A movie fit for the occasion of a lifetime

interview and written for RED Camera

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Every couple plans their wedding to be the occasion of a lifetime but when your budget exceeds $1 million the expectations for every aspect of it soar. That includes the video which for many clients in the ultra-luxury market includes publication to lifestyle magazines and social media.

StoryBox Cinema is not your average wedding videographer. The team travels all over the world for clients who are recognized for their accomplishments in politics, athletics, business, fashion and the entertainment industry.

“So much of what we do is never seen outside of the immediate family while a lot of our work is also seen by millions of people worldwide,” explains Chris Jespersen who owns StoryBox and is named a top cinematographer in the world by Harper’s Bazaar and Over the Moon.

Jespersen works with his team of cinematographers based all around the United States and in Europe, making it easy to put together a crew nearest to the wedding location. He will often spend weeks on the road traveling to different destinations at home or overseas overseeing the shoot.

“All our lead camera operators use RED,” he says. “That's our favorite go-to camera. It’s not just for the consistency of quality which is excellent but because of the flexibility RED gives us. You have to be in the moment, there is no rehearsal and there is no second chance to capture the magic.”

Jespersen has shot on RED exclusively for the past eight years of his career upgrading from SCARLET-W to GEMINI and now to KOMODO as new models are released.

“When I was starting out, RED was considered such a huge jump for the wedding market and people thought I was nuts but they also said ‘Wow your footage looks so different!’

“It was because we were shooting RAW and creating these cinematic short movies. That wasn't happening seven years ago. Shooting on RED really helped me a lot to get established.”

StoryBox has shot ultra- luxury weddings in destinations including St Tropez, Beirut, La Huerta, Lanai, London, New York City, Phuket, Providenciales, Santorini, Sardinia, Sea Island, Sveti Stefan, and The Hamptons.

Many are under NDA, but many other clips are pushed out to PR or media teams to feature in online magazines and the websites of Over the moon or Harper's Bazaar.

“I think one of the reasons why clients choose us is for our signature style. We like to break the fourth wall, it’s cinematic, but it's also at heart a home video.

“What we're doing is trying to build a rapport that pulls people in. We just integrate ourselves really well and aren't afraid to show something that’s not quite so perfect if it captures the spirit of the occasion.”

A typical three-day event will include a welcome party, a dinner, and the wedding ceremony itself including toasts and speeches followed by a brunch or a beach party before evening entertainment.

“The image quality is something that both I and my clients particularly appreciate. There's like a 3D effect to it that I love. Plus, there's just a crazy dynamic range which makes RED so easy to shoot with. We’re going in and out of so many different lighting situations from events outside to being in a marquee to inside of a house or on a dance floor. I don't really think about the camera anymore. It’s really more of an extension of me.”

Some elements of the ceremony are planned and choreographed but many others are spontaneous as the happy couple and their guests socialize and enjoy the event. Jespersen trains his team to look for multiple reactions, looks and movements when framing their shots.

“Because we’re shooting 6K, we can punch in to the frame and use clips for social. We're turning one shot into three. We train to watch multiple different things on the screen at the same time because really social is such a big part for us now. It's changed the way I shoot. At the same time RED allows us to push in so much more and play around with the image.”

Conventional wedding videographers tend to be static, and tripod bound but Jespersen shoots almost everything with the RED and a Sigma 18 -35mm lens on a gimbal giving his operators freedom to move and imbuing the video with fluidity.

“Most of our events are over three days and I’ll be on a gimbal for every moment of them. Even if a lot of the ceremony is speeches, we shoot with the gimbals because you can lock them down and hold them. It's just so much easier than setting up a tripod.”

StoryBox edits and finishes all of the videos in-house often with a turnaround of just a day in order to publish to social. There are also week-long events for which Jespersen will produce an 8–10-minute video for each day to go live online the next.

“A lot of times we're editing and grading the same night or the next morning for releases that need to go to somewhere like Vogue. We use Final Cut because we can edit 6K RAW on-the-fly on my laptop.”

Because StoryBox is able to operate worldwide there is no down time. It will always be summer somewhere. “If it’s cold in the U.S we’re likely going somewhere warm. We spend a lot of time out in Europe.”

Outside of weddings the company is in demand for shooting commercials for five-star hotel brands such as Aman, Four Seasons and Auberge Resorts and dress designers.

He is also exploring branching out into concert films and has ambitions to shoot a longer-form documentary.

“I'm loving the luxury event world where I have a lot of connections. I think after eight years of shooting I'm just starting to find my voice and a perspective for something I want to say. I would like to branch out but there's also a lot more work to be done here yet.”

DirecTV Fights to End the 'One Size Fits All' Streaming Bundle

Streaming Media

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Even the prospect of shedding customers ahead of Monday Night Football’s season-opening NFL game isn’t deterring DirecTV from doubling down versus Disney in the latest battle to convulse Pay TV. Its contract dispute with Walt Disney Company extends the blackout of channels like ESPN, ABC, FX, and Disney Channel into a fourth day for more than 11 million subscribers.

DirecTV CFO Ray Carpenter has said the company will continue to fight "as long as it needs to" and is painting the dispute quite literally as an “existential” one for the whole of cable TV. “This dispute is not a run-of-the-mill dispute,” Carpenter said in a call with analysts. “This is not the kind of dispute where we're haggling over percentage points on a rate. This is really about changing the model in a way that gives everyone confidence that this industry can survive."

At the heart of the dispute is a desire by DirecTV to sell “skinnied down” packages of programming tailored to various subscriber interests, rather than forcing customers to take channels they may not want or watch very often. Variety says DirecTV believes such a model would help retain subscribers, even if they were paying less.

