How Creators (Professional and Otherwise) Are Making Money in the Creator Economy

NAB

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Non-professional content creators — those who engage in creative activities as a hobby or a “side hustle,” in contrast to full-time creators — are not only making money from their endeavors, but they are earning at least six times the US minimum wage ($7.25 per hour).

What’s more, this is applicable regardless of the job, from graphic design to app and website development.

These findings are revealed in the latest release of Adobe’s “Future of Creativity“ survey of 9,000 online creators quizzed on how they are monetizing their content.

Per the report, four in 10 monetizers are making more money now than they were two years ago. And of those, eight in 10 anticipate earning even more in the next two years.

More than half of non-professional creators in the US are now monetizing their work. Globally, Brazil is in the lead, with 59% of creators saying they are able to monetize their work, followed by the US with 53%, and Germany, South Korea and the UK with 51%.

Remarkably, over three-quarters of the sample (77%) only started to earn in the past year, but 48% already  say content revenues represent more than half their monthly income.

The US, Brazil, Spain and UK are expected to see the highest levels of earning potential growth in the next two years.

The budding creator economy is attracting the attention of Gen Z, with half of 16-18 year-olds saying they would prefer to start their own creative businesses rather than attend college. They spy growth opportunities in gaming, photography and social media.

Gen Z monetizers are also earning higher hourly rates despite spending similar amounts of time on creative activities, averaging $58 per hour for 11 hours of work per week, whereas other monetizers average $51 per hour in earnings for the same amount of work.

There still remains a gender and racially defined pay gap. The report found that on average, monetizer men earn $55 per hour compared to $44 per hour for monetizer women, and BIPOC (Black, Indigenous, and People of Color) monetizers earn an average of $49 per hour, compared to an average of $62 per hour earned by Caucasians.

Across the board, creators are optimistic about the metaverse as a boon to their business: 68% of creators now expect the metaverse will bring new job opportunities as it continues to grow.

 

Can AI Imagery and Video Actually Be Good for the Creator Economy?

NAB

Generative AI, those text to image and soon to come text to video apps,  have caught the imagination. Not hard to see why. They’re fun, cheap and useful.

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Their popularity has caught the attention of big tech companies too. During the summer, TikTok launched its AI Greenscreen feature, which allows users to type text prompts to generate an image that can be used as a background in their videos. Meta also introduced Make-A-Video , Google and Microsoft launched Imagen Video and Image Creator, respectively.

The tech is also ushering in a new era of creators, helping people become first-time creators.

According to Lindsey Gamble, a self-described influencer marketing and innovation strategist, “People who may not possess the skillset to take an engaging photo or create a video, now have the opportunity to do so with this technology. AI lowers the barrier to entry for content creation, even more so than what the iPhone does for photography or TikTok does for video.”

Gamble explains that established creators can incorporate AI generators into their existing creative processes or workflows, “especially when it comes to ideation and inspiration” such as generating images and photos for storyboards.

Generative AI can also be used to expand into other creative works while saving time and money. For example, a creator that typically outsources graphic design work could use AI to handle it themselves and benefit from doing it for free or at a much cheaper cost within seconds.

So, these are real world practical uses of an AI tool. What’s not to like?

There are two main issues. One is the challenge to copyright

“Some argue that people are infringing on copyrights and plagiarizing because generators use existing works from photographers, videographers, artists,” Gamble notes. “Commercializing AI-generated content can be particularly problematic. Some have started monetizing their creations, such as selling prints of them on Etsy or licensing them to stock photo platforms, which has caused a great deal of pushback from certain creative communities.”

An argument can be made, though, for people who use generators. The specific images and videos that are generated depend on the exact text they input, including the combination of words and order of words.

“People must know how to manipulate the software, such as adding and refining text prompts to get their desired results. Although different than typical skillsets, leveraging technology is a skill in itself.”

Other challenges revolve around biases in the algorithms, using generators to create harmful content, and misinformation (or deepfakes), many of which are the same challenges that social media platforms face today.

Gamble doesn’t address this but does suggest that “the addition of revenue sharing or licensing will help make others more comfortable.”

Point is that generative AI is only just getting started. It’s going to improve rapidly. Sooner rather than later “people will view it similarly to how artists may sample existing songs to create new songs,” Gamble says. “There will also be more established norms, including how people look at the use of creating from others’ existing work.”

