Big News Readies to Flip the Switch to Streaming

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CNN’s wall-to-wall live coverage of the Gulf War in 1991 is widely credited with tipping traditional linear news coverage into chaos.

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/big-news-prepares-to-flip-the-switch-to-streaming/

Three decades on and now round-the-clock cable news broadcasts are being undercut by audiences seeking information online.

Big News is reacting — but perhaps not fast enough or radically enough to prevent fatal hemorrhage.

“I think [streaming] is as big a change for the video news business as the introduction of the cable news channels was — only it is happening much faster,” Mark Lukasiewicz, dean of the Lawrence Herbert School of Communication at Hofstra University, told Alex Weprin at The Hollywood Reporter.

“That was a slow tectonic shift from broadcast to cable, and while programs controlled by the news divisions — the morning shows in particular — still make a ton of money, the overwhelming emphasis for years now has been on cable news.”

It’s not to say that US TV news outlets aren’t invested in streaming. Every TV news organization now has a platform, or is planning to launch one, from NBC News Now and CBS News on streaming to ABC News Live, Fox Nation and CNN+.

“But all of these offerings are a hedge on the status quo,” says Weprin. “These TV news streaming platforms are designed to appeal to an audience that doesn’t pay for TV but still wants live news, analysis and interviews.”

Some services are catering to superfans (like CNN+, Today All Day or Fox Nation), some are trying to meet the needs of advertisers (the free streaming service Fox Weather was created in part because the company wanted to “build vehicles” for advertisers outside of its opinion shows) and others are trying to find that young audience that doesn’t currently watch linear TV news programming.

“But the incentives favor the status quo, with the current business models and multimillion-dollar talent deals — top-name TV news anchors earn eight figures annually — built around the linear present and not the streaming future,” says Weprin.

Still, there are signs of changes afoot. NBC, ABC, CNN, Fox News and others are hiring hundreds of employees to create streaming-first programming, and the approach to talent is being rethought.

THR reports that NBC’s Brian Williams, a veteran journalist who helmed various programs at NBC News and MSNBC, is departing with rumors swirling that a streaming service like CNN+ could be in his future. MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow, meanwhile, will step back from her daily cable show in 2022 but produce more content for the company’s digital platforms, perhaps including MSNBC’s The Choice. Established talents like NBC’s Tom Llamas and CNN’s Kasie Hunt have shifted or are shifting to streaming-first jobs.

“Other TV news divisions are taking similar approaches, with talent expected to treat their streaming and linear duties equally, not viewing digital content as ‘extra’ stuff meant to be done on top of the ‘real’ job,” says THR.

It could be that news orgs are preparing to flip a switch and stream all their news offerings online. But it’s all about timing and not wanting to disrupt still lucrative linear models or the talent they have housed for years.

“You don’t want to be the last person out of the gate deciding to get serious about streaming in news,” Lukasiewicz adds, “I do think there is a fear of missing out….”

How Media and Entertainment Are Remaking Society

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True crime documentaries, podcasts and social media campaigns are bringing new attention to real-world legal proceedings — and are often affecting the outcome.

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/how-media-and-entertainment-are-remaking-society/

The evidence? Two men convicted of killing civil rights activist Malcolm X were were exonerated last week, shortly after a docu-series titled Who Killed Malcolm X? aired on Netflix. The series brought newfound attention to the case, which was first opened nearly 60 years ago.

Exhibit B: Britney Spears was finally freed from her conservatorship after 13 years, following a massive #FreeBritney movement that swept social media and was popularized via a documentary from The New York Times. The film, The New York Times Presents: Framing Britney Spears, which aired on Hulu, caused an all-time high in ‘free Britney’ searches, according to Google Trends.

“On social media, real-world cases have become fodder for sweeping social justice movements, often spearheaded by celebrities with millions of followers,” according to Axios which documents the trend. “New media platforms can instantly put a national spotlight on cases that have long been forgotten or buried under red tape.”

Axios also point to the clemency granted to Julius Jones, just hours before he was set to be executed for the 1999 murder of Paul Howell. Oklahoma Gov. Kevin Stitt commuted Jones' death sentence to a sentence of life in prison.

