Markee 2.0 Winter 2014/2015

Texans go to Hawaii

Mobile Production Winter 2014-15 • V.29|No.4

Film • Video • Animation • Audio • Locations • People

Great Production!

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Winter 2014-15 Volume 29, Number 4

contents w w w. m a r k e e m a g a z i n e . c o m

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features The Business of Film

8 After Post Afterglow You’ve finished your great production! Now what?

9 Cloud-Based Dailies Take Off

22

Dailies for both film and video production are moving rapidly into the cloud.

12 Flying Files and Safe Storage Media files are large, they’re valuable, and they’re getting bigger. Where will they be stored and how will they get there?

15 New Delivery Systems, New Business Models Content for multiple screens needs care in movement and storage.

18 Business Model: Have Passion Screen Novelties shows the value of sticking to your passions.

9

Mobile Production

22 Flexibility and Innovation on the Road Covering multiple events simultaneously is the bread and butter of mobile production companies.

Spotlight | Texas Crew Productions

32 Texas Crew goes Way West Covering the Ironman events in Hawaii gives a Texas camera crew a chance to go further west.

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Film • Video • Animation • Audio • Locations • People

Markee2.0

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Markee 2.0 is a results-driven magazine that has been published since December 1985. A nationwide survey of film and video industry professionals revealed that Markee 2.0 is at the top of their must-read list.

Editorially, Markee 2.0 offers a wide range of content tailored for its diverse readership. Features span film and video production and postproduction topics to include must-read interviews with leaders in the creative community, the latest equipment and technology news, perspectives on innovative independent filmmaking, and in-the-trenches reports on shooters, editors, animators and audio pros – plus regularly-scheduled specialty supplements. Markee 2.0’s seasoned writers know the industry inside-out. That’s what makes Markee 2.0 compelling, informative and timely reading.

www.markeemagazine.com

32

columns & departments 4 From the editor 5 Markee Cares I tribute to those who helped Markee help MusiCares

[On The Cover] Elf: Buddy's Musical Christmas, a stop-motion Christmas television special was directed by Mark Caballero and Seamus Walsh of Screen Novelties. Based on the 2003 film Elf and the Broadway presentation Elf: The Musical, it premiered on December 16, 2014, on NBC.

Making Commercials

6 Promoting The Simpsons Awesome helps FXX do a 552-episode, 12-day marathon of The Simpsons.

By Michael Fickes

Making TV

7 Waking Up Naked Henry Morgan is an immortal who repeatedly dies and reawakens naked in water.

By Michael Fickes

Bonus Feature—Digital Only Producing Commercials 26 Morphing Business Models Television commercial production houses are adopting new and different business models.

By Michael Fickes www.markeemagazine.com

Winter 2014-15

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from the editor

Markee2.0

Film • Video • Animation • Audio • Locations • People

| By Tom Inglesby

www.markeemagazine.com

Will Clouds Reign?

A few years ago, clouds were considered metrological phenomena. Artists loved them, kids stared at them, cartoonists found all kinds of objects in them and basically, they were, well, they were clouds.

Then someone had the great idea to use the term “cloud” to signify an Internetconnected, multi-server storage and application repository. In the past 20 or so years, companies have used the cloud to host applications to free up local computing resources, the so-called SaaS—software as a service—approach. Recently, Microsoft started trying to move their enormous client base to their cloud—and remember, they were a founding member of the club, with Intel and IBM, that drove relentlessly to put a computer on every desk in the world. Their Office 360 is just such an application.

Eventually, the cloud will be filled with bytes, not raindrops.

Since the cloud is made up of many distributed resources acting as one, a virtual Big Iron server/storage space, it has the characteristics of distributed computing. It is highly fault tolerant through redundancy and distribution of data, highly durable through the creation of versioned copies, and typically consistent with regard to data replicas.

However, it also is a virtual world of its own, with vulnerabilities even your networked-to-the-hilt personal computer isn’t.

One of the first things you hear about is security or lack, thereof. If data are distributed across multiple physical locations, the risk of unauthorized access increases. This risk can be mitigated through the use of encryption, which can be applied to data as part of the storage service or by on-premises equipment that encrypts data prior to uploading it to the cloud.

Then there are the hackers, inside and outside. The number of people with access to the data who could be compromised—bribed, threatened, or just plain greedy— increases dramatically. A single company might have a small team of administrators, network engineers and technicians, but a cloud storage company will have many customers and thousands of servers, and therefore a much larger team of technical staff with physical and electronic access to almost all of the data at the entire facility.

That’s the inside threat. Hackers from the outside are the ones who get the publicity. The cloud increases the number of networks over which the data travels. Instead of a local area network or storage area network, data stored on a cloud requires a wide area network to connect. By sharing storage and networks with many other users, it is possible for others to access everyone’s data. Not always intentionally, either. Sometimes it happens because of mistaken actions, faulty equipment, or a bug.

The risk of having data read during transmission can be mitigated through encryption.

Encryption in transit protects data going to and from the cloud service, while encryption also protects data that are stored at the service provider. It’s not foolproof, but it helps. After all, you don’t want someone else’s cloud to rain on your parade (video).

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Winter 2014-15

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John Llewellyn llewellyn@lionhrtpub.com Tom Inglesby tom@markeemagazine.com Cory Sekine-Pettite cory@lionhrtpub.com Michael Fickes Mark R. Smith

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MusiCares

Markee Cares In 2014, Markee 2.0 Magazine and its Music Guide advertisers joined hands to help support MusiCares Foundation, a Grammy Foundation charity that helps musicians who have fallen on hard times or who need medical aid they cannot afford. We’d like to pay tribute to those advertisers whose generosity increased our donation to MusiCares.

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making Commercials

The Simpsons | By Michael Fickes

Promoting The Simpsons FXX’s 552-episode, 12-day marathon of The Simpsons hurled the new channel to the top of the ratings. Awesome helped.

Rolling Stone magazine says that the year-old FX network channel FXX ranked 49th among cable channels catering to 18- to 45-year-olds when it first came on the air. During and for a short period after FXX ran a 552-episode, 12-day marathon of The Simpsons, the channel rose to 3rd on that list.

Awesome Inc. helped. The Atlantabased multi-disciplinary creative studio produced a 40-second promotional piece for the marathon.

Creation, as the promo is called, ties the virtually eternal Simpsons series to the creation of the world. It begins with the big bang, the formation of the universe, and travels through time and space to our Earth and the moon.

A voice-over narrates the creation: “It is written that God created the world in six days, and on the seventh day, He rested.”

While God is at rest and apparently not watching, the Simpsons family appears on the scene, with transparent bodies outlined by lines drawn in blue celestial light—an animation style influenced by constellation maps. The family’s visible skeletons are made of stars connected by stick-lines that might be focused sunlight.

Dara Barton, director of production at FX, the network that owns FXX, approached Awesome in search of a studio that could animate The Simpsons characters in an outer space setting using the original—and fitting—constellation motif, which was conceived of by Pilot, a creative branding agency with offices in New York City and Marina Del Rey, Calif.

Most importantly, Barton wanted a studio with nuanced artists that would be able to keep the Simpson characters “on model,” a requirement specified by 6

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Gracie Films, producer of The Simpsons.

“We felt up to the challenge and submitted some proofs-of-concept showing that we could keep the characters on-model while animating the promo designed in this unique constellation style,” said Ashley Kohler, executive producer with Awesome.

When Barton decided to tap Awesome, the ani- [Above] mators went to work using Awesome Incorporated’s Brandon Betts and Crag Sheldon a tight animatic of the discuss production notes on The Simpsons marathon promo promo, which also was Creation. developed by Pilot, as a guide. The team used Photoshop for wanted to support the brand, while aimcharacter animation, After Effects for ing for a presentation that the audience compositing, and Maya for the 3D work. would recognize as favorite characters in a new environment.

Tough Scheduling “When adapting them into the “The biggest challenge was meeting a glowing constellation lines, we not only had to keep the character art tight schedule with a complex workflow on-model, but we also had to add model necessitated by everyone’s desire enough design elements to keep to promote and not compromise the them from looking like simple linebrand,” Kohler said. “Typically, we do a art,” Kohler said. rough pass of the entire spot, get “We were tempted to lean into approval, do the full pass, make changes, sci-fi depictions of nebulae, space gas, and produce the finished piece. and cosmic debris, but FXX wanted “For this spot, FX and Gracie the depiction of space to read as if it asked for us to finish 20 seconds of was a documentary at the beginthe 40-second spot before moving ning—up until the comedic flip with on. Everyone was satisfied at the 20the appearance of the Simpsons,” she second point, but the half-and-half continued. “It was challenging to balproduction requirement made it diffiance documentary realism with a cult to meet the schedule. No matter, vivid cartoon like The Simpsons is a we all realized how important it was delicate thing—I think we found a to do everything possible to maintain good middle ground.” the brand’s integrity.”

