The look of love: OSF

copy written for One Stop Films in British Cinematographer

OSF specialise in supplying camera, lenses and grip equipment to the film, TV, commercial and promo industry and could be the industry’s best kept secret. 

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There’s nothing cinematographers love more than perfecting a distinctive look that will help tell the story for their director. In the age of digital sensors which tend to render all glass equal this is often quite a challenge.  

Yet there is a place, one of the best industry’s kept secrets we dare say, where unusual, rare, and vintage lenses are lovingly housed ready for the director of photography with eyes for a prize. 

If you want to shoot on the anamorphic lenses through which Vittorio Storaro, ASC, AIC, created Francis Ford Coppola’s hallucinatory Vietnam War epic Apocalypse Now, look no further than One Stop Films. 

“Over the past 15 years we have built up a significant collection of some of the rarest spherical and anamorphic lenses in the UK,” Jonathan Iles, who co-founded the company in 2008 with Danny Bishop who both worked in the camera department. “Most importantly the lenses are maintained in house; in tip-top condition optically and mechanically. It’s our investment in these lenses that allows us to work with cinematographers of the highest calibre to give your production an edge, with a specific look.” 

Iles and Bishop fell in love with old professional glass at the time when film was being phased out and digital cinema rose to the fore. They set about acquiring amazing vintage and anamorphic lenses including sets of Todd-AO, Lomo, Cineovisions, Cooke S2, Canon K35s and Russian-made Elites which would otherwise have remained gathering dust in garages and attics. 

Today, One Stop Films has one of the widest selections of 35mm and full frame glass in the UK. They’re constantly updating the inventory with unique optics for DOPs from offices at 3 Mills Studios in East London; offering a range of services – both spherical and anamorphic.  

“All of our equipment is in immaculate condition,” Iles says. “We recognise that this is paramount to your production. We can offer package deals and are happy to help with testing or to answer any technical questions you might have.” 

These might be answered by ‘legendary’ lens technician Agis Louka, whose extensive knowledge was built working on location in the camera teams on classic Oscar winning films The Killing Fields, The Mission, Gorillas In The Mist and Gladiator. 

Simon Dennis BSC visited OSF seeking a specific look for the 2016 horror mystery The Limehouse Golem directed by Juan Carlos Medina.

OSF rented a number of modern Anamorphic lenses for Dennis to compare alongside the facility’s vintage varieties and knew he’d found what he wanted when he saw the Todd-AO. 

“These were old school Anamorphics in the truest sense, used on movies like Dune and Mad Max,” recalls Dennis. “There were four in the box – 35, 55, 75 and 100mm – with glass weathered at the edges in places.” 

“Even without filtration they had a natural, gauzy feel with haloing flares and beautiful fall-off. Age-wise they felt tonally closer to the ‘60s and ‘70s, which was no bad thing. Also, the 55mm had a 12-inch minimum focus, which I’d never seen before. When Juan saw the tests, he immediately stopped me and said, ‘This is the movie, this is the look I had always imagined!’ During the shoot, Juan joked by calling the Todd’s the ‘jewels’ of the shoot which, on hindsight, was a pretty good description of them. So, thank you to One Stop for helping us film our distinct period look!” 

Other productions supplied by OSF include The Ballards of Renegade Nell (DP Oli Russell with Caldwell Chameleons Anamorphics and Canon Type SKs); The Bastard Son and The Devil Himself (DP Nick Remy Mathews ACS with Canon Type SKs); Nolly (DP Sam Care with Meru Anamorphics); Supacell (DP Aaron Reid with Blackwings / OPF squish diopters; and Culprits for Phillip Blaubach BSC equipped with Caldwell Chameleons Anamorphics, Blackwings T Tuned and Signature Primes. 

OSF can also supply the latest digital cameras, including full frame, and has a good range of 35mm and 16mm film cameras.  

“We would love to welcome you to our studio to take you through comprehensive tests, to compare cameras and lenses side by side and to build the right package for your shoot and budget.” 

 

Smart lenses leap forward

copy written for Zeiss in British Cinematographer

Being able to obtain shading and distortion metadata is vital to fast, accurate and complex shot creation for VFX and virtual production. 

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Tracking metadata efficiently from capture downstream through post-production has long been a vexing issue and one the rapid rise of Virtual Production has thrown into sharp focus. 

Often, metadata doesn’t make it downstream for VFX use at all, or it arrives in a form which is unreliable or incomplete . Ideally you need to determine parameters, such as what the depth of field was, where the focus distance was set, what the lens distortion and shading characteristics were in order for 3D rendering and compositing of CG assets to match the creative look captured through the camera. On-set virtual production exacerbates this problem because the process needs to happen in real time. That’s why acquiring, encoding, and mapping camera and lens metadata has become one of the most important areas of innovation in recent times. 

Lens metadata is generated by sensors within the lens itself and can be fixed information, like focal length or the firmware version of the lens, as well as dynamic information such as calibrated focusing distance and t-stop value, depth of field and hyperfocal distance, horizontal field of view and entrance pupil position.  

