ISE2023: All Paths Lead to Real-Time

IBC

ISE and its owners, CEDIA and AVIXA, covet the broadcast audience as realtime content creation technologies move to the fore 

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If ever one needed to understand the breadth of the insatiable demand for video content then a visit to ISE in Barcelona at the end of the month will do the trick. While NAB and IBC trade shows concentrate on the narrower market of technologies to produce TV and film, ISE covers everything audio visual (and multisensory) used to create and deliver content for the rest of media and entertainment. There’s a lot of it.  

From digital signage and live stages to videowalls, and experiential art to advertising, virtual and VR experiences rocketing demand for corporate and artistic messaging in every vertical from education to museums and retail represented a $258 billion industry in 2022. 

ISE, which rather incongruously stands for Integrated Systems Europe, straddles both traditional corporate AV used in business or public services and the backend systems used to network consumer electronics in private homes. Increasingly it is muscling in on broadcast too. 

The keynote speaker at ISE2023, for instance, is BK Johannessen, the Business Director for Broadcast and Live Events at Epic Games, creator of Unreal Engine. He’s exactly the type of headline act who IBC would covet. Now ISE and its owners, the trade bodies CEDIA and AVIXA, covet the broadcast audience. 

There is already a sizeable crossover in technologies. Often it is just the final deliverable or target audience that distinguishes anything AV from the rest of M&E. 

Johannessen’s keynote, ‘All Paths Lead to Real-Time’, will explore “how content creators are taking innovations from the games industry and applying them to their projects, from broadcast virtual production studios to real-time graphics for media & entertainment, live events, architecture, and more.” 

The show’s new ‘Content Production & Distribution Summit’ features sessions on how end-users and vendors in Pro AV are “increasingly seeking to create and disseminate high-quality video content for commercial and informational use.” This is chaired by Ciarán Doran, a marketing exec with extensive background in broadcast at companies including Rohde & Schwarz. 

ISE scored a record 81,268 visitors and 1300 exhibitors in its pre-pandemic high and is expected to attract more attendees than the 43,000 who went to last summer’s bounce-back show. Already ISE 2023 has surpassed its 2022 exhibitor tally with 900 spaces sold. 

Live event boom 

That return of physical attendance to mass events will be a big theme of the event.  Music concerts, sports and entertainment spectacles (like ABBA Voyage) are feeding audiences craving the live experience. Pro AV revenues from this sector in EMEA alone are expected to top $9.4bn this year, according to AVIXA. 

Fuelling this is a renaissance of the venue as destination enticing visitors out of the home with technology-rich social media-primed immersive experiences. 

The NOW building in Soho, for instance, opened in November to claim the world’s largest wrap-around screen installation - at least until the MSG Sphere opens at the Venetian, Las Vegas later this year. Qvest was the systems integrator for NOW’s digital canvas spread over 4-storeys in 16K resolution.   

In Manchester, the £186 million cultural hub Factory International, built on the site of the former Granada TV studios, features super-sized movable walls allowing for different configurations.  An immersive Matrix films-themed dance, music and VFX extravaganza directed by Danny Boyle was the opening production last October. 

Digital immersive exhibits are shaking up the traditional art world too. One of the leaders is Grande Experiences of Australia which creates and produces immersive exhibitions hosted by LUME.  DALÍ ALIVE at LUME in Colorado is a trip through the Spanish artist’s life highlighting his introduction to Surrealism, influence on American culture and the enduring impact he has today. LUME Melbourne: Monet & Friends is another experiential storytelling project which brings to life the masterworks of the French Impressionists. 

“The soundscapes for DALÍ ALIVE are just as psychedelic as the artwork,” says Des O’Neill, sound engineer, producer and co-founder at aFX Global which designed the spatial audio for Grande Experiences at both exhibitions. “DALÍ ALIVE is a showcase for what we can achieve with immersive spatial audio systems integrated with masterpieces of art to create a thrilling kaleidoscope of colour, movement and memory.” 

Visitors to ISE2022 will recall an exhibit devoted to ambient floor to wall projection-mapped art of artists including Claude Monet and Paul Cezanne. 

Lightroom at King’s Cross similarly treats the work of David Hockney as installation art as does Frameless, in Marble Arch, which The Guardian said, “offers 90 minutes of Instagram-friendly, son et lumière experience across 30,000 sq feet of London bunker.”  

XR showcase 

The convergence of AV and broadcast is nowhere more explicit than in the use of LED walls for virtual production and extended reality content creation. All major LED wall, camera tracking and XR technology manufacturers are present including Brompton, ROE, Lightware Visual Engineering, Mo-Sys an disguise. 