Yes, even the cosmos has a middle Technical Challenges ground. As for the Simpsons, however, there is no middle ground; there is Recreating iconic characters in a difonly doh! ferent way presents risks. Awesome Film • Video • Animation • Audio • Locations • People

making TV

Forever | By Michael Fickes

Waking Up Naked Forever is about Henry Morgan, an immortal, who dies but always returns to life by awakening in a body of water—naked.

Henry Morgan, the main character of Forever, cannot age and cannot die. Two hundred years ago, serving as a physician on a slave ship, he was murdered and thrown overboard. For some reason, he didn’t stay dead. He awakened in the water, uninjured, but naked.

Whenever he is killed, which happens more often than you would expect, Henry comes back to life, waking up naked in a nearby body of water.

Always 35 years old, Henry Morgan is immortal. Presently, he is living in New York City and working as a medical examiner.

David Moxness, ASC, CSC, one of the show’s two cinematographers, says that it is challenging to keep Henry looking 35. Every show features flashbacks to Henry living in other eras in different period costumes, wearing different kinds of facial hair. “We’re always trying to find the right light for Ioan (Ioan Gruffudd, who plays Henry Morgan),” says Moxness. “The lighting has to fit the theme while keeping the look of a 35 year old man.”

The only person who knows Henry’s secret is Abe, played by Judd Hirsch of Taxi fame. Abe is an antiques dealer and Henry’s housemate. Abe also brings Henry’s clothes whenever he reappears after dying.

Moxness shoots Abe as a grizzled old man, which lends interest to a fun plot twist. While many assume that Abe is Henry’s father, a flashback in the first episode reveals that Henry adopted and raised Abe after rescuing him as a baby from a World War II concentration camp.

When shooting Jo Martinez (Alana De La Garza), a detective who comes to rely on Henry’s deductive powers, www.markeemagazine.com

Moxness selects camera angles and lighting that show off her striking beauty.

Throughout the first season, Henry and Jo meet, build a working relationship and become friends. To portray the evolving relationship, Moxness has continually adjusted the way he shoots scenes in which both appear. “I find myself going to tighter and tighter eye-lines,” he says. “For example, when Henry looks at Jo, she is very close to the camera now.”

About half way through the first season, there was no sexual tension between the two lead characters, but they had become good friends.

Moxness shoots with an ARRI Alexa equipped with ARRI master prime [Above] lenses and two Angenieux David Moxness, ASC, CSC, on location setting up to shoot Optimo zooms—a 17-80 a scene for Forever. and a 24-290. He also use three lightweight zooms—15-40, 28and feel, with big-scope wide shots. “I 76, and 45-120—for handheld and really want to take advantage of Steadicam shots. shooting New York City as New York “It is a comprehensive package,” City,” he says. “So often we fudge the he says. “My reasoning for this has to look when shooting in other cities, do with the large volume of episodic but here it is great to shoot the looks work I’ve done over the years. I’ve that the city has to offer.” learned that each script is different Whether he is shooting panoramic views of the city or medium and and that sometimes you don’t get to close-up interior scenes, Moxness see each location—so you never attends to large and small details. know when you’re going to get a “We like pops of color, glints or shiny curveball. With a complete package, objects in the background of the we have the tools to handle anything frame. Little accents like that catch thrown at us.” the eye and help to keep the frame Forever is set and shot in New alive”—even when the shot is one of York City, and Moxness works to give Henry’s many dying scenes. the city a naturalistic, real-world look Winter 2014-15

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AFTER POST AFTERGLOW

The film is in the can—digitally speaking of course—and the crew has gone home. Post is over, release is eminent and the chaos of creation has diminished if not abated. While you are basking in that afterglow of completion, remember there is more to be done. Archiving the footage, raw and edited, and delivery of various formats to their release agents has to be considered. Choosing the right storage media and location is critical for the long-term monetization of the project. It’s all part of the business of indie film making, along with the business model for your production company and the choice of subject matter you develop.

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Film • Video • Animation • Audio • Locations • People

Cloud-Based Dailies Take Off Dailies for both film and video production are moving rapidly into the cloud for many good reasons.

Collaborators in different locations need ready access to files that may reside elsewhere. To meet that need, a secure cloud resource becomes a central project space that enables a degree of workflow efficiency that is not possible when content resides only on premise.

Isn’t dailies a silly term that for years was a misnomer? “Dailies” rarely if ever arrived in a day—certainly not when distribution relied on DVDs and hard drives being couriered around to the different reviewers. The norm was at least 30 hours after processing, and often as much as two or three days later. Often, dailies arrive too late for feedback to be meaningful in checking color, determining if the feel of a shot is just right, or any other myriad elements of creative control that set a stellar production apart from one that’s just OK. However, with a cloud-based dailies workflow, teams have: • Easy point of access—for team members with varying degrees of technology savvy. Particularly with location shoots, production companies need to make it easy to get review and approve content so the rest of the work can get done efficiently. Secure cloud approaches are a perfect complement to the dailies review and approval workflow • Faster turnaround—enabling faster decision-making so projects get to edit faster, in a more organized way, saving time and money.

• Greater security—while cloud-based solutions usually inspire an immediate question about content security schemes, continual headlines about screeners and bootleg DVD copies being ripped off suggests that sending multiple physical copies around represents a perhaps worse security consideration than controlled digital access.

• Better production—with a clearer view of the whole production and the ability to make sure the content presents a consistent style, look, and quality.

It provides added time to spend on perfecting your creative instead of waiting for hard drives to arrive.

www.markeemagazine.com

By Mark Overington President, Aframe North America Burlington, Mass.

[Below] Starving in Surburbia, airing on Lifetime TV and produced by MarVista Entertainment.

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Business of Film

The Cloud

As a result, major production companies and broadcasters are using the cloud as an adjunct to existing on-premise resources, enabling the best of all worlds—the physical asset being located on site, but the accessibility and workflow efficiency powered by the cloud.

MarVista Entertainment Both TV and feature films are rapidly adopting cloudbased dailies. MarVista Entertainment is a global producer and distributor of film and television programming that provides programming to U.S. cable networks, including Disney Channel, Lifetime, Hallmark Channel, NBC Universal, and MTV Networks, as well as key international broadcasters.

Rich Carroll, post-production supervisor, began using a cloud-based approach to dailies review and approval from Aframe in summer 2012. Previously, MarVista performed transcoding after receipt of raw daily footage, adding a few hours to processing time. Then it either used couriers to drive raw footage across town, or used a costly, dedicated digital dailies solution. Dailies took up to two days to deliver.

With a cloud approach, MarVista is getting dailies up and ready to watch an average of 24 hours earlier than before. The speed and ease of use also allows fast identification and fixes of issues the next day, and makes it easier to keep an entire team of professionals in many locations on the same page creatively.

Aframe is the only digital dailies solution MarVista has used ever since implementing it on such programs as Gone Missing in 2013. Recent cloud-assisted dailies efforts include Starving in Suburbia (pictured), which aired on Lifetime TV, and more than 20 additional movies, including holiday 2014 specials Naughty and Nice and Christmas in Fashion; the teen-oriented drama The Assault; and Mothers of the Bride.

MarVista’s new workflow involves sending footage direct from multiple camera types into Aframe’s cloudbased video production solution. Once there, the original rushes are stored and web-friendly proxy files are generated automatically, saving an extra step (and several hours) in the production workflow every day. The new, cloud-enabled workflow avoids the need for transcoding, burning, and distributing 10 sets of DVDs each day. They simply can upload raw footage and send one email with a link to an h.264 proxy, to be viewed anywhere and anytime from any device by busy producers and network executives on the go.

“Aframe rivals major digital dailies solutions, feature for feature, and its use costs us a fraction of dedicated solutions,” Carroll says. “The user interface is so intuitive that a non-computer user can navigate it without asking for assistance.”

Sixteen19

Sixteen19, a boutique production and post-services company that provides a digital dailies service to filmmakers, used Aframe’s cloud video production platform to expedite digital dailies delivery on two feature films from Scott Rudin Productions: Rosewater, comedian Jon Stewart’s directorial debut which opened in November 2014, (pictured) and While We’re Young, scheduled for theatrical release in March 2015 by distribution company A24.

