Behind the scenes: Good Omens

IBC

VFX supervisor Jean-Claude Deguara discusses creating a fantasy world straight out of the minds of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman.

https://www.ibc.org/production/behind-the-scenes-good-omens/3864.article

David Tennant is the demon Crowley and Michael Sheen the angel Aziraphale in the TV incarnation of Terry Pratchett and Neil Gaiman’s fantasy novel Good Omens – written in 1990 – in which the two lead characters join forces to prevent Death, War, Famine, and Pollution becoming the Four Horseman of the Apocalypse.

Produced by the BBC and released on Amazon Prime Video with Gaiman as showrunner, the ‘comedic apocalyptic’ miniseries “has a little bit of everything” according to the show’s VFX supervisor and Milk co-founder, Jean-Claude Deguara.

That’s not surprising given the novel is part parody of 1976 satanic horror The Omen, part Discworld and part satire of religious belief from the ‘twisted minds’ (as the trailer puts it) of the two cult authors. The anarchic mix previously attracted Monty Python alumni Terry Gilliam and Terry Jones to set up separate versions of the project but only a BBC radio show of the book has been made before.

American Gods writer Gaiman has a development deal with Amazon for this and future shows and describes the series as a standalone that also draws on elements from a book sequel he had planned with Pratchett.

“When you prepare VFX for most shows you usually have specific areas to focus on, like a spaceship, but because the source is a book and we’re in charge of the whole 660 shot order, you don’t linger in one place for too long and the effects are very rarely the same,” Deguara says.

Tying down a look for the show was the tricky first task. “The book itself is a great reference and unusually we had six complete scripts to work from,” he says. “Our starting point was to work out what the main VFX components might be and to come up with a methodology that we thought would be a good way of solving them.”

Gaiman and director Douglas Mackinnon (Doctor Who, Line of Duty) wanted to film as much in-camera as they could, and this grounding in reality was the key for the VFX team.

“Neil didn’t want it to be too fantastical or for the VFX to draw attention to itself,” explains VFX producer Jenna Powell. “Even though it’s a fantasy, the idea was to make the story world recognisable to the one we live in, so it becomes believable for the audience.”

The antichrist’s loyal hellhound, for example, might be depicted as a ferocious dog-shaped beast. “We’d initially conceptualised this as a big monstrous creature, but we reined it back,” Deguara says. “We cast and photo-scanned a Great Dane and then didn’t redesign it massively. It wasn’t intended to be a caricature. We made it bit made more aggressive by lengthening its teeth and sinking the eyes, but the colouring and pattern of the dog’s coat remained the same.”

A vintage 1926 black Bentley which Crowley proudly keeps in mint condition features prominently in a number of scenes. The production designers found a classic model (a 1934 3.5 Derby Coupe Thrupp & Maberly) from which Milk made a full digital scan in order to recreate cg versions for comping into the live action photography. A scale interior of the car was also built in which to film the actors against green screen or rear projection at West London Studios.

“One day when they’d wrapped filming, we drove the car to our offices in Soho so the modellers and texturers could get a better look at it,” Deguara says. “Being in actual contact with the object you are animating is so much better for the final shot than relying on scans or photographs.

He explains: “You can see how dust sits on the car and what it feels like to sit in the leather seats, the thickness of glass in the windscreen and how the windscreen wipers work. So many little things like this help make the object appear tactile and photoreal. On our first renders the car was looking a little lifeless, the headlamps perhaps didn’t have the right depth. We tweaked it and in later renders you find your eyes drawn to the ‘eyes’ of the car.”

Scanning
During the ‘Armageddon Incident’, Crowley is forced to put the Bentley through a devastating ride, during which the car catches fire and is burnt to a crisp. Milk had to come up with the look of the car on fire at different stages, with the metal on its chassis gradually getting hotter.

The lead actors and other cast, including Miranda Richardson, John Hamm, Michael McKean and Jack Whitehall, were scanned in costume, as were key props and sets. Deguara explains that the photo-scans consist of hundreds of still images digitally processed into a 3D point cloud. Using that data, animators and modellers can deploy software to build texture.

“It’s a quicker and more economical version of Lidar scanning,” he explains. “You may not have quite the detail of a laser scan, but it works perfectly when working to a tight schedule. It means that for any scene we can talk with the director and cinematographer about camera placement and quickly populate a scene with rough VFX to help them visualise the idea.

“We began building CG assets at the start of the shoot so that when Neil and Doug came around to a specific scene, I could show them the conceptual work we’d done and make sure everyone in the office at Milk was working to the right frame. Being able to make progress like this during the shoot was essential to meeting the tight schedule.”

TV timeframes tend to be tight and in this case the crew had five months from the end of principal photography last August to deliver episode 1 by the end of January.

The entirety of Soho’s Broadwick Street was also scanned after test shoots of a generic building originally planned for the CG model of London turned out not to have the unique feel that Gaiman and Mackinnon were after.

“If you take a step back and look up at the buildings in Soho you see they are all architecturally unique so that’s what we were looking to replicate,” says Powell. “Douglas also wanted to retain this feeling of a busy, vibrant Soho with people rushing past in all directions.”

They paid attention to scanning the exterior and interior of an antique bookshop which is Aziraphale’s hideaway. The shop’s physical set was married to the CG. “We designed it so that everything 15 metres away from the camera in any direction was digital.”

The team also had to come up with designs for a 400-foot tall CG Satan. “The initial concept was extremely monstrous,” explains Powell. “It looked great, but Neil was adamant that he wanted it grounded in more a human form. We adapted the idea, notably by changing horns on Satan’s head to form a crown. Neil loved that so we started building this version and parked it for a while.”