Singer-songwriter Camilla Cabello made a virtual album launch concert on TikTok using XR last August; and Full-contact karate league, Karate Combat, used XR to allow in-person attendees and a virtual audience to see fighters immersed in a CGI environment. Just two of 600 productions which used disguise’s xR solution last year. 

The technologies are the essentially same as used to produce live broadcast mixed reality presentations, and so too are the challenges, the main one being a skills bottleneck. 

“We need high-qualified and trained operators and highly technical people capable of making the whole interconnected eco-system from camera to LED screen work,” says Marina Prak, Marketing Manager at ROE Visual Europe. “The technical set-up and complexity of an XR stage is still a bit underestimated.” 

Another undercurrent challenging every computer-based hardware vendor is the ongoing disruptions to supply lines, particularly of components originating in China and Taiwan.  

Around 120 companies will be making their debuts at the Fira. One new exhibitor is Naostage, an engineering-led start-up that has created the world’s first automatic beaconless 3D tracking solution to aid immersive, interactive live experiences. 

Naostage will be joined in the Discovery Zone by Vidable which is building “the world’s most complete collection of AI-powered solutions for enterprise video,” says general manager, Mike Snavely. “Vidable will allow creators and content managers of all experience levels to easily analyse their libraries, enhance production quality and add engagement-oriented enhancements at scale – all with the power of AI.” 

Watch the Matter  

The next big development for in the smart home is the deployment of Matter.  This is a new protocol intended to help solve current interoperability issues by enabling devices from competing manufactures to talk to one another and automate smart home applications. 

Matter’s organising body is the Connectivity Standards Alliance, formerly the Zigbee Alliance. The CSA’s core members are a who’s-who of the smart home world, including Amazon, Apple, Google, Samsung, Wyze, iRobot, Signify and Ecobee. Some Matter-certified products are already on the market, such as Amazon’s fourth-generation Echo. 

Thread is one of the key technologies in the protocol. This is a low-power consumption networking protocol that promises to make the smart home more robust. Look for announcements of support from manufacturers at ISE. 

It is hoped that Matter will make it easier for systems integrators to wire up smart homes with sensor technology that makes buildings increasingly intuitive, adaptable, and responsive. Specific devices alone such as surveillance cameras and smart light bulbs will see spend on smart home solutions exceed $100 billion globally this year [per Strategy Analytics]. 

The increased time people spent at home since has resulted in an uptick in demand for dedicated cinemas or media rooms with bigger screens and powered up audio. Similarly, collective home time is generating demand for cabling that enables outdoor lighting and entertainment systems. 

Executives from Google, Zoom and Microsoft will gather at ISE to air developments in the smart workplace. Other aspects of the show’s Smart Home Technology conference explores topics like lower energy costs, building control and automation, gaming and how Big Data, AI and digital twin technology are changing the building network landscape. 

 

Stephen H. Burum ASC: A lifetime behind the lens

British Cinematographer

Stephen H. Burum ASC – whose body of work includes 1987’s The Untouchables, one of eight films he made with Brian De Palma, and 1992’s Hoffa – is the recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award at EnergaCAMERIMAGE film festival. 

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If cinematography attracts people particularly attuned to blending engineering with the creative arts, then Stephen H. Burum ASC’s destiny was decided as a child. 

Growing up in Dinuba, a rural town in the San Joaquin Valley, he remembers seeing a magazine called Popular Science and Mechanics with an article on the special effects used to make the 1953 feature version of War of the Worlds.   

“I was a model airplane hobbyist and I just found the FX really interesting. I wanted to try it out.” 

Dinuba may have been a small town but it had three cinemas including a Spanish language theatre, a converted musical hall and a Californian state-run theatre which had the distinction of being one of the few buildings with air con.  

“Mainly to escape the summer heat I would go to that cinema on matinees. They used to have a very elaborate programme on Saturdays of a newsreel and cartoon, a serial and two features. One was usually a musical, the other a western or war picture. 

“I saw just about everything you can think of and it kind of seeped into me by osmosis. When I went to film school a lot of students hadn’t see the movies I had. I instinctively understood the structure and storyline and could pick up all the dramatic cues. That was my best training, though I didn’t know it at the time.” 

His parents either wanted him to get into the newspaper business (his mother’s family owned a local newspaper) or get a career in engineering or law. To appease them he planned to work for a film studio and attended the UCLA School of Theatre, Film and Television. “The plan was to start as an assistant for 10 years, then operate for another 10, then DP and head of the camera department. That type of corporate career path was very typical in the ‘60s.” 