By using a cloud-based approach, Sixteen19 clients can get dailies at 5:00 or 6:00 in the morning instead of noon and enjoy a fast, easy review on their choice of mobile device while getting full resolution content to both London and LA and from there, right into post-production. A team of about 20 executives reviewing the content could make frameaccurate comments on the h.264 [Above] proxy that Aframe generates, and the metadata would stay intact all Gael Garcia Bernal as Maziar Bahari in Rosewater. Sixteen19 used Aframe’s cloud video platform to expedite review and approval of dailies. Photo Credit: Laith Majali, Distributor: Open Road Films the way through to the edit suite.

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Because the full resolution content resides in the secure private cloud, specialty post services in Seattle and LA also could access files simultaneously. The cloud also enables quick and easy review for all different kinds of personalities—some who like drilling into the technology and others who just want to hit a button and comment.

“Having a clear and simple interface can do wonders for making your client happy,” said Ben Baker, workflow supervisor on the two projects for Sixteen19.

Arrow Media Other firms are using cloudbased dailies workflows to expedite review and approval, and also to enable advanced proxy-first workflows that save significant time and [Above] hassle, particularly with international In producing Ultimate Airport Dubai, Arrow Media relied on a cloud-enabled dailies review and approval workflow. shoots.

National Geographic’s Ultimate Airport Dubai, shown in the United States and whose team uploaded the proxies to Aframe for the loggers to Season 2 just debuted, was produced by Arrow Media of view and log. In London, team members downloaded the London. The series (pictured) spotlights one of the proxy files (as originals) and ingested them into Avid for world’s fastest growing airports and follows some of the the assembly edit.

60,000 staff responsible for moving 57 million passengers This speed and agility enabled the production team to and 344,000 flights a year. pull the proxy files into the edit and assemble stories Using cloud-based dailies review and approval saved while the original could be relinked for the main edit after 20 weeks on the edit—about two weeks per episode— arriving by hard drive. Nick Metcalfe, executive producand allowed the project to be completed under budget. er, said that with the cloud behind its dailies review and The added timesavings enabled the team to spend more approval, Arrow Media cut the amount of footage shot in time working on the content—ultimately resulting in a Dubai from 600 hours to 360 hours—a 40-percent savbetter show. ings. More importantly, this workflow enabled a better Arrow Media also used an innovative Proxy First workflow quality program, because the team went into the edit fully to expedite the process. During Season 1, Arrow Media’s knowing that the stories they were working on were of team shot 600 hours of footage in Dubai, and wanted to the caliber they needed. decrease that amount for the next season. In addition, the team wanted to address a classic issue with factual TV pro- Embracing a Cloud-ier Future gramming: while shooting, the location crew follows a story Cloud-based dailies review and approval workflows thread, but once the dailies are reviewed, sometimes the represent a significant improvement to the best practices story may be missing an important element that requires a in our industry. Naysayers may dismiss cloud approaches reshoot or a change. To Arrow’s team, it was important to as still too new for major productions, or more hype than get dailies back to London faster for those important assess- reality. But by using Aframe, they have the ability to take ments of whether shots were just right or even if the stories their content, put it up onto our Cloud service and manthat form an episode hold together. age it directly over their Internet browser from anywhere The Proxy First workflow involved sending the cam- or anyplace that they choose to go. So, it really takes the era-generated proxy file straight to the cloud. The main complexity and the challenges out of what we call “data cameras recorded to XDCam disc at XDCam HD422 wrangling.” As the time, cost, and hassle savings attest, 50mbps, but these cameras also generate low-resolution we’ll all be reading more about major productions that proxies as part of their folder structure. Arrow Media’s are adopting the cloud for dailies workflows in 2015. www.markeemagazine.com

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Flying Files and Safe Storage Media files are large, they’re valuable, and they’re getting bigger as 4K and newer technologies enter the picture. Where will they be stored and how will they get there?

By T. Hunter Byrd

Film production workflows are all about moving content or assets between production teams, and what you need varies by where it is in the workflow. The resolution of raw footage is not the same as what you use for work in process, and that isn’t the same as the final resolutions you deliver and archive.

Because this content moves from user to user in various locations, you want to optimize the resolution based on capabilities of the transport connection available. “You can use WAN accelerators, FTP, or dedicated lines between facilities,” explains Alex Grossman, VP, Media and Entertainment at Quantum Corp. San Jose, Calif., “but you may need to transcode to a lower resolution codec along the way. Smarter transfer technologies will transcode to a lower bit rate codec that’s not playable; they encrypt the files on the fly during transfer and then do the reverse at the destination. For even greater speed and security, parallel transfer technologies break the content into pieces and send them separately.”

Regardless of how you transfer, you want to avoid making unnecessary copies to limit the number of files that need to be stored and managed. But you don’t want to lose your high-resolution content, and, with today’s tight deadlines, you need to maintain operational efficiency. For that you need solutions that offer intelligent, policy-based storage and asset management.

“Quantum’s StorNext supports every major popular file transfer technology on the market today,” says Grossman. “To make file transfers seamless, we offer an API that integrates with applications that send or receive the content. This goes along with StorNext’s vast ecosystem of integrated workflow applications, from MAM (Media Asset Management) to production automation tools.”

To help manage where the content is stored, StorNext Storage Manager automatically migrates files to different storage media—disk, object storage, tape—according to policies you set up. “That way, the files you need the quickest access to stay on the highest-performance storage while those that haven’t been used recently get moved to less expensive media,” Grossman says. “We’re simplifying things even more with StorNext in the Cloud, which allows you to take your existing workflow into the cloud, including your applications for editing, production automation, transcoding and more, so that team members can collaborate easily and your content is stored securely and efficiently.”

How to fly files Filmmakers have become accustomed to file-based workflows in post-production and, with digital capture now the norm, production processes rapidly are following suit.

Moving large media files around within a facility is fairly straightforward, but things get challenging when it’s necessary to move content over long distances. While the triedand-true method of shipping physical media hasn’t gone away, electronic transfer is increasingly practical and offers a number of benefits.

Margaret Craig, CEO of Signiant, Burlington, Mass., says, “The never-ending push to shorten production timelines is a key reason to consider electronic file transfer: it is generally the fastest way to get the content from A to B. And with the right tools, it can be far more cost-effective, reliable, and secure than physical media. Networks around the world keep getting better and faster, with great connectivity between major media centers and often surprisingly good bandwidth in remote locations. Against this backdrop, it is critical that filmmakers become familiar with software tools for fast, secure movement of their valuable content over public and private networks.”

Old technology, such as FTP servers, can be used to move media files, but a better answer can be found in specialized file transfer software that is tuned for moving 12

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large, high-value digital assets. These solutions move the files much faster than FTP and provide a high level of security, along with central control and workflow automation.

Craig comments, “In assessing file transfer solutions, filmmakers would be well-served by asking themselves a few questions such as, ‘Is the solution easy to use and administer?’ If not, adoption will be difficult and crews will default to old methods. ‘Is it secure?’ File transfer software must have full enterprise-class security features for studio work, and should provide full control and visibility of the content at all times. And perhaps most important, ‘Is it scalable?’ As the workload ebbs and flows, it’s important to be able to quickly ramp up or down.”

A Signiant offering of particular interest to film producers is Media Shuttle, which provides a fast, secure, simple means of sending a large file anywhere in the world. It is the only file transfer solution that is delivered as a hybrid SaaS offering. Users log on to a web interface provided by Signiant. The content itself is never turned over to Signiant or a third party—it remains under the customer’s control, either on-premises or in the customer’s cloud storage tenancy.

Clouds from both sides “Cloud” is the buzzword of the 21st century—so far. But most filmmakers tend to think like Joni Mitchell sang, “I really don’t know clouds at all….” Cloud computing refers to both the applications delivered as services over the Internet and the hardware and systems software in the datacenters that provide those services. The services themselves have long been referred to as SaaS—Software as a Service. The datacenter hardware and software is what is called a Cloud.

The cloud is an outgrowth of several computing concepts that started more than 60 years ago with the “big iron” of IBM and its timeshare computing model. Distributed computing and the Internet changed the way we looked at data sharing and each added a new feature set to the concept. Today, the Internet allows computers—and computing devices such as digital cinema cameras—to connect across thousands of miles, virtually seamlessly and instantly.

The cloud is for storage, but there is more to it than just a warehouse in the sky, figuratively speaking. Patrick Macdonald-King, president of Prime Focus Technologies–North America, Los Angeles, puts the cloud in focus. “Why should a film producer study large file transfer and storage? Emerging, multiple file formats, increasing shooting ratio and the exponential risk of misplacing—not losing, mind you, misplacing— files call for extreme, organized, automated, monitored care of your content; security during transfer, acute awareness of content metadata after it is transferred. Note my use of ‘misplacing.’ I mean the consciously placing of assets in a deep structure (without metadata) mixed with the inability to find required shots despite a 100 searches and visual scanning.”