The decision followed weeks of intense pressure from Kim Kardashian and other celebrities. Kardashian posted Stitt's email address to her Instagram hours before the decision, urging her 264 million followers to write to the governor about the case. In the last week, there were 279k social media posts about Jones' case, generating up to 1.4 billion impressions, according to data from Keyhole.

The idea of using documentary films to spotlight issues of injustice or other campaign causes is not new, nor is its effectiveness as a medium for shaping real life outcomes.

Errol Morris' 1988 doc The Thin Blue Line played a huge role in helping to exonerate, in 1989, Randall Dale Adams for the murder of Texas police officer Robert Wood.

The growth of social media and greater exposure on streaming platforms has however amplified the impact of campaigning documenatries.

There is also a genre of documentary filmmaking which aims to bring about real world change. The Doc Society has produced a whole template for how filmmakers can fund, create and market documentaries to influence events on the ground or raise money for worthy causes.

Its mission statement is: “Doc Society believes that documentary film is one of the most effective tools in creating empathy and inspiring people to engage as active citizens at a local, national and international level. To change the way we see the world.”

The Doc Society also funds films. Boycott (2021), directed by Julia Bacha about how Boycotts have long been a tool used by Americans rallying for political change, from civil rights leaders to anti-apartheid activists. It looks at the cases of a news publisher in Arkansas, an attorney in Arizona and a speech therapist in Texas whose careers are threatened by the harsh measures of these new laws.

Other recent productions include Hanging On a short spotlighting the strength of community in a British neighbourhood united when faced with eviction; Ain't Your Mama's Heatwave (2020) directed by Elijah Karriem which films four Black American stand-up comedians, taking the stage to “make the climate crisis funny” in front of an audience who are at risk for a Hurricane Katrina-like disaster; and Welcome To Chechnya an Oscar long listed piece of investigative reportage about the brutal suppression of human rights in Chechnya.

It’s not always the case that such activism effects outcomes, especially in legal cases. As Axios points out the podcast series Serial led millions of listeners to question whether Adnan Syed had been wrongly convicted of murder, but the courts ultimately denied him a new trial.

Critics said the Netflix series Making a Murderer omitted key evidence; one former police officer who worked on the case has sued Netflix for defamation.

New documentary, The Phantom examines holes in the case involving the 1989 Texas execution of Carlos DeLuna  for a 1983 murder where police may have confused two Hispanic men. DeLuna is already dead and Texas is showing no signs of ending executions.

And as the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell for sex trafficking begins in New York, there are concerns that the judge and jury have already been prejudiced by constant demonising of her in the media.

There are few checks on a media that can ruin a person’s reputation even if innocent.

In the UK in 2010 a man was erroneously arrested on suspicion of the murder of a 25-year-old woman. UK newspapers condemned him as the prime suspect before any charges were brought. He later won a libel case for defamatory media coverage of his arrest and his story has been made into a TV drama The Lost Honour of Christopher Jefferies.

 

Savage Beauty: The Visuals for “The Power of the Dog”

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https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/savage-beauty-the-visuals-for-the-power-of-the-dog/

About half way into Jane Campion’s new movie, the knot tightens. It is imperceptible, such is the pace of the way in which tension is built, but it grips, much like the onscreen portrayal of cowboys painstakingly braiding new rope from rawhide. Given that this is a Jane Campion film, the metaphor is surely not coincidental.

Based on the 1967 book written by Thomas Savage, The Power of the Dog contains all the trapping of an archetypal Western but deviates dramatically from cliché.

“Our main inspiration in terms of other films was A Man Escaped (1956) by Robert Bresson, where simplicity and minimalism is used to craft an incredibly tense story,” explains director of photography Ari Wegner ACS (Lady Macbeth, Zola) and winner of this year’s TIFF Variety Artisan Award. “Everything in the film from score to color palette to wardrobe and camera movement is very unshowy. No one element and certainly not the cinematography should not be grabbing your attention.”

Yet grab it does, as The Power of the Dog seduces the audience with an accretion of detail amid the foreboding hills of Montana. Even this feels dislocated since the production shot in the Hawkdun Ranges in Central Otago in South Island, New Zealand. Its sparsely populated, grassy plains and rocky mountains proved a remarkable match for Montana.

