11 minute read
The end-to-end studio
Twickenham Studios is aiming to head back to the old Hollywood model by catering to all a film or TV production’s needs. Managing director Cara Sheppard tells Jenny Priestley about the facility’s focus on post production
The studios’s picture department includes colourists and VFX artists as well as dailies and technical staff, mastering and QC operators S ince it was saved from administration a decade ago Twickenham Film Studios has gone from strength to strength, providing studio space and post production facilities for major blockbusters and high-end TV productions.
Cara Sheppard joined the company as managing director in September 2020, and has been central to not only the redevelopment of the London site, but also an ‘in development’ northern base in Liverpool. She came to Twickenham with a background in post production, having run Warner Bros De Lane Lea for four years.
“My intention when I arrived at Twickenham was to be able to provide a script-to-screen, end-to-end solution so that you could essentially do everything under one roof,” states Sheppard. “Obviously we have the studios, but we provide on-set dailies, we can do remote grading connected to anywhere in the world, and we’ve got a number of audio suites.”
The Studios include a Dolby Atmos grading theatre, as well as additional grading suites with both DaVinci Resolve and Baselight, and four dubbing stages with the two largest featuring Dolby Atmos and IMAX sound. “It was really important to me that the audio theatres should also be able to sign off picture,” explains Shappard. “It’s the same in our picture facilities, they should have good audio because one of my bugbears is when you go and sign off a mix and the picture looks dreadful, or you’re listening to it in stereo. That ruins the experience for the filmmaker. So whenever we’ve refurbished either picture or sound facilities, I have made sure that the picture is as good as the sound and vice versa.”
Other post production audio facilities available at Twickenham Studios include ADR and Foley. “We have a highly creative Foley team that have worked on some amazing award-winning features, almost every big movie that you can think of in about the last ten years,” she adds.
“We also have Flame suites, mastering QC suites, and a ten gig pipe into the studio, which means we can deliver fully QCed content straight to the streamers or movie studios. We’re able to literally provide script to screen right from investment through to delivering to the platform.”
A major part of the redevelopment process has involved ensuring all of the site is interconnected. “You can pull up any machine in any room, an Avid or a Flame in a grading theatre, or Baselight in the dub stages,” says Sheppard. “Everything is centrally racked, and so you can access any piece of kit anywhere.”
As well as being connected to one another, all of the post production suites are connected to the outside world. “Leading the way technically is something that’s really
close to my heart,” she adds. “I don’t just want to be doing what everyone else is doing. I’d rather be saying, what do our clients want? Wouldn’t it be cool if we could do this? Wouldn’t it be great if they could do everything on the lot? And I very much want to be paving the way with technology solutions for clients, and making sure we’re building a studio that’s fit for the future.”
Having joined the company in September 2020, Sheppard spent her first few months in the job in the middle of the first wave of the pandemic. Twickenham shut down in March 2020 but was able to reopen its doors a couple of months later. Once open again, the team were able to shift toward remote workflows. “Quite often we end up doing mixes on big Hollywood movies and will need to be connected to the studios in Los Angeles,” Sheppard explains. “We’ve always done it for sound and ADR. But we have kind of taken it to the next level, certainly with pictures.
“Before the pandemic, no one was particularly keen on their content being stored in the cloud, it was all still on-prem storage and nobody was remoting in and out,” she continues. “There was still a massive security risk. You could never imagine an editor working at home or a sound supervisor working at home with Top Gun: Maverick sitting on their laptop, it just would never have happened. Despite being in an industry that’s based on technology, there was still a huge amount of fear about the cloud or about remote working, but the pandemic has accelerated how acceptable that is, and I think it’s accelerated because of need.”
Sheppard describes the pandemic as “throwing off” the balance of the UK’s production and post production industry, with it still playing catch up. “Post production had a real slump,” she states, “but I think we’re starting to come out of that. Ordinarily you’d see a very repetitive seasonality to television and features and you could literally set your watch by it. The normal business-as-usual routine that I’ve known for 20 years has still not quite regulated itself, but it’s getting there. Right now at Twickenham we’re probably fuller than the studio has been in 20 years.”
One thing the industry is seeing is a huge rise in the number of studios being built. But Sheppard warns all may not be as it seems. “I quite often call them big sheds in fields, which I think certainly has a place,” she laughs. “Big scale productions need big spaces to shoot in. But what you don’t have with those sites is everything on the lot.
“Studios have always been a very risky business, but I think the real estate market, the finance market, have seen the boom in the industry and jumped on it and so there are a lot of studios being built. You have people coming from a real estate property background and they’re interested in the value price per square foot and they don’t want to spend the money on racks, internet, networking and infrastructure because it’s expensive and it’s high maintenance.”
For Sheppard and Twickenham it’s important to be able to facilitate every element of production right through to post and delivery to the content owner. “We’re taking the old Hollywood studio model really, and we’re kind of rebirthing it,” she says. “Back in the 1930s/40s, old Hollywood, everything was designed to be done under one roof because it was easier for the filmmaker.