As someone suggested recently, the metaverse is going to be too big to be created by humans alone. There aren’t enough computer artists in the world to make it. That’s where AI generated visuals come in and where independent creators can possibly make a killing.

Gamble: “AI-powered generators will help creators accelerate their creativity and speed up their productivity, allowing them to churn out content, build audiences, and monetize faster than ever. As a result, there will be even more creators in the ecosystem, which is a benefit for all.”

 

 

The AI That Will Live in Your Video Workflow

NAB

Automatic captioning, audio cleanup and image generation from a text prompt are just some of the efficiency-saving and creativity-injecting AI tools available in smartphone apps, regular NLE software, and often just for free.

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“The AI/ML genie isn’t going back in its bottle, and for some specialties like painting, drawing, and concept art, a lot of work is about to dry up,” says Iain Anderson at ProVideo Coalition. “But it’s not all doom and gloom. While an ML system can get a lot done very quickly, humans still bring unique skills and creativity, and an artist who knows how to drive an image generation machine can use it to their advantage rather than bemoaning its existence.”

Going forward, the smart artist should focus on what an AI-augmented toolkit can do for them. Here are some of them in what is a rapidly evolving part of the industry.

Automatic captioning (available now via Premiere Pro, iOS, YouTube and Vimeo) is a neat AI trick and a big time saver. This is only going to get better, and it’s essentially free, today.

To Anderson, the interesting thing is not saving a bit of time creating captions of your finished edit, it’s getting free, accurate transcriptions of every source clip to make your editing job easier. Paid solutions like Builder and ScriptSync have offered this service in many different forms, but if AI-derived time-coded transcriptions become free, accurate, and quick enough, text-assisted editing will become a much more widely used workflow.

Need a tool to automatically recognize people and remove the background behind them? It’s called Keyper, and it works in Final Cut Pro, Motion, Premiere Pro and After Effects right now.

“While it’s not 100% perfect, it’s good enough to let you color-correct a person separate from their backgrounds, or to place text partly behind a person,” reviews Anderson. “If you can control the shot at least a little, it’s like a virtual green screen you don’t have to set up, and can work wonders.”

Simply cloning one part of an image over another is mechanical, but Photoshop’s Content-Aware Fill is a fair bit smarter. Known more generally as “inpainting,” it’s an impressive technique that’s essential for many VFX tasks. After Effects incorporated a video-ready version of this tech a few versions back. Runway can do that too.

“Soon, you should also be able to use ML-based techniques to automatically select an object, a trick which even your iPhone can do now. Another feature to be added is text recognition of your requests, so you’ll just be able to ask to ‘remove the bin in that shot’ and it will.”

Bad audio is easier to clean up than ever. iZotope RX’s Voice Denoise and the new Voice Isolation feature in Final Cut Pro use ML-trained models of what voices should and shouldn’t sound like. But beyond cleanup, modern AI methods can transform one person’s voice into another’s.

Koe Recast isn’t perfect but it’s still crazily good, according to Anderson. It lets you turn your voice (or a recording) into one of a selection of replacement voices, with a decent amount of emotion, and with far better results than the terrible robotic nonsense used by cheap YouTube ads today.

DALL-E 2, Midjourney and Stable Diffusion create realistic or artistic images from text prompts.

These automatic image generation engines have been trained on millions of the images on the internet, identified by surrounding text or their alt tags, and do their magic essentially by guided random chance. Starting from noise, the image is then randomly changed many, many times. Each new generation is assessed to discover which is the closest match for the text prompt you’ve provided, and as the process repeats, it eventually produces a coherent image.

 If you’re determined enough, you can also use these techniques to create an animation, as artist Paul Trillo did below using DALL-E 2 and Runway’s AI-powered morphing.

In fact, Runway promises to integrate this tech directly into their editing solution for a seamless “replace the background of this shot with a Japanese garden” experience.

This is just the start, and when you start combining image generation with other open-source projects — for seamless texture generation, AI-based upscalers, and deepfake-style face mapping — you’ll start to see the potential.

 

South East Asia: Far eastern promise

AV Magazine

With the pandemic basically under control, most Southeast Asian countries have re-opened their economies. Business activities have resumed and there’s a strong rebound in tourism and live performances. 