Campion has described the deeply complex central character Phil Burbank, a brilliant but cruel, hyper-masculine cattle rancher, played by Benedict Cumberbatch, as one of the all-time great characters of American fiction. He is in an impossible situation of being an alpha male who is homophobic and also homosexual.

Wegner spent roughly a year working with Campion, location scouting, storyboarding, and developing the visual style for the film, as well as working with production designer Grant Major (Oscar winner for Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King).

“For me that was incredibly exciting,” says Wegner. “Not just the prospect of working with Jane on such an amazing story but to be able to prepare properly and spend the time to get it right. I’ve shot there before and I know how the landscape changes from season to season. It was really important for us to spend time at the location in the season that we were going to be shooting. I didn’t do any other projects in that period, familiarizing myself with the property to find the great angles and getting to know the light.”

The property is the large ranch house and outbuildings built in the style of 1920s Montana. This is a settlement on the cusp of modernization, where saddle-hardened cowboys live uneasily with cars and trains, college education and civil society of the nearby town.

“I read the book as soon as I got the call from Jane and its descriptions of the land, the house and the characters within it as well as the minute details make up a holistic world,” Wegner says.

She participated in decision-making about the location of the house and throughout the art department build ensuring that the set allowed her to best capture the interplay of shadow and light that unfolds so dramatically in the mountain ridge behind the set.

“Shooting in New Zealand can take a lot of patience and endurance to deal with really intense weather, but it’s a wonderful experience,” says the native Australian. “I’ve always loved it. It’s a landscape that gives so much. You can photograph a vast plain with a mountain range that rises up behind it as one image, which is something that is not possible in Australia.”

Planning the production, Campion and producer Tanya Seghatchian met with novelist Annie Proulx, who wrote the short story “Brokeback Mountain” and penned an afterword to Savage’s book in 2001. They discussed writing about the American West from a female writer’s perspective. Her encouragement, Campion says, was incredibly helpful in giving her the confidence to tell this very American, masculine story.

An important reference for Campion and Wegner was the work of photojournalist Evelyn Cameron, who documented the American West at the time the film is set. They also referenced Time magazine archives, featuring photography of cowboys of the era, in addition to the Ken Burns documentary series The West, which offered the team a snapshot not only of 1920s Montana, but everything that came before it.

“Cameron’s diary and photographs offered an insight into that world from a woman’s and an outsider’s perspective,” Wegner says. “Her pictures — there is one of a woman standing on a horse that feels super conceptual — evoke a strong feeling that these characters could be alive now. We wanted to create that kind of realness in the moving image.”

Any desire to shoot on film was taken out of their hands because the location was so remote dailies could not be processed in time (and the cost of insurance was prohibitive).

“There are no labs in New Zealand that can take that scale of dailies footage and the idea of shipping unprocessed camera neg is a really scary process for everyone — myself included,” she says.

She shot large-format on Alexa Mini LF paired with vintage anamorphic Ultra Panatar lenses to frame actors against the vast landscapes. The while the interiors of the ranch house, with its Swiss-style wooden architecture are dark. She bounced light off molded glass to simulate moonlight and the brooding atmosphere inside.

Toward the end a sequence takes place in a barn at night between Phil and Peter (played by Kodi Smit-McPhee). There’s so much hiding in the shadows. Everything begins to lean closer: Phil rolling a smoke in a macro closeup, a very tactile shot that unfurls into a slow build that climaxes with the sensual gesture of Peter holding the cigarette to Phil’s lips. Macro shots of rope plaiting are used to underline Phil’s desire and the sexual tension between them. The scene cuts to the horses as a way to transition out of the sensuality into the morning light, but retain the mood and let it sit in the air.

It deconstructs the myth of Marlboro Man.

“The idea of giving love and attention to a macro shot was definitely in the language of the film from the start,” Wegner says. “We know by virtue of the script how much attention we’re going to pay to things like hands on rope, playing the piano, playing the banjo. It’s an easy thing to say you’ll grab a macro but it’s harder to shoot. I had a whole list that we storyboarded and handed to (Steadicam/A Cam) Grant Adam to get. In a way there is something more iconic in the detail and texture of these shots than any of the big vistas.”

How Should Streamers React to Slowing Subscription Growth?

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From Disney to Netflix, the major streamers are still growing, but subscriptions are slowing, suggesting that pandemic gains are waning as more people return to outside activities and out-of-home work.

