The present and future of post production business and technology

High Quality Fan Flick Leads To $8 Million Hybrid Fan/Investor Funded Pro Film http://bit.ly/cARYs3

If you missed Star Wreck a couple of years back, you should take the time to revisit. I was privileged to interview the founders on the Digital Production BuZZ back when I was more actively involved in that show. Made in a 10×12′ room, on green screen, even the main deck is a composite shot if there are more than 2 people in it. The animation work was amazing. It was the work of a core crew of dozens and more than 300 people were involved at some point in the three year creation process.

Well, the success of that film – it’s made a lot of money despite being available for free download and is the most popular Finnish movie ever.

They’ve been working on the sequel for some time and the good news is that it’s been funded with a combination of fan funding and more traditional professional funding in a combination not tried before.

But what’s most interesting to me is how this story progressed. It went from some fans messing around and creating a rather impressive film visually speaking, to a new $8.5 million production. $8.5M is still a small amount from a movie-making perspective, but it’s not nothing. Plenty of excellent indie films have been made for a lot less. And, of course, you never know what happens next, after this film is made as well. And that was really the point. It was never that the model that created Star Wreck was the answer, but that the overall ecosystem is evolving, and its evolving to a world where the fans and the community really area a part of things, rather than looked at as evil people who just want stuff for free. Embracing your community leads to wonderful possibilities.

Seems maybe you don’t need $200m for every blockbuster!

David Lynch To Crowd-Fund Next Project http://bit.ly/9R41mn

Well now Lynch is diving headfirst into the unchartered waters of crowd-sourcing and fan-funding akin to whatTrent Reznor attempted to do with Nine Inch Nails and the digital release of the album Ghosts. For fifty smackers, you can be part of Lynch’s project (tentatively titled Lynch three Project) which is said to be a personal examination of his last major theatrical effort Inland Empire along with chronicling some personal habits of the artist.

YouTube Tries To Boost Production Budgets With $5 Million Grant Program http://bit.ly/9Q2nVF

As they say:

The goal of YouTube Partner Grants is to act as a catalyst by infusing additional funds into the production budgets of a small group of YouTube partners who are at the forefront of innovation. Funds from YouTube Partner Grants will serve as an advance against the partner’s future YouTube revenue share. This additional funding can allow partners to invest in better cameras, achieve higher production quality, expand their marketing efforts, expand their staff, or just hire more talent. Anything that will help them evolve their art, business, and ultimately the entire creator community. We look at this as an investment that will bring an even richer body of content for our users and advertisers and raise the creative bar for online video.

So it’s more of an advance on advertising revenue than a grant, but still, it should help that “select group” to improve their product.

Our Footloose Remake Beats Paramount to the Punch http://bit.ly/bx1VvU

More an exploration of what can be done, than a serious approach for all production, they did manage to get a Footloose remake done before Paramount can.

Each team was assigned one scene from the film to recreate however they saw fit, leading to the following tally: 33 different Rens (played by Bacon in the original), 15 different Reverend Shaw Moores (played by John Lithgow in the original) and 27 different Ariels (played by Lori Singer originally). The result is an insane but delightful mashup of styles and approaches — parody, animation, puppets, Dance Dance Revolution homage, reverse motion, video remix, stop-motion — with instances of both male and female drag, puppets, puppies and amazingly bad wigs.

And yes, they knew it wouldn’t make money. In my database of production funding methods, this will go in “Gimmicks”.

Pre-buy a frame of a movie to fund it? http://bit.ly/dhtAK6

The makers of The Tunnel, a horror movie set in the tunnels bored beneath Sydney (Australia) are looking at a rather unique way to fund the movie:

The funding for the film is being handled by the ‘135K project’ – a reference to the 135,000 frames that will be present in the finished 90 minute movie. A freshly launched website invites people to invest directly by buying a single frame of the movie for $1, 25 frames (1 second) for $25 or a minute for $1,500.

Now that’s not a huge budget – around $168,000 – but for an independent feature it can be enough.

This approach was decided on with the (accurate) realization that there’s no way of fighting unauthorized distribution so you might as well move forward understanding that.

No media these days is excluded from becoming available on the Internet, and Enzo’s previous production was no different.

“It just takes a quick Google search to see the endless torrents for that [Food Matters], too. The production company was nowhere near big enough to even try and fight it, so it was accepted that it would happen. So this time around I figured we should try and embrace that huge potential audience and make it a part of our strategy,” he told us.

As well as showing the software in action, this series of videos show the results from the software. Each “edit” is based on a set of story keywords (logged with the clips) and a duration. Lower Thirds are automatic; story arc is automatic; b-roll is automatic; audio from b-roll is faded in and out and dropped in volume. All automatically and in seconds.

The project is about a young triple threat – singer, dancer, actor – Tim Draxl, discovered in Sydney when he was just short of his 18th birthday.

He played Rolf in a professional touring production in Australia in 2000 and his career has blossomed from there, and the three CD deal he has with Sony Universal: the first when he was 18!