After the actor originally cast as Satan dropped out at the last minute, Benedict Cumberbatch boarded the project. “We were already well into one of the sequences but when Benedict’s voice performance really gave the character the direction it needed. As soon as we had that the process became a lot quicker.

Further creature work included a Kraken, CG snakes and bunnies, and the angel and demon’s wings along with environment work ranging from maggots, tornado and flaming swords to ‘transitions’ and ‘disintegrations’.

Rendering was in Arnold, compositing in Nuke with effects in Houdini and Maya for rigging creature work and muscle simulation in Ziva.

Director of photography Gavin Finney (Terry Pratchett’s Hogfather, Wolf Hall) shot ‘A’ camera on ARRI Alexa SXT supplemented with Alexa Minis and drone work using a Panasonic GH5. Locations included London and Oxfordshire with sequences including those of the Garden of Eden filmed in and around Cape Town. Cardiff’s Bang! Post production managed voice work, including ADR across the 200 speaking parts. The grade was made at Molinare by chief colorist Gareth Spensley.

Molinare VFX department, headed up by Dolores McGinley, also completed 450 shots for Good Omens. They included greenscreen composites, environment enhancements (including removing modern day elements & crew/equipment removal), crowd replication, 2D animation on creatures and monitor inserts. 

“We worked closely with Douglas and Neil to bring their vision to life, creating numerous invisible fixes that keep viewers firmly in the fantasy world they created,” McGinley says. 

Additional VFX credits at Milk: Onset supervisor, David Jones; VFX editor, Andrea Pirisi; CG supervisor, Adrian Williams; 2D supervisor, Matias Derkacz; animation lead, Joe Tarrant; environment lead, Simon Wicker; FX Lead, James Reid; modelling lead; Sam Lucas rigging lead, Neil Roche; tracking Lead, Amy Felce; paint & roto lead, Natalie Lacey.

Analogue transmissions still power the majority of world broadcasts

Content marketing for Rohde & Schwarz

The global transition to digital terrestrial broadcasting began over a decade ago and completed in markets like Germany and the UK by 2012, yet switchover is far from an international clean sweep. Communities in many countries, and in some cases whole populations, still are reliant on analogue services.

https://www.rohde-schwarz.com/uk/solutions/broadcast-and-media/always-on-blog/posts/05-19-analogue_251160.html

According to the DVB, from a database of DVB, EBU and BNE members, analogue switch-off (ASO) has taken place in 35% of countries, accounting for just over 21% of the world's population. This means that analogue TV is still on air in 65% of countries.

The majority of these are rural and poorer areas in places like Sub-Saharan Africa where only 23% have completed ASO. The corresponding figure for ITU Region 2 (Americas) is 9% and for Region 3 (Asia-Pacific) is 16%. In Europe (based on the 48 CEPT countries), 81% have completed ASO.

The US contains the most remarkable case. Here are audiences watching over-the-air television from TV translators or Low Power TV (LPTV) stations. Many of these stations do operate in rural areas, but also within larger urban areas, and serve minority or other specialized audiences such as houses of worship and religious groups, high schools and colleges, local governments, small businesses and even individual citizens.

The Federal Communications Commission (FCC) created the LPTV service in 1982 to provide opportunities for locally-oriented television services in small communities. According to the FCC, this provided a means of local self-expression, and permitted fuller use of the broadcast spectrum.

Programming includes satellite-delivered services, movies, syndicated content and a wide range of locally-produced programmes. LPTV stations sometimes tailor segments or entire schedules to specific viewer groups on the basis of age, language or particular interest.

Although the US Congress established a hard deadline of June 12, 2009, for full power TV stations to cease analogue broadcasts and begin operating only in digital, and the Commission set a transition date of September 1st, 2015, for Class A broadcasters to complete their transition, neither of these deadlines applied to LPTV stations which continue to transmit analogue signals.

The FCC has now given a new deadline of July 2021 for these stations to complete their digital transition. This allows time for completion of the Commission’s incentive auction, which involves a repacking process that will displace some LPTV stations.

On the technical side, LPTV stations transmit on one of the standard VHF (2-13) or UHF (14-51) channels and are limited to an effective radiated power of 3 kilowatts (VHF) and 150 kilowatts (UHF). The distance at which a station can be viewed depends on a variety of factors - antenna height, transmitter power, transmitting antenna and the nature of the environment (rural or urban, hilly or flat terrain).

The FCC is sensitive to marginalising this thriving group of LPTV stations operated by diverse groups and organisations. Stations will therefore have the opportunity to seek either an on-channel digital conversion of their existing analogue facilities or may construct and operate a second ‘digital companion channel’ during the remainder of the digital transition. However, all LPTV stations will be required to decide a single digital channel to continue to operate after the final transition date.

In the US then, digital LPTV solutions will remain an alternative to DVB as a means to DTT broadcasting for the foreseeable future, but in countries with a less mature communications infrastructure analogue transmissions will be a mainstay most likely until the state intervenes with financial help to enable switchover.

Of those countries that have not completed ASO, around 20 have announced plans to do so in 2019/2020 including China (which uses its own DTMB system), but according to the DVB, in some of those cases further slippage can be expected. Notably, India (where there are DVB-T2 services on air in around 20 cities) has not announced an official date for ASO.

Rohde & Schwarz TV transmitters are ensuring analogue and DTT transmission service quality worldwide.

The R&S TLU9 transmitter and GapFiller range, in particular, offers the highest availability in its power class and performance which cuts energy costs by a quarter – two pre-requisites for continuing reception of TV signals among minority and rural communities everywhere. Learn more about our low power uhf tv transmitters online today.