Instead, after college he leapt straight to DP aged just 23, shooting wildlife films like NBC TV series Walt Disney’s Wonderful World of Colour for Disney Studios. He even met the legend on a few occasions. 

“He asked people to call him Walt and was very matter of fact and a good leader. After I worked for about two months, I got a raise from $25 to $175 a week because Walt said he thought I was good.” 

THE WAR YEARS 

Burum’s upward trajectory was paused when he was drafted into the US Army as part of the Vietnam war effort from 1965 through 1967. After basic training he was assigned to produce training films at the Army Pictorial Centre in New York, where the majority of the 1200 staff were civilian. 

“At least I escaped being a combat photographer,” he says. 

With some irony then he found himself a decade later recreating Vietnam as second unit photographer and director on Francis Ford Coppola’s epic Apocalypse Now. 

“I was working in LA lighting video-taped TV programmes when I got a call from Francis. A typhoon had wrecked the location of a helicopter assault scene and he needed more coverage for the attack and the boat going upriver. I was trying to get into the union and said I wasn’t interested in being a second unit director.”  

Burum suggested Carroll Ballard, a mutual colleague from UCLA. “Francis said, ‘Carroll said you should do it.’ They twisted my arm.” 

Burum spent nine months in the Philippines, initially with Coppola and Vittorio Storaro ASC AIC, then filming under his own command. 

“We were all trained by the same people so I already knew what Francis would require to piece it together. That was lucky because we’d only got dailies once a month. At UCLA I was taught that if I was interested in being a studio cameraman than I’d have to match every other camera person on the lot. Sometimes people get sick and they wouldn’t shut down so they’d have someone else just roll in. A head of camera department had to learn to shoot like everyone else. It wasn’t hard for me to figure out what they wanted.” 

Burum’s army film training came in useful coordinating the local air force that Coppola was relying on to supply and fly helicopters. 

“The Philippines air force only had sixty helicopters and while Francis needed big formation shots, the army was fighting a war against separatists in another part of the country. Sometimes we’d get four helis, sometimes 10 or 20, so scheduling was very difficult. The other problem was that the pilots couldn’t fly the big, tight formations we needed. In the end we flew in some US pilots and had them interspersed among the formation. 

“I knew what heli formations were and how to line them up,” Burum adds. “We’d get everyone up in the air and fly one, then we’d get everybody to assemble and turn 90-degrees. Then we’d fly the rehearsal leg to get everyone in position, then another assembly leg. The final leg, we recorded.”  

On return, he shot second unit for Ballard and Caleb Deschanel ASC on The Black Stallion (1979). When Deschanel directed The Escape Artist (1980) he asked Burum to shoot it for him, marking his first main feature DP credit. 

Now he was up and running. Sidney J. Furie hired him to shoot horror picture The Entity (1982), a director whom Burum reveres as one of the very best he is worked with. 

BRAT PACK ERA 

Then came a pair of Susan Hinton novel adaptations, lean youth dramas sparkling with indie spirit which launched the Brat Pack career of actors Tom Cruise, Emilio Estevez, Matt Dillon, Rob Lowe and Ralph Macchio. 

“The Outsiders was suggested to Francis by a junior high school class in Fresno. One of the students was a cousin of mine but I didn’t tell him that. Since he considered me a very efficient cinematographer, Francis wanted me to shoot the picture, which we did in 40 days. He had this rule not to shoot more than three takes. He’d make long elaborate rehearsals so that all the kids were already up to snuff when we shot. We’d sometimes only need two takes and we never printed more than one.” 

As a reward, Coppola offered Burum the chance to shoot 1983’s Rumble Fish. “He asked me what I wanted to do with the film and I said to shoot black and white because it was maybe my only chance. I had shot 50 black and white films at film school and loved it. He agreed and said it was his gift to me for doing a good job.” 

Monochrome is a common aesthetic choice in recent years but a rarity in theatrical releases of the time. A review from 1984 in the ASC journal was impressed: ‘Compared to even the luminous, lithographic grey scale photographed by Sven Nykvist [ASC FSF] for Ingmar Bergman, Burum’s Rumble Fish is seared on the screen like burnt charcoal and fuming dry ice.’ 

His agent got him an interview with Brian De Palma who was casting for cinematographers to shoot his next project. Burum had to shoot some test material and won. 

“When we first met, Brian said, ‘let me tell you what I don’t like about DPs. I don’t like those who mess around and take a lot of time.’ I said, ‘let me tell you what I don’t like about directors. Those who don’t direct. Doing both jobs is above my pay grade.’ He hired me and we had this understanding from the beginning. I’ve had to back up some people who are pretty horrible and lazy but Brian was fabulous.”  