Remember, these edits were done in seconds, from selects using Assisted Editing’s First Cuts software. And yes, this is my baby (along with Dr Greg Clarke).

The Sound of Music Edit

Without limits – about 13 minutes of material.

Four minute limit set. Edit is tighter and only the best material makes it to the edit.

Growing Up

Tim grew up partly in Australia and partly in Austria as his father worked as a ski instructor. This is the unlimited version of the “Growing Up” edit.

[Update: I forgot the 10 minute limit so one of the movies was too long and YouTube can't distinguish between a 6 minute cut and a 4 minute cut, thinking they're the same. Fortunately the videos are also available on our site. The Growing up unlimited  and six minute versions are available at http://assistedediting.com/FirstCuts/results.html]

And finally with a 4 minute limit.

Bittorrent only full of leeches? http://bit.ly/amlT3X Peer-to-Peer (P2P) users of bittorrent are often thought of as only leeching on honest content creators but this group have organized funding for a seven episode series. Or at least the first episode.

Interesting turn: financed, released and distributed via P2P networks.

VODO’s newest release is titled Pioneer One, a brand new 7-part TV-series that raised enough funds to film the first episode through donations from TorrentFreak readersand other supporters. Unlike traditional television, the sci-fi-ish series will debut on the Internet, on BitTorrent.

Pioneer One is an ambitious project from Josh Bernhard and Bracey Smith who have collaborated before on ‘The Lionshare’, a BitTorrent-exclusive film which was released on VODO earlier this year. With support from even more big names than before, Bernhard, who wrote the script for the TV-series, hopes that today’s release will set a new record.

On October 31 last year Edo Segal wrote an article on TechCrunch with the title For The Future Of The Media Industry, Look In The App Store. The article is definitely worth a read but this jumped out at me:

But the entertainment industry has a vested interest in the success of this new type of convergence, as within it lies the secret to its continuing prosperity. The only way to block the incredible ease of pirating any content a media company can generate is to couple said experiences with extensions that live in the cloud and enhance that experience for consumers. Not just for some fancy DRM but for real value creation. They must begin to create a product that is not simply a static digital file that can be easily copied and distributed, but rather view media as a dynamic “application” with extensions via the web. This howl is the future evolution of the media industry.

It brings together some of the thinking I’ve been doing on how to challenge the loss of revenue from direct consumption or from advertising revenue when digital files of programming and music are so easily shared and copied. Techdirt.com like to summarize their approach as CwF + RtB = financial success: Connect with Fans and give them a Reason to Buy some scarce goods. Many musicians are already doing this and the results are summarized in the article The Future of Music Business Models (and those who are already there).

I agree that CwF + RtB is part of the future: we can’t charge for infinitely distributable digital goods but we can charge for scare goods (or services) promoted by the music.

But I’m not as sure that will work in the same way for the “television” business, which I define as being “television style programming professionally produced” even if it’s never broadcast on a network on cable. Certainly it will be possible to sell merchandising around programming, and everyone is encouraged to do that.

I’ve also written and presented – as long ago as my Nov 2006 keynote presentation for the Academy of Television Arts & Sciences – that producers and viewers have to be more connected, even to the extent of allowing fan contributions.

Well, last night I had something of an epiphany that bought together Edo Segal’s thoughts and my own as I contemplated the implications of the recently announced Apple iPad.

As a brief aside, I find the iPad to be pretty much exactly what I was expecting (although I thought maybe a webcam for video chat) and interesting. Although I don’t see where it would fit in an iPhone/Laptop world, I can see plenty of uses particularly for media consumption. (For example a family shares an iMac but each of the older children have their own iPad for general computing, only using the iMac for essays etc.)

But the iPad doesn’t really lend itself to static media consumption as it has been: where the producer sends stories fully finished and complete to viewers who passively consume. That’s when the import of Edo’s comment struck: there is more of a future in media consumption for those producers who create the whole environment.  This has definitely been done by many movies and shows but usually with more of a consumption-of-information about the show, rather than a rich interactive experience where fans of the show are as important as the producers.

The future of independent production and media consumption is an immersive environment (website, or better yet and iPad app) with:

• Content
• Community (forums, competitions)
• Access to the wider story, side stories or “back story” in various media formats
• Character blogs
• Cast and crew blogs
• Fan contributions and remixes.

Such an experience would be almost a cross between a typical television program and a video game environment. Sure programming is part of what can be consumed on the site; but there are competitions, games, back stories; additional visual material edited out of the program source, with additional shooting, using technologies like Assisted Editing.

Any unauthorized distribution of content will only be distribution the content, not the experience of the program in its full glory.

Now, there’s no particular reason why this couldn’t be largely done on a website, but it is as an immersive iPad app that I think it will really be fantastic. The iPad is very immersive and tactile. It presents no “border” (i.e. browser window and other computer screen elements) to distract from the programming. It begs to be interacted with because holding it in place to watch a 22 or 44 minute show doesn’t appear to be going to be all that great.