This data is communicated via the Cooke/i* technology, which is one of the pioneers in this space, but there are two crucial elements not currently included: shading and distortion data.  

With the launch of ZEISS eXtended Data in 2017 and the release of the new CinCraft Mapper platform in 2022, ZEISS now offers multiple solutions for obtaining this information, taking the Cooke/i* protocol a stage further and enabling users to obtain frame-accurate shading and distortion data, both in real-time and for export for use in post-production. 

It is an innovation that is vital to producing the most efficient, accurate VFX workflows. 

Innovation for VFX 

The two key VFX workflows where having shading and distortion data is of crucial concern are compositing and matchmoving. 

Compositing 

The film crew records the footage, which has distortion and shading present. A VFX artist renders the CGI assets, which have no lens characteristics at all. Then compositing software is used to combine real-live footage with CGI. Final adjustments are made to the image by adding back lens characteristics like distortion, shading and film grain. 

 As it stands, distortion must be removed from the live footage in order to combine it with CGI. Then re-added with shading for a realistic looking final image. 

Matchmoving 

The film crew moves the physical camera and records the footage. Matchmoving software replicates the physical camera movement by tracking points in the footage and generates a virtual camera with the exact same movement as the physical camera. 

Once again, distortion must be removed before VFX, because it makes matchmoving inaccurate or even impossible due to it distorting the potential tracking points within the video clip. 

The benefits to VFX workflows of being able to use frame-accurate shading and distortion lens data should be obvious. It takes away the guesswork of interpolation, removes one whole step in the process and means VFX artists and studios can generate complex shots faster and more accurately. 

Benefits in pre-production 

However, the benefits do not end there. There are advantages to pre-production too. At a minimum there’s no longer a need to shoot and subsequently analyse lens grids in order to determine the shading and distortion characteristics of your lenses – ZEISS already provide it.  

Considering that shooting lens grids is a very manual process, with an element of guesswork still required to interpolate between different camera/lens settings, you can now remove the risk of human error. 

Additionally, there’s no need for camera assistant or focus puller to calibrate any lenses nor generate lens data files. Since distortion, vignetting and other lens characteristics are embedded into the lens and can be recorded electronically on set for each video clip, there’s no need to shoot lens grids or grey cards for VFX. This again saves time and provides much more accurate data. 

Benefits on-set 

There are multiple advantages to capturing this additional metadata on set too. For example, the script or VFX supervisor does not need to protocol lens data (focal, focus, iris). This information can be recorded inside the video clip for each frame. 

The camera assistant can exchange lenses faster. There’s no need to setup lens focal or type in the camera since the lens is recognised automatically.  

The DP and their camera team also gain a superior overview of lens settings. On sets with multiple cameras in particular, it is essential to rapidly gauge the different configurations at one glance (from focal length and focus to iris, depth of field etc.). 

What’s more, shots with a lot of movement, like car chases with cranes or Steadicam, become easy to devise and can be set-up with greater freedom by the crew. 

Benefits for virtual production  

The difference on a virtual production set is that the shading and distortion data is required in real-time, however the same issues and principles with the traditional VFX workflow still apply. 

 For example, when shooting in a VP set on a wide-angle lens, there’s going to be an element of distortion and curvature of the lens as you move away from the centre of the frame – the further you are away from the centre, the more your corners will bend, as will your walls and floor. 

If the intention then is to have CG objects or characters present next to your live subjects, the slight curvature of the floor, for example, may make it appear the computer-generated imagery is floating an inch or so off the floor, because we’ve not taken the effect of the distortion in the CG world into account. 

So not only do you want to be able to track the shading and distortion characteristics, but you need to apply them in real time, through a game engine, to ensure realistic final pixel on set.  

You can do this now with ZEISS smart lens technology. 

Summing up 

The maturation of on-set virtual production techniques has offered lots of new options for content creators, but it has also reinforced the need for the industry to find better solutions to address a long-time challenge. 

ZEISS has risen to this challenge and built on the ground-breaking work by Cooke, to obtain frame accurate, dynamic shading and distortion characteristics from the lens. While this is essential to helping VFX teams match CGI assets with real-life elements, the ability to automatically capture more frame-accurate data at source saves time, eliminates errors and enables the whole creative team to create a better picture. 

How can you obtain and use this lens metadata? 

There are two main routes users can take to obtain ZEISS lens metadata: 

ZEISS eXtended Data 

Provides real-time shading and distortion data, but can also be captured, recorded and exported for use in post-production 

Metadata can be obtained via the external connection point on the barrel of the lens, or embedded directly into the video files via the PL mount four-pin connector (with compatible cameras) 

Using third-party accessories, such as the DCS LDT-V1, for live lens data streaming to Unreal Engine 

Supreme Prime, Supreme Prime Radiance and CP.3 lens families all available with eXtended Data capability 

ZEISS CinCraft Mapper 

Perfect for compositing and matchmoving in post-production 

When paired with compatible cameras, lens metadata can be saved direct to RAW file and converted to EXR sequence  

EXR Sequence uploaded to Mapper platform 

Frame accurate ST and Multiply maps provided at the click of a button, compatible with industry leading VFX software 

Distortion data also available on a number of older ZEISS lenses, including Master Primes and Ultra Primes 

 

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The Voice Steps into the Metaverse - the Future of Blended Entertainment?