Behind the scenes: Elton John ‘fantasy’ biopic Rocketman

IBC

Rocketman editor Chris Dickens explains how he helped create the true fantasy of shy piano prodigy turned international superstar and the challenge of creating the perfect ending. 

https://www.ibc.org/production/behind-the-scenes-elton-john-fantasy-biopic-rocketman/3774.article

Coming so soon after the crowd-pleasing success of Freddie Mercury biopic Bohemian Rhapsody, the larger-than-life, rags-to-riches story of Elton John will garner inevitable but unfair comparisons.

“It’s a musical based on the life of Elton John and his rise to stardom with more of a nod to a film like The Greatest Showman than to Bohemian Rhapsody in terms of style,” stresses Chris Dickens (Slumdog Millionaire), the film’s editor.

“This is not a documentary. It has a heightened reality.”

Indeed, Paramount promotes the picture as ‘a true fantasy’ unlike the Queen story which was criticised for self-censoring some of the more rock n roll aspects of its subject’s lifestyle.

It shares with Bohemian Rhapsody a chequered and long gestating history which at various times over the past few years has had Tom Hardy and Justin Timberlake attached to star.

Taron Egerton (who ironically appeared with Elton John in Kingsman: The Golden Circle) was ultimately cast as John in July 2017 and Dexter Fletcher signed on to direct in April 2018, after finishing the final month of filming Bohemian Rhapsodyafter original director Bryan Singer was fired. Principal photography began last August largely at Maidenhead’s Bray Studios.

Fletcher had previously demonstrated a lightness of touch with 2013’s Sunshine On Leith, based on music from The Proclaimers. Dickens was no stranger to musicals either, having cut Tom Hooper’s award laden feature adaptation of Les Misérables.

“In Les Misérables the music told the story all the way through, like an opera,” Dickens explains. “It’s very hard to pull that off because you need the musical numbers to play out at length. Rocketman was different in that the script contained two stylistic approaches to the story which had to resolve in editorial. With Rocketman, we are using Elton’s music to tell the story but we’re also telling the story between those numbers. You need to find the balance between them. Too much music, for example, can be very claustrophobic.

The screenplay by Lee Hall, who wrote Billy Elliot and also the script for Tom Hooper’s upcoming feature adaptation of the musical Cats, is produced by Matthew Vaughn (Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Stardust, Kingsmen: The Secret Service). It follows the pop icon’s early years as a working class north London lad, then as a prodigy at the Royal Academy of Music, up to his eventual musical partnership with songwriter Bernie Taupin, and his preparations to release Honky Chateau, his 1972 breakthrough album.

Jamie Bell (Fantastic Four) plays Taupin, Bryce Dallas Howard (Pete’s Dragon) is Elton’s mother Sheila and Richard Madden (The Bodyguard) plays Elton’s manager John Reid.

There’s another clear difference to Bohemian Rhapsody too in that the subject of the film is not only very much alive, he is also one of its executive producers. Indeed, John is currently in the midst of his 300-date Farewell Yellow Brick Road tour and will retire from touring upon its conclusion in 2021.

Dickens adds that David Furnish, John’s husband and also a producer on the project, was hands-on.

“They came to the set on a number of occasions and David certainly had his opinion on certain things but I can’t say they objected in any way to the creative license we were taking.” Indeed, they had wanted to make this film for many years which documents John’s career highs as well as his struggles with alcohol, substance abuse and identity.

“It’s not hard-nosed about it but we don’t shy away from the drug taking and excesses of being a rock star,” Dickens says. “Tonally, it reminds me of [Johnny Cash biopic] Walk The Line in having a darker undercurrent that gives you a sense of how Elton lived his life.”

John himself has said that authenticity was the most important aspect of the film for him. “It had to be as honest as possible,” he says. “The lows were very low, but the highs were very high. That’s how I wanted the film to be.”

In the same clip, Fletcher says “because of the nature of who Elton is, the storytelling allowed us to totally indulge in fantasy and imagination.”

The film deploys John’s playlist to comment on emotional beats and to drive the story forward. More than twenty tracks were re-recorded under supervision of music producer Giles Martin using Egerton’s own vocals, ranging from his first hit single ‘Your Song’ to ‘Goodbye Yellow Brick Road’ and ‘Rocket Man’, to lesser known numbers like ‘Take Me to the Pilot’ (the B side of ‘Your Song’) and ‘Hercules.’

One of the main editorial challenges was the film’s ending, scripted as a showstopper for the song ‘I’m Still Standing.’

“The original plan was to go to Cannes and Nice and reshoot the pop promo for the track directed in 1983 by Russell Mulcahy but the weather had worsened by the time the scene came round to filming last October,” Dickens explains. “An alternative idea was to shoot a whole stage performance of the song in front of a large crowd but they couldn’t get it to work.

“We even had this idea of Elton walking on a sea of people’s hands onto the stage but it all felt too realistic, or rather, not fantastical enough,” Dickens says. “Then Matthew Vaughn had the bright idea of trying to get hold of the original rushes for the pop video.

The original was shot and art directed by Mulcahy in a tone of homoerotic European luxury prominently featuring red, white and blue for the French flag and equally prominently featuring erstwhile Strictly judge Bruno Tonioli.

“Although that seems like such an obvious idea, it was far from it, but when we saw the rushes, it was just perfect. It looks like we actually went there.”