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/how-should-streamers-react-to-slowing-subscription-growth/

Disney announced that it added 2.1 million subscribers for its fiscal fourth quarter, which ended October 2. That’s down from 12.6 million added the previous quarter.

Slowing growth was also the story at WarnerMedia and ViacomCBS. NBCUniversal’s Peacock added a few million more subscribers according to CEO Jeff Shell during a recent earnings call, but he didn’t reveal a new figure.

AT&T’s WarnerMedia revealed HBO Max added just 570,000 new US subscribers in its last quarter but chalked a net loss of 1.8 million HBO and HBO Max customers because of its decision to remove HBO from Amazon Channels last year. According to analysis from Television Business International’s Richard Middleton, instead of going direct, many customers just didn’t bother.

Lionsgate’s Starz saw 40% year-over-year growth in streaming subscribers in the quarter having lost about 600,000 global subscribers in Q3, a decline it attributed to cancellations of the company’s linear service.

Middleton believes Americans have reached a tipping point on the number of SVOD services they need in their lives.

“US apathy towards SVOD was also evident in Netflix’s latest numbers, with just 70,000 new customers in North America joining the streamer,” he says. “That was despite the advent of its giant South Korean hit, Squid Game, dominating headlines across the continent.”

That said, Netflix reported adding 4.4 million subscribers this quarter compared to 1 million adds in its Q2 as it continued to grow faster than other platforms outside the US. It is expecting an even bigger bounce next quarter, forecasting 8.5 million new subscribers on the strength of Squid Game and other buzzy content coming to the service before year end, including Tiger King 2.

Determining who is winning and losing the game isn’t easy. A simple way to gauge that is by looking at total subscribers and average revenue per user, or ARPU, which CNBC does. But not every company reveals those numbers.

Apple, for instance, has not revealed subscriber numbers since it launched in 2019, and Amazon doesn’t break out ARPU and hasn’t provided updates on Prime Video during Q2 or Q3 (though in April, Amazon said it had 175 million Amazon Prime members, all of whom receive Prime Video as part of the package).

Even where ARPU is available, it is evident that margins are far tighter outside the North American market.

According to CNBC, WarnerMedia’s HBO and HBO Max are delivering a healthy looking ARPU of $11.82 in the US market. HBO Max is in the process of rolling out overseas — where ARPU will be tighter.

The ARPU of Disney+ is currently $4.12 — a figure that includes the millions of subscribers paying for Disney+ Hotstar in Asia. Take those subscribers out of the equation, however, and the figure shoots up to $6.24. Netflix subscribers in the US pay, on average, just under $15 a month for the service, while those in Asia pay an average of $9.60.

 

What Unity/Weta Digital Will Mean for the Metaverse

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Unity Software’s audacious $1.625 billion swoop for Peter Jackson’s VFX house Weta Digital is an attempt by the maker of the second-most popular game development platform to close the gap on its rival Epic Games.

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/why-unity-weta-digital-means-another-metaverse-maybe/

The deal is predicated on a strategic bet by Unity that there is pent-up demand for the creation of 3D characters, assets and environments on a scale far beyond its current generation for big budget films and AAA games in elite shops like Weta.

In the first instance, Unity aims to open up the creation of photoreal CGI powered by its Unity games engine to fuel virtual production. It’s a market currently dominated by Epic’s Unreal Engine on stages such as Dark Bay at Studio Babelsberg in Berlin.

Longer term, Unity has its eye on the metaverse and what it thinks will be huge demand for professional and non-professional content creators to build assets to populate the 3D internet.

The deal promises to make the tools used to create Gollum for Jackson’s Lord of the Rings trilogy, Caesar from Planet of the Apes, and Pandora from Avatar available to creators all over the world. Indeed, Unity’s move for Weta is intended to stoke the market by allowing access to these tools over a cloud-based platform, though whether this will come to pass as Unity imagines remains a gamble.

Explaining the reasoning behind the deal, Marc Whitten, Unity Create SVP and GM, told VentureBeat, “The key for me [is that] the metaverse is going to need more 3D content. It’s going to need an extraordinary increase in the number of people capable of building in 3D. From a Unity perspective, we really started thinking hard about how we could build something that democratizes content creation.”