After Body Double the pair embarked on a further seven pictures including The Untouchables, Casualties of War, Snake Eyes, Mission: Impossible, Carlito’s Way, Raising Cain, and Mission to Mars.  

The climactic sequence in The Untouchables with a pram falling in slow motion down the steps of Chicago’s Union station appears to be in homage to Sergei Eisenstein’s Odessa steps montage from Battleship Potemkin. 

“It’s funny but that scene was not in the original script,” Burum reveals. “David Mamet’s script had the bookkeeper escape on a train and Elliot Ness’ team drive all night to catch it and block the railroad before a gun fight on the train, but Paramount didn’t want to spend the money. Brian’s next idea was to have Ness’ wife give birth and when he comes out of the hospital is when we have a gun fight. But we couldn’t find a suitable exterior location so the Chicago train station was used by default. It was difficult to get permission, so we had to shoot at night bringing in extra lights to shoot high speed. Those critics who see a pram and think Potemkin should know the original was a much better sequence.” 

UNTOUCHABLE TALENT 

His favourite shot in The Untouchables is a technocrane sweep of a dressed Chicago street for which the production had to fight tooth and nail for the City to agree to remove large cables and telephone poles. “The first time I saw it with the soundtrack I fist pumped ‘Yes!’ because to me it was this big Hollywood movie shot.” 

He also worked with directors including Hal Ashy (8 Million Ways to Die); Bob Rafelson (Man Trouble); Joel Schumacher (St Elmo’s Fire); Ivan Reitman (Fathers’ Day) and Martin Bregman (The Shadow). 

“You learn on each job. For example, there are fast actors and slow actors. Some get it on take one. Others need a dozen before they find their rhythm. Once you’ve shot the master, you have to figure out who to go to first. You want the fast actor because usually they burn out after four-five takes and you want them while they’re still hot. Plus, it gives the slow actor extra time to get up to speed. No-one ever tells you that in film school.” 

Al Pacino, who starred in Carlito’s Way, is a ‘fast actor’; “Al has so much energy in what he does it exhausts him. You just have to get him first.” 

So too is Jack Nicholson, who played Jimmy Hoffa in Danny DeVito’s 1992 biopic of the union boss, Hoffa. “Jack understands movie staging so well. If you’re having trouble with an actor not hitting their mark, he can do his scene and if that person drifts he’ll be this big sheepdog and herd them in the right direction. He is totally aware of his camera and lens, the background and where the other actors are. He saved many shots on Hoffa.”  

The film was praised for its cinematography, landing Burum his only Oscar nomination, but it disappointed at the box office. 

“The problem was that Danny didn’t get enough time to edit it. The weakness of the picture is you don’t understand Hoffa’s motivation for what he does. That’s what Scorsese’s version (The Irishman) gets right but it was the element missing in Hoffa. 

“We did a lot of dissolves for transitions rather than just cutting to the next scene. Danny wanted scenes and individual shots to evoke memories of things that happened before in the minds of the characters. One I’m proud of happens during Hoffa’s trial and we used dissolves to speed the scene up. We are telling the story symbolically rather than didactically. To me, it’s pure cinema.” 

 

Fabian Wagner BSC ASC & Catherine Goldschmidt / House of the Dragon

British Cinematographer

House of the Dragon has filled a Game of Thrones-shaped hole in viewing schedules with aplomb. Two of the DPs who’ve brought their expertise and visions to the prequel series are Fabian Wagner BSC and Catherine Goldschmidt.  

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Based on George R.R. Martin’s book Fire and Blood, HBO’s House of the Dragon is set roughly 200 years before the events of Game of Thrones. The much-anticipated prequel focuses on the House Targaryen (the House of the Dragon), the family from which Game of Thrones’ Daenerys Targaryen descends. It follows the family (and their accompanying dragons) through a civil war of succession between Princess Rhaenyra Targaryen and her half-brother Aegon II. 

Each of the 10 episodes in the first season reputedly cost under $20 million (£18.2 million). It is created by Martin and Ryan Condal with Condal and Miguel Sapochnik the showrunners.  

Having shot episodes on seasons four to eight of Game of Thrones including ‘Battle of the Bastards’ and ‘The Winds of Winter’, Fabian Wagner BSC ASC was a natural partner for Sapochnik to call on when shaping the look of the new pilot.   

“Because we know each other well, Miguel told me a lot about this show while they were developing it,” Wagner explains. “We knew ‘Dragon’ had to be set in the GoT universe and that we didn’t want to take anything away from what made Thrones so successful. At the same time the opportunity was to give this show a new look, its own individual look and feel and that was our starting point.” 