ProAV SEAsia: Green shoots of AV development

AV Magazine

From established markets in Northeast Asia, to emerging ones in the South and South-East, the whole Asia Pacific region is adopting video-based innovation at an unprecedented pace.

https://www.avinteractive.com/features/territory-features/green-shoots-av-development-16-05-2019/

Although pro AV is still relatively young in Southeast Asia AVIXA estimates that the region represents a $6.3 billion market growing at a CAGR of 5.9 per cent through 2023 to reach $8 billion.

InfoComm Southeast Asia opens in Bangkok this May which is a big signifier that many of the brands are seeing increased traction in the area. “Price drops in the cost of AV products and international businesses beginning to hold larger technology and infrastructure budgets are converging to drive strong growth in the region, even in higher end technology arenas,” observes Glenn Bailey, vice-president APAC, SiliconCore Technology.

However, the adoption rate and investment in new technologies differs across the region and the pace for this transition from traditional to digital AV varies.

“While Singapore and Malaysia have a huge banking, infrastructure and international business community with strong corporate AV markets, developing countries like Thailand and Vietnam are still much in the early stage on the technology curve,” Bailey says.

“In general, most markets are shifting towards digital AV but with the convergence of AV over IP, the pro AV industry is likely to shift towards more software-based solutions and this may render some of the AV products within a traditional corporate installation obsolete,” says Candice Siow, Kramer’s regional senior sales and marketing manager. The company is one of many basing their presence in the region out of Singapore, seen as the most business friendly hub to service adjacent markets in Thailand, Malaysia, Indonesia, Vietnam and beyond.

“The pro AV market is fairly mature in Singapore, and the technological adaptability rate is much faster and quicker than in neighbours like Indonesia,” says Siow. “In project tenders, you will frequently see requirements for 4K support, smart meeting rooms and control and management systems. In Singapore, we are seeing many installations of large LED displays in retail malls and even commercial buildings where owners and developers are vying for the attention of the consumers and tenants.” The potential to increase digital signage, security/surveillance, and performance/entertainment solutions is strong.

SiliconCore notes a rise in the use of large format displays in retail applications, predominantly in Singapore. “We are focused on the niche of fine pitch, direct view LED videowalls and the display market in some regions is starting to invest in high quality LED displays in corporate, control room and high end retail environments,” says Bailey.

Region’s tourism reliance
The region heavily relies on tourism, which is an area of investment for both international and domestic brands, with hotels, retail and leisure brands all looking to create luxury guest and tourist experiences. Smart city investment is a huge market in Malaysia while Singapore’s two integrated resorts (IRs) are set to invest S$9 billion in expansion. The exclusivity period for both casinos is being extended past the original 2017 expiry date to end in 2030 instead.

The investment, reports Christie, will include a 1,000 room all-suite tower at Marina Bay Sands, a 15,000-seat arena and extensions to Universal Studios Singapore aside from additional gaming provisions. In Taiwan, Siow reports that the military/defence sector is shifting from traditional AV to digital AV for its surveillance needs. Following Japan’s 2020 Olympic announcement on 8K projection, Kramer has begun seeing 8K DOOH advertisements.

“It will be interesting to see how the pro AV industry keeps pace. While the market hasn’t fully settled in on 4K functionality, we are now looking at the transition to 8K technology,” says Siow.

In the corporate market, across the region, collaboration technologies, AVoIP and 4K are all spurring new spending. Systems replacement cycles have also been shortening as a result of rapid technology advance.

“As the working practices evolve, many organisations are moving towards flexible work arrangements and team collaboration,” Siow says. “We are seeing an increase in collaborative working and huddle space rooms and expect significant growth in this area.”

Jenny Li, sales manager for B-Tech AV Mounts in APAC calls the market “vigorous” and “generally growing fast.”

“The Thai market seems cost sensitive,” she adds. “Systems integrators prefer cheaper products and don’t mind spending more time on installation. Indonesia chases for efficiency more than cost.”

Peerless-AV reports demand for “quality, field proven and UL safety tested commercial grade products that companies aren’t able to find elsewhere on the market,” according to Brian McClimans, vice-president, sales, North America and APAC. “For example, a Malaysian cruise ship company reached out to us about commercial grade outdoor displays that would be robust enough to withstand the harsh salt water, windy conditions on deck while at sea.”

Jamie Hind, sales director APAC at Exterity, describes the region as “incredibly tech-savvy and forward-thinking.” He adds: “Throughout Asia-Pacific consumers expect sophisticated, technologically-minded solutions and the various industries we operate in are responding to it by deploying more advanced services.”

For Exterity this means designing solutions that create an immersive and exciting visitor or guest experience. “One of the most creative developments we’ve invested in is ‘jackpot integration’. Simply put, we use jackpot feeds based on values, thresholds and other indicators as triggers to deliver any content, to any screen or device anywhere.”

An example of this is, suitably, at the Okada Manila Casino. Hinds says the jackpot integration means clients can communicate with visitors and guests alike, via live IP video, IPTV and digital signage wherever they are – all from a single, centralised platform.

Emerging economies 
Beyond so-called traditional markets such as Hong Kong (Macau) and Singapore, several companies are also seeing huge demand from emerging markets such as the Philippines, Indonesia, Vietnam, Thailand and Cambodia – “all of which are quickly establishing themselves as fabulous destinations and leveraging the very best that technology can offer,” says Hinds.

Christie picks out Indonesia for “strong potential” particularly in the theme park and entertainment market and within that segment, growth for pro AV requirements in the Dark Ride entertainment rides. This, says Christie, is leading to the demand for brighter, more compact and reliable technologies.

Distances and differences
A major challenge is the geographical size of the APAC regions and the stark differences between the countries. SiliconCore’s APAC HQ is in Sydney from where its team serves the whole of the region. “We make regular demonstrations in each country… some of our largest installations are in Australia, Thailand and Malaysia,” Bailey says. “We also have staff based in a number of SEA countries which gives us a good understanding of the cultural differences between our audiences. In fact, it’s vital for larger project-based sales.”