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Buoyed by positive pandemic developments, the Asian Development Bank forecasts that developing East Asian economies will grow 5.2 per cent in 2022.

AVIXA predicts the market will generate U$6.79 billion in pro AV revenues this year, representing an impressive 13.5 per cent growth over 2021. Next year looks promising too, with revenues forecast to increase a further 10.4 per cent to $7.49 billion.

“These are above the overall industry averages, highlighting SEA as a strong climate for pro AV thanks to robust recovery from the pandemic,” according to Sean Wargo, senior director of market intelligence.

“The pro AV climate has improved with more companies looking to acquire or upgrade their existing systems,” agrees Jason Yeo, senior sales manager, SEA at Christie. “If this positive trend continues and barring any unforeseen circumstances such as rising inflation and the emergence of a new, lethal variant, the outlook is positive for the next twelve to eighteen months.”

Other respondents are more circumspect. Aniket Rangnekar, APAC regional manager with Apantac says the upward trend is slower and should be taken over two to three years.

Kurt Loh, business director, Asia-Pacific, Atlona agrees that SEA is in recovery mode but that “progress continues to face global supply chain shortages while concurrently dealing with rising interest rates, inflation, and foreign exchange pressures against the USD.

We don’t know how long these will last, but the SEA AV industry will see strong growth when things begin to improve.”

Corporate driving business
Like much of the rest of the world, the corporate vertical is the largest percentage of the total revenue opportunity, at 22 per cent (per AVIXA). Media and entertainment is the second largest at 18 per cent. The fastest growth is coming from venues and events, perhaps not a surprise given that it is also the market that was the hardest hit by the pandemic and so is now recovering in earnest as in-person attendance resumes.

“Covid-19 has pushed for digital transformation, resulting in new trends when it comes to pro AV requirements,” says Jeffrey NG Kian Hong, regional director for Lightware Visual Engineering. He believes that in 18 months the local market will have increased three to five times compared to 2019.

“In education, remote teaching and training have grown, fostering global collaboration and allowing foreign teachers to share their knowledge online to students. In corporate, many companies are evolving hybrid schemes, collaboration and smart workplaces. It is a common practice now to communicate with overseas clients and offices, through UC solutions, rather than by phone.”

With corporate as the largest vertical, it follows that conferencing and collaboration would be the largest solution area, highlighting the value technology provides as a connective tissue for businesses in the region. Certainly, a global phenomenon, but no less important in SEA.

“With the shift in hybrid and remote work and learning models due to the pandemic, we are starting to see UC as an integral part of AV and the convergence of AV into IT infrastructure within the APAC region,” says Jacques Bertrand, European vice-president of Asia at Crestron Electronics. “Although adoption rates differ from country to country, Singapore is leading the pack.”

Rangnekar highlights opportunities in sports as new technologies enable local teams and niche sports to stream games to fans. “Many countries have realised the potential of local sports leagues which are able to generate good revenue through the ground event plus video rights and advertising. Muay Thai (Thai boxing) is extremely popular in Thailand, basketball/boxing in the Philippines has huge local popularity and badminton is immensely popular in Malaysia/Indonesia. All these examples can generate revenue and thus are a reason for investing in better AV infrastructure in the smaller cities of any country in SEA.”

Penetration of 5G networks in smaller cities will also benefit the AV industry by making it possible for more live events to be produced from remote regions.

According to several of our correspondents, the pandemic has resulted in a collective awakening to the importance of adopting AV tech in the region, not only to prepare themselves for a repeat viral outbreak in healthcare but also in enabling a new digital-centric lifestyle.

“Prior to Covid-19, in-person meetings were preferred and virtual conferences discouraged as they were perceived to be less personal and productive,” says Jason Yeo, senior sales manager SEA at Christie. However, such a mindset and culture have since taken a 180-degree turn.

“Companies have readily embraced AV technologies as they are proven to maintain business continuity and increase productivity. Many have made significant investments in video conferencing solutions and even closed loop systems to ensure that their day-to-day operations are not affected by sudden lockdowns and movement curbs.”

Christie reports a jump in the use of direct-view LED video walls, as well as the implementation of immersive elements such as AR and VR in installations that elevate the user/guest experience. The market for AR and VR in SEA will be valued at $31.6 billion by 2027 according to Report Ocean.

