The Midnight Sky’s gruelling ‘Arctic’ adventure

RedShark News

The Revenant meets Gravity was how George Clooney pitched his latest film to cinematographer Martin Ruhe ASC. We interviewed him to find out just what went into the making of the film, and the technology used.

https://www.redsharknews.com/the-midnight-skys-gruelling-arctic-adventure

The Midnight Sky, which Clooney directs and stars in, lands on Netflix this month. It’s a post-apocalyptic tale of survival about Clooney’s ageing scientist Augustine racing to stop Mission Specialist Sullivan (Felicity Jones) and her astronaut colleagues onboard the Aether from returning home to a mysterious global catastrophe.

It’s a human drama more than a sci-fi action film in which both principal characters have made sacrifices. Sully for instance left a daughter behind on earth. So when Mission Control falls inexplicably silent, she and her crew mates are forced to wonder if they will ever get home.

“We watched a lot of space films in research and in particular wanted the design of the spaceship in our movie to be different,” says the German DP who shot previous Clooney-directed projects including The American and Catch 22. “With production designer Jim Bissell (E.T, Jumanji) we asked ourselves what a spaceship in 2060 would look like. We decided it’s a design that could be printed in outer space by 3D printers.

“We also constructed the spaceship to have some areas of gravity and no gravity in others and there are also some sequences of a spacewalk. My thought was to have a floating camera so as not to lose the sense of gravity but also to feel weightless. We shot these sequences using a lot of Steadicam with a constant movement and rotations of the camera so you feel like you could be upside down.”

The film is also set in the Arctic for which the crew endured a gruelling shoot in Iceland.

“We shot on a glacier with limited access and minimal crew in really rough and stormy conditions,” he says. “We were there for a month, two weeks of which we couldn’t get to base camp. We stayed in hotels and drove 45 minutes along a dirt road to the base camp and then took snow mobiles and jeeps to get onto the glacier. We used a Super Techno on wheels especially constructed by ARRI for this terrain, and shot drone footage.

“George would spray water into his beard and it would freeze in seconds so it looked like he’d been walking through the snow for hours.

“Sometimes we had to wrap up all the cameras. It would take 15 minutes to change a lens. Snow would get everywhere. One day we found our containers had blown away.

“But the light was beautiful. The nature amazing and the sheer scope of the sky and landscape just blows your mind. It’s just not easy to work in.”

To capture what is a very intimate story set against the extraordinary scope of space –both  terrestrial and galactic – Ruhe chose the ARRI Alexa 65 format with detuned DNA lenses shooting full sensor 6K and finishing in 4K. This camera was augmented with Alexa Mini LFs in the confined space of the spaceship.

“Shooting 65 feels more intimate even though it’s larger format,” he says. “You end up going closer with wider lenses and a shorter field of view. I love the detail you get in the faces and how you can single out characters from the background.

He adds, “We ended up not shoot so much at night because the scenes involved a 7-year old girl and it’s not possible to do night exteriors at that temperature with a child actor.”

While there is VFX work from ILM and Framestore, much of the film is shot in camera. The spaceship interiors were lined with hidden LED strips which the DP could interactively control, variously switching between blue tinged control panels contrasted with red and warmer tones in the living areas. Likewise, Ruhe mixes in warmer tones in the arctic scenes, such as when the sun rises, so it’s not all bleak, cold and blue.

For a hologram displaying the movement of Jupiter he shot the actors with a series of china balls for VFX to replace with an animated model in post. 

“A lot of the space sequences were designed with a virtual camera,” he explains. “I would go into a meeting room with the virtual camera and an iPad and I’d say ‘give me a 58mm’ or ‘I want to be at this scale’ and I could immediately see an animated render of the spaceship interior and exterior and models of our actors. This pre-vizualisation would inform production design or stunts for the wirework or for myself and George it helped us judge the timing and blocking of the scene.

“Rather than being led by the limits of technology we were using technology as a tool to help craft the scene.”

Principal photography began in mid-October 2019 and ended just before lockdown in February this year. Ruhe and Clooney completed the grade remotely using Sohonet Clearview viewed on iPads before Ruhe returned to London for grading sessions with Stefan Sonnenfeld at Company 3. The colorist was in LA, Ruhe was in London and Clooney was viewing the realtime session at another screening venue in LA.

LED screens of the type used extensively on The Mandalorian used to light interior shots of the Arctic set interiors which were shot at Shepperton.

“We used plates shot in Iceland as background to the windows in these scenes,” Ruhe says. “Since the views and reflections are real it helps the actors if they can see a landscape or a night sky.”