Kenneth Cheung at Dataton partner Audio Visual Technique is among the few voicing caution. “The uncertain outcome of the Sino-US trade dispute and high value of the US dollar have clouded the otherwise optimistic outlook of the region’s economy,” he says. “The region’s governments are keen in nurturing the growth of creative industries to be the next economic engine after manufacturing and more young people are joining the work force in new media.

“The big challenge for the pro AV industry is to help the young blood master the tools of the trade and generate new growth. To that end, we provide specialised training across the region and, in fact, will be running the first industry-certified Dataton Academy in Bangkok during InfoComm Southeast Asia.”

Behind the scenes: John Wick 3

IBC

Cinematographer Dan Laustsen brings visual panache to the stunt-fuelled franchise.

https://www.ibc.org/production/behind-the-scenes-john-wick-3/3840.article

New York has been photographed thousands of times before so when the city is the main location for your story how do you make it look different? The answer, for director Chad Stahelski and Dan Laustsen ASC, DFF, was to make it rain.

“I love rain,” Laustsen tells IBC365. “It brings a third dimension to the look of the film.”

The Dane has worked with sea water-soaked imagery on The Shape of Water, winning a best cinematography nomination for Guillermo del Toro’s film. For John Wick: Chapter 3 - Parabellum, the ultra-stylish sequel to the ultra-stylish ‘gun fu’ action franchise starring Keanu Reeves, rain afforded the opportunity to play with neon lights and headlamps reflected off dark streets, cars, motorbike helmets and windows.

“I knew how to work with rain but it’s incredibly complicated trying to do this in New York. We discussed creating atmospheres with smoke and steam but we’re filming in the summertime and the steam would have disappeared too quickly.

“It’s difficult enough anyway in New York when you need to block streets but bringing in lots of cherry pickers, cranes and rain towers and rigs for back lighting was a challenge.”

The film’s gothic-noir New York exteriors recall scenes from the original Blade Runner but John Wick 3 is altogether slicker and filmed using digital cameras and LED lights, two tools not available to Ridley Scott and DP Jordan Cronenweth in 1982.

‘Bertolucci’ of action films
John Wick certainly isn’t running out of steam. While the first film in 2014 established a narratively sleek template for eponymous uber-assassin (Reeves) exacting revenge on innumerable bad guys with a cocktail of martial arts and gun fighting, the second ‘chapter’, unusually for this type of movie, managed to improve the high-octane formula.

Former stuntman Stahelski (who doubled for Reeves in The Matrix) and cinematographer Jonathan Sela had established how the fights were shot for John Wickbut Laustsen added further sheen, painting the action to resemble an artwork.

“Chad told me he wanted to make the Bertolucci of action films,” Laustsen says, referring to the stunning cinematography of Vittorio Storaro in Bernardo Bertolucci classics like The Conformist and The Last Emperor.

The basic camera rules for the series are shoot wide, shoot steady and shoot fast.

 “Chad comes from a stunt background, so he really is a master when it comes to knowing how to choreograph action,” Lauststen says. “We want to shoot the sequences as wide as possible, because we want the audience to feel that the actors actually are performing the stunts themselves. I feel very strongly that you should shoot as much as you can in the camera on the day. It’s much better than shooting green screen. It’s much better for the actor’s too.”

He continues, “If you move the camera too much, or you make too many cuts in the edit, it can interfere with the audience’s view of the action. So, we keep the camera fluid or with as minimal movement as possible. It’s powerful. When you have a pretty steady camera and you can see what’s happening.”

It’s not just the action of the actors and stunt team that needs choreographing but the position of the camera operators too.

“The actors have spent months rehearsing before we come on set but once we’re there we have to know what we’re doing. We want to shoot very fast, and change set-ups very quickly because Keanu and the other actors want to keep the momentum of the scene going.”

The other key element for Laustsen is lighting and composition. The signature look for the series is high contrast, high impact colour.

 “We are using LED lights for the most part and this means you have a whole world of colour to choose from. Making the precise choice is hugely important.”

In continuity from John Wick 2, the dominant colour scheme is blue to reflect the central character’s banishment from the high table of the assassin’s union.

“The aim was always to make even more powerful images than in [Wick 2],” he explains. “The blue is more of a greeny-steel blue and contrast this with orange, red and amber incandescent lights. When we change from scene to scene, we tried to find at least one of those colour tones in there.”

In an extended fight sequence in a warehouse, for example, electric incandescent lights give the scene an amber hue while the rain outside the windows is steel blue and allows Laustsen to capture reflections of the rain on the ceiling.

 “The desert scene is the only bright daylight scene in the movie, and we wanted that to be a very strong gold as a kind of relief to be free from the dark city scenes,” he says.

“It’s extremely important to me that the colour I film on set isn’t changed in the digital intermediate [postproduction process],” he insists. “Of course, it will change a little, but when everything including costume, makeup, set design, lighting has been designed so carefully for a specific colour palette you don’t want anything to move away from that.”

Laustsen had investigated a larger format Alexa 65 but couldn’t find anamorphic lenses to fit so settled on the ARRI Alexa XT with a pair of Alexa Minis and custom lenses he’d had built for John Wick 2. The set of Master Anamorphics were re-designed by ARRI Rental with a series of internal line filters to provide the bokeh and flaring he was looking for.

“Chad loved the effect, because you got nice flares off the highlights, but the image was still extremely sharp,” he says. “We shot 3.2K ARRI Raw open gate and finished at 2K.”