“We anticipate that pro AV technologies, particularly cutting-edge systems incorporating AR and VR, digital signage, wearables and voice-recognition capabilities will be highly sought after as more businesses establish their presence in SEA markets, such as Vietnam and Cambodia,” says Yeo.

Regional hotspots
In SEA, Singapore continues to be the default choice for regional HQs and MNCs, due to the ease of setting up of businesses in both countries. “With most decision makers of regional and global companies based here, Singapore is the ideal place to showcase new technologies,” says Bertrand.

Singapore is consistently voted one of the premier events and meetings destinations in the world. The AV activity in downtown Singapore extends to the Marina Bay waterfront, which is the venue for a nightly light and water show named Spectra.

Sasithorn Michitra of InceptTech, a distributor of Kiloview, selects Bangkok “because it’s a hub for the transport sector, offers low cost of living and a wide variety of venues like stadiums, auditoriums, racetracks.” He earmarks the August opening of sports and entertainment venue Topgolf Megacity in Bangkok – the first branch of this international brand in SEA.

Vietnam has seen a significant growth in AV activity, particularly in areas such as live broadcast events, rental staging and immersive corporate experience centres. The Masked Singer Vietnam, a reality singing competition featuring celebrities in outlandish costumes competing against each other to win the coveted Masked Singer trophy, is one of the top trending programs in Vietnam.

All other major country capitals Kuala Lumpur, Jakarta, Manila, Hanoi/Ho Chi Minh, Bangkok are the main hotspots. Smaller cities like Surabaya/Bandung/Medan in Indonesia, Penang /Malacca/Kota Kinabalu in Malaysia, Phuket/Chiang Mai in Thailand are examples of AV potential albeit that business would be routed through that region’s capital city.

Some specialised business, such as business process outsourcing, is contributing largely to Philippines growth, reports Loh. “Looking further out on the horizon, the urbanisation mega trends in Asia will drive smart cities, campus and buildings being developed to support the big increases in populations and businesses in a sustainable way over the long term,” he says. “Such ‘smart’ infrastructure will provide great opportunities and new applications for AV.”

Major regionals events to look for include the 2023 SEA Games to be held in Phnom Penh, Cambodia; and the Singapore F1 Night Race which resumed after two years of Covid shutdown.

Distinct cultures
Of all regions of the world, treating SEA as a single block is ignorant in the extreme. Broadly speaking, “users are very tech savvy, they tend to be early adopters and are quick to embrace new trends and technologies,” observes Jeff May, sales Director at conferencing specialist, Konftel. “However, it is a fragmented area, with many different and diverse economies. Each country has its own individuality and ways of working with many opportunities to explore.”

He adds: “It’s important to treat each country on its own merits and understand specific needs. One size doesn’t fit all. Video conferencing complements other technologies such as wireless content sharing so it can be beneficial to develop wider collaboration solutions.”

For Rangnekar cultural and linguistic diversity are the defining factors for how AV is used in the region. “Each country has a different language and culture, so content created in one country has no relevance or consumption in the neighbouring country and is less relevant (unless it is extremely engaging/viral and has subtitles).

“Take Malaysia and Thailand – neighbours but diverse in language and cultures. The amount of content produced and consumed in the Thai language and the volume of AV infrastructure in Bangkok alone (including signage in Bangkok malls) is different to that in Malaysia.

“The Philippines too has huge malls but being a different language and culture, the content made and the AV (DooH) they buy are different,” he says.

Routes to market
Such a diverse region requires international vendors to work with local dealers /distributors and local SIs who have their own channels and contacts to generate leads.

“Training and giving them an idea of the solution by doing online trainings and having demo units is crucial so that they get first-hand experience on how the product works and how it has been installed/integrated at site,” says Rangnekar. “Most Thai and Vietnam dealers have marketing literature translated to the local language and then distributed. Singapore, Malaysia, Indonesia has no issues with English brochures.”

Michitra stresses the importance of signing local staff or dealers who can speak the language(s) as well as the vital use of online channels like Facebook and YouTube to activate marketing campaigns and video tutorials.

Kian Hong’s advice is simple: “Be patient as the pace in SEA countries is different, compared to other markets.”

