terminator-style timeline where Skynet has been built and we are all slaves to the machine.

OpenAI’s Theoretical, Existential Crisis

Could this raging philosophical debate be at the heart of the schism that ripped apart OpenAI a few weeks ago and saw CEO Sam Altman dramatically ousted — and then welcomed back?

Even if the disagreement (albeit a seemingly fundamental one) was about matters more prosaic (stocks and shares, maybe) it is worth pursuing where this leads.

One reading of the summary dismissal was that the OpenAI board has a commitment that states its “primary fiduciary duty is to humanity.” In other words, if it sees something that might harm humanity, it’s allowed to make any necessary leadership changes to keep the threat contained. 

Superficially, that’s a bit like Google’s (now Alphabet) ex-corporate motto “Don’t Be Evil,” which has always had more marketing spin about it than any corporate social policy (such as syphoning user data from its platform and Android OS to sell ads).

Perhaps Altman and his researchers had made some sort of breakthrough, which made artificial general intelligence likely sooner rather than later. AGI is the type of super-AI that matches human thinking so exactly that there is in fact no discernible difference (ergo, what is the point of humans). There were rumors of this, but these have died on the vine since Altman went back to the lab.

Nevertheless, as Waite puts it, it is easy to see how the developments have reignited the debate about the future of AI, with “doomers” at one end of the spectrum and believers in “effective accelerationism” at the other, preaching a version of AI utopianism.

Waite assays what each party believes.

Doomers vs. Accelerationists

Unsurprisingly, “doomer” is a label for people who believe in a high probability that AGI will be a bad thing. high p(doom) – in other words. As a result, they often advocate slowing down AI development, or even putting it on pause until guardrails can be put in place.

Emmett Shear, the former chief executive of livestreaming site Twitch and the short-lived interim CEO of OpenAI when Altman was fired, dubbed himself a “doomer” earlier this year. 

According to Waite, members of the board who were instrumental in the recent shake-up have also expressed deep concerns about the future of the technology, which sets the battleground for the supposed conflict.

As is obvious by their moniker, accelerationists want AI development to ‘Go Go Go’. Influential entrepreneurs like Marc Andreessen are in this camp along with other tech evangelists who last year were motoring on about the greater good of Web3, NFTs and crypto. Or those with a quest for bodily immortality (like Peter Thiel) or those actually serious about fusing their consciousness into the network in a singularity (which didn’t end well for Johnny Depp’s scientist in Transcendence).

The movement isn’t monolithic, of course. Some believe that it’s important to achieve AGI as soon as possible because it will usher in a post-scarcity society, radically improving people’s living conditions across the globe and, at its core, reducing humanity’s net suffering.  

Others argue that it’s not about reducing human suffering at all. Says Waite, “They say that society’s only responsibility is to build superior beings that can take our place and spread their superintelligence throughout the universe. In this scenario, the survival of the human species is irrelevant.”

This type of thinking borders on the cult and, as Waite points out, doesn’t have many adherents. 

The debate maybe flippantly presented here, but it matters because the dividing lines are hardening. 

“To some extent, this makes sense,” Waite muses. “If you truly believe that AI can right all of humanity’s wrongs, find cures for diseases, save us from climate catastrophe, and bring about an era of abundance — as the most ardent accelerationists do — then it’s basically a moral imperative to make sure it happens as soon as possible.”

Like fundamental anti-abortionists who believe that every sperm is sacred, anyone standing in the way would, hypothetically, have millions of deaths on their hands. 

On the other extreme are those who have perhaps watched/read too many dystopian sci-fi stories and believe that machines will not only gain intelligence but doing so will inevitably mean the end of us and our outmoded muscle-and-bone technology. 

“If you believe this, then the critical mission is to stop development, or at least slow it down until we can work out how to do it safely,” Waite notes. “OpenAI reinstating Sam Altman is considered by many to be a failure of this mission, since it appears to override the original aims of the company’s board – to protect humanity from the worst consequences of a rushed AI system.”

Naturally, there’s a middle ground, so there’s hope that never the twain can meet. This belief stems from a broader reading of human history, which understands the survival of our species to be inextricably linked to new technology. 

