Production management survey
Televisual's third production management survey reveals all about the likes and dislikes of UK programme makers, from cameras and editing kit through to working conditions
23 July 2010 Here's a collection of recent creative work, which arrived too late for our August issue.
The first is a well-made 16-minute documentary called The Last Resort, made by three students from the University of Portsmouth – Russell Oastler, David Kinnaird and Lucas Way. The doc centres on the decline of Southsea, Portsmouth through interviews with the owner of Southsea’s model village, a sea-front café manager and a group of die-hard swimmers who swim in the Solent every day of the year.
The film manages to capture the fading spirits of those interviewed and is poignant but not entirely lacking in hope. It deservedly won the ‘best documentary’ award at the Inspire Film Festival.
Nexus emailed over a short promotional animation for the Austostadt park in Wolfsburg, Germany, which is a kind of Volkswagen-themed family theme park with an assortment of attractions. Nexus’ film, directed by Jim Le Fevre, is being screened on a 16-foot screen at the entrance to the park. It features a faithful replica of the Autostadt park in cg, based on footage filmed on site as well as hundreds of pictures, and the whole animation is really attractively craftted.
Next up is an art-related video painting competition called The Open Prize, which aims to find a new video artist to work with London’s Open Gallery in an ongoing commission for video paintings. The prize is being judged by Ben Lewis (BBC), Ziba de Weck (Parasol Unit), Marc Valli (Elephant and Magma Books) and Hilary Lawson (Artscape Project).
Over 500 submissions of video paintings were received during the competition, with 10 shortlisted entrants exhibited at the disused Nicholls and Clarke warehouse on Bishopsgate.
Finally, animation production company Lightparade emailed over a 60-second spot for NSPCC’s Childline, directed by Jake Mengers. Real Call is an animated representation of a call between a child and a Childline counsellor.
Two waveforms are shown with a fluttery, nervous, jittery waveform depicting the voice of the child caller, and the supportive, calm voice of the counsellor shown as a smooth, controlled line. It’s a very effective way to get across the work of the charity.
21 July 2010 I was fortunate enough to be invited to a preview screening of Toy Story 3 last week - strike that, just checked the diary and it was the week before, damn, how time flies. It was not just any old preview screening but Toy Story 3 in 3d on 4K no less, numbers fans.
The 4K bit is something Sony is getting quite excited about as a 4K projector is apparently capable of four times the quality of a standard digital projector. And this, in theory at least, means crisper, better-looking images.
Added to this, 4K has specific benefits when related to 3d as the higher resolution makes it possible for both the left and right eye images to be projected at the same time, instead of alternately. This again should mean a more comfortable viewing experience when sitting through a feature-length 3d screening.
One of the few UK cinemas kitted out with a Sony CineAlta 4K digital projector and RealD 3d is the Apollo Cinema on Regent’s Street, so that's where the screening was held. Problem was, I foolishly assumed Regent’s Street ended at Piccadilly Circus so struggled for a good 15-20 minutes to find the place.
Unfortunately, arriving late meant all the better seats, and even the merely mediocre seats were already snapped up. I ended up stuck in the front row, some way to the right of centre of the screen, which was far from an ideal spot to make the most of the supposedly superior image quality.
From this not so auspicious location, the images looked ok, but weren’t noticeably better than any other 3d screening. On occasions the left and right images didn’t manage to accurately create a single 3d image, but this was almost certainly down to being seated in such a dodgy location.
Having since read the reactions of other journos at the same screening, who weren’t fashionably late and were sat in prime locations, their experiences sound exactly in line with what Sony’s hype would make you believe. So...if you get a chance to see Toy Story 3 in 3d on 4K, be sure to arrive in time as it sounds like it’ll be worth it.
Either way, what a cracking film; it even tops Toy Story 2 in my opinion.
05 July 2010 The Farm Group's Nicky Sargent and Envy's Dave Cadle talk about whether the post industry is in trouble once more in the current issue of Televisual (p.21). This follows the closure of Welsh giant facility Barcud Derwen and The Club, based in Covent Garden.
The piece was edited to fit quite a small space in the magazine, so if you'd like to read Nicky and Dave's full, unedited comments, here they are, via the wonders of a blog...
Nicky Sargent, md, The Farm Group
“It is very sad to see more casualties in the post production market; Barcud and The Club as recent examples. However, to many of us who have survived in this volatile sector for nearly 100 years, it is not that surprising.
Without looking specifically at the casualties named or other recent companies that have gone down or gone down and bounced back, some of us get on with running pretty successful companies by adhering to a few simple rules:
1. Be in a location kind of near some work
2. Don’t be too big and too small
3.Try and make some money by charging enough to cover the overhead 4. Do that on a regular basis and then collect the money
We think that, in fact, the post production market is more stable now than it has been for many years. There are 10+ “big”, “stable” companies. The ownership of these companies seems to have been constant for several years; each has some form of definition against their competitors; each has a key core of management and creative staff; each has a pricing structure that continues to attract some work.