 

Netflix Follows Broadcast-Centric Business Models After Years of Innovation

Streaming Media

Just after the market closed today, Netflix issued its Q3 earnings statement, reporting 2.4 million net new paid subscribers after two straight quarters of net subscriber losses. Shares rose 14% after the closing bell with the company's better-than-expected reported results. Netflix projected 4.5 million net new subscribers in Q4, with an anticipated boost from its new, lower-cost ads tier.

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Netflix’ Basic with Ads tier will launch from November 1 in twelve countries as part of a wider development in the streaming ecosystem that will see streaming platforms engage with the metrics of linear broadcast for the first time.

“Remember that in most markets hybrid services from national broadcasters have been available for 10+ years,” comments Oscar Wall, General Manager, EMEA at subscription and billing platform Recurly. “This isn't really the case of major streaming players like Netflix and Disney+ creating something new. Rather it's about moving to an already established regional model that consumers are familiar with. This, combined with inflationary pressures, makes it likely that most streaming platforms will introduce ad-tiered models to help reduce customer churn.”

Launching cheaper services is seen as a necessary response to a cost-of-living crisis in which consumers are pulling back on discretionary investment.

Recent Accenture research revealed that 63% of consumers find it too expensive to pay for all the entertainment subscriptions they want. What’s more, AVOD revenues will grow much faster (+205%) than SVOD services (+67%) over the next five years.

The UK SVOD market has contracted by nearly one million households between January and September, according to Kantar research.

“One million households have stopped streaming,” said Dominic Sunnebo, global insight director at Kantar Worldpanel. “The reason people are cancelling is the need to save money. The most recent quarter saw two of the most anticipated releases of the year, they ranked as the top two most enjoyed pieces of subscription video-on-demand content during the period, and yet we still saw a continuation of the negative trend of the market getting smaller.”

The Netflix Ad Offer

Basic with Ads will be one of four pricing tiers. The current Basic (ads-free) plan will be upgraded to HD (720p); the most popular ‘Standard’ plan is 1080p and costs $15.49 a month; and the Premium tier is $19.99 and brings 4K (as well as download to four devices instead of two).

‘Basic with Ads’ customers will not be able to download programming initially “due to some technical complexities and how we would show ads within downloads,” explained Netflix COO and Chief Product Officer Greg Peters during a conference call. “We didn’t want to hold up the general release to implement” it.

In addition, up to 10% of Netflix library won’t be available on the Basic with Ads service, again just on debut, with licensing issues being the impediment, according to Peters.

Cutting those corners has perhaps enabled Netflix to get its ad-product into the market a month before Disney.

Assuming Netflix can deliver audiences at a cost that is acceptable to advertisers, how will their subscribers respond to advertising? It has been fiercely resisted. Reed Hastings once characterised Netflix as an ad-free zone that allows viewers to “relax” without being “exploited.”

“If the man at the top considers advertising to be a form of exploitation, then he must hope his subscribers have not been paying much attention to him,” says David Cloudsdale, founder at TV ad platform Adalyser.

About Those Ad Costs

The streamer is charging $65 CPM for serving ad impressions to 1,000 people and has reportedly insisted on a $20 million minimum spend. Netflix said it has hundreds of advertisers lined up for launch, and are “nearly sold out” of inventory.

Advertisers see a “great untapped audience” of Netflix viewers who are walled off from them,” says Brian Wieser, president of business intelligence at GroupM, the WPP-owned agency.

The ad load will average four to five minutes per hour with the spot being either 15 or 30 seconds in length. Ads will play before and during series and films. Although new release films will only have pre-rolls but titles that have been on the services for a while have the potential to have mid-rolls. There will also be tight frequency caps - a common complaint with CTV advertising.

To shore up credibility with advertisers Netflix had little choice but to join the established currencies in major markets. In the UK, measurement body Barb will report Netflix viewing every day at both a service and a programme level from launch. This means the streamer will be rated alongside commercial broadcasters like ITV and Sky as well as broadcaster VOD services.

Netflix will also join Nielsen's digital ad ratings in the US from 2023 and will eventually be part of Nielsen's rebranded measurement tool Nielsen One. Netflix has also partnered with DoubleVerify and Integral Ad Science to measure its views and traffic beginning Q1 2023.