(The jump cut between an ape smashing bones in a tantrum to a spaceship orbiting the moon can serve as a useful metaphor. We use tech to advance.)

… And Somewhere in the Middle

It’s also the case that in the middle of these two polarized camps lie the vast majority of AI researchers and billionaire funders.

“Hopefully, they can take some of the arguments from both sides and work out how to get the best out of the technology while limiting the damage it might cause, through measures like industry regulation and international safety deals,” says Waite.

Though this, to me, stray,s a little too much onto the side of the argument that says AI is just a tool and it is how we use it that counts, for good or for evil, but that good will prevail.

Are you so sure? 

Is It Technology Dread or Imminent Apocalypse? (Both?) Asking Sam Esmail

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From the dystopian science fiction thriller Mr. Robot through Amazon’s military mystery Homecoming to his new film, Leave the World Behind, writer-director Sam Esmail’s thematic obsession is the impact of technology on society.

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The film examines the reliance we have on technology as an apocalyptic series of events cuts off all communication.

“I’m not a technophobe,” Esmail insists in a Google Talk moderated by Josh Lanzet. “I think technology is agnostic, it has no morality to it. It’s the human side that I’m more fascinated with. I really do think that it’s our sort of complicity, or how we use tech that will, in the case of the film, kind of offer a cautionary tale of what could happen to our world if we go one way or the other with it.”

Can we can still have sort of a functioning community without technology? he asks.

“Ultimately, technology, is a double-edged sword,” he said during an interview on the RealBlend podcast produced by CinemaBlend. “When I think about… the positives, it gives us access to information, to people, to media, to content that we want to explore. I think it’s a tool like anything else [and] it’s what we do with it.”

Based on Rumaan Alam’s 2020 novel, Leave the World Behind is set mainly in a country house outside of New York City, where a couple played by Julia Roberts and Ethan Hawke travel with their children, for a weekend getaway. On their first night there, two strangers arrive at the door: played by Mahershala Ali and Myha’la who declare they are the owners of the house and ask to be let in, citing a blackout in the city. Distrust and paranoia ensues as Esmail uses the tropes of the disaster movie to explore relationships of race and class.

The Towering Inferno, Earthquake and The Day After Tomorrow were among influences but the idea that touched a nerve was about how people can lose sight of their common humanity in the face of a crisis.

“It’s pretty relevant today given what’s going on in the world,” Esmail told Matt Zoller Seitz at Vulture. “The other thing that interested me is that this book does the inverse of what a typical disaster film does. The disaster elements tend to be the center of the story in disaster films. The characters tend to be secondary. Here, I could invert that process and be with the characters and have the disaster element exist more in the distance. That instantly felt more authentic to how humans would experience a crisis like that.”

Esmail read the book during lockdown when the idea that people can easily lose sight of their common humanity in the face of their own danger was all too real.

“But prior to reading the book I had this idea percolating in the back of my head about trying to construct a sort of disaster thriller centered around a cyberattack,” he told Brenna Ehrlich at Rolling Stone. “Because I think cyberattacks — even though they’re out in the public consciousness — there’s something ominous but equally mystifying about them.”

The Hitchcock Connection

Classic paranoia thrillers like The Parallax View and North by Northwest were other touchstones, the latter providing inspiration for a scene in which Mahershala Ali’s character runs from a crashing plane. 

“It’s not very subtle,” Esmail admits to Rolling Stone. “In all honesty, I don’t think there’s a movie made in contemporary times that doesn’t show some influence by Hitchcock. I think he’s essentially invented modern-day film grammar, but clearly, his work was looming large over the film.”

We also learn from Vulture that Esmail cast Ali in part because he thinks of the actor as a modern day Hitchcockian leading man. “The prototype was Cary Grant or Jimmy Stewart in Hitchcock’s films. They are an Everyman. They’re not five steps ahead, like a superhero, but they’re half a step ahead. They’re savvy enough to size up any situation. Mahershala has that.”

The director also talks about the cinematography of Leave the World Behind, in particular the camera movement that seems to move through the architecture similar to The Shining, and another iconic Hitchcock film.

