Category: Backstage Conversations

[ 00:00:19 ] You know I think I kind of like the fact that audio is placed second to visual in a way.

[ 00:00:25 ] I mean it’s a symbiotic relationship obviously. I mean you can tell a story you’re going to need both visual and sound but for me I like that audio has that sort of back door entrance into your mind. It’s an emotional response it’s something you can’t see. You can feel it. So sound can drive a story forward just by what you hear. And we can get away with so many things. Expanding What a scene looks like giving things depth pushing the story along it’s just the same kind of emotional quality that music has. But even on a more subliminal level.

[ 00:00:59 ] So I’ve always enjoyed that that sort of secret entrance that sort of Speakeasy feel of what sound is and what we can do with it. Certainly if sound is is not done correctly you’re going to feel that it’s going to it’s going to cheapen your project it’s going if something’s not miked correctly or or wind noise or room tone sound you know that it’s too much on the original soundtrack you’re going to feel that it’s going to be subliminally for you like that didn’t seem right. It seemed that with the production wasn’t done correctly but on the on the you know inversely to that if you do it really well you sometimes it doesn’t draw attention to itself and all it does is draw to drive the story forward so that that’s sort of a meter of success there.

[ 00:01:45 ] If you’ve done your job no one really paid attention to it. I mean of course Skywalker Sound would do a lot of tentpole films we were born out of Star Wars and Indiana Jones era and we do a fair amount of films from Marvel and Pixar and and and J.J. Abrams and a lot of animation and what we do. We also do Sundance projects and we do documentaries and so sound is equally important across all those spectrums.

[ 00:02:13 ] Star Wars being one of the projects that I work on and I specialize in so that that has a whole other scrutiny that that does. Fans who watch the films over and over and over and over again and just almost like we do when we’re working on it we want to feel like we’ve given something for them for each feeling that they have with little Easter eggs or audio that we’ve put in there that’s something that’s going to be appreciated for the multiple viewings sound gives that believability to your images on screen sound as your backup sound is going to have.

[ 00:02:48 ] Is this your wing man it’s going to definitely help your your story be driven forward. And we at Skywalker definitely source a lot of our audio from real world where we’re going out and recording cars and animals and backgrounds and machines and we’re going out and amassing this library we have a very unique library at Scott Walker for 30 plus years of material that we’ve accessed over the years it’s all catalogued in a way in a way that we can use and new and interesting ways and that’s part of the allure and the beauty of working at Skywalkers is that you know we have a fantastic library and a great group of sound designers that have come together to make this audio environment and people come to us knowing that Skywalker is one of those places that we really do care about sound. It’s not a technical process it’s not something to be slapped in at the last minute. It’s a craft that we can we can really help your movie in story earlier. We come on better. So that’s that’s one great thing about working there. Well sound has always been a mixture of technical and creative. And I have I’ve always had a technical background and then I’m also an actor by trade. So two of those things coming together right and left brain coming together and sound has been very satisfying for me so I can play with the latest tools and latest gadgets and come to any and just go on the show floor and just be like a kid in a candy store. And then also can really get into the script and see what’s going to drive story forward and merge those two things to create something that a director or a movie is going to need for their soundtrack.

[ 00:04:29 ] So it’s just that blend of technical and creative that I really love about sound.

[ 00:04:39 ] You know Ben Burks who is who created our Star Wars soundscape he was the gentleman who made you know the light sabers the sounds of the Wilkie’s and the Millennium Falcon and the lasers and everything. Here in the original Star Wars films are so iconic and we’ve been able to maintain that sacredness with those sounds. So they do feel special when you hear them in the new movies now. So I’ve had the luxury of remastering those old films with Ben directly working on the prequel movies with George Lucas and then also now this new and this Disney and Kathleen Kennedy Era be part of the new new Star Wars era. So George Lucas always pushed the boundaries with technology. He never pigeonholed us into it like this is what you do you don’t stay and stay within the lines you know so he financially backed a lot of crazy ideas that we had to do sound work and it’s still that same way at Skywalker we’re very pushing boundaries changing the way things might have been done before.

[ 00:05:35 ] And and and anything that can drive story forward and can do it with a good focused team and technology gives you that option.

[ 00:05:45 ] And we don’t ever just stay within the lines we usually try to you know push it as far as we can go and the fact that we have Star Wars films coming once a year gives us almost an educational environment to build upon each one and each one is built upon the max of what we’ve learned we can push forward and that’s super satisfying for me too that you’re not reinventing the wheel every movie and having to go back a step every time.