 

Future of animation this is

RedShark News

With a budget of $15 million per episode and all the wizardry and firepower of ILM and Disney, The Mandalorian would be impossible to recreate in anything like studio quality in your front room, right?

https://www.redsharknews.com/the-future-of-animation-production-this-is  

Well take a look at this new Baby Yoda fan film and then work out if it was done using an iPhone, free downloadable CG assets and other off-the-shelf tools by just one person in just two weeks - or whether the Force was with them.

“The Child Strikes Back” is created by Cory Strassburger who performed, voiced and animated the seven-minute film from concept to completion in fifteen days.  

In the film, Baby Yoda (or should we be calling him Grogu?) finds his voice and makes his opinions clear in a behind-the-scenes negotiation with his agent. All of the sets (Baby Yoda’s apartment, the desert environment), the stormtroopers and agent character were low-cost assets purchased via the Unreal Marketplace and CG Trader and modified by Strassburger.  

He performed and voiced all of the characters from his living room and used Unreal Live Link Face iOS app to map his performances directly onto characters in Unreal Engine. 

Strassburger explains, “This whole project was about not trying to spend time doing anything elaborate or any custom build. Almost everything was art directed from what I could find online, or plug-and-play from existing assets. 

“The agent was a character I found on the Unreal Marketplace which I modified, by adding a series of facial expression poses using a head mounted iPhone camera rig so the iPhone could puppet his face with my face performance.”  

Strassburger is using the short as an opportunity to road test some of the animation and virtual production methods that have taken off in the work-from-home era. He believes that, in the same way that affordable video cameras and editing tools have led to a flood of new creators on YouTube, new animation methodologies are making way for single creators to produce studio quality animated stories like this one from home.  

“A major studio feature has armies of creative teams to build fantastical sets,” he says. “On a project like this, there was no budget to custom build the perfect settings but virtual filmmakers now have vast libraries of marketplace props and environments which are easily customised.” 

Strassburger is the co-founder of VR and animation studio Kite and Lightning and took weekends off current game in development, Bebylon Battle Royale, to complete the Baby Yoda/Grogu film.  

For Bebylon Battle Royale he has previously test built a pipeline for fast performance capture (of face and body) using an iPhone X.

Red Bee Media: Strength under pressure

copywritten for RedBeeMedia

A new global OTT managed service launched on time under remote working restrictions validates the strength of Red Bee Media’s relationship with client TV5MONDE, the resilience of its team and the flexibility of the platform’s architecture.

https://theiabm.org/red-bee-media-strength-under-pressure/

Red Bee Media, one of the industry’s leading managed services providers, was instrumental in the launch of TV5MONDEplus, the new global video-on-demand platform serving French language series, films, documentaries and children’s content in full HD quality to 193 countries. A project of this scale and profile would be worthy of note under any circumstance but is even more remarkable given it was successfully launched on deadline during this most challenging of years.

Extending the reach of French language programming to audiences across the globe is a central mission of TV5MONDE. The global TV network, which is supported by the governments of France, Canada, Switzerland, Wallonia-Brussels and Quebec, conceived of a new streaming service to deliver high quality and free French speaking content to users worldwide.

Specifically, TV5MONDEplus is intended to promote French-speaking content and the programs of its partner channels, TV5MONDE’s own productions, as well as co-productions and programs acquired all over the world over multiple device platforms.

The project was greenlit in the autumn of 2019, assigned a launch date of 09 September 2020, and put out to public tender.

Red Bee Media’s relationship with TV5MONDE goes back several years stemming from the integration of the broadcaster’s facility to today, providing staff to operate and engineer its playout, production and post facility. Red Bee Media has also concluded several projects for the broadcaster.

“We have a long term and strong relationship with TV5MONDE but that was no guarantee that they would select us for their streaming service,” says Cong Thanh Nguyen, Key Account Manager for TV5MONDE at Red Bee. “We applied to the RFP as we would any other public tender process and with four competitors were invited to proceed to the next stage.  It was a strict process which included making several demonstrations of our proposed solution.”

TV5MONDE stipulated several criteria in the RFP. A key one was to be fast to market. “They had a strict deadline and they didn’t want to spend 18 months or more to get the service up and running from scratch. They were looking for a managed service provider.”

Secondly, TV5MONDE did not want a phased deployment. They required availability of the service in every region from day one.  “One of their essential requirements was visibility into the management of rights to assets published by region or by country,” says Nguyen.

In addition, the platform needed to be available on multiple devices including the web and set top boxes and with a strong focus on mobile to cater for audiences in territories where mobile is a major or primary means of streaming video.

Red Bee Media won the business at the beginning of 2020, and immediately set to work.

“They were looking for a partner that could provide a managed service end to end including back end and front-end apps and to meet several device types,” says Olivier Braun, Technical Product Manager for OTT at Red Bee. “Red Bee’s managed OTT platform has been developing over five years and contains several cutting-edge technologies. One of its core features is that it is very modular meaning we can tailor solutions for each client from multiple building blocks.”