Under the deal, Unity is obtaining the Weta Digital suite of VFX tools and technology and its team of 275 engineers, who will join Unity’s Create Solutions division. WetaFX remains a standalone entity (under majority ownership of Jackson and led by CEO Prem Akkaraju) and Unity’s largest customer.

Whitten added, “You had this set of people who had built the most spectacular tools ever for 3D content creation that had never been productized, and then you had Unity, where our bread and butter is packaging and democratizing tools and making them more accessible.”

“Industry observers viewed the buy as a shrewd move by Unity to make gains in the rapidly evolving area of virtual production — a term that describes techniques that enable real-time visual effects production and may include technologies such as LED walls,” The Hollywood Reporter, said of the deal. “Most major VFX companies such as Weta, as well as the likes of Netflix and other entities, are exploring or investing in virtual production.”

“This whole space is exploding,” Whitten told her. “This is the beginning… I hope something you see, is a substantial shift in our position and our kind of level of commitment to Hollywood and the industry.”

Weta Digital’s tools provide a range of features including advanced facial capture and manipulation, anatomical modeling, advance simulation and deformation of objects in movement, and procedural hair and fur modeling. All told, Weta Digital’s software assets comprise some 50 million lines of computer code.

More prosaically, IndieWire suggests that means the “secret sauce” behind the facial capture of Caesar will now become more widely available, along with the rendering capabilities of Manuka and Gazebo, the physics-based simulation Loki tool for water and smoke, the Barbershop hair and fur system, the CityBuilder world-building tool, and a Weta VFX asset library in the thousands.

According to Akkaraju, Weta Digital previously evaluated commercializing the tools itself but concluded that selling the technology assets to Unity was the best way to bring them to market.

“There was a gigantic demand for artists and these services that were driven by Amazon, Apple, Netflix, and all the major studios,” he told IndieWire. “But there were so many restraints on specialized hardware and a lot of licenses, and, by putting it in the cloud, you don’t need all these licenses by providing end-to-end service.

“We looked for a partner that could actually bring these tools to life, and fill up the gap between the demand and the supply in the film [and TV] business. Then beyond that, it gets significantly larger as you go into consumer products and you start thinking about this as being the new creation device of 3D content rather than what it is today, which is more 2D content.”

Weta already has an arrangement with Amazon AWS to create a cloud-based VFX workflow, and has also signed cloud-services bundling deals for Autodesk’s Maya and SideFX’s Houdini.

Unity now intends to offer these tools in a cloud-based Software-as-a-Service subscription model to build on the more than five billion downloads of its apps per month that Unity claims it received in 2020.

According to Bay Raitt, principal of UX design at Unity (and formerly an animator at Weta), Weta Digital’s tools, “have been kind of landlocked inside of Weta,” he told Variety, but with cloud-based access, “You can essentially spin up the Weta workstation and summon the power of thousands of computers from anywhere.”

If the deal can help bring down the cost of virtual production content creation, by providing competition to Unreal for example, all well and good. It could also help to bridge the skills gap between traditional content production and the emerging disciplines of real-time digital production, photographing virtual assets live on LED screens and integrating game engine technologies into VFX pipelines.

When it comes to the metaverse, though, there are dissenting voices skeptical of the whole enterprise and its trillion dollar valuation. Rob Fahey worries that vast amounts of time, money and effort are being thrown at a “massively hyped venture” — the metaverse — that ultimately ends up changing very little about how people interact with their hardware devices, with the Internet, or with one another, because the necessary groundwork hasn’t been done.

“It’s great that Unity is doing some blue-sky thinking about the metaverse and the tools it might require,” he writes in Games Industry, “but companies that can’t afford to spend billions should be far more circumspect, especially since the real value of Weta Digital to Unity is almost certainly going to end up being far closer to its own wheelhouse than to Zuckerberg’s grand and nebulous plans.”

 

Avatar to Web3: An A-Z Compendium of the Metaverse

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Metaverse, NFT, creator, Web3, avatars: buzzwords that have gone viral in 2021 are all linked to one another. Here’s how.

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/avatar-to-web3-an-a-z-compendium-of-the-metaverse/

First, let’s look at the idea of community. The world’s citizens as one digitally connected species. Some 60% of the human race or 4.5 billion people, are online.