[ 00:06:07 ] So that’s that’s a very unique thing about public involvements Gallacher working on Star Wars you usually have the choice of the cream of the crop and a lot of people Star Wars mean something to them wherever they saw whatever era that was and that resonated for them be it in the 90s or in the 70s or even the animated stuff we’ve done recently. And I can take that enthusiasm and use it to to drive the new shows forward. I mean we have have a fantastic team of folks that have been there for a really long time and we have animated projects that are that are smaller quote unquote but still have to have that same level of competency and technical ability. So if you put an episode of Clone Wars or the rebel series up against the force awakens they need to actually sound like they’re in the same universe. But it’s it’s a great testing ground to bring people through. I have got great mixers that come through that that show and come all the way to the future so it’s just it’s it’s it’s the ranch is almost like a school and bringing people through is really satisfying to me because everyone went up their game with Star Wars. They love it. They want to be part of this thing that is bigger than us and the team is I want motivation and teamwork and very small amounts of ego if not if none half possible so to know that we’re working on something bigger than ourselves and it’s going to be experienced in the world.

[ 00:07:36 ] Like you know we have a lake Alex Lakey walk at Skywalker Sound and I always joke about like we make this drop in the lake of our work and it resonates out over the entire world. And we have this Star Wars is the biggest icebreaker in the world as far as conversations and meeting people and and we get to be part of that. And it’s it’s incredibly special and we’re very humbled by that.

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Backstage Conversation Season: 2017

Senior Pilot, DJI

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[ 00:00:18 ] I’ve worked at Technicolor for close to seven years. Before that I was I worked at a company called E film for five years and then those two digital DI facilities for that was a color timer photochemical timer or at deluxe laboratories for close to 17 years. So I’ve been grading motion picture images in photo chemically or digitally for close to 25 years. 

[ 00:00:58 ] Well yeah it’s an amazing project project. When Jess first came to me we met a couple of years ago and we met at a little restaurant in Santa Monica and we talked about his vision and then he spelled out exactly what he kind of thought this would look like and he showed me some clips and he got me incredibly excited about it it was amazing. And so you know after filming and production that we got to the DI stage and it was it was amazing for me just to open up some of these images that he shot and then to project them on my screen. Personally I’ve I’ve worked on quite a few films and this really struck me you know at the heart. It was shot really beautifully. The texture that he created in this in this film was amazing. And so as a colorist with this amount of like perfection and shotting and the color differences really made DI a lot of fun and really rewarding for me.

[ 00:02:09 ] Yeah what texture can be a lot of things Texture can be something that you can when you can add to the image. With that with with plug ins with effects with your with your grading or texture can be added on set with with different types and atmosphere techniques. Jess an amazing job adding texture to the image by adding smoke or atmosphere and was difficult. That is that when you find a lot of films with guys who use Alexa and film and use a lot of smoke but it can be very difficult to control too much smoking and contrast to kind of cut it if you don’t get enough smoke so the contrast is perfectly really flat what jess did was to able to be very consistent from shot to shot. Or he use an actual Oh I forgot the actual name of it but a reader then allowed him to read the actual particles within the air the particles of the smoke the air so he can he can determine from shot to shot seen to see a consistency of this set of this texture. So create a really beautiful soft kind of painterly effect to the image that we were all trying to go through with the Anime to try to get this debt to try to really create this soft watercolor painterly effect on the anime and I get a lot of credit for it’s for the obviously his lens choices you know the real X the arri 65 and his atmospheric techniques and his ability to do this 28 hue color palette that he created that was so just so it’s just so clean and so consistent from scene to scene.

[ 00:04:03 ] Well you know it’s part of it. There was so many elements I mean you know what he’s going to talk more about that I can’t. But he had so much I mean years of research to to make this look it’s not about just adding some some smoke on the scene and some lights and you get you know it’s about composition and it’s about Linda’s choices it’s about about the aspect ratio issues. You know in addition to a grade that I’m contributing to making the blacks kind of off you know making the highlights kind of glow a little bit.

[ 00:04:36 ] Kind of a whole lane effect you know something that all animates types have what we’re trying to recreate that in live action cinematography. Now you know I don’t think we try to even though we we all love the end the original anime. I think Jess and movie about their own type of spin to it. Where we actually trying to masha’allah. We’re trying to create it and find something that was really beautiful on its own. Those will be the room some time looking at a shot and Jess would turn away and then he looked at the image and you go wow that was like an enemy shot. At that point I knew I had something I needed that it was I thought we were on the right track. For this you know there are a lot of features I’ve worked on that it becomes that there can be a lot of work in that to create a look you know out when you try to create a look in the in color correction it can be a little more challenging and maybe not as as true right. It can be a little false with phantasm Winchester and it was all created in camera so I didn’t have to do a whole lot. Basically he created Ludt that allowed all the stuff to fall in really nicely. So once the way I see the image into my into my room I would just be able to add a little bit of contrast again a nice spot that he wanted and in that case that enabled us a lot more time to focus on other things focus on things like like skin tones focusing on the sharpening of the eyes and adding a little bit lift to it. Adding vignette ing trying the natural color contour from shadows to highlights the new ending. So yeah it by him being so close on the grain and working in P3 with his dailies and the vicious effects people. When I received in the room there were no surprises for me no surprise for the director and no surprise for us which is like a beautiful thing.