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A virtual version of ITV Studios’ reality format The Voice is “redefining how entertainment can be consumed 365-days a year,” according to Justin Hochberg, CEO of metaverse developer Virtual Brand Group (VBG).

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The Voice Studios, built by VBG for ITV Studios on metaverse platform Decentraland, launched last month during the final weeks of Season 23 of the show on US network NBC.

It is free for anyone to access and intended to be a permanent year-round destination where, among other things, fans have a chance to audition for a potential slot on a future season of the series.

It is designed as a global hub into which planned activations for key territories, such as the UK, will be connected. The Voice currently airs in 148 versions around the world.

“We are hoping to build this global hub for The Voice to give local fans places to see their local coaches,” explained Lucie Stoffers, ITV Studios’ head of brand licensing, global partnerships. “Australia might be next where we can tie in the Australian audience to the same experiences and create a global hub with a local relevance to local friends.”

The Voice Steps into the Metaverse: Decentraland and Engagement

The launch follows a four-day virtual pop-up event for The Voice last November at the Decentraland Metaverse Music Festival. The music festival featured acts by dozens of bands – virtually – including Bjork, Ozzy Osborne and Deadmau5. In the adjacent The Voice experience, fans spent an average of 49 minutes per session — generating 13 times more engagement than typical social media platforms. By contrast, said Hochberg, the average click-through rate for an ad on social media is less than one per cent.

“Over the last decade the idea that [banner ads] was going to be an amazing way to connect brands with people has not proven all its value. In our world, 13 per cent of those who came to play clicked through, even when there was nothing free being giving away [as an incentive]. That math on its own tells me that the world of deep immersive engagement is so much more powerful than what I call pancake media (two-dimensional, flat screen). It’s phenomenal to see those type of results.”

It’s clear that the VBG see the metaverse as a tremendous untapped business opportunity. Hochberg – a former producer of the American version of The Apprentice - said his company’s job is to work with brands “to help them connect with youth culture and find ways that are not being serviced by existing media – TV, print or social media. It’s less about the technology and more about how you best connect with your consumers.”

That’s why ITV are playing in this space too. It’s not the first time it has dipped into the metaverse and Web3. A set of ‘collectable’ NFTs for Thunderbirds dropped last year and ITV-owned agency Metavision created a version of I’m A Celebrity…Get Me Out Of Here! in Fortnite to mark the launch of ITVX.

“With VBG we have a whole line up of activations with The Voice to come including on Roblox and Sandbox,” said Stoffers.

The Voice Steps into the Metaverse: Ramsay Opens his Doors

Coming soon to Sandbox is Gordon Ramsay’s Hell’s Kitchen described as “a multi-dimensional, participatory adventure for our community to take part in challenges, win prizes, and even be reviewed by the 3 Michelin starred Chef.”

As ITV said in its promotion for the virtual Hell’s Kitchen “no activation is complete without the opportunity to buy a ‘digital representation in sync with the theme” - 2333 unique avatars will be available for purchase.

“Broadcasters have historically found it hard to meet their audience but this is where the metaverse opportunity lies,” said Hochberg. “Broadcasters and programme brands can now meet their consumers from different countries. They can meet even when the show isn’t on TV through a global hub that gives you ways to interact and build things.”

Regardless of the platform – Decentraland, Sandbox, Roblox – Hochberg said developing a successful activation is all about iteration.

“You try something, you adjust it, you look at the data - unlike a TV show, where once the programme airs you can do very little about it until maybe the next series.”

It’s one reason, Hochberg claimed, why “the metaverse is redefining how entertainment can be consumed on a 365-day a year basis.”

The short-term goals for ITV are to find out what fans like, what success looks like in terms of time spent on the platform and what does the audience engage with the most.

“The main challenge has been working out to adapt The Voice brand to the metaverse,” said Stoffers. “We learned we shouldn’t just copy & paste what we’re doing IRL into the metaverse. It was helpful to work with VBG to create something new.”

The Voice Steps into the Metaverse: An Ongoing Experience

Whereas the pop-up was temporary The Voice Studios is intended to exist indefinitely. Hochberg said, “Like Disneyworld, it is a persistent experience. It is also bigger. Where we had 2-3 things to do in the pop-up, we now have five different games. Instead of a small quarter, NBC has an entire building.”

The selection of virtual clothing (wearables) has been expanded. This merch can be paid for using conventional mechanisms like PayPal or Visa and Decentraland’s own currency Mana. Merch can also be won.

“Wearables are virtual clothing that participants can wear just to look fashionable,” said Hochberg said. “For first time in the history of any TV show we have merchandise that mirrors what the coaches give out on the TV show.”

On NBC’s The Voice, coaches including Kelly Clarkson and Niall Horan, will gift a collectable hoodie or sweatshirt to contestants every season.