“That was a huge influence,” he admits, talking about Kubrick’s psychological horror film on the ReelBlend podcast. “I love big camera moves, especially when it’s relaying something the audience doesn’t know. It’s like what you’re saying: It’s almost as if the movie’s a little possessed, and you’re the demon looking down at those people.

“It’s that great shot in Rear Window: Jimmy Stewart’s asleep and the camera’s moving, and then you’re looking across the street seeing the thing he’s not seeing, and then you realize, “Wait a minute — who am I? What’s happening? Who’s seeing it?” It’s very unsettling. Ever since I saw that film as a kid, I’ve always loved the idea of a camera being its own sort of person.”

Esmail’s script exhibits an eerie synchronicity with current events. For instance he made the movie when conflict had not yet escalated in the Middle East. Yet there’s a startling scene where Ethan Hawke’s character is being pursued a drone that drops leaflets written in Arabic that say “Death to America” — and later, another character who heard about similar messages, this time in Korean.

“Honestly, I tried to follow the guidelines out of the playbook of how coup d’etats actually work, especially when it’s a foreign actor,” he told Rolling Stone. “Propaganda misinformation is an old tactic. I just took that and magnified it and heightened it to this situation. It plays on your own biases and your own beliefs about who our enemies are, and I always love it when you can remove the barrier between the audience and your protagonist.”

Turning on Tech

Another scene features a number of Teslas that turn on their self-driving functions to block the roadways. Esmail says he didn’t seek permission from Elon Musk for that.

“Look, I wrote it in the script. I asked my amazing props guy, Bobby, to bring a bunch of Teslas out on the street. We shot the scene. I edited it in post, I showed it to Netflix, I crossed my fingers. And to this day, no one has said anything to me. So yeah, I’m hoping the movie comes out and no one will say anything.”

What doesn’t get lost in a digital attack are physical media like vinyl, DVDs and VHS (though you’d still need a source of electricity to play them). These become a source of comfort and nostalgia towards the end of the picture. But how did that sit when making the movie for a streaming service?

Esmail wasn’t afraid to poke the hand that feeds. On the one hand, he claims to be a “great proponent” of physical media, but also explains that one of the advantages of streaming services like Netflix “is that you really have access to any movie from across history at your fingertips,” he says.

“So there’s, there’s always a conflict because I’m a proponent of theatrical. I’m a proponent of DVDs and Blu-rays. But I’m also not mad at a streaming service that lets me see all the classics at a moment’s notice.”

Nonetheless he includes a cheeky shot that he doesn’t think “the Netflix folks” have noticed: “In the very end, you see Rose’s thumb hovering over the remote, and it goes past the Netflix button to hit ‘play’ on the DVD player.”

Notes From a Former President

The film’s exec producers are Netflix stablemates Barack and Michelle Obama, who were more involved in production then lending the cachet of their name.

“He’s a huge movie lover and a huge fan of the book,” Esmail confides to ReelBlend. “He really was committed to making this into a great movie. And he was giving me notes at the script stage, multiple drafts, including, post rough cuts. It’s kind of a surreal because I do think he is one of the most brilliant minds on the planet and to get his insight on the disaster element, characters, the theme. It was the highlight of my career.”

Behind the Scenes: Napoleon

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In Ridley Scott’s bio-epic Napoleon we see the French general at the battles of Austerlitz and Waterloo, in his tent, standing outside his tent, on a horse – waiting, waiting, waiting.

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“Those wars were gruelling and probably not very exciting for the most part because it involved lots of strategy and waiting around for days,” says Dariusz Wolski ASC, the film’s cinematographer speaking to IBC365. “We have to make them more concise, more exciting and clear for the audience to follow.”

Doing so involved a whole army of production crew who exhaustively reccied, plotted, discussed and maneuvered cast and kit on 3D models prior to shooting a single thing.

“First it’s just planning, planning, planning and logistics,” he says. These include “conversations about whether we can run horses at full speed, ensuring the terrain has no rocks or holes so they don’t break legs. Austerlitz was combination of three locations, so what background plates do we need? We have 500 extras to coordinate. We have a lot of rehearsals. We discuss with armorers and military experts and horse experts and stunts people, SFX for explosions, the camera team and VFX, production designers, AD, producers and so on. When battle planning everybody is involved in setting up a huge event.”