[ 00:06:47 ] You say that but Eido for B.

[ 00:06:51 ] You know I kind of go by. I kind of go by feel and but the images come up again from a school of photo photochemical timing where a lot of our correction where only printer points. So printer points are red green and blue intensity and it’s a nice little increment Taishan of levels of color correction where you can go from Point two stops to 2 1/2 points aquarter points and it’s a language of Undercity color correction that colourist any any cinematographer’s understand and relate to. So this language of understanding you know when a director says or DP says to me Hey Mike make it stop darker. Add three points. Red. We all understand that. Now today when I’m working on Michaela Prechter which is a cluster. It’s a very you know beautiful exceptional log grading tool which allows me to work in printer points at the same exact way I worked on motion picture film. So I’m going to work in a film style grade meaning I’m going to go right to my printer points Balas out the shot and then I’ll add secondaries meaning windows adjusting the blacks contrast things like that. I don’t use a lot of people will work and so I work in law. Most people work and lift can again and they’ll work with panels and reams of walls. I work I can log on to work on a keyboard and mouse and that’s all I this is for me getting their printer points and in a way. For me it’s it’s just it’s a precise way of working that the Scimitars is actually see my changes on the on the screen. And I think it’s it can be more yet more technically correct for me. You can get there with the other way. But I try and work this with.

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Backstage Conversation Season: 2017

[ 00:00:19 ] That’s an important point you bring up as streaming becomes the medium that people are comfortable with both broadcasting their rights to and certainly people ingesting this content from there there’s a demand for more and more content. Right. Because traditional linear models only had a certain amount of time slots available for sporting events. Now with streaming it’s unlimited. And so what the world has shown us is that they want to see everything that’s going on. What I like to call it is that they want less of more.

[ 00:00:54 ] They want highlights from everything. So where the motion fits in is that we are a low cost high quality solution to produce sporting events you know legacy solutions are probably too expensive except at the highest levels. And our software is actually much more affordable.

[ 00:01:14 ] It’s a software solution so it’s shareable by the stakeholders in each arena per game.

[ 00:01:21 ] Costs are $7000 for a high quality professional productions. If you think of.

[ 00:01:37 ] A driverless car and if that driverless car were to drive around 24 hours a day as a taxi versus what it costs a taxi driver plus that car costs would be much lower.

[ 00:01:50 ] We are a human less camera system and so we can be used 24/7. And it is much less expensive than fortifying it with humans producers renting the equipment. And so when I break down Subud thousand I think of a Columbia University that uses us for men’s basketball women’s basketball women’s volleyball. We have a multi-tiered solution where we are live streaming we are coaching solution and we’re in an instant replay for referee solution different constituents within the university will use different aspects of our technology. When you break down how much they are using us for all the practices all the games and live streaming some of their events. It’s actually well under $1000 per event.

[ 00:02:43 ] Well under a permanent installation we’re not a per event installation.

[ 00:02:55 ] And the way we deliver the product to the end user is that we’re a software solution. So all they’re doing is scheduling the time to start a production and stop the production. They tell us what graphics they want. We embed that and then our algorithms take care of the rest. They film everything that’s going on on the court and make it look like a camera and is moving things back and forth. It’s motion detecting technology. We are starting to use some machine learning but to be honest with you in that space machine learning has still got quite a ways to go. We have algorithms that understand the movement on the court and it captures.

[ 00:03:40 ] A frame which again looks like a cameraman zooming in zooming out panning left and right. You really cannot tell that a human is not shooting it.

[ 00:03:50 ] We just did an event for the any day which is the equivalent of different division to in college basketball. We filmed 31 games in six days and we stream them all to Fox Sports go.

[ 00:04:04 ] Without a cameraman and with one system basketball focus we do volleyball.

[ 00:04:15 ] We just partnered with an NHL team to develop hockey.

[ 00:04:19 ] We will quickly develop every other indoor sport afterwards. That’s not going to be that much of a challenge outdoors. We will get there. I’m not sure that it’s this year. Yet Or it’s solution as more hardware challenges than software so our software is fully transferable to outdoors as well as to other sports but outdoors presents challenges as far as lighting goes as far as protecting the equipment goes.

[ 00:04:49 ] And so your hardware costs actually go up and I don’t know that you know I want to focus on where we know we are a value add and a need.

[ 00:05:00 ] And so in the lot of these colleges where a men’s team a women’s team in another sports team are all sharing that facility. Again the software of it is a beautiful solution because all these teams are using the same exact software.

[ 00:05:17 ] It’s equal for the men as it is for the women of Title 9. People are happy. We have a three pronged solution. So we are live streaming. We have a coaching product that the Golden State Warriors Villanova Wildcats use five other NBA teams and then we have an instant replay for referee solution that’s being used in Europe and we will bring it to the United States for next season. But it’s all centered around our motion detecting technology so that’s the hub of our solution. And then we have built all these software solutions outside of it.