Carpenter said there is also interest in helping customers find other content, even if it's not sold directly on the service. DirecTV backed up its claims the pay TV audience is now more segmented by releasing data indicating less than 40% of users regularly tuning into live sports, and less than 40% of the audience regularly watching pure entertainment channels. News and Kids are other niche segments. 

Ars Technica quotes the American Television Alliance, condemning Disney for “seek[ing] to raise rates and force distributors to carry an unwieldy 'one-size fits all' bundle of more than a dozen channels to the vast majority of their subscribers.” The group said Disney's proposed terms would require TV companies to sell “fat bundles” that “force consumers to pay for programming they don't watch.”

Pouring oil on the flames, Disney declared, “DirecTV continues to push a narrative that they want to explore more flexible, 'skinnier' bundles and that Disney refuses to engage. This is blatantly false. Disney has been negotiating with them in good faith for weeks and has proposed a variety of flexible options, in addition to innovative ways to work together in making Disney's direct-to-consumer streaming services available to DirecTV's customers.”

Around the same time last year Disney was embroiled in a similar license dispute with Charter Spectrum. This was resolved after two weeks after Disney agreed to make Disney+ and ESPN+ available to Charter Spectrum subscribers at no extra cost, but also saw Disney agree to cut loose some of its cable channels. Disney of course plans to form a sports-specific streaming only joint venture with Warner Bros. Discovery and Fox called Venu Sports. The $43-a-month package could best be described as a skinny, genre-based bundle. 

The launch of Venu has been delayed pending an antitrust suit filed by rival pay TV company Fubo. which obtained a preliminary injunction against it. Fubo had sought to stop the launch of Venu that it claims would have controlled 60%-80% of live broadcast sports content.

It argued in the suit that the JVs primary effect would be to limit competition, remove consumer choice, and ultimately lead to “steep price hikes for consumers and boosting profits for the partners." The suit, filed February 20, alleges that the vertically-integrated media companies have engaged in a years-long campaign to block Fubo’s attempt to build a sports-first streaming business “resulting in significant harm to both Fubo and consumers.”

Everyone TV: Collaborating for the future of public service broadcast

IBC

Had the UK’s regulator not blocked a proposed ‘Freeview for the internet’ from BBC Worldwide, ITV and Channel 4 all the way back in 2009 the country’s media landscape might look a lot different today.

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As it was, Project Kangaroo never got off the ground. It was kicked into touch for being anti-competitive after the government’s Office of Fair Trading ironically voiced fears ‘that the platform could become too powerful.’

Fifteen years on and YouTube and the international streamers threaten to swamp public service broadcast.

Is Freely, the latest attempt by UK free-to-air content providers to ensure the future of public service TV, too little too late?

“I hope not! We believe our timing is right,” says Jonathan Thompson, Chief Executive of Everyone TV, the organisation leading the evolution of free-to-view TV in the UK. He was at Channel 4 when Project Kangaroo was killed and says Freely is different in two main ways.

“One is that we are particularly focussed on bringing a live TV experience together in one place in the way that Freeview has always offered but as a streaming experience.

“The other difference is that we're trying to go with the grain of where the market is going in terms of working in partnership with Connected TV vendors. Viewers are still watching TV on the bigger screen in their home but that screen happens to be a Smart TV. Those Smart TVs are getting better in terms of how they aggregate content and we're partnering with Smart TV vendors to offer Freely as part of their experience in a way that brings together live and on-demand content from the PSBs, but not interfere in the Smart TV’s wider ecosystem and their user experience.”

Hisense, Freely’s exclusive partner at launch in May, also has Netflix, Amazon Prime, Disney Plus and an array of other streamers on its service.

“We’re evolving the historic model of collaboration that has existed in Freeview and preparing for the streaming age where more people are increasingly or potentially exclusively watching their content over the Internet, rather than via an aerial.”

Everyone TV is a joint venture owned and supported by BBC, ITV, Channel 4 and Channel 5 andhas existed for twenty years providing a platform for UK PSB collaboration to deliver Freesat and Freeview. That model of proven cooperation helped get Freely off the ground.

“It’s never straightforward to get broadcasters on the same page particularly with a project of this complexity where you're trying to get different entities with their own different strategies to work together,” Thompson says.

“What has helped our cause is that we are an independent entity acting as a vehicle for collaboration on behalf of our shareholders and one with which they are familiar and comfortable. Another point is that we're not standing in the way of existing ventures. Freely is not an alternative to iPlayer which the BBC will continue to invest in and develop as its own. What we're trying to do with Freely is focus on the live experience and use that live experience as a bridge into on-demand content in iPlayer, ITVX, 4 or 5.”

The streaming service has also expanded its lineup to include STV and S4C, bringing the Scottish and Welsh channels to the new platform.

While there is speculation about a merger of one or other of the UK’s broadcasters to better compete economically, the Freely model means each PSB can continue to evolve their own VOD player and VOD strategy. Thompson says they can use the joint streaming service as a vehicle for collaboration and to drive more viewing into on-demand from the live experience.

Freely is free to the viewer. There's no commercial transaction with partner Smart TV manufacturers and the platform is not monetised by Everyone TV. Rather, it is monetised by the individual broadcasters themselves.

Thompson explains, “For instance, any monetisation of ITV content, whether it's the live channel or ITV content on ITVX is monetized by ITV. It's their customer. It's their data. We play no part in the ad tech solution.  Freely is the enabling vehicle for the syndication and distribution of our shareholder’s live and on-demand content.”

No figures have been released around sales of TVs from partners carrying the service but the keys to success will come down to how widely it can syndicate onto devices.

Thompson says he is “really pleased” with rollout to date which, apart from Hisense, has added the brands Bush, Vestel, Toshiba, Panasonic, Sharp, and Metz TVs.

“We are in discussions with other partners and we'll be announcing more deals later this year,” he says. “We saw a similar pattern when we launched Freeview Play where you benefit from the millions of TVs that are sold over time and it starts to scale, but we're in the early stages of that.”