“We recreated that limited edition merchandise so anyone can collect it. You can’t get that anywhere else but you can earn it by playing on Kelly’s team in the metaverse. In short, [the new activation] is bigger, better and more connected.”

VBG also works with fashion brands and said are it is at the forefront of creating the physical + virtual (aka “phygital”) retail environment that delivers new products and more revenue faster than ever. The first NFT merchandise drop on the pop-up The Voice event sold out in three hours.

The Voice Steps into the Metaverse: Real Life Engagement

Hochberg argues that fans will flock to metaverse experiences like this because the experience is more like real life. Interactions between celebrities and fans and among communities are the biggest difference between metaverse platforms and traditional social media like TikTok or Facebook.

“Social media is not very social,” he insisted. “For example, if a celebrity posts something you might write back a comment and or you might post a picture or a hashtag but your comments will get lost in the noise of thousands of people doing the same thing. There is very little way for me to connect with you. It’s a limited experience.

“What makes virtual worlds so sticky by contrast is that they are social experiences.”

He likens virtual worlds to going to a party, a festival or to the park, “places where we are around people, we can talk and have a more personal conversation.” Hochberg claims that visitors are likely to spend multiple hours a day playing in virtual worlds as opposed to the 10-minute average visiting a physical retail store.

“These are social gaming platforms,” he added. “If we went to the park with a frisbee and our dog we’d probably have a great time and we could do an unlimited number of things. That is what makes social gaming platforms sticky.”

One of the ways that the physical world of televised and at-arena events may merge with their virtual counterparts is via technology like holograms and augmented reality. You could imagine a fan in the guise of their avatar in The Voice Studios winning an audition and then being invited to translate that experience back to the live TV show, still as an avatar.

One example: AI-based technology including synthetic voice creator Respeecher and deepfake video specialist Metaphysic ‘resurrected’ Elvis Presley live during the final of America’s Got Talent last autumn.

“It’s early days but when the metaverse is in a more persistent form we hope to connect to physical concept and spaces,” said Stoffers.

“Avatars and holograms are technically possible now,” added Hochberg. “The thing to keep in mind with Gen Z and Alpha is that they live their life in multiple places at the same time. They might be watching The Voice and maybe dressing up and performing with the virtual Voice.

“So yes, The Voice Studios is experimental but virtual worlds are not speculative. There are already 600 million people in the world using virtual worlds.”

Three decades ago Mosaic became the first widely available web browser was first released. At that time there were a mere 10,000 academics exchanging papers about it.

“With the metaverse we have 600 million people as the starting point. We all have a smartphone to access the metaverse. It doesn’t require another piece of hardware or special technical knowledge so the adoption rate will go much, much faster.”

He said it took people a while to realise that the Internet was more than just a visual brochure but a way to conduct e-commerce. Virtual Brand Group’s perspective is why wait five years to figure this out.

“Why not start from the onset with that perspective? Every partner that we onboard or consult with is all about how quickly we can convert your metaverse business to be $20-$50 million,” he concluded.

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Barbie: Pretty in Pink

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If you’re already tickled pink to see Barbie on the big screen you will be familiar with the dayglo gloss with which the film appears plastered.

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So much so that the entire supply of the fluorescent pink paint available at the time was diverted to create Barbieland at Warner Bros Leavesden, which in turn caused a shortage of stock at supplier Rosco.

“The world ran out of pink,” the film’s Production Designer, Sarah Greenwood, told the Architectural Digest.

In the same interview, the film’s Director Greta Gerwig said the colour was important in “maintaining the ‘kid-ness’” of the film’s aesthetic.

“I wanted the pinks to be very bright, and everything to be almost too much,” Gerwig said, adding that she didn’t want to “forget what made me love Barbie when I was a little girl.”

Barbie is both live action feature and marquee sales generator for brand owner Mattel. A new white paper exploring the psychological impact of colour in narrative storytelling and brand advertising has just been published by New York finishing house Nice Shoes.

Its colourists argue that it is not only creativity that relies on colour: all forms of communication do. The link between colour and human psychology is so established that any communications strategy must utilise its power.

Orlando Wood, Chief Innovation Officer at marketing agency System1 Group helped put the paper together. He said: “If you want to create an environment in which people are happy to exist and spend time, it needs to be an attractive and beautiful one.

“All the available evidence tells us that warmer colours are more successful at doing this than cooler ones. They make us more comfortable, they elicit positive emotional reactions, and we tend to want to continue watching something warmer for longer.”

Clearly the primary-coloured Barbie is intent on bringing us feelgood vibes – even if Ken is having an existential crisis.

There’s something more to the colour in Barbie than just its neon-candy appeal. Colour in visual communications is a code, overt or subtle, and pink itself has an interesting history.

“Millennial pink was one of those important colours that captured the zeitgeist,” Jenny Clark, Head of Color at WGSN, said last year. “It pushed the boundaries to become a colour which was gender neutral and it felt empowering, youthful, playful, and, most importantly, wearable.”

Nice Shoes noted that during the 2016 US presidential election, millennial pink represented resistance with hundreds of thousands of people marching and protesting while wearing pink hats, in contrast to the red MAGA caps of the incumbent president. The shade swiftly became omnipresent across industries and products (interiors, fashion, tech) and soon reached a point of cultural oversaturation.