[ 00:05:57 ] Different sports don’t some sports are pretty easy to transfer to. So as we played around with other sports like indoor soccer or handball those are going to be not so different than the way basketball moves. A lot of those sports are somewhat clustered and sometimes they spread out. You know the challenge with hockey is that there’s rapid change of direction there’s ice clearing of the park. And so those things again we think we’re going to be able to figure out in the next three to six months.

[ 00:06:28 ] And once we do that everything indoors is kind of Arap concert would be probably pretty easy to do.

[ 00:06:42 ] We best operate is since we’re a permanent location a permanent fixture as our algorithms are viewing what’s going on out in the stage or on the field or it’s best if that’s a fixed area.

[ 00:06:57 ] And so with a concert it’s going to be the same age in the same spot. And so they can figure out you know where is zoom into when the lead singer is moving around you know panning out once in a while. But you know I would say that sports are a definite need a lot of the venues are either manage or owned by the sports team as well. They play in the same place there multiple teams so there are a lot of synergies in how much we can save all the teams connected with that.

[ 00:07:29 ] So we’re operating in Europe. We were started over there or in eight countries we do five entire professional leagues there. Again we work with multiple NBA teams we’re bidding on a number of Division 1 leagues to do different aspects of our solution again some of them lifestream plus coaching some of them lifestream plus instant replay and some of them all three no dissatisfaction.

[ 00:08:00 ] I can show you a clip afterwards and you’re going to be like I can’t believe a human can do that again. We’ve been streaming a lot with Fox Sports go we stream for ESPN. You know we do all of France’s top two professional leagues all of Finland you know. So we’re getting great response from the end user. The pushback. I would say is like any new technology as you are educating the marketplace. There’s a certain amount of inertia that’s you know working against you. Right. There are ways people are comfortable doing things. Some people don’t want to believe that you know things are changing that quickly. But I think it’s only a matter of time before everyone adopts it because we’re saving them so much money right. A TV basketball production at the highest level in the NBA finals game is $250000 and a regular NBA game is $100000 per night.

[ 00:08:54 ] A big east men’s basketball game is $50000 and a women’s game is somewhere between 15 and $20000 per night.

[ 00:09:04 ] Sub a thousand sometimes in the low hundreds depending on how much you’re using us as we move to a world that’s just demanding all this content whether it’s through live stream through mobile.

[ 00:09:22 ] You know any sort of digital content. We believe that we’re going to unlock a world of content that’s never been seen before and I’ll give you an example. So in France there are 18 professional teams in the top league Canal Plus had the rights to those 18 teams they would produce two games per week.

[ 00:09:40 ] The other seven to 16 games depending on how many were being played that week or warehouse and nobody ever saw them. Even the coaching staff couldn’t get footage on their own games unless they brought in somebody on a tripod. Now with us we produce all 18 games.

[ 00:09:54 ] They still TV produced two and then sometimes more games per week. But they have a catalog of all the other games that were being played. They have highlights that they can shoot out and now they’re monetizing the other content to subsidize the you know legacy productions so everybody wins.

[ 00:10:18 ] We have multiple set ups in our traditional set up is there’s no producer right. Everything is run by our algorithms. We are launching for next season. ANGLE And so that might be from fixed set up or we can add in handhelds off the baseline so you know you can capture a guy shooting a free throw or get into the huddle.

[ 00:10:38 ] And so we can either locally produce that or remotely produce that but that’s going to be you know that’s an evolution in our product because we’ve heard from the marketplace they’re not as concerned with it all being automated as it being affordable. And so if parts of us are automated and parts of us are manual Still as long as it’s an affordable price point which absolutely is there like great you know there are drone solutions out there that’s not what we do.

[ 00:11:16 ] The only drone solutions I’ve seen have to be chip enabled right. They have to have a chip. Married to the person that they’re following. Otherwise you can’t do what we’re doing.

[ 00:11:34 ] We did a very interesting exercise as part of that and a tournament where we did 31 games in six days we married with a technology company called shuk tracker. They put chips in the sneakers chips in the balls chips in the room. They know every single thing that’s happening who’s checking in who’s checking out.

[ 00:11:51 ] So we married our data. I mean our video feed with their data 31 games six days rich data overlaid on the production no human beings.

[ 00:12:06 ] It’s you know something that Fox Sports in sports was involved with the L.A. Dodgers who is a partner of ours R-GA took a lot of different parties to bring together.

[ 00:12:18 ] But it was a smashing success. Again you think of the power of one site tournament which there are tons of those in college. Thirty one games over six days.

[ 00:12:31 ] No humans.

[ 00:12:39 ] Basketball is easy in that it’s clustered. So we follow the blob right. Periodically of run outs one individual play running for dunk and then our camera just widens out to that. But for the most part you’re sitting there in half court or everyone transitions together and you know we’ve been doing basketball since 2012. So now we’re finally venturing into other sports hockey.