All these new TVs embrace the latest HbbTV standard that released this year and into which Everyone TV had input. It chose the HbbTV Operator Application and worked with the HbbTV Association to update the software. HbbTV OpApp acts like a virtual set-top box inside the smart TV set, enabling operators to provide a branded, uniform user interface across different manufacturers.

“One of the things I've been at pains to explain over the last few months is that Freely is not an app like iPlayer or Netflix,” says Thompson. “It is always running and effectively takes over control of certain functionality when the viewer wants to watch live TV. The Operator Application allows a deeper level of integration into the native experience of the device and a greater level of control over the IP-delivered linear channels on the device.”

The new version also enables interactive (‘red button’) applications to appear alongside live playout and for a consistent viewer experience across broadcast and IP-delivered linear channels.

The challenge of maintaining free to air broadcast is not confined to the UK alone. Germany, France, and other countries are facing similar issues. Does Freely offer a path forward?

“Everyone TV are big believes in the ongoing relevance and availability and salience of national broadcasting,” Thompson says. “Regardless of the breadth of global content available from the SVOD players, we continue to ensure that the underlying notion of having easy access to a valuable national broadcasting library on demand is maintained.

“My strong view is that a big part of achieving that is through PSB collaboration. National broadcasters can work together, where it makes sense, to ensure that viewers can find and access that content really easily on the devices that they are using more and more to watch TV.”

Whilst acknowledging the difference in individual TV markets, the macro trends of globalisation and content discovery and the road towards a fully streaming future are common to all. Innovation like Freely can help secure a broadcaster’s own future.

In a report published in May UK regulator Ofcom concluded that delivering TV over the air is no longer economically viable and charged the TV sector and the government with planning for a future of near total reliance on broadband networks. One scenario was to sunset DTT whilst ensuring digital inclusion and support for those reliant on terrestrial delivery. As a former Director of Strategy for both Ofcom and Channel 4, Thompson has extensive experience working in the broadcasting sector and the regulatory environment.

“There are big existential questions that needs to be thought about from a policy perspective within government,” he says. “I would point out that broadcast DTT whether it's satellite or terrestrial still contributes a large volume of viewing. Sometimes we forget this. In the UK, there are lots of homes which are still either reliant on or heavy users of terrestrial TV. So DTT is definitely here for some time to come.

“Nonetheless, the direction of travel is that more and more homes are spending more time streaming. An increasing number of households are effectively internet only and not connecting an aerial to their TV. It's maybe 20% of homes today but that share is forecast to grow to half of TV homes by the end of this decade.”

Thompson responds to the two principal questions Ofcom raised in its report. One of these is about the long term economic sustainability of DTT. “The cost of running DTT infrastructure will reach a point where it becomes an increasingly challenging platform for broadcasters to justify investing in if it's only reaching a small proportion of homes,” he says.

“The second question is how we transition to a fully internet future to ensure universal access. We did something similar successfully with analogue switch over in the late 2000s. There are a minority of home owners who are very heavy users of DTT who are nervous about internet connectivity. So, there's an economic question for the long term sustainability of DTT and a big policy question around any transition to ensure no one gets left behind.

“That's something that the industry, the broadcasters and government need to collectively solve over the next year or two.”

 

Faster, fitter, cheaper: AI moves into sport

FEED

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The sports broadcasting industry is poised to surpass $60 billion this year, a significant increase from $56 billion in 2023 and $54 billion in 2022. With so much at stake, broadcasters are innovating to attract new viewers and engage more closely with existing fans.

A new study from IBM, “Global Sports Attitudes and Behaviours,” reveals a growing generational shift and acceptance of technology-driven experiences that will impact the future of sports consumption.

It argues that by embracing digital transformation, adopting AI and data analytics, enhancing social media engagement, and supporting multi-device viewing, broadcasters can stay ahead of the curve and meet the evolving needs of sports fans.

A primary area of innovation is the integration of advanced technologies into sports broadcasting. Augmented Reality (AR) and Virtual Reality (VR) are revolutionising the viewing experience by offering immersive and interactive content that brings fans closer to the action in ways previously unimaginable. Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning are also playing a critical role. These technologies are not only enhancing the personalisation of content but also enriching viewer experiences with real-time statistics and predictive insights.

IBM’s study shows that younger sports fans are more likely to favour AI-enhanced features as they increasingly turn to digital platforms for sports content. Nearly two-thirds (58%) of 18-29 year-olds polled believe AI will have a positive impact on sports.

Automated content generation is another key enhancement that can ensure timely and relevant updates for fans and help broadcasters keep their content fresh and relevant. AI tools can automatically generate highlights, summaries and other content, ensuring fans have access to the latest updates without delay.

In fact, AI in the sports market was valued at $1.4 billion in 2020 by IDC and is projected to reach $19.2 billion by 2030.

FEED spotlights the fresh developments.

Olympics

AI was extensively by Olympic Broadcasting Services during Paris 2024 to improve internal workflows, enhance the viewer experience, enrich storytelling and better explain the action.

It would not have been possible to produce 11,000+ hours of content, equivalent to 450 days of content compressed into just 18 days, without it.

Automated highlights were produced for 14 sports in Paris. Many of the algorithms on more niche sports like climbing having been trained by OBS from previous Olympic events.

Another AI tool was used to assist editorial teams to quickly generate highlights and to format them for different media including vertical video for social feeds. These AI systems pulled data live from commentary, auto-tagged the video and created automated summaries.

“We do not allow AI systems to auto-publish stories but it helps us a lot in identifying all the elements that make up good stories for posting to social media,” said OBS chief Yiannis Exarchos.

AI-based motion tracking technology also helped commentators and viewers keep track of athletes’ positions during events like canoe sprint, marathon and triathlon.