The building blocks of successful OTT

One of those building blocks is an entitlement engine which is able to manage the rights for each individual TV5MONDEplus asset per region and per country.

Adherence to the highest standards of content security, protection and digital rights management (DRM) was also mandatory. All TV5MONDEplus assets are protected according to content owner rights. Red Bee Media’s solution defines both a MPEG-DASH and HLS source with Google Widevine, Microsoft Playready and Apple Fairplay DRM technologies.

TV5MONDEplus is a free to view advertiser-funded model which required integration of an ad serving solution. At RFP stage it wasn’t decided if this were to be server-side side or client side. In the event, they chose a client-side solution with partner France Télévisions Publicité as provider of inventory using FreeWheel (a Comcast company) for video ads and Google for banner and in-app ads. The back-end integration into Red Bee’s platform was straightforward.

The service was to allow users to pause programming on one platform and continue seamlessly on another device. This required Red Bee to build in authentication and cross device synchronisation of content to the user’s account. Localisation is enabled with subtitles of French language content available in French, Spanish, English, German and Arabic. The user interface is also localised in five languages.

An absolutely vital ingredient for TV5MONDE was video quality which had to remain consistently broadcast standard even as bandwidth and devices varied country to country.  Red Bee used per title encoding to analyse the complexity of individual assets for TV5MONDE in order to optimise the bitrate ladder and produce the best quality to bitrate ratio.

“The quality of video is extremely important to the client,” says Braun. “When we ingest content we use Adaptive Bitrate streaming (ABR) to provide multiple bitrates which the video player can adapt based on the best available bandwidth. All assets are available in full HD.”

On the distribution side, the service taps into the network of TV5MONDE’s existing partner, Akamai. Since Red Bee Media’s platform is CDN agnostic the integration of the service with Akamai’s CDN presented no problems.

The end-user applications for the platform were built by Dotscreen using Red Bee’s standard Software Development Kit (SDK – available in iOS, Android, Smart TVs and Javascript), which allows for seamless connections with Red Bee’s services for content display, playback, entitlement, analytics, security and streaming.

Deadline delivery under Covid conditions

The delivery date was immovable – global pandemic or not. Despite a six-week period from March when virtually the whole of Europe was in lockdown, Red Bee’s team kept the project on track.

“There’s no doubt that Covid-19 made everything a lot more challenging but we were fortunate in already operating a fairly dispersed team,” says Braun. “We have key team members in France, the UK, Sweden and Romania so we are used to collaborating on projects remotely.

“The most severe period of lockdown happened during the specification phase of the project when we were nailing down issues around the front-end UX and the app’s look and feel. Those sorts of conversations are much easier when everyone’s in the same room but on all sides we pulled together and just got on with it.”

Another advantage to maintaining business continuity is that Red Bee’s platform is entirely cloud-based with no need for local deployment in Paris.

TV5MONDEplus continues to evolve both technically and editorially. New features are planned by the end of the year, to improve the user experience on the web as well as on the IOS and Google applications. Distribution will be extended with the TV5MONDEplus application being made available on LG and Samsung connected TVs, then in 2021 on some American cable operators via Adobe Prime.

 

Hélène Zemmour Digital Director, TV5MONDE says “Press and user feedback since launch has been very positive. Our Francophone and Francophile audiences appreciate this rich and free offer, in French and subtitled in 5 languages. The catalog of more than 5,000 hours of cinema, series, documentaries, magazines and youth programs has enabled Internet and mobile users from all over the world to discover the diversity of French-speaking creation in Quebec, Canada, Switzerland, Belgium, French or Africa.”

Zemmour adds, “With Red Bee Media’s OTT-platform, we got access to first-class streaming and broadcasting expertise, as well as crucial features such as advanced ad tech and geo-blocking functionality. This, in combination with Dotscreen’s design expertise, allows us to offer a high-end user-experience comparable to the biggest streaming services available. We are looking forward to continuing this cooperation, developing TVMONDEplus for the benefit of global audiences.”

Stéphane Grandvarlet, Head of Market Area Southern Europe and Managing Director Red Bee France adds: “We are very proud and excited to have been a part of this unique launch for TV5MONDE. By delivering a competitive global streaming service, in a very short period of time and in less than ideal circumstances, we shave showed the strength of our OTT platform and our team.”

 

Red BTS: Director Mark Toia on Monsters of Man

interview/ words for Red

A new indie science fiction feature shot on RED has grabbed attention for its superlative budget defying production value  

https://www.red.com/news/monsters-of-man

All the high gloss cinematic spectacle of a studio blockbuster is delivered on a fraction of the budget. Monsters of Man, the guerrilla-style production from filmmaker Mark Toia, puts every cent on screen. The sci-fi action feature is generating Hollywood heat for the Australian writer-director-DOP —which is just as he intended.  