[ 00:13:05 ] Spread out ice clearing a lot of different rapid changes in direction. So you know we’re confident that we’re going to figure that out soon.

[ 00:13:14 ] And then I think after that it’s kind of a wrap for all the other sports.

[ 00:13:24 ] So we’re currently operating in 10 countries around the world. We serve eight countries and five entire professional leagues in Europe.

[ 00:13:32 ] We’re really making a push into the Americas we’re operating down in Brazil both in basketball and volleyball. And then we serve some of the top NBA clients and NCAA Division 1 you know past champions like Villanova and we think that that marketplace is really going to benefit because due to Title 9 and Equal Opportunity for Women and the showcasing of live sporting events especially for people as they want to recruit people from the other side of the country and their families have to see what’s going on.

[ 00:14:02 ] Their friends have to see our ability to produce all this content at a low cost is really a game changer for the university level.

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Backstage Conversation Season: 2017

Brigham Taylor has been associated with Walt Disney Studios since 1994 when he began as a production assistant and steadily grew to Executive Vice President of Production. As an executive, Taylor oversaw a range of films including the Pirates of the Caribbean franchise, Tron: Legacy, Chronicles of Narnia, Oz: The Great and Powerful, and Tomorrowland. 

In his newest endeavor, Taylor has signed an exclusive producing pact with Disney, TaylorMade Productions, where he develops and produces titles for the live action studio. His most recent project is the live action/computer generated hybrid version of The Jungle Book with director Jon Favreau.

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[ 00:00:19 ] Well when I was very young about around five years old the 1933 production of King Kong came on television and I had no idea what I was looking at but I was fascinated by all of you know big monkey dinosaurs around that time.

[ 00:00:38 ] Life magazine came out with a series called Life through time where they printed a bunch of murals in the New York Metropolitan Museum of Natural History Museum of dinosaurs. So I got kind of looked like that because like little boys tend to like they go to light trucks and tractors or like monsters and dinosaurs so I went that way. And then in 19 58 when I was about seven years old the movie called some footage of Sinbad came out that had creatures that were down. I had no idea how Ray Harryhausen. So he spent the next I don’t know how many years just trying to figure out you know how to do that kind of stuff and eventually did and met people that knew more than I did and eventually got hired in Hollywood and worked on commercials.

[ 00:01:33 ] And then met George Lucas and you know just went on and on there was always a lot of technology.

[ 00:01:49 ] I mean it was always always the cutting edge of technology.

[ 00:01:52 ] You know that changes you know roughly every five to 10 years. But you know it’s you know you are always looking to graduate.

[ 00:02:01 ] I started with an eight millimeter camera and then graduated to a 16 ometer camera and then a 35 millimeter camera. And then you start working for these places that have more resources.

[ 00:02:14 ] And you know when we got to front from Star Wars to The Empire Strikes Back it became very clear because of their most controlled technology that we could be adapted for the kind of stuff that I do which is more creatures and characters. So it was that was just an engineering job of you know working with engineers to work all that stuff up. Back in practicality as well as the tools certain there just haven’t been like this before.

[ 00:02:50 ] Not much on my rocket. You know I think its applications are elsewhere. I mean there’s a lot more of the stuff that we did was pretty Cluj just not very sophisticated.

[ 00:03:03 ] But folks are like really sophisticated stuff for motion pictures creatures some not not so much.

[ 00:03:11 ] One of the problems with with robotics and that kind of thing is there’s not a lot of range you know. So if something if you cast it to play a robot that does this and you got it.

[ 00:03:28 ] But if you want to. Robert. And yeah you’ve got the wrong thing.

[ 00:03:33 ] And plus you know a lot of times you have to find the right robotics kinds of people that work in movies cause it’s a whole different thing if you hire normal like scientists robotic people they don’t get it.

[ 00:03:50 ] And you know you know these things break all the time and then that takes time and you have a whole room full of people sitting around waiting for all the you know Springs to be put back in the thing.

[ 00:03:59 ] So you’ve got to you’ve got to shoot really quickly and it’s got to be to upon and that that’s where like all the digital stuff helped production because you can move very very very quickly and get in and get out.

[ 00:04:11 ] And instead of having a cable control your radio controlled thing you just put the camera up against the background and you shoot and then you spend your time putting the thing in later.

[ 00:04:27 ] If everybody’s gone home the movies of Brian and King Kong and Ray Harryhausen to quite a few you know I think close to like 15 feature films and I got to know Ray over the years I never worked with him but I would be shooting over in London that same stage that he was shooting on.

[ 00:04:58 ] So we’d go out for beers at the pub stoned.

[ 00:05:02 ] Whenever we come to town on like a book tour we’d get together you know well I’ve kind of started.

[ 00:05:17 ] Tippett studio in my garage.