Its demise was marked this year when the London restaurant, Sketch, redecorated its iconic pink Instagram-destination of a dining room (launched in 2014, the same year as Wes Anderson’s rose-hued The Grand Budapest Hotel hit the cinemas), in shades of earthy yellow.

Pink is the shade most closely associated with femininity and girlhood today. Director Sofia Coppola, most known for her layered depictions of womanhood, used shades of pink in The Virgin Suicides and in Marie Antoinette to interrogate the hyper-feminine nature of her protagonists, bathing them in rosy hues.

Pink’s association with all things feminine, however, is a fairly recent one. As Nice Shoes outlines, the diktat of pink for girls and blue for boys - familiar to anyone who has witnessed ‘gender reveal’ videos - was quite the reverse only a hundred years ago. In 1927, pink was thought to be the appropriate colour for boys due to its association with strength (and the complementary associations to its parent colour, red) while blue was thought to be daintier, prettier, more suited to little girls.

The historian Jo B. Paoletti thought that the invention of prenatal testing solidified this trend from the 1980s onwards. When parents learnt the sex of their baby, they could ‘emphasise’ it with the colours of the products they purchased before the baby’s birth.

Mattel bought into this with its early ranges of Barbie merchandise though it has swerved from straightforward gender and colour stereotypes in recent times (and in doing so been accused of ‘rainbow capitalism’).

The 2008 animated feature, Barbie & The Diamond Castle is often said to be the gayest Barbie movie yet. Liana, the Barbie, and her BFF Alexa, “are dragged off a rainbow, away from their cis-het partners”.

According to Nice Shoes, the meaning of colour needs to be placed in context and that demonstrates that there’s nothing essentially ‘feminine’ or ‘masculine’ about either blue or pink: “In another hundred years the trend may be reversed again or done away with altogether.”

Take for instance the arrival of Janelle Monáe’s Make Me Feel video. The 2018 video used neon shades of pink, blue and purple at once (the colours of the bisexual flag), which was dubbed ‘bisexual lighting’ by the media.

The openly queer Monáe spends the video flirting with her girlfriend, played by Tessa Thompson, and playfully running back and forth between her and a man.

“While the use of those colours isn’t itself new, the newfound queer - specifically bisexual - meaning gave audiences a new way of reading moving images,” Nice Shoes suggested.

Films including Moonlight, Atomic Blonde, and the ‘San Junipero’ episode of Black Mirror bathed their protagonists in the ethereal mix of blue, pink, and purple light, “conveying metatextual elements of those characters’ biographies through colour alone,” Nice Shoes’ Colourists suggested

“Employing the mix of blue, purple, and pink works as a signal to the audience that the characters on screen are bi, without having to spell it out narratively at every point.”

On the surface, Gerwig’s film appears to play to the high camp of Ken living in a Barbie world. In devising Barbie’s fantasy house the director referenced Pee-wee’s Big Adventure to Wayne Thiebaud’s paintings of pies to Gene Kelly’s tiny painter’s garret in An American in Paris.

“Why walk down stairs when you can slide into your pool? Why trudge upstairs when you take an elevator that matches your dress?”

For Barbie’s bedroom, the team paired a clamshell headboard upholstered in velvet with a sequined coverlet. Her closet, meanwhile, reveals coordinated outfits in toy-box vitrines. “It’s very definitely a house for a single woman,” said Greenwood, noting that when the first Dreamhouse (a cardboard foldout) was sold in 1962 it was rare for a woman to own her own home.

Set decorator Katie Spencer summed up: “She is the ultimate feminist icon.”

 

 

AI Can Be An Awesome Creative Assistant, Here’s How

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The Harvard Business Review outlines three scenarios that companies should prepare for in the brave new world of AI.

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The more cheerful one is that AI will be your best creative assistant. AI tools will give us all a lift away from less menial work to be able to concentrate on the more interesting work of management and curation.

The authors, David De Cremer, Nicola Morini Bianzino and Ben Falk, suggest that we learn “prompt engineering” — the skill of asking the machine the right questions — to produce more relevant and meaningful content that humans will only need to edit somewhat before they can put it to use.

Overall, this scenario paints a world of faster innovation where machine-augmented human creativity will enable mainly rapid iteration.

A doomsday scenario is if machines monopolize creativity. Here, human writers, producers and creators are drowned out by a tsunami of algorithmically-generated content, with some talented creators even opting out of the market. If that would happen, then an important question that we need to address is: How will we generate new ideas?

“In this scenario, generative AI significantly changes the incentive structure for creators, and raises risks for businesses and society,” De Cremer, Bianzino and Falk caution. “If cheaply made generative AI undercuts authentic human content, there’s a real risk that innovation will slow down over time as humans make less and less new art and content.”

This could also mean fundamental changes to what content creation looks like. If production costs fall close to nothing, that opens up the possibility of reaching specific — and often more marginalized — audiences through extreme personalization and versioning.