GoT fans may recall that the filmmakers awarded each location (and there many of them) a different colour palette to aid identification when the story shifts. Broadly, north of the wall the hue was blue, the south had warmer tones. 

For Dragon, Wagner pushed colour in a new direction supported by onset colourist and DIT Ian Marrs and Asa Shoul, senior colourist at WB De Lane Lea. 

“I wanted the look to be more subtle, slightly softer and more colourful than Thrones,” Wagner says. “So, we designed a LUT that had a much softer curve. Miguel and I always talked about making the image feel more dirty, more lived through, and so the LUT is hopefully underlining that. Because it’s set in Westeros, yellow just gave it that touch. We only put it in the highlights so you can feel it in the light that comes through the windows.” 

The show LUT was also designed to give each cinematographer and director the space to stamp their own imprint on their part of the story. DPs Pepe Ávila del Pino AMC (Ozark) and Alejandro Martínez (The Mosquito Coast) lensed two episodes each. 

Austere approach 

Catherine Goldschmidt (A Discovery of Witches), who lensed episode eight for director Geeta Patel, says that her notes were to find a colder, darker, starker and more austere look than previous episodes.  

In slight contrast to the very classical framing of GoT, Dragon deploys slightly more handheld work and considerably more Steadicam as well as what Wagner calls “braver” framing to tell story. 

“Perhaps by offsetting a camera or by centre punching. For example, when Princess Rhaenyra is crowned in episode one, we put her centre of the frame to really make a bold statement.”  

Goldschmidt adds that the vibe for working on camera moves with VFX was, “more David Lean, less Marvel”. She says, “They wanted more classic developing shots, large scale moving masters, to shy away from pure fantasy and toward a historical epic.” 

Wagner describes a “subtle change in style and mood” to each episode as story develops and character arcs as well as leaps of time continue over the course of the ten episodes. Some of this was pulled back in the final grade for overall consistency of series look. 

Because the narrative leaps forward a decade in episode six, and introduces new actors playing many of the same characters, Sapochnik and Wagner teamed to film this and the following standalone episode ‘The Battle for the Iron Throne’. 

There seemed no doubt the series would be shot large format to capture both the detail of the production design as well as the expansive nature of key locations. Having used ARRI Alexa packages for most of Thrones, they segued to the large format Alexa 65 recording 4.5K.  

“We’d do shots on a 21mm or a 27mm because on those wides you get amazing depth of field developing into strong close ups,” Wagner says. “That’s what I enjoyed the most – big wide shots where you see detail in the sets and big close-ups of the principal characters.” 

ARRI DNA lenses, also supplied by ARRI UK, played a role in terms of slightly softening the digital image and producing quite identifiable focus falloff, bokeh, and rainbow flaring. 

Blood and Fire 

Photography was cross-blocked and scheduled over ten months from April 2021 wrapping February 2022. In part, this shoot length was in anticipation of delays due to COVID (of which there were some). Beneficially to the DPs and crew this gave breathing space between shoot days to swap notes and review dailies from other episodes.  

Two main camera units – named Blood and Fire – ran simultaneously, each with an Alexa 65 complemented by Mini LFs (which uses the same sensor as the 65) for Steadicam and crane work. Joe Russell ACO operated A cam (Steadicam) on Fire and John Piggott ACO did the same for Blood. 

While the Blood unit did all the location work in Spain, both units were shooting on different episodes with different director, DP and AD teams at Leavesden. 

“It could get confusing if the schedule changed,” says Goldschmidt. “For instance, if you’d prepped the Blood unit to shoot the throne room and that changed to Fire then you’d have to go over the same notes a second time.” 

Both units shot a minimum of two cameras, upping to three cameras with three to four characters, and four cameras for larger dialogue scenes.  

Bar a week in Spain, Goldschmidt shot at Leavesden. Unusually, she found herself shooting the biggest scene of her block on the final day of her production schedule.  

“Normally you’d be shooting inserts this late on but the way the scheduling worked we ended big. It wound up feeling great to have everyone there and finishing with this scene that involved so many characters.” 

For her, the main challenges were pinpointing and visualising each critical turning point for the characters. Where episode six is the foreshadowing of the conflict that will befall the Targaryens and all of Westeros, and episode seven ‘Driftmark’ almost a standalone episode, episode eight is the calm before the storm, when events coalesce before inevitably breaking apart.  

“There was responsibility to get it right. And there are a lot of characters but working with Geeta ensured we were able to [home] in on our hero triangle.”   

The cast members we see in the eighth episode will be the ones playing their characters for the rest of the series. The second series is commissioned, with HBO planning on running for three-four seasons. 