“The production was shot, cut and mixed under one roof. With this boom in high-end TV you’ve got very compressed schedules where the showrunners or directors can be shooting episode four, but they’re also required to be cutting episode one and working with a sound supervisor, and working on looks with the DoP, and they’re at various stages in various different episodes.
“The convenience of having high quality every single service under the same roof, I see that as becoming more relevant again.” n
Amazon Prime’s Ten Percent and Top Gun: Maverick are amongst the latest releases mixed in the studio’s sound facilities
Twickenham’s newly renovated sound theatres have state-of-the-art technology and native IMAX mixing
Tellyo’s Stream Studio
LEADING AN EVOLUTION, NOT A REVOLUTION
Tellyo CEO Richard Collins talks to Jenny Priestley about the company’s development and plans for the future
Employed by broadcasters, sports leagues, and content owners, Tellyo’s suite of products can be used to clip, edit, stream, and distribute video in the cloud. The company was founded in 2012 by Jakub Majkowski and Mariusz Ostoja-Świerczyński, CEO Richard Collins joined in 2015.
With Collins on board, Tellyo went through what he describes as a “massive pivot” with a move away from the founders’ original idea into the company it is today. “We started in the highlights business,” explains Collins. “We were doing single clips, montages, and automated highlights for companies around live sport, just when social media was getting started.
“In 2018 we wrote an internal paper stating that bandwidth and compute capacities were beginning to evolve, and since then it’s been the most incredible journey.”
That has included the development and launch of Stream Studio, the company’s cloud-based switcher/vision mixer. “The original concept was that you could do a single stream and add some graphics with a single camera,” explains Collins. “Now we’re at the point where we’re doing 12 cameras, synchronised feeds, frame accurate switching, live graphics, and a 64 channel audio mixer. We’ve also got a partnership with Adobe so our platform can live within Adobe Premiere Pro.”
One of Tellyo’s major strengths, believes Collins, is the people it employs. He adds that almost all of the money the company has raised to date has been invested in both the technology and staff. “Of 45 people in this company, there are seven people who cannot code, including myself,” he laughs. “We’re the best company that nobody’s heard of. We’ve got some of the most fantastic technology, our clients love our speed of iteration, and we’ve doubled our turnover since 2019. We’ve just appointed a head of sales in America, and we’re looking at a partnership in APAC.”
Collins describes Tellyo’s vision as an evolution of technology, not a revolution. The company has partnerships with a number of other vendors in the media tech industry, including MediaKind, The Switch and more that will be announced in the coming months. “We have clients in the big broadcast sector who use us as capacity uplinks,” he adds. “There is only so much broadcast metal that you can hold. There’s only so much capex you want to provide.
“We are a far, far more cost effective and ecologically friendly approach,” he continues. “And actually as a work/life balance, I think it’s a far more creative approach than trying to send another 20 people to a major sports event. We worked on the Olympics with CBC and 10,000 hours of content ran through our platform in two weeks. They were awarded bronze in the digital social media class by the IOC, and they credited it to us, that was so generous.”
While cloud continues to become more important to production workflows, Collins believes tier one sports are still a way off from moving away from on-prem production. “I don’t think that the Super Bowl is going to go to cloud production anytime soon,” he adds.
“Remote production very much depends on what you’re talking about. For example, if you’ve got a World Cup, and you need SDI feeds back, you need ten gigabits per second piped back for three weeks of the tournament. That’s £250,000 just for the connection between the Middle East and Europe. So there are still barriers.”
Tellyo instead operates at a level Collins describes as “digital and online centric,” supporting 20 megabits per second which it is able to maintain throughout the entire route at 60fps 1080p. The platform is also able to support HEVC 265. “We’ve found that you could technically produce a 4K channel.” he adds. “It is good enough for some linear broadcasts. Would you have it at your sole production? Probably not.
“We have live graphics, we have remote, we have intercom, we have instant replays, which is one of our absolute stand-out features. We have
the ability to bring in remote commentators. We work with J.League and in the past we’ve taken the feed in real time and allowed them to have local language commentators and restream it to Korean markets. That costs less than £200 an hour, which is an inconceivable cost reduction.” He continues: “I think what we’re heading to is that the top tier sports will move to hybrid. Some of it will be done purely in the cloud, some will be done or metal in the stadium.” Earlier in the year, albert recognised Tellyo for its work in sustainability in the TV industry, naming it as a sustainable supplier. “When we talk about sustainability, we’re really talking about what our clients do,” states Collins. “It’s the reduction of road miles, reduction of freight, it’s not flying unless you absolutely need to. It’s about a technology shift that’s enabling environmental improvement.” At home, the company has adopted a hybrid work model for its own staff, working remotely two days a week and using digital technology wherever possible. “I haven’t been to Poland to see developments even once in the last year,” states Collins, “and that’s predominantly because of Covid. Generally I’m there twice to three times a year to see the team. But we have a director on site who leads the development teams. “We haven’t taken our foot off the gas in terms of development since day one,” he adds. “We’ve got a clear strategic direction of where we want to go, we also have a great deal of partners in the market who we want to listen to and clients who we take feedback from constantly. We still try to TVBEurope_Ad_July_2022.pdf 1 7/07/2022 2:34:55 PM amaze our clients on a weekly basis.” n