It was also important on Napoleon to understand the facts and strategy of the battles from historians. “How was it won, which are the dramatic moments.”

Production designer Arthur Max created a physical 10x8-foot scale model of each battle scene to represent the landscape, the hills, trees and valleys of the shoot location which also takes account of the background plates and VFX required to simulate the actual battleground. They could move toy soldiers on the board to simulate positions of their extras.

“Everything is scanned topographically so that its accurate. The very first meetings in the office are with that model and that model travels to the location where we repeat discussions over and over.

“Once we’ve done all this we hypothetically place all the cameras - which we are pretty good at by now. Two here, two there, a crane there and you’re done, so that when you shoot you have what you want in your mind.”

The first day of battle shooting involved horses. “I am proud of the horses’ performance in this film. It is spectacular. You can only run horses so many times. You have to be very, very efficient. We really wanted to them charge full speed. To achieve that you truly have to have fresh horses. They are not going to gallop like this on take 7. You have to capture it by take 3.”

While real horses were trained to swim and enter and exit the water on location via ramps, mechanical horses were filmed falling through the ice in a water tank.

Scott is also famed for drawing ‘Ridleygrams’ or storyboarding each shot. His drawings are “inspirations,” Wolski says. “This is how he thinks. A lot of times he does the storyboards very early and then he redraws them once we see the locations. Ridley drawings are like key frames which we always start with and then elaborate on. He is always drawing shots and angles.”

Wolski makes it sound a breeze which it clearly is not but it’s a practice he has honed with Scott on all the director’s movies since Prometheus including Kingdom of Heaven and The Last Duel. Earlier in his career Wolski shot Crimson Tide and The Fan for Tony Scott who had perfected multi-cam before his brother.

For the battle scenes in Napoleon recreating Waterloo or Austerlitz they shot with up to 11 cameras simultaneously. A practical reason for shooting with so many cameras is simple economy of time. Instead of shooting dozens of takes from different angles, lighting for each setup, Scott attempts to capture everything they need in as few takes as possible. Three in the case of Austerlitz.

“You pause after each take and analyse what can you improve,” Wolski says. “When you do the main event three times it become very apparent what details you have to pick up.”

Feeds from all the cameras are radio transmitted to a trailer where Wolski can instantly view the material on monitors and talkback to his operators.

“If there’s something very simple I will operate camera but if do that for complex sequences

I will miss 80 percent of the action,” he says. “It’s all about design. Ridley and I are constantly brainstorming the whole thing.”

For this reason (and also because the director publicly admits to being restless on lengthy shoots) they photographed the movie in just two months. Impressive for movie of this scale.

Despite the storyboards and meticulous planning both director and DOP leave room for spontaneity from their camera operators and the actors.

“No matter how fancy you are with camera cars and cranes a lot is simply handheld. Plus, you can only explain so much to the operators – that the French army will come from here, the Austrians from over there.

“The amazing thing is everyone is so professional that you can move so fast. You explain just enough in the beginning and still leave room for improv. Some operators have a great eye of their own so they can quickly find an angle.”

Of the battle scenes it was the opening one in the film depicting Napoleon’s capture of British held Toulon which was most tricky, mainly because it was shot at night.

“Everyone gets tired at night and so you don’t want to shoot too long. It was complicated because the whole battle, when the French blow up the ammo depot and erect ladders to mount the walls was shot on a real fort but its actual height was too short so we built another set for the top of the wall. Once the French go over the top we are then shooting on a set that stretches to the other side of the fort where there’s a huge blue screen. That’s where the English ships are in the harbour (a VFX shot).”

It wasn’t just multicam for the action sequences either. Scott’s modus operandi even on two person dialogue scenes is to roll four cameras. In these and the battle sequences Wolski likens his own approach to that of a documentary photographer.

“It’s like when you look at really fine reportage photographers like Sebastião Salgado or New Deal photographers of the Great Depression in the 1930s or, later, Life Magazine photographers from the 1950s - they were on the street. They were not designing everything. They were capturing a moment. But those images are beautifully composed with a huge consideration for their subject – the expression of the person, for example. They exhibit great observation of lighting too. If these documentary photographers comes into any room to capture its atmosphere they don’t have lights or ask people to pose. They just capture it.