 

Automated content production

Greater visibility can make all the difference to club or league finances particularly in niche or lower tier sports where rights values are low if they are sold at all. Here, automated production systems are proving their worth. Pixellot’s system relies on PTZ cameras programmed to follow the on-field action using AI tracking. It automatically generates clips, for example of players who have scored, with functions processed in the cloud.   

According to the company, more than 150,000 games are broadcast every month in around 80 countries across 19 sports. This data feeds and improves its AI to increase the quality of productions.

A rival solution from Dutch developer Studio Automated has covered over 100,000 sports matches with installations in 1500 locations around the world. It is being used by Riedel Communications to build an AI-assisted video production solution. By joining forces, the companies aim to create a solution that will enable sports productions and leagues to remotely produce live broadcasts with minimal personnel and operating costs.

Paul Valk, Founder and Director of Studio Automated claims, “the maturity of our AI model enables us to serve clients that seek to automate production in the higher end of sports broadcasting.”

High-quality slow motion replays require expensive specialist camera systems – until now. EVS has developed the AI-based XtraMotion that allows production teams to transform any live or recorded footage into super slow-motion replays. The software drives other effects like deblurring, auto-cropping, and shallow depth of field.

Ross Video has added AI facial tracking to some of its studio cameras for live sports presentation. The Vision[Ai]ry range uses video analytics to automate the functions of a camera operator by using facial and body detection to locate and track the position of faces and bodies within the video stream directly from the camera. 

When using a facial tracking system, the AI can be used to accurately keep the talent in a specific frame and in focus. This frees up the camera operator’s time to prepare and frame the next shot.

AI-powered auto-tracking is becoming standard in PTZ cameras. Presenter Lock, a new technology from PTZOptics, allows its cameras to lock onto a specific subject and track even in crowded areas such as a sporting event or on-stage production. This technology leverages AI and computer vision, instead of simple motion tracking used in previous generations of auto-tracking cameras. 

Coaching and training

Even as the Paris Olympics ends us, sports federations are already turning to technology to prepare the next generation of Olympic champions for the 2028 Games in LA. Pixellot claims that its technology is transforming young athlete development at a scale unfathomable only years ago.

“By eliminating the need for manual filming, breaking down games and creating highlights Pixellot allows coaches to spend time on what truly matters: guiding athletes to excel,” says Yossi Tarablus, Associate VP Global Marketing.

Pixellot’s AI-automated end-to-end solution provides coaches with “a treasure trove of video and data,” enabling, for example, identification of strengths and weaknesses, and the creation of personalised game and training analysis.

“Our technology ensures that young talent from all backgrounds can be discovered,” says Tarablus “The platform’s video and data-driven approach helps federations and leagues refine their strategies by sharing and analysing game footage to uncover patterns and the stars of tomorrow. This level of insight is invaluable in the high-stakes environment of team sports.”

AI is gaining ground to plan analyse soccer training. Around ten percent of professional football clubs use data scouting at the moment, a number that will explode in the coming years. “At some point, all leagues will have this data,” Daniel Memmert, adviser to the German Football Association and the German Football League, told sports body ISPO. “You will then be able to click on a list of players with certain metrics that the respective club considers important.”

As sensor data from the ball and players is now highly reliable, everything is tracked accurately.  Tactical variables such as spatial control of individual players or entire team and pressing values can be analysed in fractions of a second.

Piracy

Piracy is an ever present threat with both sides taking AI to the battle. Cybercriminals are using AI to create highlights clips of sports which are then posted on TikTok to lure people into their illegal services.

“Pirates run sophisticated marketing organisations and AI is making their fake content look as good as if it were created by someone like the BBC,” says Tim Pearson, VP global solutions partner marketing, Nagra. “For example, what would have taken quite complex video editing to create a montage of the Olympic 100m final featuring previous winners like Usain Bolt, can now be done relatively quickly with AI tools. It’s all done as a shameless promotion of an illicit service.”

He adds, “AI gives pirates lots of promotion benefits that they use to create better clips driving traffic away from legal services. When content look this professional it dupes the consumer into thinking that the site must be legitimate.”

Nagra is using AI to fight back. “AI helps us find illicit shared content and confirm that it’s our customer’s property. Previously we scanned for patterns of activity and AI allows us to search much faster and for smaller patterns which may be focussed in a particular location.

“We also able to apply smart enforcement with AI. If AI detects an infringement, perhaps by identifying a watermark, then the model now has enough intelligence that it can disrupt that pirate by instigating counter measures.

In July the 2024-25 football season was a month away but Nagra is already detecting piracy and instigating proactive measures.

“We are detecting as much if not more piracy in this summer of sport.  There is a massive amount of content ripe of picking but AI is incredibly powerful for use in analytics, discovery, quantification and then remediation.”

 

Voice commentary  

With AI, sports teams can connect with their diverse fan base more effectively.  Platforms like Veritone Voice synthetic voice AI technology facilitate real-time commentary and descriptions in various languages. A partnership between Veritone and Stats Perform’s Opta sports data, offers not only lifelike voice options in a wide range of languages but voices like that of former pro football turned pundit Alan Smith. He has had his voice fed into Opta Voice and can now virtually commentate on soccer games in multiple languages.

Similar solutions are provided by Elevenlabs which is able to translate audio clips or the sound of videos into 29 languages to efficiently scale the localisation of content.

However, in the rush to expand reach, rights holders are wary about introducing AI too fast too soon, particularly if the audience is not ready.

Wimbledon shelved the use of AI commentary for this year’s championships following criticism of the “emotionless” feature on debut in 2023.

The model was trained to ‘read’ tennis matches and was only used for highlights commentary on Wimbledon’s website for matches on the outside courts where live human commentary was not in place. It was criticised by broadcaster Annabel Croft among others, for being robot-like.