“What’s fascinating is that today’s communities are both the deepest and the broadest in human history, argues Rex Woodbury of Index Ventures blogging at Digital Native.

On the one hand, maybe only 1 in ,000 people like the same things as you—but with 4 billion people online, that’s 4 million people who share your interests. On the internet, no niche is too niche.

At the same time, the internet’s scale unlocks breadth: 142 million Netflix accounts watched Squid Game in its first month—67% of all accounts around the world.

“The pace of internet culture means cultural phenomena have shorter durations but this scale has never been seen before,” Woodbury says.

He cites one Chinese internet company, Bilibili which has a $33bn market cap and 202 million monthly active users achieved by building friction into community.

“In order to join a Bilibili community, users must pass a 100-question test. A sample question from the quiz to join the Game of Thrones community, “Which of the following is not part of the Faith of Seven?”

No, me neither. Building in friction means that communities are comprised only of superfans; 80%+ of its users are still loyal after 12 months.

Woodbury: “If the 2010s were the decade of performance online—status and signaling in broad brushstrokes, through likes and retweets and follower counts—the 2020s are the decade of deep and engaged digital communities.”

Taking this forward is the concept of authenticity. Admittedly an overused word—especially when tied to Gen Z—"it also captures a collective exhaustion with the narcissistic, image-obsessed internet culture of the past decade,” Woodbury says. “This year’s social media upstarts have leaned into authenticity. Authenticity shows up in the types of platforms we’re spending time on. More ‘authentic’ platforms like Snapchat and TikTok continue to thrive.”

Authenticity brings us to avatars. This might seem a strange connection: aren’t avatars, by nature, inauthentic?

“But for many people, avatars are a vessel for more authentic self-expression. Avatars have evolved into digital representations of who we are or who we hope to be.”

A couple of examples: YouTuber Ironmouse is a creator who streams in the form of a pink-haired anime girl.  She became a vTuber (virtual YouTuber) because of an autoimmune disorder that limited her offline life. In interview here she remembers: “I got so sick that I couldn’t go out. My contact with people was very limited and I felt that I couldn’t really be a human. So I started being a vTuber.” Adding, “I have never felt more myself than I have in this digital body.”

Equally fascinating is Sam Kelly, a man who spends hours in a virtual world called Stardew Valley. Sam writes:

“In the real world, I am a burly 27-year-old man with a bushy beard. In the video game, I am Olivianne, a strapping blue-haired woman married to Penny.”

Within worlds like Minecraft and Roblox and Fortnite, people are already embodying new digital identities. In Fortnite, you can pay 1,500 V-Bucks ($15) to be Iron Man or a Patriots player.

New companies are bringing avatars to life in new ways, often by building interoperability into digital assets. RTFK for instance, is a digital fashion house that sells NFT sneakers. “You can envision one day wearing these sneakers between virtual worlds,” Woodbury says.

Ready Player Me – Metaverse Full-Body 3D Avatar Creator is a cross-game avatar platform. Game developers can integrate avatars into their game, while players can snap a selfie (which generates their avatar) and then use that avatar in 660 supported games.

Woodbury quotes from Ready Player One. Asked why people visit the OASIS—a vast, immersive virtual world—the protagonist says: “People come to the OASIS for all the things they can do, but they stay because of all the things they can be.”

In a piece for Vanity Fair  The Metaverse Is About to Change Everything | Vanity Fair Nick Bilton envisions what this future could look like:

“In a world where the metaverse exists, rather than hosting a weekly meeting on Zoom with all of your coworkers, you could imagine meeting in a physical representation of your office, where each person looks like a digital version of themselves, seated at a digital coffee table drinking digital artisanal coffee and snacking on digital donuts. If that sounds a bit boring, you could meet somewhere else, perhaps in the past, like in 1776 New York City, or in the future, on a spaceship, or at the zoo, on another planet. You could choose not to be yourself, but rather some form of digital avatar you picked up at the local online NFT swap meet, or at a virtual Balenciaga store. You could dress like a bunny rabbit to go to the meeting. A dragon. A dead dragon. And that’s just one measly little meeting. Imagine what the rest of the metaverse might look like.”