He adds, “Then there is the risk of losing footage; not being able to retrieve it in time; unreliable infrastructure; and many other issues that compound the need for a robust storage infrastructure, not just a portable LTO or bunk-head www.markeemagazine.com

[Above] Storage choices have both expanded and changed in their adoption rate over the past decade. The old reliables are fading; new reliables are coming on strong.

room of storage, for assurance of zero content loss; precision service levels of retrieving the content in agreed timelines; and always process controlled, which in fact is becoming a norm mandated by insurance requirements.”

Macdonald-King also notes, “The media and entertainment industry’s storage needs are at an interesting cusp—you have the likes of Amazon storage options, but they cannot really be used for operational purposes as they do not support frame-accurate transfers. Such storage is not meta-data aware, not-content aware. On the other hand, Prime Focus has designed for media assets thus meeting all these needs. Our focus has been on the downstream benefits to film producers rather than focusing on the benefits of using transfer/storage infrastructure per se.”

Continuing, Macdonald-King says, “The Prime Focus solution provides the connecting tissue between the studios and networks for seamless, creative collaboration; and all this on one platform, with one metadata bus and one end-to-end digital supply chain. You can come on-board at any stage to engage with your vendors and customers on the same platform.”

History lesson For media developers and producers, the cloud offers several advantages over local storage for the large files being generated in 4K and greater high-definition video. But every week we hear of hackers gaining access to databases—Sony’s being one that hits close to home for most filmmakers—leading to concerns of security and reliability. Perhaps the cloud shouldn’t be the first choice. Various file sharing systems are available that use local networked storage—servers owned or leased on premise or in co-located server farms.

Not too long ago, it was the norm for broadcasters to physically ship hard drives of the media assets they created. This method was conceived to address legacy business agreements that had been drafted before the advent of specialized network technologies to transport large media files, and the networks’ Winter 2014-15

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Media Management

[Above] The “Wheel of Life” for production in the 21st Century.

inability to handle such files due to insufficient bandwidth. An intern would take hard drives loaded with raw footage from remote filming locations or productions to the closest courier, where they would then be sent for review or processing to those with an invested stake in the project’s progress and direction.

Shane Guthrie, senior manager for global solutions architecture, Equinix, Redwood City, Calif., picks up the lesson. “This physical process created a logistics and expense nightmare, slowing down workflows by days, if not weeks. This one-way flow of information to solitary endpoints also made it very difficult—if not impossible—to respond in real-time to changes or requests by producers or financiers of the project. Once a project was finished, films and television spots would again be sent by physical courier to content delivery networks, which would then distribute the completed work in the same laborious, expensive manner.”

Figuring out a way for gigantic, copyrighted files to be transferred worldwide, more securely and faster than a courier service, while allowing for constructive dialogue between sender and receiver, was crucial. “For example, if a shoot was done in Tunisia, England and Guatemala, studios and broadcasters would sign long-term contracts with service providers in those nations to build out additional infrastructure to handle the bandwidth necessary for a particular production,” recalls Guthrie. “This process often took months, but it would ensure that large amounts of raw footage could be sent back to headquarters and, from there, to the various teams involved in production.

“To complete the transfer, production companies also would have to beef up the networks of the intended endpoints to cope with receiving a high volume of large assets, as well as sending edited or annotated versions back into the field. When production ended, studios and broadcasters often would be stuck with a long-term contract for lots of fiber and throughput that they might not ever use again. While building physical infrastructure for a singular purpose is nothing new in the movie business, having to continually pay for these highspeed, data-intensive connections after wrap was a new financial burden that few could handle.”

Thankfully, this initial fix brought to bear another trend—that of carrier networks fortifying their own infrastructure to handle 14

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the explosive amounts of data being created and transferred daily worldwide. As Guthrie says, “These network providers were co-locating in third-party, multi-tenant data centers to exchange traffic and connect directly to their customers, ensuring quality of service and security were not compromised by over-reliance on the public Internet. The huge influx of capital spent by wide-area network providers and Ethernet carriers to upgrade capacity and reach of their networks is a boon to the media and entertainment business.”

Jeff Herzog, product manager at EditShare, Boston, Mass., runs the numbers: “It seems as though we have come full circle.

Back in the early days of HD editing, uncompressed HD was all the rage. At around 180 Mbps, you needed the fastest storage available at the time, and even then it seemed like capture and playback of one stream was almost on the edge of the capabilities of the equipment. Then along came extremely high-quality compressed codecs like Apple ProRes and Avid DNxHD, and uncompressed HD diminished in popularity.

“Now, 4K acquisition and editing is everywhere, data rates have jumped back up, and producers, editors and other content professionals must equip themselves to push around much bigger files once again,” Herzog continues. “When someone says they are working in 4K, it could be one of dozens of different scenarios, and the only way to effectively support the full range of 4K workflows is by investing in a scalable infrastructure that can be configured to meet any of these demands.”

EditShare’s Shared Storage is a scalable platform that can easily be configured to meet the varied demands of high bitrate workflows such as 4K. According to Herzog, “Some compressed 4K workflows can be enabled with a 10-Gigabit network infrastructure linking your workstations to your EditShare server, especially if you have just a couple editors working at this resolution and each of them is playing only one stream. For example, the data rate of 4K UltraHD at 30p in ProRes 4444 is 165 Mbps, easily supported with your EditShare server and workstation both connected via 10-Gigabit, including 10GBaseT, which uses regular Cat 6 cable.”

However, if your workflow calls for multiple editors sharing compressed or uncompressed 4K footage or each working with multiple 4K streams, you likely will need more bandwidth between your storage server and your switch than a single 10Gigabit connection can accommodate. “EditShare supports 4K editing over 40-Gigabit Ethernet, changing the game for largefile transfer, storage, capture, and playback,” claims Herzog. “For not much more than the price of a 10-Gigabit infrastructure, you get a single pipe that is four times the size, allowing you to much more easily support playback of uncompressed or RAW 4K files, where data rates can be up to 48MB/frame or a whopping 1,150 Mbps at 24 fps. This bigger pipe also allows you to quickly push these files around your facility, whether it is from SSDs of camera originals or to an archive.”

As 4K, 8K and beyond becomes a daily reality, large files will be the norm. Advanced compression algorithms will help, but the numerous editions of a shoot still will require flexible and scalable storage and fast file transfer options.

Film • Video • Animation • Audio • Locations • People

New Delivery Systems, New Business Models You can be entertained in a theater; on your TV set, on your computer, tablet, smartphone and probably soon, on your wearable. Content for multiple screens needs care in movement and storage.

Every major and minor OTT (over-the-top) streaming media service has set up shop in Hollywood to grab the attention (and content) of new, independent filmmakers.

YouTube, AOL Video, Yahoo Video and others are uploading more than 150 hours of video a minute, and it’s not just kitty videos anymore. People have come to expect theater-quality 4K content that is being offered as “freemium” or premium video.

Think about it and you’ll understand why Clyde Smith, senior VP of New Technologies for FOX Network Engineering and Operations, is involved in both traditional Hollywood and the New Enterprise of Silicon Valley. Years ago, he said, “If you can’t identify it, you can’t operationalize or measure it; if you can’t measure it, you can’t monetize it.”

That’s all old Hollywood—and the new breed—wants: to make money!

Even though Smith is involved in the SMPTE/HPA (Society of Motion Picture and Television Engineers/Hollywood Post Alliance), he also was interested in Vanity Fair’s New Establishment Summit, the emerging entertainment event. On the other hand, many of his Hollywood contemporaries make no bones about being at war with tech folks. After all, they steal valuable content, parse it out, and have forced the industry to change dramatically the distribution/monetization landscape.

What the new kids don’t understand is that SMPTE/HPA has a 100-year track record of establishing the standards that let us enjoy our content on any device, anytime, anywhere we want.

“Maybe we didn’t know it at the time,” Smith said, “but our industry made it possible for the technology industry to make ‘our’ art form available to the masses.”

The biggest discussion continues to be about 4K becoming a reality and the openended question as to whether people really perceive enough of a difference with the pixel count between 2K, 4K, 8K and beyond, or the differences in content shot/shown at 24 fps, 48 fps, 60 fps and 120 fps.

New technology standards, such as H.26,5 make it easier to stream 4K content over the Internet to today’s UHD TV channels, such as UltraFlix, on the newest sets and people say they can see the difference.

www.markeemagazine.com

By Larry O’Connor Founder/ CEO, Other World Computing, Inc.

[Below] Australian Colin Brown of Blackmagic Design shoots handheld in a river bed for Cirina Catania’s documentary Preserving the Cowboy's Way of Life .

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Business of Film

Screens and Storage

[Above] Colin Brown outfitted with a Ready Rig camera stabilizer.