I am not surprised that, despite the push to the regions and nations, in the main all of these companies are in Soho. It now seems that us old post bores have left the Mucky Duck and grown up!”
Dave Cadle, md, Envy “Post production isn't in trouble. In fact, there exciting times ahead. But in these recession times it's even more important to get your company to work together.
Post production companies have always been oversubscribed and of course it's never nice to hear people losing their jobs when companies go under. It's easy to drop rates and try and win work, which massively affects your margins and thus restricts any future investment.
Embracing your clients' workflow is so key considering budgets at the moment. Clients want a safe haven for their work. They want it to be delivered on time, correctly and within budget and this in turn creates repeat business, which is so important for any facility.
It goes without saying that cash flow is key to any successful company and business plans must be very robust and realistic in these recession times. They must be set and tailored to your own margins considering the issues of rates at this moment.
It's all well and good trying to win a job by lowering your rates but it devalues your facility's brand. In my opinion, clients will pay the best rates when they know they are going to be guided through their project. Mastering their workflow is key.”
01 July 2010 MPC and commercials production company Gloss Media are amongst the companies creating dramatic, interactive window displays for the London Festival of Architecture 2010.
Gloss’s commercials director Simon Burrill has teamed up with The Hospital Club’s “creatives in residence” House of Jonn, “visual artist in residence” Alex Shepherd and aberrant architecture to create an installation for Selfridges’ window display.
The installation, Welcome To Your City, is based around conversations with members of the public giving their take on London, each of which is “turned into customised shoebox housing units.”
These “micro-homes” are placed together in the window to create a model city that grows throughout the two-week residency, as more and more interviews are shot. The footage in the windows is a mix of lo-fi phone video clips and a performance-based studio shoot.
MPC’s installation, Urban Prairie, which has been created by its digital department along with architecture firm in square lab, also centres on public interaction. The ambitious project sees MPC’s window turned into a virtual prairie, covered in a “sea of grass” that sways in the breeze. Images on 42” screens set behind the ‘real’ grass further intensify the visual effect of the prairie.
The movement of the grass is controlled by the speed and location of passers by. Optical sensors and something called arduino boards capture the movements of people walking past the window, which are then translated into kinetic responses via a series of servos, creating the effect of a swaying sea of grass.
The wind effect then travels to the grass on the large screens before eventually fading off into the horizon.
I’ll put up some pictures of MPC’s window display as soon as they arrive in my inbox...
29 June 2010 The scarily convincing facial movements of the ‘young Dren’ character in Warner Bros’ new horror flick Splice were created by facial animators Image Metrics, using data captured during a motion capture shoot at Toronto’s Core Digital studio.
During the shoot, a rig controlling the cheeks, eyes, eyebrows and forehead of the actress Delphine Chanéac, who plays the adult Dren, captured a wide range of facial movements.
Five animators and four tracking artists at Image Metrics used this data to build an accurate if unrefined first animation pass for the character.
Next, the animation team “took more time” to intricately refine this initial pass and further hone the realism of the movements to closely match the vision of director Vincenzo Natali.
In total, Image Metrics’ proprietary rigging and animation technology, which has been used in a long list of games and films (including Benjamin Button), created 128 seconds of facial animation in Splice.
Check out the trailer for Splice below and watch carefully for a few tantalising glimpses of the ‘young Dren’ character.
25 June 2010 Sony Professional has put together a 'behind the scenes' video demonstrating how live 3d sports broadcasts work. The video (watch it below) was recorded during the run up to a live 3d broadcast of a Premier League match on Sky a few months ago.
A very similar setup is currently being used to broadcast 25 World Cup games in 3d. Unfortunately, none of these games is being broadcast on TV in the UK as neither the BBC nor ITV has a 3d channel.
The good news, though, is it's recently been confirmed that 40 cinemas (including branches of Odeon, Cineworld, Vue and Empire) will be showing eight of the matches in 3d, from the quarter finals onwards.
16 June 2010 There's been a strong reaction to the comment from Framestore's vfx exec producer of commercials Tim Keene (who was also exec producer of 3d effects on Avatar) in Televisual this month about how much he dislikes 2d-to-3d conversions.
One of the responses we received about Tim's piece was from Prime Focus' Martin Hobbs, who heads up View-D, the facility's proprietary process for converting 2d to 3d stereoscopic images. Martin has equally strong feelings about the subject – so in order to provide some balance, here's the full, unedited version of Tim's comment piece, followed by Martin's response.