“Both Disney+, and now Netflix’ recent decisions to join Barb should be seen as an encouraging first step towards the collaboration that advertisers and media agencies would like to see from the video industry,” Kieren Mills, Head of Broadcast at planning agency Total Media. “For several years, the advertising industry grew used to (and frustrated by) data protectionism from large media owners, which only added complexity to the overall media evaluation process.”

In the UK, broadcasters continue to account for the lion’s share of viewing in the UK. According to Barb, across 2022, broadcasters’ linear channels and on-demand services have accounted for around two-thirds of all identified viewing, while SVOD/AVOD services comprise about one-sixth of all viewing. The average daily viewing time to broadcasters’ services was 159 minutes in September 2022, and the average for SVoD/AVoD services was 36 minutes per day.

“The intrigue of discovering if there really is a goldmine of audiences, eagerly waiting to be tapped, could initially inflate CPMs,” says Cloudsdale. “However, Netflix’s welcomed move to sign up to Barb will shortcut this discovery process. Barb will enable advertisers to compare Netflix with traditional broadcasters using a consistent set of familiar audience metrics. Overlaying pricing will soon reveal a comparison of cost efficiency.”

For the first time, advertisers will have an independent view on the scale of Netflix’s event programming (The Crown, Stranger Things etc) and can make an objective comparison on the cultural significance between them and the Jewels in the Crown of the broadcaster’s schedule. Agencies will also now be able to proportion Netflix’s audience delivery in event TV series vs the more consistent programming that occupies the majority of titles on the platform.

For media agencies to effectively attribute advertising pounds across the video ecosystem, “collaboration needs to go further,” says Mills. He suggests that streaming services sign up to cross-platform advertising campaign reach and frequency measurement. In the UK, Barb’s C-Flight which measures reach and frequency across linear and BVOD, “now appearing the most frictionless route.”

Tom Harrington, head of television at Enders Analysis, worries the ad tier “will be counter to brand” for Net­flix which for a decade has prided itself as being the industry innovator.

“The ad tier will be like what everyone else has been doing for the last five years… I thought they’d have some deeply immersive, brand sponsorship, light-touch offer,” he said. “It sounds like they’re going to do pre-roll advertising and cut to ads halfway through their shows — which don’t really support ads. It might not look very good.”

Recent research suggests that more than a quarter of streamers won’t put up with adverts no matter how much money they save.

Research from WatchTVAbroad.com shows that, when streamers were asked if they’d be prepared to watch adverts in order to get a cheaper monthly subscription, 28.8% said they’d do it for any discount but 24.2% said they wouldn’t watch ads regardless of how much they saved. Nearly half (47%) said they’d consider it but it would depend on the saving.

“The cost-of-living crisis has created a nightmare for streamers and the picture seems to be deteriorating fast,” comments Jeff Richey, TV analyst at WatchTVAbroad.com. “[Streamers] provide something non-essential that is easy to cancel and subject to fierce competition. The imminent arrival of a slimmed-down Netflix subscription is likely to be just the first shot fired in a bitter price war as providers try to stem the exodus."

In parallel, the content mix of a streaming entertainment business is changing too. The winners in the streaming wars will be those companies that diversify into news, music, or sports or video games or preferably a mix of the lot, according to a Publishers Clearing House survey.

“It is glaringly clear is that having movies and TV shows are now, simply, table stakes,” stated former-cable-network-chief-turned-industry-consultant Evan Shapiro, who wrote that report. “They are not at all a differentiator: Every service has them. In streaming TV, scripted and non-fiction TV are an expensive, hit-driven, share-shift model. Consumers of all ages and incomes will sign up for them, to binge something. But if that is all you have, they will not stick around.”

Recurly’s Wall agrees: “Hitting the right price point for subscription plans is a vital and challenging task for many service providers. However, when it comes to customer retention, the Amazon Prime ‘bundling’ approach should be emulated - with entertainment bundling, exclusive offers and free next-day retail product delivery. This adds value and drives consumers to think twice before cancelling. In the end I think the streaming services that find innovative ways to bundle a range of services together, will win out.”

BTS: Star Wars Andor

IBC

Series co-producer and editor John Gilroy says filming the old fashioned way on location in the UK suited the Star Wars spin-off’s gritty look

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Just as the final act of Rogue One: A Star Wars Story neatly plugged the feature prequel into George Lucas’ Star Wars canon, so the new Disney+ series Star Wars: Andor will arc its way to the start of Rogue One. In another, not uncoincidental piece of symmetry, the editor on both projects is John Gilroy.