“Creating Monsters of Man was always an ambitious undertaking,” he says. “What started off as a hobby turned into more of a commercial experiment to see if I could create a really cool calling card to Hollywood by producing a compelling film with high end production values and studio quality visual effects with a budget that probably wouldn’t cover the catering on some big tent pole movies.”  

Toia is no ingenue. He has 25-years’ experience as an acclaimed advertising TVC director in constant demand by the world’s biggest commercial agencies and brands.  

“I wanted to do a movie under my own rules with no one telling me how I should make it,” he says. “If you are lucky enough to be able to self-fund your own film then you can create in a whole different way. Decision making is a lot quicker since you answer only to yourself. It’s why I can get large scale production values where nothing is wasted without compromising my vision.”  

The script he co-wrote with Jeff Hand concerns a corrupt CIA agent (Neal McDonough) who sends four prototype robots into a suspected drug manufacturing camp in central Asia in a covert military operation that goes awry.   

“In bringing this project together I had to think really smart in all areas. I wanted all of the budget we had on screen and not behind the camera. I began by putting together a small, multi-talented commando style crew who were more than happy to shoot in a minimalistic way.”  

He continues, “I still wanted to shoot with at least four cameras stripped down to the minimum for obvious speed and agility reasons. Having multiple cameras on an action film can get you so much extra coverage. Continuity becomes far easier and actors can start to breathe into a theatre style performance which I know a lot of actors really enjoy.”  

Since the story was set in the Golden Triangle (which traverses Thailand, Myanmar and Cambodia), Toia decided to shoot on location in Cambodia.  

“We didn’t have to build any sets. No giant art department was required. No lighting or grip teams. We just shot lay of the land and the images we captured are just incredible.”  

He would be shooting in the jungle over several weeks, encountering mud, rain, heat and rugged terrain. Filming began in late 2016 with three RED EPIC Dragon 6K and one of the test Helium 8K’s No.#00003. 

 

“The choice of camera was easy. I give RED cameras a flogging day in day out around the world in all sorts of crazy tough conditions. I know how robust they are that if we did drop one it wouldn’t matter.”  

The same couldn’t be said of lenses. Instead of high value cine lenses Toia bought sets of less expensive Rokinon glass and a few Canon zooms.  “I was expecting a lot of damage and didn’t want to worry about smashing them in the effort to get the shot. We tested them and they were as clean and sharp as any true cine optics and did a more than adequate job.”   

 

To move through the jungle at pace they didn’t run a video village. The cameras were stripped down so that Toia and four operator including main camera Tony O’Loughlan ACS could move around free of cables and hardware. The REDs were time-code synced so they could shoot multi-camera at any time. Rushes were transcoded on location and available for the director to check each night and early morning.   

 

“All I needed was to know if the operators were on point with exposure and that everything was looking good,” Toia says. “I lensed for different types of emotion contained in the script from tripod, to handheld to crazy.  I have confidence in the operators and the cameras and in my ability that we were capturing the visuals so that I could concentrate my attention on the performances.” 

 

“The main reason I shoot RED is for the dynamic range,” he continues. “For me, having 17-18 stops is the biggest drawcard especially when you are making an HDR finish.  When we shot in the caves using real light bouncing around the walls, the Helium really came into its own and saved the day.  

“These cameras give me a ton of information to play with in post - more than I need. I can get so much extra control by manipulating the RAW files and digging into the shadows or bringing down highlights. The low noise attribute of the cameras allows for far better results when keying, tracking and compositing.  

“If we do make a mistake on set with color temp or if we slightly over or under expose the camera the RAW data gives you that much more room to alter in post and to do the final grade. It’s just more flexible in very sticky situations. I know I can come out of it and still be in a safe place.”  

Toia stresses that the final look is not set by the camera’s sensor or some default color setting. “The final look is set by the cinematographer, our lens choices and the decisions during final color grade.”  

Resolution is another critical creative advantage for Toia. “When you’re doing an action movie you tend to shoot quite feverishly with your angles because of all the running and jumping. If you want a close up, then instead of asking actors to repeat that movement or reaction from an earlier take I can zoom into the frame. A 6K and 8K resolution allows me to reframe easily to enhance a scene or an actor’s performance. To push into a shot up to 200-300% is like throwing on another lens. I reframe a lot of my shots. It might be 5% or 200% but I reframe because I want that shot to be right.”   

 

The additional resolution also helped accommodate the film’s aspect ratio which is delivered 2:1 but shot 2.39. Another “massive time saver” for Toia is the ability to pull hi-rez production stills straight off the RED.   

 

“Resolution really does help you from a creative point of view,” he says.  

He also shot scenes in New York and Vancouver during breaks between TVC jobs. The robot characters were modelled in 3D and rendered in RedShift with the entire film finished at full 4K.  