That sounds like a bonus — except that if enhanced personalized experiences are applied broadly, “then we run the risk of losing the shared experience of watching the same film, reading the same book, and consuming the same news,” says HBR.

“In that case, it will be easier to create politically divisive viral content, and significant volumes of mis/disinformation, as the average quality of content declines alongside the share of authentic human content.”

The third potential scenario that the HBR authors consider as possible is one where the “techlash” resumes with a focus against algorithmically-generated content. In this scenario, humans maintain a competitive advantage against algorithmic competition.

“One plausible effect of being inundated with synthetic creative outputs is that people will begin to value authentic creativity more again and may be willing to pay a premium for it.”

It follows that political leadership taking action to strengthen governance of information spaces will be needed to deal with the downside risks that could emerge. For instance, content moderation needs are likely to explode as information platforms are overwhelmed with false or misleading content, and therefore require human intervention and carefully designed governance frameworks to counter.

Is computational creativity possible? A pair of academics have come up with a reassuring answer. Chloe Preece and Hafize Çelik write in The Conversation that the key characteristic of AI’s creative processes today is that computational creativity is systematic, not impulsive, unlike humans. Generative AI is programmed to process information in a certain way to achieve particular results predictably, albeit in often unexpected ways.

“In fact, this is perhaps the most significant difference between artists and AI: while artists are self- and product-driven, AI is very much consumer-centric and market-driven — we only get the art we ask for, which is not perhaps, what we need.”

Preece and Celik conclude that, so far, generative AI seems to work best with human partners — even acting as a catalyst for human creativity.

“Art history shows us that technology has rarely directly displaced humans from work they wanted to do. Think of the camera, for example, which was feared due to its power to put portrait painters out of business. What are the business implications for the use of synthetic creativity by AI, then?”

They note that AI has been known to “hallucinate” — an industry term for spewing nonsense — and that human skill is required to make sense of it — “that is expressing concepts, ideas and truths, rather than just something that is pleasing to the senses. Curation is therefore needed to select and frame, or reframe, a unified and compelling vision.”

A similarly optimistic view is held by Ahmed Elgammal, professor at the Department of Computer Science at Rutgers University. Writing at Science Focus, he says the current generation of AI is limited to copying the work of humans and that it must be controlled largely by people to create something useful.

“It’s a great tool but not something that can be creative itself,” Elgammal says. “We must be conscious about what’s happening in the world and have an opinion to create real art. The AIs simply don’t have this.”

Artists are often the first to experiment with new technology. But the immediate future of generative video is being shaped by the advertising industry, which is leaning into the often disjointed, surreal and even horrific imagery that generative AI tends to produce.

For example, the 12-minute movie The Frost is being held up as one of the most impressive — and bizarre — examples yet of this strange new genre to date. Every shot is generated by AI (DALL-E 2 and D-ID mainly) yet, it was also prompted, tweaked and guided by humans at Detroit-based video creation company Waymark.

“[AI is] not a perfect medium yet by any means,” Josh Rubin, an executive producer at Waymark and the director of The Frost, tells Will Douglas Heaven at MIT Tech Review. “It was a bit of a struggle to get certain things from DALL-E, like emotional responses in faces.”

The Frost follows a fake beer ad, “Synthetic Summer,” from British studio Private Island, which was designed to showcase the video capabilities of generative AI.

According to Heaven, both examples play to the strengths of the tech that made them.

“The Frost is well suited to the creepy aesthetic of DALL-E 2,” he writes. “Synthetic Summer has many quick cuts, because video generation tools like Gen-2 produce only a few seconds of video at a time that then need to be stitched together.”

This may mean that we will start to see generative video used in martial arts videos, or music videos and commercials, he speculates.

More complex narrative video, however, still requires huge amounts of human creative input.

 

What Is Apple’s Vision Pro (and, Um, What Are We Doing With It)?

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Vision Pro, Apple’s long anticipated entrance into AR/VR headgear, was announced with much fanfare last week and now everyone is trying to figure out what and who it is for and whether it will be a success.

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“The Vision is stuffed with innovations that eclipse every other headset on the market,” The Economist found in its write-up, adding, “The product is dusted with Apple’s user-friendly design magic.”

Blogger Nick Hilton called the device “arguably the most exciting new product on Apple’s slate since the iPhone.”

The device’s eye-tracking “is the closest thing I’ve seen to magic,” tech reviewer Marques Brownlee said in Business Insider.

VR/AR agency founder Cortney Harding, called Vision Pro “an overnight sensation seven years in the making.”

Apple CEO Tim Cook said, “We believe Apple Vision Pro is a revolutionary product,” and Elav Horwitz, EVP and global director of applied innovation at McCann Worldgroup, took him at his word.

Vision Pro “revolutionizes advertising, integrating digital experiences into the real world,” she theorized. “Streets become immersive playgrounds, and homes transform into immersive stores. Brands can deliver meaningful digital experiences seamlessly.”

In truth it does nothing of the sort, at least nothing that can’t be achieved now on any number of metaverse platforms from Decentraland to Meta Horizons.