The rush of New Hollywood content can be attributed in many ways to the availability of affordable 4K cameras like those offered by Blackmagic. In addition, robust economic production software like Final Cut Pro and Adobe Premier, as well as very powerful Mac and other computer systems make it tempting for almost anyone with a fire in his/her gut to tell their story visually. Add to that low-cost, high-capacity SSD and hard disk solutions and entertainment is suddenly coming from everywhere.

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Shooting good to great content is only the first step in movie production, as every director/producer knows. Once the scenes are shot, new Thunderbolt 2 solutions let filmmakers transfer their scenes to [Above] large, fast storage systems A cinematographer’s equipment choices and solutions. In addition, are important; after post, other technologies come into play. every pixel of every scene is precious to new filmmakers and they want to do everything possible to ensure every bit/byte is available to them. Software RAID delivers that without the high cost and IT support that is needed for hardware RAID. Filmmakers find that 480GB of SSD in the camera is more reliable and easier to use than film. Most of the independent filmmakers we’ve worked with lately almost immediately move the content from the in-camera SSD to external hard drives/systems and often make a couple of copies. These cinematographers don’t have the big studio luxury of specialists doing various stages of the editing, production, and post-production. In fact, many do their dailies and rough editing out in the field or on the set, so they can move quickly from camera to finished film and each stage adds another layer of content.

Film • Video • Animation • Audio • Locations • People

At the end of the day, all of that creative and post work has to be stored … somewhere. How much are we talking about? Consider one hour of material in our present/projected formats: • HD – 22.5GB • 2K – 716GB • 4K – 6,880GB (6.88TB) • 8K – 86,000GB (86TB) So it’s easy to see how a 4.5TB movie shoot can turn into 72TB of storage. That’s because a film is so much more than the raw video shot or the finished work. It’s: [Above] • Original media as shot • Protected clone (never Indie producer Cirina Catania stored her film The Kionte Storey Journey onsite. Here Kionte Storey and his companion Koja visit Pt. Loma Memorial Cemetery. touched) • Worker copy (files renamed, organized) • Insurance copy of worker copy • Studio copy of worker copy • 3rd clone of worker … just in case • Project output • Clone, 2nd protection • Maybe, just maybe, something for archive.

Filmmakers like cloud storage, but they also use it lightly. They will pass copies back and forth between themselves, colorists, special effects experts, and others, but the idea of putting all of their work in the cloud is just too scary. Bad things happen every day with retailers having customer data stolen/sold, and this past December Sony had four feature films distributed from pirate sites.

That isn’t good for anyone in the industry, but for an independent filmmaker that content is more than just a movie; it is the best creative effort he/she can do, and taking a chance of having someone steal it just isn’t in the cards.

The answer may be found in local storage. Three simple storage units will hold more than 72TB of video content safely, securely, and reliably. The filmmaker can get up at night and pat the storage systems, knowing his/her movie is right there. And yes, they have a backup copy (or two) somewhere else. But they know their local 72+TB of storage is a very small target and requires a lot of hunting and work to locate and steal. With large clouds available for the picking, it just is too much work for a hacker or cybercriminal. So filmmakers know their work is close at hand, always available and easily accessed by just the right people.

Why local storage? Any filmmaker knows that a lost scene, lost frames, and even lost pixels means they will have to invest countless hours to correct, rescript, reshoot, re-edit, and rework the content. Usually, it isn’t www.markeemagazine.com

[Above] Catania’s film shows Storey, an amputee, working out daily.

possible (and is cost prohibitive) to go back in the field/on the set to reshoot/reproduce portions of the movie.

There are more good filmmakers coming on the scene every month, and they are doing great, exciting work.

Their storage requirements are different from those of IT or company departments. The data on the various storage devices isn’t just data—it’s a big part of them. Our job is to do the best job possible to make it fast, easy, and economical for them to store and protect their content.

The industry is exploring the impact of enriched image/sound technology even as time and money are at a premium for the budget-constrained post-production world. About five years ago, I heard a Hollywood executive say that film was still the basic form of entertainment. Changes in capture/distribution are adding longevity to the movies and they will probably continue to be our major form of entertainment throughout my lifetime and yours.

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Business Model: Have Passion In a classic case study of wanting to do something and then sticking to it until it happened, Screen Novelties also shows the value of sticking to your passions along the way.

By Tom Inglesby

[Below] On screen, the characters in Elf: Buddy’s Musical Christmas come to life because of the work done behind the scenes.

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Seamus Walsh and Mark Caballero met at school. “We both realized we had a common love for stop motion. So we thought it would be cool to just start making our own little short films,” recalls Caballero. It was the late ‘90s and there wasn’t a lot of stop-motion animation around. “We took our tuition money and started making films that way,” he says. “Our first film, The Old Man & the Goblins got us some attention around the film festival circuit. Because of that we landed jobs as animators for MTV’s Celebrity Deathmatch” He adds, “That’s where we met our third partner, Chris Finnegan. Seamus and I soon left MTV to work with Ray Harryhausen and complete his final film, The Tortoise and the Hare. Working with Ray was the highlight of our careers. No matter what projects we get, it just won’t compare to that experience. Soon after, Chris moved to LA and we started getting calls for work.”

Success showed the three that there was a market for what some had considered “old movie technology.” It also pointed out the disadvantages of not having a company structure. “When people started calling us, we decided that it might be a good idea to have the checks made out to a company as opposed to individuals,” Walsh admits.

“That’s when we came up with Screen Novelties, so we could start functioning as a stop-motion company. It was never our intention to start a company, we just wanted to make our own films. Suddenly, we started getting calls… the good folks at SpongeBob, Cartoon Network and Disney were all asking us to tackle projects for them.”

Screen Novelties developed a style of animation that they wanted to try. Walsh explains, “It mixes 2-D animation sensibilities with stop motion. We felt like we hadn’t seen that form very much; it was something that not many studios were open to doing.

We couldn’t really convince anyone else to pursue that style, so the only way we were going to be able to do it is if we made something, put it out there and see what the audience thought.”

Film • Video • Animation • Audio • Locations • People

Regardless of technology, stop-motion seems to carry a nostalgic look. “Yeah, that is one of the things that attracted us to it,” claims Walsh. “I remember when I was growing up, there weren’t really very many other kids that were crazy about stop-motion like I was. I guess it’s always going to be a niche thing. That’s actually what I like about it, it’s not ubiquitous. It’s not something that you’re bombarded with on the airwaves every day. So I hope that stop-motion is always just this niche art because then it somehow keeps it a little bit more special.”

He quickly adds, “Stop-motion is a weird thing that you either really, really, really love, or it doesn’t really matter to you. One of the things I love about it is that, because it’s not usually striving to look photoreal, it somehow works on a different plane of your imagination.

[Above] It has an otherworldly feeling.”

The early days, going back into the late ‘20s Seamus Walsh of Screen Novelties makes an adjustment to one of the animated and early ‘30s, stop-motion was basically a case of characters. shooting a single frame at a time and moving the “animated” we’re manipulating puppets, and puppets sometimes have a object ever so slightly to create movement in the final product. mind of their own— when things are too perfect, they tend to Today, we have digital cameras and all these wonderful comput- lose a little bit of their personality. There’s something unpretener capabilities. “It’s funny because the basic process hasn’t tious and fun when you see little imperfections happen. It just changed,” acknowledges Walsh. “You are still moving a puppet means that a human hand made it, and that affects you on this and taking a frame, and moving a puppet and taking a frame. It’s subconscious level.” just that the way we capture those frames and deal with them “When people watch our work, I want them to feel the has changed. The core process itself is still exactly the same as it fun we had making it.” chimes in Walsh. “I don’t want them has been for the last one-hundred years.” to feel the arduousness of it. And it is; it’s an insane process of Caballero agrees, saying, “The only difference is we utilize building a film frame-by-frame. But we try to have our work modern technology such as 3D printing for puppet fabrication feel like it’s not been too labored over, and that is our style.” and digital cameras for animation. But the cool thing about the stop motion process is we’re not that different from how our predecessors did it.

And that’s both amazing and humbling. Those guys were absolute masters of their craft.”

One of the things that computerization has added to the mix is the ability to apply a smoothing algorithm to compensate for any obvious digitized movement of the animated object. Walsh, however, doesn’t think that’s the right approach.

“We don’t use any smoothing software or algorithms. For us, part of the charm of it is that it has a slight bit of clunkiness. Our particular style relies heavily on 2-D tricks, like smears, squash, and stretch, things that you’d normally see in classic Warner Brothers’ cartoons. That actually does help give a sense of pliability and flexibility to the characters that you may not have seen in some of the older films.”