When you can use Epic Games’ MetaHuman Creator Digital Humans | MetaHuman Creator - Unreal Engine for creating believable digital humans within minutes we’re hurtling towards our metaverse future. The full manifestation is still years (decades?) off, but the bricks are being laid. The next steps are VR and AR.

We’re still in the early days of VR and AR, but things are picking up. VR software sales inflected in 2019. By early 2020, over 100 VR titles had broken $1M in revenue. According to Woodbury, VR is finally moving from product to platform.

He cites Snap’s AR platform Lens Studio Lens Studio - Lens Studio by Snap Inc. (snapchat.com) that lets developers build their own AR experiences with a set of accessible tools. 200 million Snapchat users interact with AR in the app every day, and ‘AR creator’ is rapidly becoming a new job title.

The Metaverse is being built using open standard software like Universal Scene Description that allows 3D assets to be read by multiple third party software. This is one part of what can also be described as Web3, the successor to our current internet which Woodbury characterises as a reorientation of our digital economy.

“Web3 is the internet (finally) owned by creators and communities. This is made possible through blockchains like Ethereum. Smart contracts run on Ethereum as collections of code with specific built-in instructions—there’s no need for a centralized authority and no intermediaries are involved.”

This is in contrast to the first stage of the internet which centered around documents and pages being linked together, with companies like Google and Yahoo! making the world’s information easily discoverable. In Web1, most people were passive consumers.

“If Web1 was about information, Web2 was about social connection and content creation. With Web2, which has run from around 2005 through to today, we became active creators and the web shifted from a reading platform to a publishing platform.  But Web2 had a dark side: the major platforms vacuumed up all of the economics. In Web2, users created the value that the platforms then enjoyed.”

With Web3 the idea is that instead of Facebook owning and profiting from user-generated content, everyone contributes value to the internet, and everyone enjoys the benefits of that value creation.

“In Web1, we browsed. Web2 was about users who were acquired. Web3 is about creators and communities who are owners.”

And then there is crypto which is covers a broad range of new economic currencies and transactions which will power the creator economy.

“If you strip away the noise, you get to the heart of why this movement matters: crypto is about removing gatekeepers and providing a more efficient and more egalitarian digital economy. Crypto infuses value into the web’s vast networks of information, people, goods, and services.”

Digital tokens underpin this. Trading volume of NFTs surged this year to $10.7 billion in the third quarter with OpenSea emerging as the go-to destination for buying and selling NFTs, capturing 97% market share.

Brands from Pringles to Gucci to McDonald have introduced NFTs. For The Matrix: Resurrection, Warner Bros. will offer 10,000 NFT avatars for $50 each The Matrix NFTs Planned By Warner Bros. and Nifty’s – The Hollywood Reporter. On December 16th, NFT holders can choose to take the ‘Red Pill’ or ‘Blue Pill’ and if they choose the ‘Red Pill’, their avatar will transform into a resistance fighter.

Now that’s meta.

But despite more companies entering, NFTs remain niche: only 25% of US adults are familiar with NFTs, and only 7% are active users. OpenSea has about 300,000 monthly active traders. By comparison, Ebay has close to 200 million monthly actives.

“Across all of Web3, tokens are being used in new ways to influence behavior,” Woodbury says. “Fungible tokens are becoming the currencies of virtual worlds; NFTs denote ownership and scarcity. Above all, tokens inject incentives into the digital economy. They incentivize creation and consumption, investment and governance. They are the architecture behind the complex economies being built.”

More buzzwords to learn: DeFi is decentralized finance, a blockchain-based form of finance that doesn’t rely on traditional financial intermediaries like brokerages, exchanges, and banks. Fewer industries have more middlemen than finance, and DeFi obfuscates them all. 

“You don’t need your government-issued ID or Social Security number to use DeFi. By using blockchains—software-based smart contracts—DeFi enables frictionless peer-to-peer transactions with no institution or bank or company facilitating.

“Crypto needs both money and culture. If DeFi ushers Wall Street into a new era, NFTs will do the same for Hollywood, for Fifth Avenue, and for other cultural hubs. Both matter, and both will be massive.”

Finally, creator. In Web3, it is argued, it will become easier for us all to be participants in the creator economy—to earn income from the things we make.