The film has already been hugely successful for Toia. Advance screenings and word of mouth have resulted in more than thirty feature and TV drama scripts from twenty + producers landing at his door inviting him to direct. They want a piece of Toia’s magic.  

“A lot of big producers are not seeing any real return on their productions and hopefully what I’ve been able to show them is that they can deliver a great product and make a profit,” he says.  

“Shooting Monsters of Man on RED was a no brainer. They are small, powerful and super reliable.  I have no idea what you will watch my film on, whether an 8KTV screen, iPad or phone but whatever you watch it on I just want it to look amazing. That’s why I chose RED.”  

 

Monsters of Man was screened at the 2020 Sydney Science Fiction Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award, and will be released on multiple streaming platforms worldwide on December 8th.  

 

Cloud-native, cloud-agnostic professional media processing has arrived

Copywritten for MediaKind

By Tony Jones, Principal Technologist, MediaKind

https://www.mediakind.com/blog/cloud-native-cloud-agnostic-professional-media-processing-has-arrived/

A few years ago, broadcasters and content owners perceived the public cloud as an unsuitable option for replicating live TV quality or reliability. Today that has definitively changed.

Greatly helped by the emphasis given to professional media by the likes of Microsoft, Google, and AWS, the public cloud is now seen as eminently viable in most respects. These big cloud providers are becoming the system integrators of the 2020s. It is now up to the software vendors to provide the capabilities that seamlessly integrate into cloud infrastructures and deliver the tools that work the way customers need.

Media processing in the cloud: A complex process

This is not as simple as it sounds. It is relatively easy to make something deployable as an application in a cloud environment. The tricky bit with media processing in the cloud is meeting the exacting expectations of a real-time broadcast TV service.

Unlike everyday internet applications, broadcast services are in the same failsafe category of availability as emergency services. For example, if an online ticketing application fails, it doesn’t cause any significant outage problem. If someone can’t make their booking, they can probably do it successfully five minutes later. But if you lose five minutes of a broadcast event, such as a high-value soccer match, that could be terminal for the business.

The expectations are leagues apart.

Also, most cloud-based applications are transactional. Online ticketing is precisely that. You make your request to book, the system transacts calling on data stored in the database, you get the response, and the transaction is complete. Live video is a different beast. By nature, live video is a continual flow of data that doesn’t want to be interrupted.

The other aspect that needs consideration is how to get real-time video content into the public cloud. Secure Reliable Transport (SRT) is an industry-standard solution that can achieve this by providing a robust stream connection with controlled end-to-end latency and encryption, enabling a new generation of real-time connections into and out of the public cloud. You can read more about SRT in my interview with the SRT Alliance last year.

The advantages of cloud-native environments

The challenge in building a cloud-deployed broadcast-capable system is to meet those expectations within an IT environment that wasn’t initially designed for either five-nines availability or real-time content flow.

MediaKind has been targeting this challenge for over five years. It has taken us toward building our technology in a Kubernetes environment because that can be deployed just as easily into Google Cloud or Azure and AWS as it can on-prem. You can take the same code that can be cloud-deployed and build it into a physical appliance. Since it is all software, you can integrate a complete stack across the whole spectrum of different deployment models, but it operates the same way regardless.

The advantages are legion. Apart from giving operators a variety of deployment options – whether on-prem or in any form of public cloud – they can scale operations with cost efficiencies unachievable if attempted conventionally.

A number of our major tier 1 customers began moving in this direction some time ago. They wanted to eliminate manual operations and costly errors and outages by automating the process in the cloud. Not only are operations far less error-prone, but they are reproducible too. With software built on Kubernetes, the same results will be repeatable ad infinitum, a predictable model that is highly expensive – if not next to impossible – to achieve manually on-premises.

MediaKind’s cloud-native media processing products

All of our media processing software is now available in a cloud-agnostic containerized deployable format. Within Cygnus (contribution and distribution solutions) and Aquila (consumer delivery solutions), we can address specific media industry and content delivery applications and use cases today.

• MK CE1 – A world-first for professional contribution video encoding based on cloud-ready software, coupled with powerful X86 hardware acceleration Ensures delivery of demanding live event coverage, as well as Remote/At-Home Production with UHD support, SMPTE ST 2110, SRT, and BISS-CA. Combined with MediaKind’s multi-codec and multi-service decoder, MK RX1, the CE1 enables an end-to-end media contribution workflow that is more resilient and future-ready than existing professional media contribution processing and delivery solutions.
• MK CE Mini contribution encoder is designed for remote production to contribute secure links into studios or the cloud.
• MediaKind Encoding Live brings together 25 years of video compression experience to deliver the highest quality, any-screen software applications for live video encoding and transcoding, including ABR compression for streaming.
• MediaKind Stream Processing enables powerful network adaption, bandwidth-efficient statistical multiplexing, open interfacing, and continuous delivery through inbuilt resilience.
• MediaKind Packaging is a modular solution designed for the distribution of multiscreen video services.