[ 00:05:23 ] And I never thought like a business person you know. This was more like some kind of weird calling. It was like what I did and it so happened that one thing led to the next. And. It just happened you know just like that. I mean I had to go fill out all the paperwork at the city to start a company which I did. But you know I don’t have a lot of people it’s like it’s like having a ranch you know and then you realize oh hey you know it all up up another patch over there and then over there and then how he you know he’s got enough money for a combine harvester and then you get that and then you get bigger and bigger and then there’s a drought and you get smaller and smaller. Lay off a bunch of the hands and it’s just like that that technology whatever. It.

[ 00:06:24 ] Is necessary for it you know I’m pretty you know omnivorous when it comes. I like I prefer simple things and things that aren’t complicated so that if the situation would have arise where I did not have to use complicated facts for for something I would go on to the stage and shoot the camera. And incorporate it that way. I would much prefer never so much thought about being faithful to. Anything. You know but the you know you’re just you’re building a world with the other filmmakers the director and the writer and director of photography. You know. So you’re exclusively focused on that world.

[ 00:07:18 ] And you know that’s pretty much the job yeah. I mean back in the day I you know I started working for George Lucas and.

[ 00:07:34 ] Through him I met and worked with Spielberg through a producer friend of mine John Davis and we did Robocop and Starship Troopers with the Hoven. So those guys I really enjoyed a great deal because they were very good. Managers of creative people and what they did was they.

[ 00:07:59 ] They really encouraged you to do your best stuff with minimal of no interference.

[ 00:08:07 ] And so what they did they were just they wouldn’t let whatever shit was slowing down stream get to you so they would protect you from whatever stuff was going on you know with the studios and and they were fine.

[ 00:08:22 ] It was a lot of work but once you get on the same page it’s kind of like kids playing with toys you know just start doing what I do. About how about a few years. Yeah. And it kind of goes like that.

[ 00:08:45 ] Generally it’s not a choice. It’s what you make of a project is or you know if somebody like you know Spielberg or Hovind you know wants you to do something Carlsruhe you up you go.

[ 00:08:58 ] Like yeah sure I’ll do it.

[ 00:09:01 ] You know they did a reboot of getting the thing to the first five or dead for theatrical Simoneau really was the end of it was the old chest scene and Star Wars a couple of years ago Kathy Kennedy the producer called me up and said Hey Phil we’re going to we want to do the chest scene again but we want it to be stop motion.

[ 00:09:25 ] What are you thinking. Sure fine. Kathy goes OK great. Ok back on ready by.

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Backstage Conversations
Backstage Conversation Season: 2017

[ 00:00:19 ] Sure. So if you look at WB It’s the classic protagonist and an antagonist and the storyline continues through Ron and the programming. One of the things I’ll say is when we look at the overall technology landscape and what we do there’s a lot of things that were intertwining. So one is the explosion of social media. So if you follow our shows or Raw Smackdown or are our marquee events like wrestle mania you’ll consistently see things about Twitter trending topics we’ve really intertwined social media with WB and if we start looking at our programming we know we have our live events.

[ 00:00:56 ] We have Ron Smackdown running but we carry that story line continuously through social media through short phone video content on YouTube. And we’ve done a great job in my opinion of intertwining that storytelling and using technology to help enable that. Sure if you look at me you know our content is you know I’ll say we’re klap agnostic and we know our fans are everywhere and we Devizes the content strategy to help us manage that.

[ 00:01:29 ] So if we look at the social media and the digital side that’s our or our free ad supported piece so you can go to YouTube and watch schwere form content. You can go to Facebook and Paolo’s stories you get a snapshot or you can go to Instagram and we’ve done a lot to leverage that. So you have a huge fan base from that perspective.

[ 00:01:46 ] And then you go into the Trishul TV model so we should be our flagship shows Ron Smackdown globally in 20 languages in the U.S. it’s on USA Network. And we have a strong fan base there and then you continue to go down there you have the WB network where we really super serve in our marquee events is wrestle mania and summer slam are streamed live there along with seven thousand hours of P.O.D. programming.

[ 00:02:09 ] So when you look at that strategy of taking our content and putting in all these different tiers the analytics is so boring for that. So we spent a lot of time and leveraging technology to really understand our fans and understand that to be subscribers to make sure we can provide a personalized experience for each one of them.

[ 00:02:33 ] Sure we launched her over-the-top service call it network in early February of 2014. Today you know looking at parks associates is the fifth largest network in the United States. We’re really excited about the growth that we’ve seen in the network and we think there’s a lot of opportunity going forward. You know the thought process behind that ad when we looked at the market in late 2013 we looked at the double to be fanned. We saw that it was a tech forward group. Tech savvy a lot of in-home broadband connectivity and we really saw the where the world was going with direct to consumer identity.

[ 00:03:06 ] And so we took that leap in early 2014 and launched the service.