“What we do [as filmmakers] is create an environment. We do light but we try to light unobtrusively and naturalistically. All the rest is observing the scene properly. Is it better to be next to the window or better to be in silhouette? You sculpt the space. Once you start thinking this way you don’t think about shooting just one frame and filming becomes easier. Working with a director who is very visual helps with this of course.”

It's a remarkable thing to say when so many DOPs will compose for particular frames yet, if nothing else, Napoleon looks almost at all times like a painting hanging in the Louvre. Not just any painting, but those of the era. Indeed, Wolski studied paintings by Jacques-Louis David and Eugène Delacroix and then seemingly captured this essence using a highly complicated multicamera technique.

The secret it seems is experience and skill. “My logic makes sense,” he insists. “Anyone can walk into a room and ‘see’ [capture or film] a painting there. That’s where you put the camera. There are paintings everywhere.”

Even Wolski’s lighting requirements appear simple and quick, even though his knowledge of placement stems from years of work.

“In Napoleon it boils down to, if it’s night there will be fireplace or candles and if its day it will be windows. These are your main sources.  That’s how people saw the world at the time. You might then put the couch in the right place for that light but I always allow actors to have room to move and not have to stick to marks. When I started out my career lighting was a bit more crucial or specific because film negative was not fast [sensitive’ enough. Now the camera technology is incredible and so liberating.”

For the record he shot mainly on Alexa Mini LF using Panavision 65 and Angénieux EZ zooms with a Panavision 11-1 zoom, a package he has used for several movies before. Smaller DJI cameras were held by stunts riders.

The look of the film tends toward the bluer cooler tones for battle and warmer sunlit moods for scenes with Josephine, at least in their happy days in Paris. Wolski says he relies on DIT Ryan Nguyen to help him tweak colour during the day of photography, later working with Stephen Nakamura at Company 3 to grade.

“It starts with design and costume but myself and my DIT decide on a colour pretty much during the day we shoot. Of course, if it’s dusk and dawn and sunrise we make it cooler or warmer but ultimately, we colour reference while we setting up. Ridley gets involved too – because he loves this. Sometimes they conspire against me – Ryan and he. Usually what they come up with I don’t object to because we’re on the same wavelength.”

Also by his side on all but one of the movies Wolski has shot for Scott is A camera operator Daniele Massaccesi, who is now a DOP in his own right (The Matrix: Resurrections].

“I inherited the whole operator’s team when I started working with Ridley and I found Daniele the most responsive and smart and just understanding Ridley. It’s all about understanding Ridley. It’s not second guessing so much as being intuitive. That’s the number one reason why Daniele is instrumental.

“Number two is that when you’re bringing in a lot of operators, I can’t be running around and teaching them all what do to. Daniele shares this responsibility with me. He understands the whole picture.”

He elaborates, “Our core team of operators are fantastic but when you need so many more they are in a little shock at first. Like, ‘What are we doing!? they say. Because every operator thinks their frame is their frame but with Ridley you are part of a much bigger puzzle. Since we’ve worked together so much now Daniele is an extension of my thinking. Between Ridley, Daniele and I is another brain pulling everything together.”

Since the location shoots were mostly done in the UK, those additional camera ops were British.  “They are an amazing young generation of operators who did so much good quality work,” Wolski adds.

The Polish born DP is now 67 and is currently shooting a documentary about Keith Richards while prepping Nuremberg starring Russell Crowe.

Perhaps the obvious question to ask is whether he thinks the cinematographer’s craft is under threat due to AI.

“The tech is overwhelming and moving so fast and I guess some DPs might be afraid of being replaced by digital visual imagery but ultimately it is a question of taste. As long as people respond to something that is unique filmmaking will be safe. No matter how smart a computer is it is going to be repetitive.”

He argues that if Gen-AI had existed at the beginning of the 20th Century to impact visual arts “a computer wouldn’t figure out that you could completely change perspectives and make a head looking different ways as the Cubists did. It has to be a rebellious human being who says ‘fuck it, let’s do it’.  A computer would never come up with the idea that you could just start painting Coca-Cola cans.”