The only scene set in New York without rain is one involving a motorbike and horse chase under Brooklyn’s iconographic elevated train.

“It would have been too dangerous for the horses to film them galloping in the rain. We had to put rubber mats down on the street for five to six blocks to protect them. Keanu does all the riding in the scene and we’re filming from a trailer.”

On reflection
Another set-piece sequence takes place in room high up in the Continental Hotel where ceiling, floor and interior is made of glass. The cinematography here echoes that of Roger Deakins’ work filming a glass filled room in Skyfall and recalls the house of mirrors shoot out from John Wick 2 (itself a homage to Orson Welles’ climactic scene in The Lady from Shanghai).

Just to make it even more difficult, in John Wick 3 there are giant LED screens playing back vibrant colours inside and outside the glass room.

“Chad wanted this idea from the beginning, and we spent a long time talking about how to achieve it,” Laustsen says. “They built the set about 800 x 400 ft in a studio. It was really complicated to light, so we shot tests and decided on a blue tone for the interiors with the big LED screen on the outside more tuned to red and the screen inside tuned to amber for our contrast colours.

“When you have glass surrounding you 360-degrees you have to be very careful to avoid lights and other equipment being in picture but we had the experience of handling something similar from John Wick 2 and if we had any issue we knew we could erase in post.”

The Continental itself, the hallowed nerve centre of the assassin’s guild, is a composite of various locations including exterior (The Beaver Building in Manhattan), interiors (The Cunard Building in Lower Manhattan) and rooftop (Rockefeller Roof Gardens).

At the beginning of a big shoot out in the Hotel lobby, Laustsen made the decision in the film’s story to have all the lights turned off except for an emergency green lighting strip.

“It was really expensive in terms of human resource to install a hundred metres of LED, but I didn’t want to do a shootout that would look just like any other shootout,” he explains.

A section filmed in a Bedouin-style tent in the Moroccan desert proved equally challenging.

“It’s daylight outside but really dark inside the tent. We had to run 800 metres of cable to the lights inside. Even though you don’t see the desert the challenge was to keep the feeling of desert heat outside without letting so much light into the tent that the background burns out.”

Laustsen was educated as a fashion photographer, wanted to work for National Geographic on documentaries and applied to the National Film School Of Denmark on the advice of his sister.

“When I got the acceptance letter from the school it was a big shock. I’d never dreamt about making movies for a second.”

He shot his first feature aged 25 in 1979, Do We Start Off With a Dance? and in 1984 made acclaimed thriller Nightwatch for director Ole Bornedal. When they remade the movie for the American market a few year later Laustsen was criticised in some quarters for creating images that were too beautiful – a sort of style over substance.

“I think that’s just the Danish mentality. After all, nobody would ever say that Lawrence of Arabia or [Bertolucci’s] 1900 were shot too beautifully. But it is a balancing act. For me, it’s important to make the most powerful image as possible if that is what the scene suggests, or to make it softer or grittier as appropriate for another scene. In any case, movie making is not the result of one person. It is very much a collaboration between director, cinematographer, production design and everyone involved from the gaffer to the dailies team. That said, I believe you need a strong plan about what you are going to do and to execute that plan to the best of your ability.”

While making Nightwatch in the US, he met Del Toro who was about to make his US film debut and asked Laustsen to lens it. Mimic, a film about a plague of cockroaches invading Manhattan may not have been a runaway success but the pair have since made Crimson Tide, The Shape of Water and are currently prepping Nightmare Alley, an adaptation of a 1947 noir with Leonardo DiCaprio attached to star.

Online Second Behind Pay TV as Europe’s Preferred Watch

Streaming Media

Audiences in Sweden, the UK, and Germany juggle multiple services to get all the video content they want, and they access those services across multiple devices.

http://www.streamingmediaglobal.com/Articles/News/Featured-News/-Online-Second-Behind-Pay-TV-as-Europes-Preferred-Watch-131707.aspx

Whereas 12 years ago, when Netflix launched, most European homes relied on a single-source for TV, today nearly half of viewers in all three of the countries are multi-source television households.

That’s according to research undertaken by analyst nScreenMedia in a report sponsored by Nielsen-owned Gracenote.

The "TV Universe—U.K., Sweden, Germany: How People Watch Television Today" report looks at viewing habits around pay TV, free-to-air, and online TV.

Across the board, online TV is now the second most popular source behind pay TV with usage ranging from just under 40% in Germany to more than 50% in the UK and Sweden. The report calls this rise “remarkable” given the relative newcomer status of online.

Being Gracenote-sponsored research, there’s a focus on UI. Six in ten viewers indicated visual imagery and TV artwork displayed in the guides as important factors on their viewing choices. Among 18-to-24-year-olds, the number jumped up to around 90%. In addition, respondents said TV show and movie descriptions that shed light on content are also factors in their tune-in decision-making. 70% of U.K. viewers said the program descriptions were at least somewhat important. 65% of Swedes and 57% of Germans thought the same.

Other data from the report shows free-to-air TV is gaining traction on mobile. More free-to-air viewers use broadcaster apps to supplement viewing than pay TV viewers use their operator "TV Everywhere" apps. Over half of free-to-air users in each country use broadcaster apps.

The smart TV is the preferred device to watch video content on in all three countries. A significant 70% of total viewing time is on the TV screen in the UK and Germany, while in Sweden, the number clocks in at 60%.

The report also delves into viewing habits by market. Among the most surprising insights:

• 17% of the UK study group use all three TV sources available to them, higher than in Sweden and Germany.
• While the on-screen guide is the dominant way Swedes and Brits find content to watch, newspaper TV guides and channel flipping are the main ways for Germans.
• 31% of Swedes consider online TV to be their primary TV source, the highest of the three countries studied.