Apple’s message is clear: after desktop and mobile computing, the next big tech era will be spatial computing — also known as augmented reality or mixed reality — in which 3D computer graphics are overlaid on the world around the user.

But it didn’t need Matthew Ball, sage of Silicon Valley, to point out the emperor’s new clothes in Apple’s presentation. The idea of spatial computing has been around for longer than the metaverse and is in fact the metaverse by any other name. 

We are pretty much where we were before Apple’s launch: that is, a long way from a wearable device that the mass of the population will adopt to access a 3D version of the internet.

If Apple is playing a long game, then what does it hope to achieve in the short term with Vision Pro?

Some this as a victory for AR over VR and a power shift away from Meta, that has struggled to convince anyone that VR is now.

“It feels like Apple will probably force through the advent of AR with Vision Pro,” says Hilton. “It is, after all, the logical extension of a product base that has been tied together, as much as anything, by a shared UX.”

That said, Hilton isn’t convinced that Vision is augmented reality, but is rather an augmented version of a smart phone.

“AR must, definitionally, be something that augments the lived, human experience. [Vision Pro] prioritizes the augmentation of smart phone experiences, rather than human ones. Improving the way we experience FaceTime and Zoom calls is, in my opinion, not a way of unlocking new pathways for the human experience, but a streamlining of extant technological advances.”

The Economist also observed that Apple had “strangely uninspiring suggestions for what to do with its miraculous device.

“Look at your photos — but bigger! Use Microsoft Teams — but on a virtual screen! Make FaceTime video calls — but with your friend’s window in space, not the palm of your hand! Apple’s vision mainly seemed to involve taking 2D apps and projecting them onto virtual screens (while charging $3,499 for the privilege). Is that it?”

There is unanimous agreement that Vision Pro is the state-of-the-art AR or VR headset, but its price point is not the only thing that might put consumers off from actually using it.

Scott Galloway, a professor at New York University’s Stern School of Business, was doubtful:

“I believe these ski goggles will be the company’s first major commercial failure of the century,” he said. “The device will age as well as candy cigarettes — and Tim Cook knows it. Headsets are a bad form factor, full stop, and no headset-based product will achieve mass adoption. The nosebleed price limits trial, even by influencers and institutions.”

Galloway suggested the whole launch is a cynical exercise to scupper Meta’s plans for Oculus: “This may be the first product in history that’s primary purpose is to remind consumers who can’t afford it how crappy the competition they can afford really is.”

He added, “The $250 billion cosmetics industry helps us mimic visual cues for health and reproductive fertility. There is no version of a headset or goggles that makes us seem more appealing.”

Although a post in response to the article points out that in the metaverse we will be interfacing with each other as photoreal alternative versions of ourselves — so we can appear to others as we desire.

There is also widespread acknowledgement that the first-generation Vision Pro is nowhere near the final iteration of the headset — “in point of fact, it will likely look prohibitively clunky in just a few years’ time,” says Hilton. “But now everyone knows that Apple sees AR as its future.”

Galloway observed something similar, suggesting that the launch was strategically intended to stop Meta from running away with a virtual reality version of the spatial internet.

“Apple doesn’t have to own the headset category to win the war against Meta, or even sell that many,” he said. “The company just has to keep the category unsettled and splintered so Meta doesn’t own it. It has the cash to play spoiler — it generates over $100 billion per year in free cash flow, more than enough to engage in a high-cost, low-ROI arms race.”

The Economist says the real purpose of the Vision was to get the hardware into the hands of developers and thus speed up the march to the metaverse on Apple’s terms.

“Apple will not sell many of the expensive first-generation units, and doesn’t care. Its aim is to get the product to the people who will work out what spatial computing can do.”

Although Apple pointedly didn’t focus on gaming as an application, it did show a demo from Disney extolling the virtues of watching movies on the face screen. Perhaps Apple’s TV and film division will surprise us with some content that can only be appreciated on Vision Pro?

The Economist speculates that surgeons, engineers and architects, or educational institutions might adopt the Vision Pro first — in truth, the same sectors that Meta and Google have been pushing with their mixed-reality gear.

The truth is no one yet knows what the metaverse or spatial computing’s killer use-case might be — or if it even has one.

Behind the Scenes: French Open 2023 Tennis

IBC

With more than 300 Warner Bros. Discovery staff, including production staff, experts and reporters on-site across the UEFA Champions League Final to Roland Garros and Le Mans and more, the WBD were tasked with delivering over 70 hours of live content.

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Over that weekend, a staggering 370 live feed and production control rooms (PCR) recordings were booked while WBD had 70 concurrent events planned for its digital platforms. PCRs were open across Europe including London, Paris, Oslo, Stockholm, Copenhagen, the Netherlands, Warsaw, Madrid, Milan and Munich.

For tennis fans all attention was on the men’s and women’s finals from Stade Roland Garros in Paris. WBD took the host feed from Host Broadcast Services (HBS) in Paris in partnership with the Fédération Française de Tennis and was working with Gravity Media on site as facilities partner.

France TV and Amazon shared domestic rights while WBD have the rights for various territories including the UK, Germany, Ireland and Italy. EMG was among the facilities company providing broadcast services to HBS.