Location and studio 

House of the Dragon was mainly a traditional studio and location shoot. Four stages at Leavesden and a massive set build on studio backlot were supplied by teams at Warner Bros. Set Lighting & Rigging. 

The main stage housed the Red Keep; “a character in its own right,” says Goldschmidt. It’s actually several sets with the Council Chamber, courtyard, hallways and staircase on the ground floor and the king and queen’s chambers on a second level. The other main stage houses the throne room. Two stages contain rotating sets (e.g. for the Driftwood Throne or Hall of Nine). There are additional spaces for green screen and temporary sets. Permanent sets on the backlot include the Red Keep gates, godswood and ship (seen in episodes four and five). 

The main location filming was on the Iberian Peninsula around Girona, Granada and Extremadura. “As always you try to shoot location before you shoot studio but because of schedule it ends up the other way around which can be annoying because you never know what you’re going to get on location,” says Wagner, who spent eight weeks in Spain and Portugal. 

In the UK, Holywell Beach in Cornwall features as the Stepstones, a chain of islands that link Westeros and Essos. The season’s first big battle sequence is brought to life by the natural rocks and caves at Kynance Cove. St. Michael’s Mount, off the coast of Cornwall, becomes Driftmark, the castle and home to House Velaryon.  

“For exterior daytime shoots I use a lot of negative fill and bounce,” says Wagner. “We had an amazing location in Portugal up on a hill which we’d recced the week before during a beautiful sunset when you could see for hundreds of miles in each direction. On the day of course it was so misty you couldn’t see your own hands, but that’s how we had to shoot the scene.” 

He established the studio lighting to be flexible for himself and the other DPs to create scenes set in any time of day, or mood.  

The new element was use of a volume stage at stage. Indeed, Dragon was the first production to use the V Stage at Leavesden, although its use here was more as testing ground in anticipation of heavier work during season two. 

“You can get an incredible sense of size and grandeur shooting virtual so really the reason why we decided not to go too far down the [virtual production] road was because it is still a learning curve,” Wagner says. “When we began prepping (late 2020) the whole LED volume technology had not been around for that long. New technology takes time to learn it and make the best out of it.” 

This LED volume stage is one of the biggest in the world, comprising more than 2,000 LED screens and 92 motion capture cameras. All the dragon riding sequences were shot here. For instance, the arrival of Rhaenyra (played by Milly Allcock) on her dragon Syrax in episode two. 

Also in episode two, a stand-off between Otto Hightower (Rhys Ifans) and Daemon Targaryen (Matt Smith) takes place on Dragonstone bridge with Dragonstone itself and the rocky environment surrounding the bridge played back on the video wall. The bridge is based on the San Juan de Gazelugatxe, a site near Bilbao. The virtual production team captured LIDAR scans of the site to rebuild it virtually within Unreal Engine. 

 

Behind The Scenes: Babylon with editor Tom Cross

IBC

Babylon is both love letter and hate mail to the birth of the movies and the studio system that horrifically bullied its employees while manufacturing dreams for the masses.

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Director Damien Chazelle’s ultimately romantic depiction of the Golden Age of Hollywood is a decent from hedonism into hell that starts with the cavernous arse of an elephant dumping on the camera. It proceeds to a ludicrous drugs orgy which features a starlet urinating on a corpulent client and a pogoing dwarf on a spurting phallus.

“Rather than be polite and mediative Damien really wanted to come out of the gate and be explosive and loud and in your face and reckless,” says Tom Cross ACE, the movie’s editor. “That was his directive to all the departments and certainly something he talked to me about. He talked about The Wolf of Wall Street and how he wanted the opening to feel frantic, frenetic. For there to be a coked-up energy. With this party to end all parties we’re setting the road map for rest of the movie.”

Babylon spans the rise of Hollywood as a wild west in the 1920s to the glamour and fakery of its mid-thirties heyday and mixes fictional characters with real life figures like studio boss Irving Thalberg. It pays homage to grandiose epics like DW Griffith’s silent Intolerance, which featured a sequence about ancient Babylon (filmed on a Sunset Boulevard lot) while mining the pages of cult filmmaker Kenneth Anger’s 1959 book ‘Hollywood Babylon’ for scandal and intrigue about the stars, their bosses and the criminal underworld.

“Damien wanted it to be a big, ensemble movie in the tradition of Nashville where you really feel a tapestry of different characters,” says Cross, who cut Chazelle’s Whiplash, La La Land and First Man winning an best editing Oscar for the former in 2015. “I also knew that to have all these characters arcs that all interconnect it would require a lot of screen real estate.”