[ 00:03:16 ] So we go back to where the fan is. So we have our flagship programming which again it gets young children it gets it gets adults it gets people really family consumption watching Raw or Smackdown. But in addition we are going where we know the future of the WB fan is so snapshot. Instagram we’re tailoring content specifically for those platforms and we want to make sure we’re creating an all encompassing content strategy whether it’s social media whether it’s TV or whether it’s over the top.

[ 00:03:44 ] We know our fans consume content each one of those areas where they’re the WB network today’s mobile you know were available across the globe today.

[ 00:03:59 ] Our marquee programming we distribute our content globally. So Ron Smackdown are available in over 180 markets today in 20 different languages. And then when we go back to that short form content YouTube Facebook and so on that’s valuable globally for everybody. So we look at a lot of things of a market look at localization and language.

[ 00:04:17 ] And we really try to tailor experience for our fans globally.

[ 00:04:26 ] So we listen to our subscribers and we use analytics. We look at what features are working well. We keep an eye on what’s happening in the industry understanding where the expectation of our subscribers is of the service. One of our missions is to put smiles on people’s faces as part of the WB and we want to do that with the best consumer experience with that with the WB network as well.

[ 00:04:47 ] So we iterate we test that we learn and we continue to keep building vord.

[ 00:04:57 ] So I joined OPW in late 2013 and I was really excited about the opportunity to launch the RTT network. My background is always been in digital and I.T. and and growing up I was a huge fan of the brand and still am. I grew up watching the programming and I thought it was an amazing opportunity of taking something that I grew up watching and helping it to go to the next level.

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Backstage Conversations
Backstage Conversation Season: 2017

Originally from the Midwest, Kylee spent six years as an editor in Indianapolis and Atlanta, working on projects ranging from PBS shows to independent films. She then branched out into post production technology in Los Angeles, applying her knowledge of a working editorial department to the technical and creative aspects of workflow design on shows like CBS’s Scorpion and Jane the Virgin on The CW. A Women in Film member, Kylee is also an advocate for gender equality in post, having spoken on the topic on numerous podcasts, in classrooms, and at the National Association of Broadcasters conference.

Kylee participated in the AFI Directing Workshop for Women (Script to Screen) at Barnard College in 2013, and holds degrees in video production and applied computer science from Indiana University and Purdue University. She is an associate editor for CreativeCOW.net, writing about industry news and interviewing notable film personalities. She is also a board member for the Blue Collar Post Collective, an accessible and focused grassroots initiative supporting emerging talent in post production.

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[ 00:00:19 ] I say data is like religion you know it’s an abstract concept that you need real world examples to to describe to people.

[ 00:00:27 ] I mean long story short if you can’t find content you know it has no value to you has no value to the content creator. So the way to think about it is it’s the secret sauce that makes content discoverable Yeah it’s great.

[ 00:00:45 ] It’s a great question. Yeah. There’s a practical problem with your conta creator. Look your business is not making your content discoverable right. You’re creating a piece of content. You’re not thinking hey how do I optimize my description for example of my show or the genres that I put around it to to make my content discoverable even if you do do a good job at that. Is a you know obviously tens of thousands of creators who are trying to do the same thing but all doing it differently. Right. And so what we do and grace note is we take entertainment meditatively from thousands of different sources we normalize it not only for format.

[ 00:01:25 ] And so for example a standard word length standard genres but we normalize it in terms of distribution format so that it makes it really easy for companies creating discovery interfaces search a guide on a cable box a DVR.

[ 00:01:41 ] Apple you know iTunes or Apple Music making a common format that the industry can use to make all that meta data that was really dissimilar discoverable and searchable in a really nice looking UI because the industry is so fragmented we have to be pretty flexible in terms of how we accept content.

[ 00:02:09 ] So we can be in the old days fax carrier pigeon. You know email today obviously more ex-MIL some type automated formats but we’re pretty flexible in terms of how we accept content. Our secret sauce is a combination of technology and editors actually we have twelve hundred editors around the world but we also have 500 engineers that apply technology and real human expertise to normalize standardize and maintain the quality that metadata. And then we distribute it. Obviously we have our own standard format and how we distribute them edit it. But again our clients are varied and not only would produce custom formats like photo types for them but we often distribute in custom format so you know I think if you take Experion or any other companies that you see in the data space. The real fundamental value they provide is taking messy space. They clean it up and provide kind of an independent you know service for an industry. I think that what we’re producing you if you think about music it’s album cover or the tracks. And we have unique idea. It’s a higher profile structure. So for all the nerds out there think of just like a Dewey Decimal System for for content meaning you take Michael Jackson there was Michael Jackson Thriller. Michael Jackson has a unique ID which by the way when he collaborates with somebody else another album will treat those unique ideas that are searchable thriller probably has you know not only the album but the track probably has you know thousands of different releases every country in the world. How do we display the iconic release.