The AI-powered audio, provided by Wimbledon’s data partners IBM, will continue to be used at the US Open, as well as golf’s Masters Tournament but may only reappear at the All England Club if the technology improves.

That said, Wimbledon and AI partner IBM continued to use AI to deliver a new mobile app that was intended to boost editorial coverage on the website. ‘Catch Me Up’ was built using IBM’s Granite LLM to provide AI-generated text and trained to mimic the Wimbledon editorial style. The Club also used Gen-AI to serve coverage of a broader range of matches than ever before, including wheelchair events.

 

Monetising the archive  

Advances in AI-powered digital asset management offer numerous opportunities for sports organisations to capitalise on their content. AI platforms make this possible via metadata tagging, content management, and e-commerce capabilities.  

“Past broadcasts and events hold significant value,” says Gary Warech, head of sports and entertainment, Veritone. “Through GenAI, archives can be rejuvenated and showcased innovatively through curated highlight reels, nostalgic montages, or other audio and video content types. This approach revitalises past content and helps carve out avenues for sustained revenue generation through sponsorships or licensing opportunities.”

Sports organisations can gain insights into their content through transcribed audio, logos, facial recognition, and other AI cognitive engines. NFL team San Francisco Giants described this speed and visibility into its archive with AI content management as having their own “personalised YouTube.”

AI is employed in MAM systems nearer production, for instance in EVS’ MediaCeption Signature solution. Its ‘natural language’ search capabilities enable non-technical users to more easily find what they are looking for.

“With AI, the potential to cater to diverse market segments—ranging from editorial teams and advertisers to the direct fan base—is exponentially magnified,” says Warech. “But it’s more than just a direct fan engagement tool. It serves as a means to do more with existing and future content, creating new content forms while extracting greater value from an archive.”

AI ad tools

New AI-powered content recommendation systems and advertising tools are opening more revenue streams. For example, AI/ML models dynamically identify the best spots on screen to deliver ads. “This is hugely important as viewers don’t want to be diverted away from the main event and forced to watch full screen ads,” says Nitin Jain, Managing Partner at Skandha Media Services. The company developed the Evince Ad verification tool for one of the largest OTT providers in India that currently owns the rights to stream a marquee cricket tournament in India.

“For live sports streams that may be firing hundreds and even thousands of ads over the full length of a live event, providing consistent and accurate data has been challenging,” Jain says. “The human resources needed to accomplish this level of verification just isn’t viable. We introduced machine learning to automate the process – training cameras to identify and capture ad elements. We can deliver super-efficient ad verification a proof of delivery that simply did not exist before.”

The Future of AI in sports

Metahumans or digital doubles might change the face of sports broadcasts.  During the 2022 FIFA World Cup animated replays created in Unreal Engine from official OptaStats match data showed new angles of play that were not captured by broadcast cameras. The AI-powered results, displayed on TUDN, the highlights show of Mexican broadcaster TelevisaUnivision proved popular. SMPTE suggested that the gamification of the event made it more accessible for those who normally wouldn’t be into the sport.

SMPTE also noted, in a recent paper, that the technique is expensive which perhaps explains why it hasn’t caught on. However, SMPTE suggests, in future people could rewatch entire games of their favourite sports from angles they have never imagined.

 

Film Pioneer Alice Guy-Blaché Championed at the Olympics

HPA Online 

During the spectacular Opening Ceremony of the 2024 Olympics in Paris, before the performances of Celine Dion and after Lady Gaga, ten superwomen were on parade along the banks of the Seine. Tributes to heroines of French cultural and sporting life took the form of golden effigies rising from the river as the Marseillaise trumpeted from the roof of the Grand Palais.

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The figures included Alice Milliat, who lobbied the Olympic movement to include more female athletes, philosopher and feminist activist Simone de Beauvoir, and Alice Guy-Blaché, the world’s first female director. Blaché might not have been recognized at all were it not for the recent award-winning documentary by Pamela B Green, Be Natural: The Untold Story of Alice Guy-Blaché.

I started getting these crazy text messages urging me to watch the Opening Ceremony, says Green who produced, co-wrote and directed the documentary. “I was so happy for Alice and so happy for the other woman as well.”

Notably absent from cinema’s history, Guy-Blaché (1873-1968) was one of the firsts to create narrative films in the history of cinema. At Gaumont, she experimented with sync-sound and with color-tinting, interracial casting, and special effects. In New Jersey, she founded her own company Solax where she directed and managed all aspects of production. Following a two-decade career in two countries (from 1896 to 1922) during which she made a thousand short and feature length films she all but disappeared from the annals of filmmaking – until Green’s film, which made its official debut at the Cannes Film Festival, brought her international acclaim. Now she’s embraced as a national and international treasure which is always what I wanted.”

Green had spent ten years struggling to get the film made and distributed. She was greeted with skepticism at almost every step even in France, where Green spent her childhood and is a fluent French speaker. Many were trying to discredit her. I found myself having to convince archivists and funders how significant she was.

“When I showed them what I had discovered you could see their minds starting to open up, but this was not instant, and it didn’t happen with everyone. Nor was this just in France, it was a worldwide issue.

“I remember going to the Academy Library and asking if I could see the papers of Louella Parsons, who was a widely read journalist of the time. And they quizzed me as to why I would want to do that? When I finally got access, I found all these articles about Alice Guy-Blaché that I put into the film. The people at the academy were shocked that Parsons would have mentioned Guy-Blaché.”

Green didn’t go to film school but worked her way up in post-production as creative director of title sequences and graphic sequences. In 2005, she co-founded PIC Collective, an entertainment and motion design studio. There, she creative-directed and produced main titles and marketing campaigns for numerous titles including The Kingdom, Twilight, the Bourne film series as well as TV show packages for the Academy Awards, the Critics’ Choice Awards, and the mini-documentary sequences for VH1ʼs Soul Divas: History of Soul Music. She took those skills into becoming a filmmaker. She also served as co-producer on the Emmy nominated 2010 documentary Bhutto.