Babylon is three hours long but the first third at least barrels along like an insane screwball comedy.

“Usually when we sit down to edit we start at the end,” Cross says. “With Whiplash we started editing the ‘Caravan’ jazz number first. With La La Land it was the dream fantasy epilogue and with First Man it was the Apollo 11 mission.

“Babylon was different. Because of the way Damien wrote it he knew that where we’d wind up was a very different place to where we start. So, we decided to start editing at the beginning. It’s where we could establish our style which was going to carry us through a third of the movie. That style was going to be fast, percussive and something that you would have to keep up with.”

Like Chazelle’s previous work, Babylon is powered by music and a score by Justin Hurwitz. The director, who created Netflix Paris-set jazz drama The Eddy, writes a prominent part for a Duke Ellington-inspired trumpeter (played by Jovan Adepo) but the whole movie fizzes with freeform flourishes. This is all meticulously planned of course.

“He draws his own storyboards which consist of stick figures, very raw, but you really feel the essence of the shot,” Cross explains. “In some cases, he will take these stick figures and create rough animatics with a temp score to map out how he wants to shoot the scene and as a rough guide for me to start.

Chazelle and Hurwitz outlined the melodies and musical tempo of the picture in advance of the shoot enabling Cross to cut with rough digital demos of the score.

“We knew that sound and picture would be braided together. The music gave me a bed to glue all these chaotic elements together and some percussive edges which I could bounce the picture off.”

Most editors, Cross included, will cut to temporary music or without any music at all until they’ve assembled scenes with a satisfactory pictorial rhythm. For Babylon, since they already had music custom made, the process was more symbiotic.

“Justin was in the room next to my cutting room so I’d send him picture cuts then he’d refine the music edits and recompose and gave that back to me. I’d lay it up to picture and further adjust. This a very specific type of rinse and repeat cycle that I don’t do on any other movie. What it means is we work more closely to Justin’s music to guide the picture cutting.”

The bawdy nature of the first act gives way to a more contemplative pace (though not without a wild snake bite scene which recalls Uma Thurman’s trippy experience in Pulp Fiction). The transition in the story is marked by the arrival of sound to the movies and a scene depicting a seasoned silent film crew and silent star Nellie La Roi (Margot Robbie) trying to get to grips with recording voice on set.

For Cross this was among the most challenging sequences. He explains, “Not long before that scene we’ve staged a battle which has shots of axes and swords and blood hitting faces. It’s very stylized and loud and part of a language we’ve established for the film up to this point. All of a sudden you are resetting for the audience. It is quiet. We’re trying to create a scene with a certain amount of tension and suspense but instead of being built on something overt it is built on minutia.”

He explains that the challenge was similar to that in Whiplash where the task was how do you make band practice feel like a war movie? “Here, it is how do you make Nellie’s first dialogue a scene that hinges on a pin drop? How do you make that feel life and death? Damien’s answer to that was to revel in repetition.”

Chazelle wanted to set up a visual preamble of elements that go into every take—such as insert shots of the red recording light, a bell ringing, the slate boy with clapper board, a close up of the director using her hand to cue the action, Nellie’s feet on stage and a door opening.

“With all these little details pieced together we set up a rhythm. The audience start feeling uncomfortable because their expectations are being played around with. They think the take is going to be ruined but they don’t know when or how. So, every time we cut back to this preamble of the slate boy and bell ringing I cut it little bit faster creating the shorthand for the audience whilst also building momentum and upping the ante. You’re pulling a rubber band back and the audience is waiting for when it’s going to snap back. By speeding it up each time the hope is that you are subconsciously speeding up the audience’s heartbeat and having that synch with the rhythm of the movie.”

He adds, “Our intention was to make the audience feel like a steady mechanical march towards dorm.”

As might be expected cinematic references abound, some obvious and others more subtle. Singing in the Rain, a movie that Babylon mirrors, is a refrain throughout the film. Musical satire It's Always Fair Weather from 1955 is another. Cross picks out the action on the staged battlefield sequence that “feels like Apocalypse Now and in the same shot we move into Monty Python and Holy Grail.”

Another Python character, Mr Creosote, might spring to mind elsewhere, though it’s not clear if this was intentional. The gross out vomit sequence almost tips the picture over the edge.

“We talked a lot about calibrating the vomit and the other extreme elements and we usually aired on the side of more is more,” Cross says. “We really tried to push it. If in doubt we decided to go for it.”

The coda to the film is a sugar rush of cinematic hits from The Wizard of Oz and 2001: A Space Odyssey to Avatar showcasing the alchemy and the art that the dream factory has produced amid all of the dross and the behind the scenes horror.