The Cube, WBD’s centrepiece virtual studio, has undergone significant enhancements following the conclusion of the Australian Open. This includes upgrades to the disguise servers resulting in a substantial boost in computational power. Additionally, Roland Garros marked the introduction to tennis majors of the broadcaster’s 3D virtual studio, which was launched during the Giro D’Italia.

“Considering the numerous European markets using green studios, we have designed an environment featuring multiple studio locations and stand-up positions, catering to the requirements of all our markets,” explained Alex Dinnin, Director of Graphics and Innovation. “The remarkable advantage of this setup is that any developments implemented within The Cube can seamlessly be transferred to our other markets.”

The new 3D studio means there are a lot of new locations for the presenters and viewers to explore. Dinnin said: “There’s always a new location you find that was never originally thought of as a presentation area, all contained within WBD’s purpose-built virtual tennis environment. Working with Nazia Zaman [WBD’s Unreal expert] the area is fully operational with screens and area dividers to keep the coverage fresh and engaging, rather than being confined to one presentation location.”

A dedicated HawkEye analysist on-site at Roland-Garros in Paris worked with producer Arnold Montgault in the Cube studio at Stockley Park. Explained Dinnin, “Between them, they identify the opportunities and key moments to harness HawkEye analysis to help tell the story of what’s happening on court for the viewer.

“The data was then sent from Paris to London and can be integrated into our live broadcast. This plays out through our augmented reality technology, which included two full size tennis court within the Cube studio, and the data can appear on-screen through live graphics added by our Cube operator.”

Behind the Scenes: French Open 2023 Tennis – Scaling production

WBD is employing a mix of on-site and remote production and operates four of its own PCRs in London and Paris to offer full coverage of the show courts Philippe-Chatrier, Suzanne Lenglen, plus the Roland-Garros Extra multi-court feed.

In total, WBD had access to all 16 host broadcast feeds plus two press conference room feeds meaning every match can be viewed live or on-demand on discovery+ and the Eurosport App or Eurosport.com, plus wall-to-wall linear coverage on Eurosport’s linear channels and WBD’s free-to-air channels in certain markets.

In addition, WBD had producers based on-site, led by Aurelia Mounier, at Roland-Garros as well as RF cameras that go behind the scenes of the grounds to bring viewers every angle from the tournament.

WBD produced live coverage of Roland-Garros in 20 languages for 50 markets across Europe (excluding France). It received the host feed in Paris and overlaid commentary remotely. Additionally, linear and digital highlights plus social clips were produced in English, German, Italian, Spanish, Dutch, Polish, Romanian and with ambient sound.

Local studio shows provided daily introductions and post-match analysis in the UK (the Cube analysis show anchored by Tim Henman and Barbara Schett), France (producing WBD’s on-site ‘In the Alleys’ intro show hosted by Alize Lim, Laura Robson, John McEnroe, Chris Evert, Alex Corretja and Mats Wilander), Germany (Matchball Becker with Boris Becker), and Spain (Pasando Bolas).

Eurosport offered 4K coverage in Austria, Germany, Ireland, Poland, Portugal, Spain, the UK, Romania, Slovenia, Latvia, Czech Republic, Hungary, Bulgaria, Slovakia, Macedonia and Serbia.

Unlike for coverage of the UCI Track Champions League last December WBD didn’t have any metaverse activations during Roland-Garros.

The next stop for WBD’s tennis Slam coverage is Wimbledon in just a few weeks’ time.

Also over the weekend, The UEFA Champions League reached its climax on Saturday 10th June with the final between Manchester City and Inter Milan broadcast live on BT Sport from the Atatürk Olympic Stadium in Istanbul for UK viewers.

Coverage of the iconic 24h of Le Mans featured increased RF coverage from 15-onboard cameras and analysis from nine-time race winner Tom Kristensen.

The picturesque high valley alpine resort of Lenzerheide provided the backdrop for the next round of the UCI Mountain Bike World Cup with fans of downhill racing set to be able to watch their heroes on two-wheels for the first time this season. Live coverage will be delivered by over 20 cameras, accompanied by First Person View drones.

Fans of two-wheeled motorcycling were able to watch the latest speedway event from Teterow in Germany with 16 pit cameras (eight streamed at one time); four on-board cameras including two bike cameras, one start marshal camera and one race director camera, in addition to RF and ISO cameras. Each Speedway GP winner in Teterow was also be equipped with a live camera to provide unique first-person views of the podium ceremony following each race.

Scott Young, SVP, Content and Production, Warner Bros. Discovery, said in a release, “The complexity of simultaneously broadcasting multiple events across numerous channels and platforms in 20 languages to millions of fans in 50 markets across Europe alone is unprecedented and only Warner Bros. Discovery has the capacity to make this happen at this scale.”

From 18th July, TNT Sports becomes the new name for BT Sport. TNT Sports will present the same exclusive live sport including the Premier League, UEFA Champions League, UEFA Europa League, Premiership Rugby, MotoGP, UFC, Boxing and WWE.