“The new TV Universe study shows that online TV has become the second most popular source of TV entertainment in a remarkably short period of time,” said Colin Dixon, founder and chief analyst at nScreenMedia. “Also telling is the fact that, though most online viewing takes place on the television, consumers don’t have the discovery tools they need to efficiently find something to watch there. Features such as voice and cross-service search are thinly used in each country. There is also plenty of room for improvement with content recommendations as a quarter or less think they accurately reflect their interests.”

APAC Ready for next-gen networks

InBroadcast

There is no doubt that 5G is under the spotlight now and the world’s tier-one operators are leading the race with large-scale field trials and aggressive commercial deployment progress. Operators’ decisions on when, where and how to deploy 5G are not only driven by the availability of spectrum, but also application scenarios, site solutions and business models.

http://europe.nxtbook.com/nxteu/lesommet/inbroadcast_201905/index.php#/24

In APAC, arguably the world’s most diverse telco region, operators are encountering all of these issues. World leaders in the move towards 5G and next generation fibre networks, such as South Korea, Hong Kong, Singapore and Japan, are neighbours (in the context of the massive APAC geography) of the poorest and least developed countries such as North Korea and Afghanistan.

In terms of pure speed, Singapore vies with Iceland as the world’s trail blazer. Singapore ranked fourth (behind Norway, Iceland and Qatar) with the fastest mean download speeds over mobile in the 12 months from December 2017 – November 2018 at (54.71 Mbps) according to Ookla’ Speedtest. The nation-state trumped all others in recording mean download speeds over fixed broadband of 175.13 Mbps. Next fastest were Iceland (153.03 Mbps), Hong Kong (138.31 Mbps) and South Korea (114.67 Mbps).

At the other end of the spectrum markets such as China, Indonesia and Myanmar have seen their previously strong growth stagnate due to the challenges of connecting those still unconnected, particularly poorer and rural communities. The digital divide is greatest in markets such as Bangladesh, Pakistan and India, where 70–80 percent of the population are not yet online.

This does, however, leave room for growth; penetration levels across South Asia will rise from the 50 percent average to 61 percent by 2025, according to mobile operator’s body GSMA. By end of this year, mobile broadband will account for 93 percent of total connections across the region, with 2G all but obsolete in over half of APAC markets.

Asia continues to be the dominant player globally in the fibre broadband market too, with ResearchandMarkets.com identifying South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong and Singapore, as world leaders in this regard.

Intense competition, a techno-literate culture and favourable regulatory environments have helped drive a rapid migration to fast mobile and fixed broadband networks over recent years but facing rising customer expectations in saturated markets, operators are now looking to pioneer services in the gigabit era.

East Asia, for instance, is home to some of the most penetrated mobile markets in the world (such as Taiwan, Hong Kong and South Korea), with minimal opportunity for further subscriber growth, [per GSMA]. On average across East Asia, 81% of the population subscribe to mobile services; this will increase by just three percentage points between 2017 and 2025.

To reach the ‘Gigatopia’, as coined by Korea Telecom’s Jeong Hyeong Lee, operators must rollout an intelligent network based on Gigaspeed internet, GigaWi-Fi and 5G. China Telecom, for example, which has 255 million mobile and 135 million fixed broadband customers, expects the volume of data traffic on its network to grow eleven-fold between 2018 and 2025 as a growing number of customers use 4G and ultimately 5G mobile broadband services and FTTH uptake grows.

For many operators the rollout of 5G cannot come a moment too soon. The promise of network slicing, which creates multiple logical partitions within resource allocations are designed to address specific use cases ranging from self-driving cars to IoT devices.

The Asia Pacific as a whole is on track to become the world’s largest 5G region by 2025, led by Japan and South Korea (with Australia and China not far behind), according to the GSMA’s latest report.

The first 5G launches in South Korea, Japan and Singapore are expected to focus on enhanced mobile broadband services, supplementing the capacity and capabilities of existing networks, particularly in dense urban areas. However, 5G’s next phase will lay the foundation to support a range of future use cases and innovations, including massive connectivity and low-latency services such as critical communication services (e.g. remote surgery, smart grids) and virtual reality.

“This is the ground floor of 5G,” noted Pete Lau, CEO of Chinese handset brand OnePlus at Mobile World Congress (MWC) this spring. “The first phase will be characterised by an evident increase in speed and new cloud functionality. 2021 to 2025 will see 5G, Cloud and AI enabling a whole new level of smart functionality in our lives. Then from 2025-2030 the age of internet of things will be unleashed.”

Next summer’s Tokyo Olympics will be a showcase for 5G technologies including for use in multi-camera video contribution links and 8K virtual reality – planned as live streamed by telco NTT Docomo.

The International Olympic committee has partnered with Alibaba to envelop the Tokyo’s games venues Alibaba’s cloud. “This will transform the Olympics for fans, venues and athletes,” IOC President Thomas Bach said.

There is wide industry consensus that the biggest piece of the 5G pie will not be consumer but in industrial and enterprise applications like mining, private healthcare or the military: those with the cash to spare for the premium of millisecond precision engineering and tailored algorithms.

“For us, the 5G business case stacks up,” Andy Penn, CEO at Telstra said at MWC2019. “It makes more sense for me to invest in 5G for the enterprise. Those use cases are starting to become clearer but how we package the solution for customers is a trickier issue.”