MediaKind cloud technology can run on-prem or in the public cloud. It’s a cluster that works the same whether built on virtual machines in a private data center, in a headend, or the public cloud using third party servers and infrastructure.

These enhanced solutions provide an immediate response to the anticipated changes in professional media contribution, enabling broadcasters, operators, and service providers to transition to all-IP and the cloud, integrate existing and future codecs and standards, and embrace new flexible business models.

Cloud infrastructure is accepted as a viable option for broadcast today. Now, broadcasters and content owners can invest with confidence in media software, safe in the knowledge they will always remain current in a world of shifting media contribution technologies and infrastructure.

Timeline TV transitions Meydan Racecourse to remote controlled workflow

SVG Europe

Timeline Television has been working alongside Racing TV (and parent Racing Media Group, RMG) for the past five years to provide host broadcast coverage of the Meydan horse racing season.

https://www.svgeurope.org/blog/headlines/timeline-tv-transitions-meydan-racecourse-to-remote-controlled-workflow/

Timeline facilities and crew support RMG’s host production, course coverage and client broadcasters’ needs in delivering the event – which culminates in the Dubai World Cup, the world’s richest race day – to audiences around the world.

When the 2019/20 season was cut short due to the outbreak of COVID-19, and with the Dubai World Cup cancelled only days before it was due to take place, Timeline’s crew had to return home.

Fast forward to seven months later and with COVID restrictions still in place, the facilities provider has transitioned Meydan Racecourse into a remote production workflow controlled from Ealing, UK. This remote workflow delivers the same level of coverage as previous seasons without the need to send a full crew to Dubai, reducing travel by about 70%.

Meydan Racecourse will host 19 race meetings for the 2020-21 season, including 11 Racing at Meydan (RAM) fixtures, where the primary focus is on local horses and trainers. In welcoming racing back to the iconic venue, there is a firm focus on the UAE government’s health and safety regulations. Thorough sanitisation, thermal screening of attendees and social distancing are part of the measures undertaken by Dubai Racing Club.

Daniel McDonnell, managing director, Timeline Television, explains: “It became clear in September that they were potentially going to have a full season starting again in November. The challenge we had was around COVID testing where staff needed a negative test within 48 hours of flying to Dubai, another similar test on return, plus 14 days’ quarantine in the UK at that time. That made getting staff in and out very difficult.”

Fortunately, Timeline was already remote producing events including SailGP, Formula E and BT Sport’s English Premier League coverage.

“There are two distinct workflows for remote and a combination of both,” McDonnell says. “For BT Sport we take all presentation feeds back into Stratford where we mix and add graphics. It’s the same with SailGP where we take 40 to 50 sources back to London for full production. Dubai is a bit different in that we remote control the kit in Dubai from Ealing.

“Because we went from concept to completion in just a few weeks we didn’t have the ability to get our own permanent fibre installed. We’re using a leased connection, so we have guaranteed bandwidth of 250Mb but it’s not quite enough connectivity to bring back all the cameras from Dubai to the UK.”

That’s not a problem, however, as Timeline’s solution is to bring back multiple lower resolution but good quality multi-viewers, which allows the team to perform all operations remotely, including camera racking of 16 Sony 4300s.

“We are stitching the matrix in Dubai so we don’t need to bring back all cameras. In Dubai you will see all the familiar positions; the Grass Valley Kahuna vision mixing desk, EVS and graphics, but

nobody is sitting there. The only staff we have on site are some camera and systems engineers. Everyone else, including the director, PA and sound is located in the UK. The director in our Ealing broadcast centre has a vision mixer and when they press a button it is remotely controlling the mixer at the OB.  Similarly, the EVS operator has a remote control of EVS at the OB and the sound mixer has remote control over the Calrec desk.”

An EVS Cerebrum Control system enables the UK broadcast centre and the Dubai remote site to be linked together seamlessly. This has enabled the Ealing-based team to control the remote equipment from thousands of miles away.

Timeline also produces a feed for the venue’s 110 metre-long trackside screen, driven by a second bank of mixers and also remote controlled from London.

“We are pioneering this type of remote production offering,” says McDonnell. “We’ve been looking at Dubai as an obvious candidate for remote for some time because of the high cost of travel and also the environmental impact. While this has been accelerated with the impact of COVID, it has always been a long term goal of ours, in order to deliver a significantly more sustainable production.”

Timeline is estimating that this Meydan Racing season alone will see a 70% reduction in flights, which equates to two million air miles and 200 tons of CO2.