Woodbury poses this scenario: you make a video of a popular dance trend set to Olivia Rodrigo’s ‘Good 4 U’ that uses an AR filter. In Web3, three creators earn income off of this: the person who came up with the dance trend; Olivia Rodrigo; and the person who originally made the AR filter. Each component part lives on the blockchain and value flows to creators frictionlessly and instantaneously.

“Today, society devalues creative work,” he says. “In many circles, being a lawyer is more prestigious than being a podcaster. Building better monetization will help solve this.”

The market for digitally-native creative work is predicted to grow enormously in Web3.

At its heart, the creator economy is a reorientation of how economics flow to the people who make things, rather than being captured by intermediaries along the way. That is where avatars, authentic online communities, developments in AR/VR and the whole project metaverse is headed but I’m not sure how big tech will take that lying down.

 

 

The Camera in “Succession” Is a Player in the Game

NAB 

The cinematography of Succession is full of flaws. Yes, one of the most popular and critically acclaimed TV dramas of the moment seems to get away with imprecise framing, characters who block other characters and awkward focus pulls – all the things that in the normal world of TV styling and especially with the kind of HBO puts behind a prestige show like this this would have the camera operators fired.

https://amplify.nabshow.com/articles/the-camera-in-succession-is-a-player-in-the-game/

Of course, the flaws aren’t flaws but carefully designed into the visual grammar of the show. The show is consciously shot as though a real camera were in the room, often at the expense of ideal compositions, and a big part of why that is has to do with how the show treats its camera like it’s a character.

Thomas Flight a video blogger has dissected all this in a video https://youtu.be/_lU91279xZk

Since the show is mainly driven by dialogue between various people in a room it could easily be a very formulaic and boring, Flight says. Yet many of these conversations feel tense and exciting.  It’s also a show about a group of people who aren’t particularly nice yet you find yourself getting engrossed in their drama. Why?

Because the camera crafts a character that doesn’t exist consciously on screen but one that sits in the unconscious mind of the viewer that aids in the telling of the story.

This style of cinematography isn’t new. The pilot to the series is titled Celebration which is a reference to the 1998 Danish film Festen (The Celebration) made by director Thomas Vinterberg. Festen was the first film in the Dogme95 movement that employed handheld camera work and an approach to filmmaking that attempted to mimic the conditions of documentary filmmaking.

Succession takes cues from Dogme95, cinema verité and other styles that use documentary techniques to create fictional stories.

“Even though it is not a documentary or a mockumentary the scenes in Succession are still shot as if the camera-operator is in the room with the characters attempting to capture things as if they were real events,” Flight explains.

“A more formal narrative show would place the camera between the characters and the actors would pretend it isn’t there. But filming in an ob-doc style the cameras are forced to the sidelines. The camera operators don’t want to get in the way so they end up looking around the people in the room to get the best view. Sometimes the result is less than ideal compositions.”

If it feels like the cameras are actually in the room is also feels like there’s an actual person operating them in that room. They are not just objective floating observers. Where they look and how they move has a subjective motivation and personality to it, Flight contends. This creates the opportunity for the character of the cameras to express itself.

Flight says the camera acts like a player in the game being played on screen.

Succession is about the schemes and machinations of the family as they each try to achieve what they want. It’s like a game. They have strategies and they talk about making ‘plays’. The board of this game are the spaces on screen and the conversations between characters. Often the goal is to accomplish what they want while hiding their true intentions.

“The actual lines the characters say are often meaningless while the real meaning is in the looks and glances and expressions of characters caught off guard by the camera in the room.

“All the players know they are playing this game so each character is also trying to understand what the other character’s hidden motivations are. Reactions, hidden subtle expressions, body language are all clues that the character and the audience can use to understand what the character really wants or really means.”

In the same way the characters in the scene are scanning each other for clues that betray their real intention, so are the viewers and the camera operators in the scene.

Breaking form

The show’s style doesn’t always stick to these rules. Once the conventions for a show are established you can break those norms to create contrast for a specific impact. For example, the energy of the cameras often matches the energy of the scene. When the family is scrambling around trying to say the right thing, the camera searches and dives as well. In other scenes where the characters feel safe or in control the camera calms down. At times the cameras use smoother movement, dollies or even slow-motion in contrast to the frenetic handheld movement in the other scenes to build tension.