“Yet people questioned whether I could make a documentary. “But not Jodie Foster, who signed on as the film’s narrator, and both she and Robert Redford backed the film as executive producers,” she says.

The film was a critical and commercial success. Green was nominated for an Emmy, a Peabody and a Critics Choice award among others. Many of her films were restored and preserved as a result of Be Natural, a pillar in her name is featured at the Academy Museum of Motion Pictures and, last year, the French postal service issued a special stamp celebrating Alice Guy’s 150th birthday. A biopic project about Guy–Blaché is in the works which Green is producing. “I’m very excited by the approach we are taking because of the unique research we have in hand and the many findings we have discovered..” In the meantime, Alice Guy–Blaché has risen as a heroine from the banks of the Seine, in front of a massive global audience.

What’s next?

Green is at work on her first dramatic feature. Ask the Question is a biopic of Ben Barres, a transgender scientist who revolutionized neuroscience and fought for women, LGBTQ+, and the disadvantaged in STEM.

“Ben’s story is about a visionary scientist who played a key role in trailblazing research on an overlooked, yet crucially significant, part of the brain: glial cells Glia cells are paving the way for the prevention and cure of neurodegenerative diseases, such as Alzheimer’s, Parkinson’s, multiple sclerosis, and Lou Gehrig’s disease.

As a trans man who previously experienced prejudice as a woman scientist—who was an acclaimed pioneer in the field of brain structure and function– he became an outspoken, and fierce advocate who single-handedly and successfully confronted STEM institutions’ discrimination against women, LGBTQ+, and other marginalized students and faculty.

Green describes Ask the Question as a brew of Oppenheimer, Milk and The Imitation Game. It brings to life the story of an incredible scientist, activist, mentor, and friend. He rose to the heights of scientific success while fighting for the rights of women, LGBTQ_+ and others who were disadvantaged in STEM fields—namely, science, technology, engineering, and mathematics Above all, Ben believed difference was a great advantage. As Green says, ”Ben has left an amazing legacy behind as a scientist but It’s his infinite kindness and empathy that got me hooked.”

John Seale AM ASC ACS

British Cinematographer

It wasn’t until he experienced the despair of losing three thousand sheep that Oscar-winning John Seale AM ASC ACS switched from cowboy to camera op. His personal loss was the industry’s gain.   

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“I’d dabbled in making 8mm movies with my mates around Sydney but it didn’t really grab me as something the future might hold,” John Seale AM ASC ACS, the Oscar-winning DP, says. “I took the camera with me to my uncle’s sheep station in central Queensland to learn to be a Jackaroo.” Two years later after the trauma of losing the herd in a storm, he “bailed out, sold my Land Rover, hitchhiked back to Sydney”, beginning the long pursuit to get into the film industry. 

He joined the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, spending seven years learning from “garrulous combat cameramen” who had survived the Second World War and the Korean War, “who celebrated every day” they were still alive. 

“Each taught me something new,” he says. “A lot of it was mechanical, solutions to tripods or lighting.”  

When ABC moved into drama Seale commandeered a Mitchell R35 “half the size of a VW” when accessorised. ““I’d practice on the heads during lunch and loved it all,” he continues. “I worked my way up from clapper loader to focus puller then camera operator.”  

In the late ’60s, Australia barely had a film industry. English director Nic Roeg (Walkabout) and Canadian Ted Kotcheff (Wake In Fright) inspired a local renaissance, which New Wave directors Peter Weir, Bruce Beresford, and Gillian Armstrong later catapulted internationally. 

Seale enjoyed operating so much he was content to let peers or operators younger than he graduate to cinematographer. They included Russell Boyd ACS ASC who asked the 33-year-old to operate for Weir’s 1975 haunting drama Picnic at Hanging Rock. Much influence “in those early days had come from the United States where the rule of thumb was you had to have a wide”, a medium and a close-up otherwise the editor couldn’t cut it.  

“Your lighting had to be key, fill and a back light otherwise it didn’t look any good. We kinda threw that book away.”  

He found that American cinematographers instructed the operator, with directors talking to the DP, while English directors preferred to talk directly to the operator, which he found exciting. 

“Peter had that English attitude,” Seale recalls. “It would be the three of us discussing ‘what if’ we did this or that on set.”  

A year later, he photographed the low-budget action movie Deathcheaters in 16mm, his first solo DP project, which gave him a shock. 

“I’d never bothered to study lighting,” he continues. “I’d ignored the meter. That was what Russ Boyd did – I didn’t have a clue. I just think you are so much closer to the film and the actors when operating. That goes back to working on low budget films which couldn’t afford an operator so the lighting cameraman would do it.”  

Union power 

Against the advice of peers, Seale went back to operating for a while. He returned in 1980 to light Fatty Finn, and in 1981, he lit Survivor, Australia’s biggest budget feature to date.  

“When I went back to operating I’d studied lighting a lot more so I was ready to move up,” Seale says. “Survivor is a strange film with an erratic director [David Hemmings] and a massive plane set which we shot with nine cameras.”  

After operating for Boyd on Weir’s Gallipoli and The Year of Living Dangerously, Seale was called to shoot Mosquito Coast. When that was delayed, they made Witness (1985), which was significant for him as “suddenly, Indiana Jones” was in front of his camera”. 

“I was so used to helping lift lights and put them in place because of our low budget upbringing, but if I even touched a lamp on Witness I was told it had to be a union member.”  

Union rules required Seale to hire an operator, which he and Weir resisted in vain. They also fought the unionised crew to shoot their ‘what if’ system. 