“That’s the endearing part of it,” boasts Caballero, “because you can see a little fur chat- [Above] ter here, or the movement isn’t as smooth and Walsh’s partner, Mark Caballero, populates one of the sets used in Elf: Buddy’s perfect as it could be. We embrace that because Musical Christmas. www.markeemagazine.com

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Screen Novelties

Screen Novelties latest work is a mashup of the feature film Elf and the Broadway show Elf: The Musical for NBC called Elf: Buddy’s Musical Christmas. Starting in early 2014, Screen Novelties set to work designing the cartoonish world of Elf, including characters, sets and props. The team, comprised of up to 60 crew members at its peak, shot the show frame-by-frame over the course of four months, producing a whimsical and handmade miniature world. Multiple exact copies of each puppet were created to allow concurrent shooting on multiple environ-

ments and stages. Walsh recalls, “When we are working with puppets, we get to become the ‘actors’ ourselves. We are in control of the expressions, emotions, and dynamism of the puppet characters as they perform in each scene of the show.”

Screen Novelties was started because the founders had a passion for an older art form, stop-motion animation. They just wanted to make films. As success came along, so did offers of help. As Caballero says, “We were chugging along, learning how to do all this, and we would meet old pros who were amused by our endeavors to revive this old form of animation. They loved what we were doing and they would start contributing some of their old equipment to our cause. ‘Hey, you want some lights?

Here are some lights.’ ‘You want to borrow this? Go for it.’ And it was great because we would get tips from them, and little tricks of animation and how to build certain things. It just grew and grew, and each paying job brought in new equipment, to the point now we’re up to our ears in film gear. Enough to have multiple stages running at the same time.”

Walsh joins in saying, “We were so passionate about this particular aspect of animation that we went out of our way to see as much as we could that had been done in this particular medium. The more we saw, the more we’d be able to figure out what our contribution was going to be. We felt like there’s no point in just retreading what people have already done so well years ago. ‘We’ve got to take what we can learn from our predecessors and add the new technologies that are available, and smoosh

[Above] Caballero works on a set under the gaze of two of the characters who will act there.

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Film • Video • Animation • Audio • Locations • People

those all together to come up with our own style.’ Hopefully, that’s what we’ve done.”

Are studios banging on their door to get more-more-more stop-motion animation?

“We get a lot of calls for work but we still have to remind ourselves that it’s always going to be a niche thing,” admits Walsh. “It’s risky, and certainly not a career choice that’s stable or easy.

You only do this kind of thing if you’re ultrapassionate about it. It’s a labor-intensive job that we do. It really is. You have to have patience to do it; it’s about having the drive to get a project finished. It takes a while to get things made, get things animated, get things finished and wrapped up. In many ways, it’s like saying ‘I’m going to clean out the garage today.’

But it actually takes six weeks of hard work, not one day.”

Caballero laughs, “In stop-motion, you [Above] always have to clean the garage out first. You A cluttered workbench is common at Screen Novelties. Walsh is seen here adding have to clean out the leftovers from the last to a character’s wardrobe. project to make room for the next. On Elf, we had to rent a it’s packed. It looks the set from that old 70’s show Sanford & bigger space because we had to get it done fast, so we had to Son. But we’re getting things reorganized, and taking a short create more stages and more everything. We just recently breather. We don’t want to take too long though, we’re anxmoved everything back to our regular home base, and now ious to move on to the next project.”

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Mobile production units were deployed at two major events in Nashville in 2014—the Country Music Awards and a rare live episode of the television series Nashville; this is the story behind the scenes.

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Film • Video • Animation • Audio • Locations • People

FLEXIBILITY and Innovation on the Road

BY TOM INGLESBY

In

September 2014, ABC decided to take the third season premiere of its flagship drama Nashville live on network television. In this

day and age, this is very unusual for a primetime drama, and it was even more unusual because the producers of a very film-style show such as Nashville had never attempted anything like it before. Mobile production company TNDV was tapped for cameras, engineering crew, a video production truck, an audio mix truck, and a host of specific production tools such as jib cranes, replay servers, intercom infrastructure, and of course venue-wide monitoring.

Live television is nothing new, but to create a live version of a dramatic show, while still maintaining the feel of the very scripted and typically heavily posted show, took months of preparation and a strong team of production professionals. The combination of both HD uplink and HD fiber made the live component unique, as TNDV was not shooting in a typical environment that might have these resources available. Every aspect of live production had to be brought in.

In November, ABC picked TNDV for its seven-hour-long, live-streamed CMA Awards: Backstage special. This live, multi-camera streaming media experience gave viewers the ability to use their tablets and mobile devices to get [Opposite Page] Mobile production crews have to be flexible to cover a wide range of events. TNDV supplied a five-camera HD flypack for the CMA Chevy Riverfront Stage.

[Left] Music legend Buddy Miller looks on as ABC takes their hit drama Nashville Live

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Mobile Production

[Above] Large LED boards and a custom PA sound system were used at Greer Stadium

[Below] The crowd waiting to see and hear the performers on CWA’s Riverfront Stage.

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an exclusive look at what was taking place behind the scenes before and during the live CMA Awards telecast.

Fourteen cameras from the limo drop to the red carpet to the live award stage gave viewers exclusive access to one of the country’s largest awards shows—and did it live.

Each of these projects was unique, and each required out-of-the-box thinking and the use of resources that may not be typical in a day-to-day production environment. Nic Dugger, TNDV’s owner and president, believes challenges like these are what keep his company on the leading edge of mobile production. TNDV has to be flexible to meet the needs of a diverse set of clients, events, and productions.

“There is common thread across all of what we do: Flexibility,” explains Dugger. “We’re finding more and more that clients don’t want to be forced into a specific production infrastructure.

The days of a mobile production company saying, ‘This is what we have, so this is what you’ll use’ are waning. We continuously re-architect [sic] our infrastructure to meet the demands of each production project and environment.”

That flexibility enables TNDV to accommodate multiple formats easily, for example.

“Our infrastructure is designed to quickly swap out systems and components, and build each show around camera counts, and I/O capacity across switching, routing, and audio mixing,” Dugger continues. “We’ve evolved beyond relying on fixed lists of products and specifications. That flexibility gives our clients the confidence that we offer the best in production equipment, services, experience, and capabilities.”

What does the market for mobile production ask for these days? There’s no question that mobile production needs to be a more interactive experience. There are projects where you can simply park your truck, position your cameras, and record.

However, the lines are blurring across several verticals when it comes to mobile production. As Dugger says, “We’re rarely just shooting for a show or projecting visual content onto a stage backdrop. We’re taking live programming to air, streaming it online, recording line cuts for DVD editing, professionally mixing audio tracks, and driving image magnification for multiple display screens all at once. We’re sharing a high-end intercom matrix across the venue for every production arm to tap into. And we’re accommodating all of this from compact, energy-efficient trucks that take up a lot less space on the production site. Our footprint may be all over the venue, but we’re never in the way of the client. Our trucks strategically integrate all required equipment in a smaller package than most high-end trucks. That keeps everything nimble, which our clients consider a significant benefit.”

Those working on the technical side of broadcast and production like to have options. Certainly when it comes to equipment choices, the industry is lucky to have an

Film • Video • Animation • Audio • Locations • People

array of vendors to choose from for all but the most specialized products. However, when it comes to connectivity, an ever-present requirement in mobile production, the options quickly diminish.

Looking specifically at cameras, there are two primary connectors most mobile production companies consider.

For many years it was triax, which provided the extra protection, greater bandwidth and interference rejection compared to its coaxial cousin. Triax was perfectly fine in the SD universe, and it remains a viable option in HD productions.

Fiber is the second viable connection option, and the preference for TNDV, as it offers the dual benefits of accommodating longer camera runs; and wider bandwidth for HD signal transport back to the truck. The latter benefit certainly makes fiber—specifically, SMPTE fiber—a better option when it comes to moving 4K, 3GB/s and other advanced HD signals across large venues.

Still, as Dugger admits, “Cable is cable, and whether connecting with triax or SMPTE fiber we’re still adding weight and consuming storage space on the truck. Every pound matters when it comes to long-haul highway transport. For example, a three-camera shoot with 1,000 fiber foot runs still requires 3,000 feet of cable. The fiber connectivity solutions from MultiDyne have helped us solve the problems of reducing the costs, labor, and complexity associated with long-distance fiber connections.”

TNDV recently added a sixth truck to its fleet, allowing the company to meet increasing demand for its live production services around the country. Dubbed Elevation, the 40foot truck delivers all the power of the industry’s largest trucks in a more manageable, energy-efficient footprint.