“Like everyone else I feel the original Star Wars (IV, 1977) was ground breaking and I was fascinated by how, on Rogue One, we were able to touch that first movie,” he told IBC365.

For those who don’t know, the breathless finale of Rogue One (2016) has rebel insurgents deliver plans of the Death Star to Princess Leia.

Leading that treasonous act was Cassian Andor (Diego Lunar) whose backstory the 12-part serial digs into. Like Gavin Hood’s film, Star Wars: Andor also leans into the mud, mood and metal of a war story.

“Rogue broke some new ground in terms of its gritty look and in its examination of character,” said Gilroy, who is also the TV show’s co-producer. “Andor is all about pursuing and pushing that a little more.”

The showrunner and co-writer on the project was Gilroy’s brother Tony who is best known for scripting four of the Jason Bourne movies as well as co-writing Rogue One. He set Star Wars: Andor five years before the events of the feature. 

“The five years beforehand is where everything is fermenting and cooking, and bubbling up, and all these nascent revolutionary, rebellious ideas are percolating all over the galaxy in all kinds of independent, improvised and ad hoc ways,” Tony Gilroy said. “People are trying to build a revolution and the tactics that are used in revolutions are uncompromising.

“Digging deeper into the life of Cassian Andor, you realise that this guy has this incredibly complicated and long history,” he says. “He arrives in Rogue One, and he’s the consummate spymaster warrior. He’s the one person that the whole Rebel Alliance is going to trust with this assignment. So, he’s the tip of the spear. How did he get to be the tip of the spear? How did he get to have all of the skills that are required for that?

Star Wars: Andor - Virtual production decisions

Star Wars: Andor makes a break from previous live-action Star Wars spin-off series The Mandalorian, The Book of Boba Fett, and Obi-Wan Kenobi, in shooting conventionally rather than using ILM’s StageCraft volume.

“We definitely discussed [using virtual production] but decided it did not lend itself to what we were trying to do,” John Gilroy explained. “Virtual production frees you up in some ways and it limits you in others. In the production design and look we wanted to go more realistic and therefore to shoot in a more old-fashioned way.”

Tony Gilroy confirmed this take: “We want reality. We want to make the galaxy real. We’re just saying that everything that’s happening is happening to people. We’re going to see people that are just absolutely thrashed by the Empire.”

To that end, much of the production was practical, with massive, intricate sets built at Pinewood Studios (harking back to the original series’ Elstree base) and in locations across England including Coryton Refinery in Essex, the Fylde Coast in Lancashire and the disused Winspit quarry in Dorset.

“We see a variety of planetary cultures that are destroyed in what will be reminiscent of Colonialism in many ways,” said Tony Gilroy, seemingly unaware of the irony.

Star Wars: Andor – No easter eggs

The filmmakers were also keen to avoid too many Easter Egg style references feeling they would be a distraction from the core story.

“If you start thinking about [those things] too much you lose sight of the story you want to tell,” said John Gilroy. “I like to think we’ve pleased the Star Wars fans as much as anybody but we’ve also paid attention to the meat and potatoes. We’re not leaning on Star Wars references as a totem.”

Covid delayed production in 2019 and even when filming began in early 2021, the brothers were prevented from travelling to the UK. Covid also prevented Tony Gilroy from directing the first three episodes as planned so the team assigned three talented British helmers including Toby Haynes (Black Mirror); Susanna White (Generation Kill); and Benjamin Caron (The Crown) to shoot the blocks.

“My whole department was in Pinewood while we were in the States and we worked that way for six months before we could travel,” said John Gilroy, who also oversaw post including VFX, sound and music. When he did get to London he was based with editorial at Hireworks on Shaftsbury Avenue.

“The end of episode three was particularly challenging to cut because we have a lot of plates spinning and the storytelling is complicated,” John Gilroy said. “My process is generally to go with my gut and make a rough cut of a scene to make it feel like a finished product as fast as you can. I also find I can get to the truth of what the show or movie is faster. Sometimes a good dialogue scene between two characters is harder to cut than action.”