“One day I noticed sunlight shafting through the barn and wanted to grab three shots we needed before we lost it,” Seale says. “You couldn’t emulate that natural light in this size of barn unless we had cherry pickers and HMIs – which of course was the American style.” The barn was wrapped in black, with lamps erected on huge platforms.  

“Peter said to me later, ‘I’ve always regarded every movie I’ve made as an Australian film with an American accent’,” Seale adds. “That’s been my approach too,” Seale adds. “We use the ‘what-if’ system. Let’s get in as fast as we can and keep the actors hot.”  

A year later in Belize for Mosquito Coast, they found union rules more relaxed and Seale was able to operate. Reunited on Dead Poets Society in 1989 the pair were required to hire another operator. “We found one with a broken leg, put him in a wheelchair and paid him but I was able to do the operating,” Seale says.  

Hit after hit 

Over the next dozen years, Seale filmed Children of a Lesser God, Stakeout, Gorillas in the Mist, The Paper, Beyond Rangoon, The American President, The Talented Mr. Ripley and The Perfect Storm.  

On The Firm (1993) Sydney Pollack said to him ‘You don’t talk much do you?’ “I said, ‘I’m doing a lot of listening since you and the other HODs have been working on this for a lot longer than me but I hope that when I do say something, it’ll be intelligent as far as your film is concerned.”  

Seale tells students now is try not to worry too much about the technical side. “Get that knowledge into your brain so you’re feeling confident with your equipment and start making movies,” he says. 

Seale adds that in every film he shot post 1983, he “tried to simply honour the script” and never to take a photographic style from one film to the next. “I always tried to take three or four months off between movies in order to clear my head. I’ve missed out on a lot of good ones because of that, but I always thought it was worth it.”  

He confides, “A DP once said to me, ‘I’m only doing this to win an award’ but I knew that wasn’t right. You are there to record a movie and to help get the emotion of the script onto the screen.”  

On Dead Poets Society, Seale drew on the rapid schedule he’d learned at ABC. “We shot 21 setups a day on one camera. The boys and Robin Williams were amazing. The speed that Peter worked helped create the emotion from the boys because they just didn’t have time to get out of character.”  

On-set monitors were introduced so Weir would stand where he wanted the next shot to be. “Anybody who wanted another take had to have a damn good reason to do so because the first take was usually the one they printed and made it into the movie.”  

Things were different on Rain Man where director Barry Levinson afforded Dustin Hoffman the luxury of thirty takes.  

“The difference was chalk and cheese but Dustin loves working,” Seale says. “He would often say ‘We can do better’. And they’d go again. Barry was able to absorb that kind of indulgence whereas with Peter’s Australian training you stay within the schedule.”  

Rain Man – for which Seale was Oscar nominated – had virtually no pre-production. “There was no style,” he says. “Barry’s exact words were ‘It’s a contemporary film. That’s what we’re presenting. Let’s go shoot it.’ That sentence was pre-production.”  

The English Patient (1996), Seale’s first collaboration with Anthony Minghella, and a challenging shoot in Tunisia, earned him an Academy Award. 

“If you haven’t been able to literally shoot 80 percent of the film in your mind before you hit the set on the first day then you’re going to be behind the 8-ball,” he says. “But if it isn’t the same as what you thought it was going to be in pre-production don’t worry. You have to be on the balls of your feet like a boxer ready to leap sideways.”  

In 1990, Seale directed the low-budget drama Till There Was You on the South Pacific island nation of Vanuatu, a project near his family in Australia. “I made a terrible mistake there,” he admits. “A cameraman’s ego can sometimes outweigh the logic of what he’s doing. What I think it did for me was made me a better cinematographer because I learned the immense demands that are put on a director like organising actors, wardrobe and makeup. It wasn’t my bag and I never look back with regret on that.”  

On the other end of the scale Seale set the look of a multi-billion dollar franchise by photographing Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone in 2001 directed by Chris Columbus.  

“There was a lot of discussion about the seven films that at that stage were going to be made. I think that first one was the easiest because it was the lightest, innocent looking film, an explanation of where Harry came from, how he got to Hogwarts and the beginnings of witchery. There was nothing really dramatic or dark.”  

They shot up to six cameras to capture the performances of an inexperienced lead cast. “I take my hat off to Chris for handling the kids but I think the multi-cam helped immensely because we were able to cover them and know that if they hit it, we got it on multiple cameras on multiple kids.”  

Seale was offered the second film too, but was committed to Minghella’s Cold Mountain. The Miramax romantic drama was subsequently delayed until 2002 and although Seale was Oscar nominated for his work he regrets not doing more Potter.  

“Sometimes you lose, but that’s the film business,” he says. 

 Back in the saddle    

His fifth Oscar nomination came from the high-octane reboot of the Mad Max franchise which saw Seale embrace digital cinematography for the first time. He’d come close to lensing The Road Warrior and shot Lorenzo’s Oil for director George Miller in 1992, coming out of retirement to make Mad Max: Fury Road and Miller’s Three Thousand Years of Longing.  

“I would have done Furiosa for George but I was seriously contemplating retiring even before Fury Road,” he says. “I’ve spent so much of my life travelling the world that I wanted to enjoy a big part of my life my wife and children and grandchildren.”  

He suffers from macular disintegration – “a backstop for me” – but more than that, he doesn’t want to make another digital film.  

“The digital revolution with LED lighting, tiny cameras and Movi rigs can make all those beautiful dreams that we had 30-years-ago come true but I miss the photography,” he says. “On big budget digital pictures the DP tends to be a pixel collector. I miss waking up at three in the morning terrified that I should have opened up half a stop wider and you sweat it out till dawn before you can call the lab. I’m very happy to bow out and leave the new one to all the newbies.” 

Sohonet 5 minutes with Rawr

interview and copy written for Sohonet

RAWR Productions is a full-service boutique post house run by husband and wife team Alicia Vogel-Hannan, CEO and Jeff Hannan, president and Emmy winning re-record mixer.