Elevation offers a similar video and audio infrastructure to TNDV’s other mediumsized, multi-format mobile production trucks—flexibly integrated to accommodate live and recorded shoots of any size. The architecture adopts TNDV’s strategy of flexibly customizing the workflow to meet any client’s demands, rather than forcing broadcasters, venues, and other customers to work within a strict, fixed system.

Elevation also adds unique energy-efficient flourishes to differentiate it from other mobile production trucks, including an on-board 25kW generator to power air conditioners and the entire Elevation production infrastructure. This makes Elevation an ideal choice for isolated remote shoots—a common task for the TNDV team—by eliminating the costs and headaches of finding power in more secluded locations. “Elevation becomes self-powered with the flip of an onboard switch, eliminating the costs of expensive generator rentals,” notes Dugger.

The medium-sized footprint also aligns with TNDV’s strategy of keeping trucks manageable for clients working within limited spaces, including arenas and temporary outdoor venues. This strategy accelerates load-in and load-out times while taking up less real estate on location. At 40 feet long, Elevation is the same size as TNDV’s flagship Aspiration truck, a vehicle that TNDV clients appreciate for its features-to-size ratio. Like Aspiration, Elevation includes a Ross Vision 3 switcher, an Imagine Communications Platinum integrated router, and AJA Ki-Pro recorders on the video side, along with multiple Hitachi SK-HD1000 cameras for multi-standard, multi-format field production at premium quality. The audio infrastructure is also similar, with a redundant Pro Tools system, JoeCo MADI recorders and an 80-port RTS ADAM intercom system—but adds a Soundcraft VI-3000 audio console for expanded functionality. www.markeemagazine.com

[Above Top] TNDV Aspiration (production truck) and Vibration (audio mix truck) form video village for Nashville Live

[Above] Replay/ EVS area in TNDV Aspiration for ABCs Nashville

“The VI-3000 moves us into the 96-input world from the 64-input world of our other video-centric trucks, and adds an integrated I/O infrastructure located physically on the desk itself,” Dugger says.

“This not only increases our channel count for larger audio productions, but simplifies our setup and configuration process for signal processing and source equipment across the audio infrastructure.”

Mobile production has to meet several criteria: be everywhere, be unseen, and be flexible enough to do both at the same time. It’s more than just having the right gear, a truck to put it in, and a business card. Those days, and those competitors, are long gone.

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MORPHING BUSINESS MODELS Television commercial production houses are adopting new and different business models.

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Film • Video • Animation • Audio • Locations • People

C

ommercial production and post-production houses aren’t just morphing characters in the studio anymore. Today,

they’re morphing their business models. On any given day, one of these houses might be producing a television show, developing a visual effect for a commercial that someone else is producing, or working with the creative team at an ad agency on an innovative concept. These 21st century studios will work on any and all varieties of video being produced today, handling part of the production or post-production or all of each.

To be sure, the traditional model is still in use, but the new model, in which a company can handle every step in the process, has gone mainstream.

The new model makes creativity king and aims to put the right creatives in the right slot on a project—no matter which company they work for.

That’s the way the industry is going, today. Many observers attribute the change to the decline in cost of key production technologies. Technology used to be an important differentiator for production and post-production houses. Now, for the most part, everyone has access to the same excellent tools. As a result, the essential piece today is the talent—the talent for creative, design, and execution.

In other words, a successful business model has to be able to fit the right creative talent to each part of a job. When multiple firms with talented people can compete for production, post-production, visual effects, and color grading, the best creative talent tends to pull in the projects.

Granted, this isn’t universal. Many agencies work in the traditional linear model with separate production, post-production, and visual effects firms.

That model may never go away, but the new model with firms that have mastered all the different trades is competing with tradition.

Here’s a look at how four production/post-production/visual effects houses (Alkemy X of New York and Philadelphia; Hostage Films of New York City; Nice Shoes, also of New York City; and Timber in Los Angeles) structure their businesses to deal with the many different kinds of video productions for which today’s clients are demanding.

BY MICHAEL FICKES

www.markeemagazine.com

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Producing Commercials

Production house: Alkemy X Master of all trades

A Above Top: Director Mark Finkelpearl, a senior VP of development and production with Alkemy X, preps a shot with his crew on location. The production was one of 11 three-minute episodes, a series in which comedian John O'Hurley promotes AARP's various discount programs. The series will run on the AARP website at www.aarp.org.

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lkemy X (formerly ShootersINC) produces commercials, network promos, original content, branded entertainment, and visual effects. Clients can bring to Alkemy X one part of a project or all of a project.

“More and more companies like ours do editorial and post finishing along with production,” says Jim Huie, executive producer with Alkemy X. “I will say that I think we were at the forefront of this movement.

“The reason for that relates to our original location in Philadelphia,” he continues. “In the mid-1990s, we were going to New York for color correction. We decided to bring on a good colorist and offer the services here. The same was true for editorial. We were going to New York, but decided it would be more efficient to learn to do it ourselves.”

Alkemy X always has offered production services for small projects. For instance, when a political commercial requiring 24 seconds of graphic design came into the shop, Alkemy X would arrange to shoot the six-seconds of the candidate in-house.

Over time, the Alkemy X post clients and their projects grew in size, and they began to ask the firm to bring in good freelance directors. That led Alkemy X to a decision, implemented last year, to launch its own directorial roster.

“We looked at our clients’ objectives, what type of work they were asking us to produce and we intentionally searched for directors that fit those areas,” says Huie.

Multiple skills enable Alkemy X to produce many different kinds of projects entirely or in part. A current project illustrating what the all-encompassing business model can do calls for the production of an 11-part series of three-minute episodes promoting AARP’s various discount programs. Comedian John O’Hurley serves as spokesperson for the series.

“We traveled the country with John and did a travel series,” Huie says. “He pointed out all of the best AARP discounts.” Shot, edited, and posted by Alkemy X, the production values mirror national commercial campaigns.

The episodes will run on www.aarp.org. You can watch the first one at https:// www.youtube.com/watch?v=NGmnMzBxLsk. Film • Video • Animation • Audio • Locations • People

Production house: Hostage Films The collaborators

P

roduction house Hostage Films uses a collaborative business model for its individual projects. Sometimes that means collaborating

with other production companies, possibly competitors.

“I think of everyone as a potential collaborator,” says Melissa Beth, executive producer with Hostage Films. “At Hostage, I work with one director, Ruben Latre, who has a strong, distinctive style. If he’s right for a project, everyone will see it.”

Recently, Trademarky Films, a production company with offices in Richmond, Va.; Sanibel Island, Fla.; and Silverlake, Calif., brought a project to Latre. It was a commercial promoting Bellawood, a brand of flooring marketed by Lumber Liquidators.

“We were looking at three directors,” says Mark Meyers, Trademarky’s executive producer. “Ruben wrote a 46-page treatment and got the project.”

Meyers also directs and might have directed the Bellawood spot, but he didn’t think his style fit the piece. “My goal as a producer is to find the right producing and directing talent for each project. I tell the agencies I work with not to settle.

If the creatives want this director and that producer, try to get them both, even if they work for different firms.”

It’s a philosophy similar to Melissa Beth’s collaborative style. When the production team is perfect for a spot, you get a commercial like A Bountiful Life with Bellawood. Meyers and Beth joined forces as co-executive producers, and Latre went to work.

The concept called for an all-out assault by everyday life on a Bellawood floor.

A watermelon explodes, a glass falls and breaks. Kids tap dance and skateboard across the floor. Dad drops his golf bag on the floor and the club heads bounce on the floor. You get the idea.

Each scene features Latre’s signature cinematic flourish. It’s a collaborative triumph. Take a look: https://vimeo.com/106608182.

www.markeemagazine.com

Above Top: Hostage Films: “A Bountiful Life With Bellawood,” Photo: Coffee Spill.

Director Ruben Latre shot a disaster-every-second commercial promoting the durability of Bellawood flooring. Hostage Films and Trademarky Films produced the commercial jointly.

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Producing Commercials

Production house: Nice Shoes Where’s the remote?

N Above Top: Nice Shoes, Remote Studio.

Photo: Vapor Post Remote.

Nice Shoes offers remote services at facilities in Atlanta, Boston, Chicago, Dallas, Detroit, Los Angeles, Miami, Minneapolis and New Orleans. This is the fully equipped suite in Miami-based Vapor Post.

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ice Shoes has modeled itself as an end-to-end production and post-production house out of necessity. “We’re in a world with low

margins and tight budgets,” says Chris Ryan, a partner and colorist with Nice Shoes.

“Survival in this world means controlling the costs from beginning to end. You cannot get into a bind where the visual effects group looks at the digital footage and says ‘this was shot wrong.’ That would double the cost.”