He began his career working with Francis Coppola’s longtime editor Barry Malkin on Peggy Sue Got Married. His other credits include Pacific Rim, Narc, Duplicity, the Academy Award winning Michael Clayton and The Bourne Legacy (both directed by Tony Gilroy) and Nightcrawler (directed by brother Dan – who also scripted episodes of Andor).

“We are very blessed that we all get along,” John said of working with his siblings. We have a shorthand when we work together and can call each other on something—and tell each other if we feel something is bullsxxx. Tony is in New York for most of the time while I am in London but even if I don’t see him at all we communicate telepathically.”

Star Wars: Andor - UK production design

The show’s production values were on par with the work that goes into a Star Wars feature. Cassian’s home planet of Ferrix, a salvage and repair hub where the first three episodes take place, resulted in an extraordinary build in the grounds of a former quarry at Little Marlow, close to Pinewood.

“We’re still delivering space fantasy but every step of the way, we ask ourselves how we would do this if this was a movie set in an everyday town,” relates production designer Luke Hull, who won an Emmy for his production design on Chernobyl.

“We tried with all the sets to be quite earthy and raw and not get too cartoony. We wanted to be able to follow a character and not feel inhibited by the set to do that, giving more 360 environments and more detail, so it feels alive.”

The production travelled to the Cruachan Dam in the Scottish Highlands to capture for environments for the planet of Al-Dhani. Hull notes, “So many of the Star Wars planets are desert or ice, so it was interesting to find a tangible landscape that could form a different version of a planet.”

He adds, “If you look at the dam, it looks like Darth Vader’s mask. The notion of everything that we’re trying to do with the series is to suggest that the Empire was a bit of a blight on any landscape, so it was perfect.”

While the timeline for Star Wars: Andor spans a year, Season 2 begins shooting next month back at Pinewood and will cover, over 12 episodes in blocks of four, the next four years leading up to Rogue One.

 

ISE2023: Technology Zone: Multi-Technology

one of a series of 7 articles copywritten for ISE Show 2023

Professional AV has never been about a single technology or a point product business. The reason pro AV exists as an industry and the absolute driver of its continuing expansion is its integration of different, evolving audiovisual and networking technologies into outstanding creative and practical solutions.

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This diversity is also the reason why many tech vendors cannot be easily corralled into neatly defined categories. Their innovations are used in a multitude of vertical markets, cross-pollinated by the skills of specialist integrators to deliver new and exciting experiences.

Anyone wanting to appreciate the sheer scope of the AV industry’s innovation should head to straight to the Multi-Technology Zone which lies at the heart of ISE (Halls 3 and 5). In particular, Hall 3 is the location of many of ISE’s flagship exhibitor brands.

The clearest examples of the broad range of technologies in AV projects lie in visitor attractions and live event venues. Many of these are combining cinematic techniques, interactive content and theatrical design to give visitors a sensory experience of fantasy or photoreal environments with a depth of immersion they cannot enjoy at home.

The ability to engage in-presence audiences and remote guests in an interactive way is also crucial to AV going forward. That goes for the AV/IT team in the office as much as the live event producer. 

An overlapping technology which will increasingly tap into data points gathered from our sensor-laden Internet of Things is artificial intelligence.  AI is set to play a bigger role in our workspaces and our creativity, meaning that design skills and our ability to ‘collaborate’ with AI tools are going to be increasingly valuable.

Multi-dimensional formats also point to the future of out-of-home visuals which hitherto have been displayed in 2D on LED screens or projection mapped onto architecture. Three-dimensional illusions created using autostereoscopic techniques are advancing toward true holography of which there will be examples no doubt in the Multi-Technology Zone, given its concentration of projection and image display solution providers.

Related use of technologies such as game engines and powerful processors are fuelling virtual, augmented and mixed reality experiences. Extended Reality (XR), which is the catch-all for VR, AR and MR experiences, is playing a fundamental role in shaping our future real-life realities from digital learning and museum tours to CAD design and the digital twins for industrial research and engineering.

XR is entering the enterprise space too, with innovation here an expectation of Gen Z as they join the workforce post university.

Key vendors in the Multi-Technology Zone include manufacturers with a broad range of technologies such as Crestron, LANG and Kramer; makers of displays and/or projectors that serve multiple verticals, including Samsung, LG, Epson, Sharp/NEC, Panasonic, Absen and Christie; and broad-based audio companies including Harman, Shure and Biamp.