“It was very important that the audience got lost in this sequence with wonder,” Cross says. “We didn’t want there to be clear motive for the choices of film clips or for the audience to instantly understand what was happening in each movement. We wanted it to be ambiguous. To be a visually spectacular experience, yes, but we designed it to be feral.”

The length of the film might seem to deflate the energy that is built up over the course of its first third but Cross says he’s proud of the breadth that is travelled by the characters. “Damien wanted to play it very broad and very light at the beginning and to have enough runway to take the story down different roads where you don’t expect it to go.”

For example, we first meet major movie star Jack Conrad (Brad Pitt), drunk and pontificating about cinema, arguing that Hollywood has to innovate because, the character says, “in Europe they have Bauhaus while here we’re making costume pics”. But when innovation comes, mostly in the form of audience’s expectation for something new and different, it is Conrad who is faded out. His fall is contrasted with the rise of fixer Manny Torres (Diego Calva) from elephant wrangler to studio chief.

“Conrad describes the movies to Manny as the most magical place in the world and we can see Manny is moved by it,” says Cross. “But there is a naivety about Conrad in that these innovations are really the seed of his own downfall. As the story unfolds we have a different understanding of this person. The reason why we wanted this film to be so big is to be able to hold all these tonal changes and to move from lightness into dark.”

Much like going to the movies itself.

 

AI and the Rise/Role of the “Super Organizer”

NAB

As AI enters the workplace, including many creative processes, there are hopes that the technology will displace rather than replace jobs provided the overall work in question can scale.

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If that sounds convoluted, well — it’s all just speculation for now. AI could just as easily wind up delivering mass unemployment as employers seek to automate efficiencies.

A more positive spin on the same argument is that as AI breeds efficiencies it will help employers scale more quickly than they could before, in turn providing at least as much work for humans as before.

Except this time we will be managing the robots, as Dan Shipper writes in a blog post on behalf of time-management platform Akiflow.

“I think there’s a strong case to be made that rather than replacing individuals, recent advances in AI will empower them to make an impact on a scale matching some of the biggest businesses, research labs, and creative organizations of today,” he forecasts.

Take creators. Text-based large language models might replace the research assistant or co-writer role. “They’re happy to help look up facts and quotes, or to create an outline based on a simple idea. Of course, they’re not as good as a human at these tasks yet — but their rate of improvement is high enough that in a year or two I think we’ll be shocked that we ever wrote without them,” Shipper says.

Other AI tools will speed a writers’ ability to produce content for different formats — podcasts or mini-blogs, for example. Text-to-speech models like Murf are already able to turn essays into human-like narration.

AI-generated video is coming. Shipper highlights Runway as advancing rapidly in this space. It won’t be long before anyone can create high-quality, format-driven YouTube videos from an essay.

What this all means is that solo content creators can suddenly do more for less. Some content creators currently employ several people in a team to pump out content under their name. AI would cut the cost of this. But Shipper’s argument is that doing so would enable creators to create even more content, requiring the need from more AI supervision from actual humans.

This train of thought could be applied to startups of any kind. What many startups lack, he comments, are the means to quickly scale. They can’t afford to high lots of people who are at the end of the day the source of intelligence in the company which enables it to grow.

But employing AI bypasses that. Suddenly a company doesn’t need to employ a customer service team working in a depot when a sophisticated chatbot will do.

That kind of future sounds dreadful, but the point that Shipper is making remains sound. “In a few years this will mean founders [of startups] will be able to scale a product to millions of users without requiring a huge team.”

He admits much of this is guesswork, notably the point that AI in the workforce won’t actually mean less people at work. He thinks skills like vision (imagination, inspiration), taste, and the ability to prioritize are always going to be “quite important” and in the wheelhouse of a human.

“In other words, you’re still going to have to have some idea what you want the model to do and not do. You also need to have some idea whether it’s doing the job well or not. I think this is true even of models that are self-improving — at some point, someone’s got to look at it and decide whether or not to keep it plugged in.”

This kind of AI “super organizers” role sounds deeply unfulfilling, menial almost, and the kind of job that an AI is probably better doing. An AI to manage the AIs.

That doesn’t mean things are just going to work out automatically. “These kinds of technology shifts can cause significant harm to people whose jobs and skillsets need to change dramatically. It will require good policy and regulation to catch up with the shift, and significant conversations at the societal level about how humans should function and relate to each other in concert with these tools.”

Those who succeed in rising above an AI apocalypse in the job market may be individuals who are already adept at using IT and computer programming. “That opportunity is distributed to anyone with an internet connection, a laptop, and a desire to play around with these models.”