There’s one more selling point for the iPad: it allows in-app sales, so some of the “reasons to buy” can be sold very transparently without even leaving the app’s environment. Avatars, screen savers, certain games or activities might carry a small charge. Yes, even the media itself (or some of it) could carry a small transaction charge. Smooth, frictionless sales in an environment optimized to engage people in the story of the show.

Apple’s iTunesLP format is a very small start in this direction by building a micro-site for the album artwork. This is very powerful because it supports most modern web technologies in a tight package and interactive features (all, b.t.w., without Flash but looking a lot like Flash).

Edo has some further good ideas and I recommend reading the article at the top of this post.

In my experience few productions – be they film or television – are well planned from a workflow perspective. It seems that people do what’s apparently cheapest, or what they have done in the past. This is both dangerous – because the production workflow hasn’t been tested – and inefficient.

In a perfect world (oh *that* again!) the workflow would be thoroughly tested: shoot with the proposed camera, test the digital lab if involved; test the edit all the way through to the actual output of the project. Once the proposed workflow is tested it can be checked for improved efficiency at every step. Perhaps there are software solutions for automating parts of the process that require only small changes to the process to be extremely valuable. Perhaps there are alternatives that would save a lot of time and money if they were known about.

Instead of tested and efficient workflows, people tend to do “what they’ve done before”. When there are large amounts of money at stake on a film or TV series it’s understandable that people opt for the tried and true, even if it’s not particularly efficient because “it will work”.

Part of the problem is that people simply do not test their workflows. I’ve been involved with “film projects” (both direct to DVD and back out to cinematic release) where the workflow for post was not set until shooting had started. In one example the shoot format wasn’t known until less than a week before shooting started.

Maybe there was a time when you could simply rely on “what went before” for a workflow, but with the proliferation of formats and distribution outputs, there are more choices than ever to be made.

Which brings me to the other part of the problem. Most people making workflow decisions are producers, with input from their chosen editor. Chances are, unfortunately, that neither group are very likely to truly understand the technology that underpins the workflow – or even why the workflow “works”. They know enough of what they need to know to get by but my experience has been that most working producers and editors do not actively invest time into learning the technology and improving their own value.

And when they’re not working, they’re working on getting more work. Again, not surprising.

But somewhere along the way, we need producers to research and listen to advisors (like myself) who do understand the workflow and do have a working knowledge of changing technology that can be make a particular project much more efficient to produce, but I have no idea how to connect those producers with the people who can help.

We’ve seen, in just a little under two years, how technology can improve workflows, just with our relatively minor contributions:

Rent a couple of LockIt boxes (or equivalent) on set and save days and days synchronizing audio and video from dual system shoots;

Log your documentary material in a specific way, and take weeks off post production finding the stories in the material (Producers can even do a pre-edit);

Understand how to build a spreadsheet of your titles and how to make a Motion Template and automate the production of titles (and changes to same).

If you know you can recut a self contained file into it’s scene components, how does that change color correction for your project;

Import music with full metadata.

These are all examples of currently-available software tools from my company and others that are working to make post production more efficiently. I wrote more about this in my Filling in the NLE Gaps for DV Magazine.

My question though, is how do we encourage producers to “look around and see what’s available” and open up their workflows to a little modern technology. To this end, Intelligent Assistance is looking to work closely with a limited group of producers in 2010 to find ways to streamline, automate and make-more-robust postproduction workflows. So, if you’re a producer and want to save time and money in post, email me or post in the comments.

If you’ve got ideas on how encourage producers move toward more metadata-based workflows? How do we get the message out?

On the Yahoo-based Final Cut Pro list MarkB posted this just a few minutes ago:

Gave my kids (14 & 16) a green screen kit from Cowboy Studio for Xmas. The older one does a sports video blog, the younger one shoots and edits it (Canon HV20 camera, Final Cut Express, 4-year old iMac).
They used their new chroma key trickery today. I helped them set up the green screen, gave the younger one a 5-minute lesson in how to use my DV Garage plugin, then stayed out of it except for a tip or two. This is what a 14-year old kid can do first time:
http://www.youtube.com/user/JLBsportsTV

Watch the video or at least the first couple of minutes. (I’m not that into football/soccer so it doesn’t mean much to me) but look at the work.Not only is the 16 year old good talent, but the way it’s put together is damned nice too. (In this style of presentation I’ll overlook my long-standing distrust of jump-cuts and live with fact that it’s become an acceptable style: heck in this example I think it works fine.)

Mark mentions that the keyer they used was DV Matte Pro, which I’ve also had a lot of success with: using it on A Musical Journey with Richard Sherman, on the 40th and 45th Anniversary Edition Mary Poppins DVD. After testing all that were available that’s what gave us the best results (although it does have a different approach to fine tuning edges than most keyers, which threw me at first).

I’ve long argued that we have to constantly be improving our skills, because those coming up behind us are staring with a whole lot better craft/technical skills that we did. In fact, we have to keep learning to keep up and make sure our experience and people skills are a whole lot better.

But it does make you wonder what these guys will do with their Christmas “green screen kit” if ever they discover 3D. (I suspect that would be the 14 year old’s realm.) Does easy, accessible keying technology really change production forever?