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The Los Angeles based facility is a relatively new kid on the block having launched out of the pandemic offering a wide range of services from re-record mix, sound design and foley to color mastering and visual effects.

Its work includes We Need To Talk About Cosby (Showtime); The Stroll (HBO), The Golden Boy (HBO); 1000% Me Growing Up (Max); How To Become A Cult Leader (Netflix); The Long Game (AppleTV+); Intervention (A&E); Freaknik (Hulu) and The Perfect Wife: The Mysterious Disappearance of Sherri Papini (Hulu).

They take time out of their busy schedule to talk about growing their business.

Please tell us about Rawr’s origins story.
Alicia Vogel-Hannan: Neither of us had aspirations to open a finishing facility - it just sort of fell into our lap. We were both working from home during the pandemic. As a post supervisor I understand the relationship with clients and Jeff is an expert re-recording mixer. Jeff had built a full Dolby Atmos mixing bay in the guest room of our house including with speakers in the ceiling. No-one knew how long that work from home period would go on for.

Jeff Hannan: I started picking up work during lockdown and we spotted a way in which we could bring on a colorist and an online editor to offer full finishing. Once people started returning to the office, we obviously couldn’t invite everyone into our living room so we decided to open a physical facility. At the time it was a gamble, a toss of the dice, but within two months we had 15 shows and we’ve just kept going.

We’ve since opened a data center from where we host offline rentals. That enables us to offer the soup to nuts of a full postproduction workflow. We ingest and archive media, transcode it and deliver proxy files to offline editors. We supply the systems and 24-hour support and oversee projects through final stages and delivery.

Rawr has had great success working on unscripted TV. Why do you think that is?

Jeff: We gravitated to documentary just because that's what we like to watch. Personally, I like approaching a subject about which I maybe know very little and then if the documentary is told well, finish watching it with a new understanding. We feel that we are creative partners in helping producers tell their story and to create a lasting impact with audiences.

Alicia: Our niche are the water cooler documentaries, the ones that everybody's talking about. The appetite for docs has been strong for some time now and I don’t think that’s going to diminish. I think that’s because you never get the whole story from news headlines or social media. There’s always another side to it and viewers appreciate a deep dive to discover more. Plus, there are so many interesting stories to tell.

Unscripted shows tend to need a lot of media. How do you manage storage?

Alicia: It’s a constant battle but we have petabytes of storage to stay on top of it. A three-part documentary will generate close to 125 terabytes of media. There is typically a high shoot ratio on these projects and a lot of archival elements that come into play. Sometimes we're taking archive footage and treating it in software to make it suitable for insertion into the show.

Each situation is unique. The one you think is gonna be amazingly difficult is the one that goes super smooth and the one that you thought was gonna be super easy, is the one that's constantly changing the road map.

What is the Rawr experience like?
Alicia: We're at the heart of Burbank on Magnolia Blvd, among this beautiful little strip full of vintage shops, and coffee houses, and restaurants. It's a really nice area. We have a Dolby Atmos Mix suite and a full Dolby Vision color suite in addition to online bays accompanied by a stylish lobby, lounge area and kitchen. 

As a post supervisor I knew where the pitfalls are from the client's perspective, down to what makes working in a dark edit bay for hours on end a more comfortable experience.  The level of talent and the attention to detail across Client Services is definitely one thing that sets us apart.

How do you manage workflow?

Jeff: It made sense to bake-in total flexibility for producers and artists to enjoy in-person or remote sessions. The way we’ve structured our workflow is so we can get up and running really quickly.  People drop off the media and we give them a 24-hour turnaround but within hours their media is transcoded and ready for edit. We send them proxy files while the Raw media lives at our finishing facility. Once they send back their sequences, we instantaneously relink to Raw for finishing. The days of long-winded weeks of online prep are over.

That’s kind of how we fell into Sohonet. We’d used a lot of other remote connectivity products throughout the pandemic and ClearView stood out as the best. We’ve been using it as a staple of our workflow for 18 months. You do pay a premium for it but you are paying for reliability. The ease of use is astonishing. I literally just click on it and boom! up pops the stream. And it’s in sync. I don't have to worry about it. That was the big selling point to me. I use it almost daily in audio to run live reviews with clients who might be in Texas or New York or wherever.

Another big selling point for us was ClearView’s ability to stream high quality video, consistently for HDR. That is increasingly vital for remote sessions as more and more projects require HDR. We also use ClearView for online and color sessions and recently began offering ClearView for our offline clients so they can collaborate remotely.

FileRunner is a natural addition to our portfolio because we need to be able to move large amounts of media. You can imagine the media required for a three-part documentary. File Runner is really fantastic as the transport for ingesting media.

Our whole philosophy is to give artists a better experience. So having the best tools available is what makes us stand out from everybody else.

How challenging is it as owner operators to make decision on hires and investments?

Alicia: It’s a constant conversation and a scary one because we might be riding high right now but what does tomorrow bring? Our accounting firm advises us on market projections and we are constantly running the numbers. Getting the timing right as to whether or not you invest in a new system or new talent is hard.

Having worked for large corporations in the past, I know how frustrating it can be to get the tools that you need. Decisions as simple as a new plugin would have to go up the chain and then it would be months later as to whether you got the go ahead. Since the chain of command is route one for us we typically support those purchases straight away. We had no hesitation getting ClearView and File Runner. If it's a larger purchase, we will talk with accounts and that outcome depends on the projections.

How did the name Rawr come about?

Alicia: We were making up names for a potential company and we just couldn’t think of the right one so we asked our four-year-old son, ‘What should we call it?’ And he came around the corner in a full dinosaur costume, stomping his feet and said, ‘RAWWWRRR!’