[ 00:03:59 ] Right. And then the track itself how do we make sure that that track is associated with the iconic album so that when you pull up Spotify for example you’re not seeing cover art for Johnny’s wedding mixtape and you’re seeing the cover art that you expect. So it’s a kind of a basic example of what we do. It gets a little more complicated is we also have really complex descriptors that power search recommendations. So for example on TV or DVR or make it really easy to DVR game of thrones whether that’s on HBO or amazon prime or something. You know that’s an easy example. But let’s say you wanted to search for you know show me kind of the micro Zoners that you see on the carousel. Your favorite UI whether it be Gas-X Warner or Apple. Apple iTunes. You know the new Apple TV you know romantic Westerns set in Italy in the 1950s spaghetti westerns right. That will be example of genres that we would that we would create for music. It’s even more complicated than that. There are thousands that are for music taste types.

[ 00:05:08 ] And so what Apple and Spotify and other people in the music space use great for is that the deep descriptors are around different types of music so will differentiate for example between let’s say Taylor Swift her early career where she was very much a country artist and is now obviously in her later career become much more of a pop artist. Our classification system for tracks would differentiate between those two types of cat tracks and the different portions of her career.

[ 00:05:43 ] So we so far we work directly with all country creators. We have relationships with obviously all the major music labels with all major studios and networks and we work with them to capture information since it’s created by their marketing departments and we all make when just that we also have a business that actually tracks things and pre-production. So we actually do start tracking assets the minute a script is announced or movie ideas being put together we will create an entity for so we were tracking as an example you know Star Wars Roug won probably 10 years ago when it was just an idea and we’ll follow that all the way through. You know obviously when when it goes into theaters and then through its lifecycle. So yes we and I think the other thing is we are working closely with consecrates is getting early access certainly helps us get ahead of the game. The other thing is we use technology as I mentioned with twelve hundred editors. Yes clean up the content but we use technology to automate as much of the process as we can.

[ 00:06:52 ] So as an example for music we use machine learning to analyze individual music tracks. If you think about the scope theres about 250 million music tracks in the world today.

[ 00:07:05 ] We use machine learning to actually listen to a track and determine along the characteristics and tracking for characteristics like mood era genre and thats obviously with editors who train the machine but you cant do that at scale without some of machine learning you know the basis for any machine learning right is it looks for patterns. So you train it that fits these patterns. And in that beauty of machine learning obviously too is it’s thousands of patterns so you know we train the machines to look for certain patterns. It applies the patterns we them do. Obviously we continue to train it and it becomes smarter as it goes on. That’s kind of a high level how we approach it.

[ 00:08:09 ] We saw about three or four years ago that there was a transformation happening in content. Obviously the world was moving from traditional schedule based TV to streaming the music world was moving from downloads to streaming. And we saw that that discovery for consumers was going to be a real problem. And we saw that actually the traditional metadata providers the companies that power the TV Guide whether in your local newspaper or on your cable box we’re not really keeping pace with next gen you guys in next gen search so if you think about next gen you guys whether it be Spotify playlists and search right or Netflix it’s carousels and imagery and technology meaning recommendations being a key component so discover weekly for example on Spotify or you know or Netflix recommendations that metadata really need to change to power this next gen you guys and things like descriptors and photography and so we really set about number one. Transforming the metadata industry by investing in technology to really drive the connection you guys.

[ 00:09:19 ] We also saw though that the world was going international and we saw companies like Roku or Apple were going worldwide. And so we said you know what. What we do at scale in the United States we do it scale around the world we brought huge value. And if we can produce the highest quality at the lowest cost we win.

[ 00:09:37 ] Kind of like an auto manufacturer right if you’re GM and you can produce the highest quality car at the lowest lowest cost for a while you win and then the third component was really we saw these genres breaking down and we said hey you know Comcast you’re your competitor is not is not necessarily Verizon your competitors Apple and you have to be competing not just for the you know the video ball but you have to be competing for the music ball or the ear I guess. And so we said hey we do in video we still do in music and sports as well and so you know kind of we read along those lines and the company has grown from about 60 million three years ago to over 200 million today in terms of revenue and we’ve grown from probably foreign employees to 2000 boys today and used to operate only in the United States. Now we operate in 20 countries around the world and offer our product in 80 countries around the world. So we count as our customers virtually every large manufacturer every network every cable operator around the world. So you know whether it be Apple TV or whether it be Amazon Prime or whether Samsung TVs or Comcast X-1 or or DirecTV we power spotify with we provide data that powers all these interfaces.

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With a degree in advertising, Paulo began his career as a visual effects artist in Sao Paulo, Brazil. He then moved to New York where he specialized in filmmaking, acquiring more experience as an editor and effects compositor. In addition to New York, Paulo worked on projects in Montreal, Toronto and Los Angeles, returning to Brazil to join O2 Post, Brazil’s largest film production and post production house. After a two-year contract, Paulo left O2 to open his own shop, White Gorilla, which quickly became a leader in the media management and digital development film market. He returned to O2 Post as Managing Director, overseeing the opening of services to the Brazilian entertainment market.

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