While the conversation tends to focus on 5G, the near-realisation of this long anticipated network upgrade hasn’t come alone. It is the combination of 5G with AI, Cloud and the IoT which have all come to maturity at the same time which isbehind a new wave of computing. In different combinations this will unleash incredible compute power in our personal devices and unlock patterns in data that humans just can’t see. Together these technologies will transform how we live, work and play. The GSMA characterises this as the era of Intelligent Connectivity.

Scaling for IoT

Already the world’s largest IoT market, APAC is expected to account for 11 billion connections and $386 billion in revenue by 2025, according to GSMA Intelligence. Mobile operators SingTel, M1, Maxis, Optus and Celcom together with consultants, manufacturers and systems integrators from across Asia have joined the GSMA’s IoT Programme.

“This programme will support the development of the IoT by creating a cross-regional community to facilitate collaboration and knowledge sharing,” explains Julian Gorman, Head of APAC, GSMA.

The Labs will be available to partners in markets including Bangladesh, Cambodia, Indonesia, Nepal, Sri Lanka and Thailand.

“The aim is to accelerate the deployment of innovative IoT use cases that will improve the lives of over 3 billion people across the Asia Pacific region,” adds Gorman.

For example, in Sri Lanka, Dialog Axiata has a commercial mobile IoT network, supporting LTE and NB-IoT (NarrowBand) technologies, in partnership with Ericsson. It also partnered with Orange Electric, a manufacturer of electrical and lighting products in Sri Lanka, to launch the Orange Electric Smart Socket for the connected home market.

As M2M communication helps optimise and automate everything from urban planning to critical weather warnings, telcos are arguably in prime position to unlock growth from this emerging technology. For example, more than 500 cities in China are using Huawei’s NB-IoT network gear in smart city deployments. Chinese city Yingtan is saving 2 million tonnes of water a year after deploying 2 million smart water meters to reduce leakage.

Automated networks

The billions of internet connections predicted by the mid-2020’s should translate to enormous profits for carriers, but with the downward pressure on revenues globally, these profits will only be recognized by operators that learn to run their business more efficiently. Trying to manage that number of connections manually is costly, and operators who fall behind in automation will see all their profits consumed by higher OPEX costs.

The cost of rolling out and implementing 5G across all sectors of the economy globally is expected to reach at least $2.7 trillion by the end of 2020, according to research from finance house Greensill.

Huawei alone has invested more than $15 billion in technology and claims, with some justification to be the first company able to deploy 5G networks at scale, to deliver 14Gbps per 5G sector and boost 5G speeds using fibre up to 200Gbps - four times greater than any competitor.

“While the industry’s networks are 21st century, the network operation and maintenance is still in the 18th century,” said Chairman Guo Ping. “Globally, 70% of network faults are from human limitations.”

AI has the potential to change this and create autonomous networks that are responsive, self-healing and self-optimizing. Huawei is using AI embedded in its chips to build intelligent networks that would, among other things, reduce network issues and reduce power costs for carriers.

Increased complexity in networking and the need to scale is driving the need for increased network automation and agility. “It’s not just about putting 200-400G into the network but about the programmability of the network,” says Bob Everson, Cisco’s Global Director of Mobility. “In particular, the use of machine learning to make things like network management a bit easier. We’re a long way from self-healing networks but that is the ultimate plan which is why the focus for much of the optical industry is on software.”

E-commerce operator Rakuten plans to roll out Japan’s first new mobile network in a decade and will do using greenfield technology that it claims will see it leapfrog rivals. Its radio access will be completely virtualised and running as VNF (virtual network functions) on a private cloud enables Rakuten to deploy new services rapidly.

“We aim to not only disrupt Japan’s telco industry, we want to revolutionise mobile networks worldwide,” CTO Tareq Amin said.

Government regulation

The impact of government regulation on driving internet equality and giga-speed connectivity is critical. Some recognise superfast broadband is a pre-requisite to entering the fourth industrial revolution.

Australia’s attempt to expand fibre rollout and increase and usage speed appear to be working, according to recent reports.

“We’re now seeing benefit that high speed broadband brings to everyone in Australia,” says JB Rousselot, chief strategy officer at NBN, the public body tasked with driving the initiative. “We started roll out in rural areas and we’ve recently seen the tangible economic benefits that this brings to connecting the whole of the country not just dense urban areas.”

NBN predict that its broadband infrastructure deployment by 2021 will have added AUS$10.4 billion (US$7.36 bn) to the economy and 31,000 jobs. Other indicators in its Connecting Australia 2018 report show that video streaming isdriving data consumption, with the average home user now consuming 213 GB per month. It has connected 4.4m customers to the network and is on track, it says, to reach 8 million by 2020.

This approach still pales besides that of New Zealand where fibre connectivity reaches 70 percent of the population with a target of 87 percent attainable by 2022. Speeds range from 100Mbps to 1Gbps.

Kate McKenzie, CEO at communications infrastructure provider Chorus says there are global lessons to be learned from the open access, wholesale only, shared infrastructure model employed in New Zealand. “This has meant investing once in the national infrastructure, without wasteful duplication, allowing us to deliver congestion free fibre to the home to nearly 90% of the population,” she says.

Spark, the former encumbent and one-time parent of Chorus scooped Sky NZ to rights to this summer’s Rugby World Cup (the sport is virtually a religion in NZ as McKenzie points out), with most matches available for streaming only. She says it will be a major test of Chorus’ ability to deliver concurrent HD streams at peak to a huge national audience exclusively over broadband.

“Culture is more important than strategy for rollout,” argues McKenzie. “If you aren’t customer focussed and you are change resistant then it will be really tough to make next-gen models sustainable. It’s also good to have a bit of competition in the market to keep you on your toes.”