“These sorts of workflows have been pushed forward by the fact that we’ve had to do it,” he adds. “This will be a changing point for a lot of OBs; it will give productions flexibility. For example, we might decide in future that it makes sense to send the director out to the venue but not our EVS operators, or that we don’t want graphics but do want the production manager on site. Each role doesn’t need to be locked nor does the number of onsite roles.

“Our goal is to assist more productions over the coming years in going remote and to deliver an even greater environmental impact.”

Where to watch the world’s richest race 

This season at Meydan Racecourse includes 19 meetings, seven of those comprise the Dubai World Cup Carnival, an international showcase taking place on six consecutive Thursdays between 21 January and 25 February, before culminating with Super Saturday on 6 March next year. The UAE season will be topped by the historic 25th running of a Group 1 flat race, the $12 million Dubai World Cup, sponsored by Emirates.

Typically, around 40 broadcasters would cover the Dubai World Cup Carnival (around 10 fixtures beginning in the New Year) and/or the Dubai World Cup scheduled for the last Saturday in March.

Broadcasters in North and South America and the Caribbean include: NBC, TVG (US); CBC, HPI (Canada); ESPN (Latin America, Caribbean) and SportsMax (Caribbean).

Far Eastern networks include The Green Channel, Fuji TV, (Japan), HKJC TV, TVB, Cable, Now TV (Hong Kong) and Sina (China).

Africa is served by Super Sport (sub-Saharan Africa) and Tellytrack (South Africa), while Australasia is covered by Racing.com, Sky Thoroughbred Central (Australia) and Trackside (New Zealand).

European broadcasters include Match (Russia), Equidia (France), Racing TV and Sky Sports Racing (UK, Republic of Ireland), Virgin Media 1 (Republic of Ireland), SilkNet (Georgia), Arena Sport (Slovakia and Czech Republic) and TVP (Poland).

The MENA region is served by live coverage from Dubai Racing Channel and Yas TV (UAE).

In addition, Sport 24 has shown a special two hour live programme, available on cruise liners and airlines, including title-race sponsor Emirates.

Behind the Scenes: One Night In Miami

IBC

Editor Tariq Anwar and director Regina King deliver a masterclass in bringing a stage play set in a one motel room to screen.

https://www.ibc.org/trends/behind-the-scenes-one-night-in-miami/7060.article

On one incredible night in 1964, four icons of sports, music, and activism gathered to celebrate one of the biggest upsets in boxing history. When underdog Cassius Clay (Eli Goree) defeats world heavyweight champion Sonny Liston in Miami, Clay memorialised the event with three of his friends: Malcolm X (Kingsley Ben-Adir), soul singing legend Sam Cooke (Leslie Odom Jr.) and NFL star-turned-actor Jim Brown (Aldis Hodge).  

Adapted from his own award-winning play by Kemp Powers and directed by Regina King, One Night In Miami is a fictional account inspired by the night these four formidable figures spent together. Their conversations relate to racial injustice and religion, questioning what the personal responsibilities of an artist of colour should be, if a Black athlete can just be an athlete, and asks whether BAME artists should embrace, or stay away from, activism. 

“I had seen the play at the Donmar in London a few years ago and loved it but I was concerned that because it is so theatrical it would be a bit too stagey for a movie,” says editor Tariq Anwar. “My agent sent me the script out of the blue. I discussed the approach with Regina and really thought it was worth doing.” 

King won a Golden Globe and an Oscar as best supporting actress for If Beale Street Could Talk and has previously been behind the camera on TV shows including TNT’s Animal Kingdom and ABC’s The Good Doctor but this was her debut feature as director. 

British editor Anwar spent 18 years at the BBC honing his craft on programmes as diverse as Last of the Summer Wine and Bergerac before moving to features, notably on American Beauty and The King’s Speech for which he was Oscar and BAFTA nominated. He also cut The Madness of King George and The Lady in the Van, both stage plays adapted for screen. 

“With action and music sequences it is easier to maintain a visual interest than with dialogue no matter how well it’s written and performed,” he says. “It’s important to keep the audience stimulated by the choice and variety of shot and rhythm changes. At the same time, you don’t want the audience to be aware of the editing. There is always a danger with making scenes too choppy in an attempt to energise them, particularly when exchanges become heated which they do several times in the film.” 

One Night in Miami largely takes place in the confines of a nondescript motel room, although the screenplay opens out locations including a rooftop, a visit to an all-night store and recreations of Clay’s boxing bouts with Henry Cooper and Liston. It’s a masterclass in how to articulate a fluent and engaging drama which is heavy on politics and light on scene changes. 

“The important thing is having enough coverage,” Anwar says. “If a director doesn’t cover something well you have a problem. You are limited in what you can do. By having a variety of shots to go to you can always keep it interesting. There’s nothing you can do if a film is shot in a very stagey way and the actors or cameras don’t move around.” 