Houses that just do VFX—or just one of the other services—can get into trouble without doing anything wrong, continues Ryan. Geography can affect the use of services by clients. Clients in Minneapolis or Dallas might decide to handle some of the VFX, color grading or other work locally.

To deal with such contingencies, Nice Shoes has set up Remote Color Services in suites at studios of trusted editing and post-production partners across the country. The remote services began by providing color grading for clients that didn’t have the budget to make a trip to New York and lacked local facilities.

To view examples of Nice Shoes’ remote work, check out a Syngenta spot color graded by New York-based Lex Rudge in a remote session at Volt Studios in Minneapolis: http://www.niceshoes.com/portfolio/?post_id=4341.

Nice Shoes Colorist Ron Sudul collaborated on a McDonald’s spot locally and remotely at Republic in Dallas. See the finished piece at: http://www.niceshoes.com/ news/?post_id=271.

“Nice Shoes Remote Viewing can be used in conjunction with any Nice Shoes creative offering from visual effects to color to finishing,” says Robert Keske, the firm’s chief technology officer.

Keske developed the service with Nice Shoes’ engineering staff. “We can broadcast multiple, real-time, viewing streams from a single live session in New York to numerous, different locations,” he adds.

Film • Video • Animation • Audio • Locations • People

Production house: Timber More content, please

At

Timber, the business model is to provide targeted content. Content is a word that encompasses all of today’s many different

kinds of video productions that populate television, the movies, and websites. Content makers, of course, aim to produce video that creates emotional connections within all of the niches of a fragmented target market.

“We have all been involved in every Producing Commercialspart of the production pipeline over the years—as production has become more and more digital,” says Kevin Lau, creative director at Timber. “Clients can come to us for some or all of the parts of projects.”

Lau goes on to say that design ranks as a key creative capability at Timber, along with illustration and visual effects. “Motion graphic design and live action design are different,” he says. “Design discipline combined with our other disciplines enables us to work in many different channels.”

Talent and capabilities across many disciplines also enable Timber to pivot without blinking when the nature of a project changes in midstream. Consider a recent project for UGG, the popular women’s shoe brand—now a men’s shoe brand, too. “Originally, the agency had a graphic idea for the spot, and we started developing a design for that,” says Lau. “We were working with a kaleidoscope design.”

Then following a conversation between the M&C Saatchi agency creatives and UGG, the project morphed into a full, live-action production. “We believe in frictionfree service offerings,” Lau says. “We quickly changed up and designed a live-action dance sequence for the holiday campaign.

“In the old days, if a graphics spot morphed into a live-action spot, a motion graphics firm probably wouldn’t be able to make the change,” he continues. “The agency may have had to start over on production. My partner and I come from slightly different backgrounds, and we can bridge those gaps. We can create whatever you want. If you can think of it, we can create it.”

Have a look at UGG’s holiday dance production: https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=mvwDAkOm1iY.

www.markeemagazine.com

Above Top: Timber.

Holiday Commercial for UGG. Photo: ugg_02.

When UGG’s holiday commercial morphed from a graphic idea into a full-blown live action dancing and singing extravaganza, Timber launched a redesign effort that kept the production on schedule, never missing a beat.

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Spotlight

Texas Crew Productions

Texas Crew goes way West From the Southwest to the far, really far West, production companies learn they have to go where they are needed.

[Above] Competitors in the Ironman marathon, some still wearing their biking helmets, continue the grueling event under the watchful camera of a Texas Crew Productions cinematographer.

BY TOM INGLESBY

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Sometimes a crew has to be ready to go even further west than their home state. Emmy award-winning director of photography Terry Stewart established Texas Crew Productions in Austin, Texas, in the early 1980s. His company has covered many major sporting events, including the Super Bowl, World Series, NBA Finals, and the Olympic Games. His personal favorite is the annual Ironman World Championship, a triathlon that was held in Kailua-Kona, Hawaii, and aired on NBC. This was Stewart’s 22nd straight Ironman. “It’s a really challenging day because it’s long; it’s over a huge footprint,” Stewart explains, “and you’re dealing with 2,000 athletes of various abilities. You need to be ready for anything.”

Working the same event for many years gives a producer a chance to look back at the evolution of his art. “Well, 22 years ago, we shot Betacam, and then we supplemented with some film cameras, as the budget would allow,” recalls Stewart. “I’m talking about the mid-‘90s, so we didn’t have all the toys we have now. When we stepped Film • Video • Animation • Audio • Locations • People

into the HiDef world we thought, ‘Oh, wow, this is going to be tremendous. Pictures are going to be great. We don’t have to really deal with film anymore.’ What we didn’t realize is all the different formats.”

He continues, “To give you a quick rundown of the different cameras that we use to get the footage this year, we have two RED EPICs, two Sony F55s, one Sony F5. We had 11 Xdcam 800s, one Canon C300, and one Sony FS700. We had a GH4 on a (Movi). We had a couple of 5Ds shooting timelapse. And then for the interviews, we shot a Sony F3 recording on S-log into ProRes four-by-four on a PIX 240i. So add all that up, and the post side gets a little frenetic.”

Texas Crew brought all the footage back to Austin, where editors created the 90-minute program. Luckily, they have the luxury of a five- or six-week turnaround. “Two years ago, we did it in eight days, which was … everyone’s hair was on fire. That was pretty crazy. But normally, we have time,” Stewart says.

During the event, crews often drive in front of the racers to shoot the action. This year, Stewart used a Zylight F8 LED Fresnel while shooting out of the back of a convertible. The F8 can be powered by a standard 14.4V camera battery, which was useful on the road and when Stewart was in more remote locations along the Ironman course. “I really wanted an LED with some punch that could run off a battery,” he recalls. “It’s a huge time saver.”

Again, times have changed. “Back in the old days, I used a Sun Gun,” reminiscences Stewart. “It was just a big light that you had very little control of. We used to put some diffusion on it, just to slow it down a little bit and make it a little more pleasing to the eye. It was very limiting. It took big batteries, and the batteries didn’t run very long, and you had to be really judicious about how you used them. For me, it didn’t look quite right. It was always either too much light or too little light, but getting it right where you wanted was always a problem.”

That was then. “Zylight came up with a light that, for me, is just a great tool,” he says, “They put a battery on it, it’s dimmable, and I get exactly the light I want in a way where I don’t have to rely on an outlet that’s either unreliable, like in Russia, or unavailable, like in the lava fields of Kona. So I’m a big fan of the Zylight, and I keep one with me all the time.”

Available in daylight (5600K) or tungsten (3200K) versions, the F8 features an eight-inch Schott glass lens, which maintains single shadow traditional Fresnel beam shaping with an adjustable beam spread (16-70 degrees) and patented focusing system for spot and flood operations.

The Ironman event is a triathlon: swimming, bicycling and running. The swim starts right around dawn. Contestants swim 2.2 miles, then they transition to the bike for a 112-mile ride, and then they transition to the run, which is a marathon. Over the years, Stewart has shot everywhere along the routes. “I’ve done everybody’s job there, so I think I do have a unique perspective on it. I would say that the swim part is the most difficult.

When you’re on the water, you’re trying to pick out a couple of people to focus on from their swim cap with a number on it. A lot of the challenge depends on what the day gives you. Say www.markeemagazine.com

[Above] Some Texas Crew Productions camera operators followed the bike racers on motorcycles while others had an easier task, sitting on the corner, waiting for the runners.

there are big swells and you’re trying to hold a shot that’s pleasing to the eye while you’re getting tossed around inside of a Zodiac. That’s really a challenge. I would say just for me, as a cinematographer, that one probably was the toughest.”

The pros will finish in daylight—the men around the eighthour mark, the women around 30 or 40 minutes longer.

Then there are what are known as the age groupers. “This is a sport where anyone can go to the start line and run the same course on the same day with the best in the world,” Stewart explains. “The cutoff point is 17 hours, which puts it at midnight. So the sun goes down at 6:00 sharp, and we have six hours, still, to cover in the nighttime.”

He adds, “When it gets dark, sometimes it can be really difficult to find the particular age-groupers that we’re doing a human interest story on. When you do locate them, you try and focus on them as much as possible with tracking shots.

One thing that’s helped us keep up with these people is we put trackers on our age-groupers for the bike and the run, so we can deploy our cameras but it’s still surprisingly hard, because it is really dark out there. Aid stations are lit up, but if you’re not around an aid station, it can be pretty lonely and dark out there for a lot of these athletes.”

Stewart look ahead, saying, “When we start talking about 4K, we start thinking about all the problems we’re going to have when we get to that point; it’s a good problem to have.

The show looks amazing. It’s a fantastic venue, and we’ve been lucky enough to have been nominated and won quite a few Emmys for photography and for the show itself.”

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