King and cinematographer Tami Reiker ASC (The Old Guard) shot with two large format Alexa 65 cameras, moving them on jib arms. That allowed the operators to keep the cameras floating and to better follow the actors around the room. She recorded at 6K for the image quality but softened the look with Prime DNA lenses. 

“Much of the editing is dictated in terms of the rhythm by the actors,” Anwar says. “So, in a way I am following the way they perform, in the edit. At times you need to make a longer pause or speed up the action or overlap the dialogue. Some scenes as scripted didn’t work and needed either deleting or a bit of re-imagining, not unusual for any film, but as always doing this without damaging the integrity of the script and the performances. All these are generally left to the editor; they are not micromanaged by the director.”

Miami Blues 
Set in Miami but filmed in New Orleans, Reiker and production designer Barry Robinson created a colour palette of vibrant blues and glowing warm tones in keeping with archival photographs of Clay/Ali fights by Howard Bingham and Neil Leifer and the street photography of Saul Leiter and Gary Winogrand. Anwar was installed in cutting rooms in New Orleans, posting scenes for King’s review on Frame.io and speaking frequently on the phone. 

“It can be very confusing filming in such a cramped space [as the motel room set], to get the angles all wrong or the eye lines wrong, or just to mess up the whole thing,” he says. “Regina and Tami did a brilliant job by giving me a number of choices to keep the audience interested by giving them a different point of view and to make to make it visually more engaging.” 

The characters volley barbs back and forth about their personal experiences as high-profile Black men against the backdrop of overt and casual racism and growing civil unrest. For Malcolm X the choice is clear, but the others exhibit more nuanced and equally persuasive arguments for their stance. All of them are at a crossroads too. Cooke for example is depicted wrestling with writing a Bob Dylan-style revolution song; Brown is shown in his first movie role (he would subsequently star in The Dirty Dozen, Ice Station Zebra and Mars Attacks). 

It’s also a very masculine portrait but there’s vulnerability on display too even from the brash champ who is on the verge of announcing his conversion to Islam and his name change to Muhammad Ali.  

“I stumbled across the idea while reading a book about the intersection of sports and the civil rights movement,” explains Powers in the film’s production notes. “It mentioned that following his first defeat of Sonny Liston, Cassius Clay went back to the Hampton House Hotel in Overtown, Florida near Miami where he spent a quiet evening in conversation with friends Malcolm X, Sam Cooke, and Jim Brown. This was just a little paragraph in a book that kind of blew my mind at the time. After all, these were four of my heroes.  

“I became very obsessed about this idea of discovering how these men met and why they were hanging out with one another. The more I learned about them, the more that it seemed natural that they would have been drawn to one another.  They were unapologetic in their art. They were unapologetic in their political beliefs. And in the early 1960s to be a free, unapologetic Black man was quite a rarity.” 

The riffs of the quartet’s friendship and frustrations are underscored with a delicate blues piano score which Anwar inspired.  

“With all films I like to use music at a very early stage. I feel it helps me with the picture cutting. Some directors find it abhorrent to put music on since they don’t want to be influenced or manipulated by someone’s music choice, which I understand. Regina expressed her concerns about the over-use of score, however she was very open to making my first assembly with music.  

“The first sequence I put to music was a prayer sequence with Clay and Malcolm X and initially I put on a gospel jazz piano and then went back to the duduk (an Armenian wind instrument). I was torn between the two. Regina thought the gospel was wrong considering Malcolm’s devotion to Islam, so we stayed with the duduk but I went back to the piano for the opening boxing fight. I felt this had a kind of playful feel to it for Clay’s character. Once I felt that worked, I stuck with the blues piano for all the characters trying to vary them slightly. With Malcom X we tried to have a gospel feel, with Brown it is more introspective and with Sam Cooke it’s fun-loving.” 

Grammy winning composer Terence Blanchard worked with jazz pianist Benny Green to write the ideas into the score. The film’s playlist also includes tracks by Nina Simone, Bob Dylan and Cooke’s own civil rights song, A Change Is Gonna Come.  

Lockdown locations 
Principal photography completed in February and COVID-19 nearly derailed the scene in which Ali and Cooke drive to a late night store. They filmed it under lockdown conditions but this presented some editing challenges for Anwar and his assistant Naomi Filoramo. 

“Following the shoot we worked together on refining the edit: swapping out takes, transposing scenes, shortening/deleting scenes, re-instating scenes, playing with music,” he says. “Just a few weeks short of finishing the ‘director’s cut’, COVID stepped in. From then on, both Naomi and I worked remotely, having editing gear installed in our homes. I relocated to LA and we continued to use the internet to exchange material (visual effects and music sketches from Blanchard) and post edited revisions to Regina and the producers. I used FaceTime and WhatsApp to show her scenes. I was surprised at how easy the transition to remote working was.”