Is Sky right to ban 2d to 3d conversions?
Tim Keene, vfx exec producer, Framestore "Sky’s recent – and slightly controversial – announcement that it’s banning 2d to 3d conversions on its new 3d channel is excellent news for our industry. For too long, 3d has been associated with the age-old red and blue anaglyph glasses that gave us all a headache. But with improvements in stereographic techniques, 3d is now a subtle and very watchable artform, as proven by the outstanding success of Avatar. But if 2d content is simply re-versioned into 3d via a post-process, the effect is more awkward and in danger of harking back to the bad old days of painful viewing experiences.
True clarity of depth can only be achieved if the work is originated stereographically, ie – where it’s shot 3d in the first place using two cameras in ‘stereo’; one for each eye. The subtleties of depth perception are surprisingly recognisable by the human eye. Converted footage is effectively a cheat and runs the risk of producing ‘bad’ 3d which can detract from the viewing experience.
The concern, given the already massive investment and excitement over the emerging world of 3d, is that poorly executed 3d runs the danger of making the experience 'gimmicky’ and 'B-movie' like. There is now little excuse for this given the UK expertise that is now at hand in both production and post production, something Sky is only too aware of. And, it should also be noted that if material is shot or generated in 3d in the first place, you get the 2d version for free.
If new 3d platforms, like Sky 3d, don’t boldly stand up for industry standards by discouraging 2d to 3d conversions, 3d will lose all the hard-earned credibility it’s recently gained. And the headaches will just start all over again."
Martin Hobbs, exec producer, Prime Focus "The question that was posed in June’s issue of Televisual to Framestore’s Tim Keene - ‘Is Sky right to ban 2d to 3d conversion’ - was somewhat flawed. Although Sky initially said they wouldn’t use any converted content, Chris Johns, chief engineer at BskyB, has gone on record to say that while they’ll be looking for native content where possible, they’re continuing to monitor 2d-3d conversion technology and they’ll look at conversions on a case-by-case basis.
Tim Keene’s response also contained some sweeping statements. I agree with Tim that converted footage can ‘run the risk of producing bad 3d’, but the technology’s evolving and when it’s done right - and it’s creatively led by people that know what they’re doing - it can produce great results on a timescale and at a cost that will be instrumental in providing content as fast as the technology itself is moving.
Conversion shouldn’t be ruled out – planning early is the key. Shooting in 2d with 3d conversion in mind is a time and cost effective alternative to shooting stereo 3d and if you work closely with your post house from the beginning they can advise you on shooting in a way that will look best in 3d – which is just as important when shooting in stereo.
Obviously when converting existing content you won’t always have this luxury. There are some shots which have the potential to give you a headache, for example when there’s rapid movement between shots or when a wide shot zooms in quickly to a close up, as these don’t translate well when converted into 3d. But there are ways of minimising these effects and if you choose the right conversion technique and the right team, they can make this happen.
At Prime Focus, our artists have spent many years calculating 3d space for the post production and visual effects projects they’ve completed for 2d films, TV programmes and commercials. We’ve used these skills, along with our stereo 3d VFX experience on films such as Avatar and Journey to the Center of the Earth 3d, to develop our 2d-3d conversion process that sits as part of our stereoscopic 3d pipeline, and which was recently used to convert Clash of the Titans to stereo 3d for Warner Bros.
I’m certainly not saying that conversion is the only way – at Prime Focus we’re working on content that’s been shot in stereo, content shot in 2d that we’re converting, and a mixture of the two. But Tim Keene’s view that converted footage can only lead to a painful viewing experience is flawed and misleading."
11 June 2010 Yesterday’s Westminster eForum, held at a very near capacity Congress Hall, London brought together the great and good from the world’s of stereo 3d and TV technology to talk about what the future holds for 3d broadcasts.
With a delegate list including all the main UK broadcasters, representatives from many Government departments, management consultancies and plenty of city types, it was a fairly corporate, suited affair.
But it was far from dry, with speakers such as BSkyB’s director of product design and TV product development Brian Lenz (pictured), providing further detail on the broadcaster’s forthcoming 3d channel, which launches in the autumn.
Lenz revealed the channel will mix arts, docs, films, general entertainment, music and kids programming alongside (naturally) sports content, with the emphasis being on quality, not quantity: “It’s in our own hands to control quality – that’s the key,” he says.
He pointed to Sky’s recent 3d commission, the David Attenborough-fronted Flying Monsters and an English National Ballet production, both acquired in 3d, as good examples. He admitted there’s currently a “scarcity of content” in stereo 3d, but added that Sky “isn’t prepared to fund everybody’s first 3d project, as it isn’t likely to be their best.”
As regards the technical side of Sky's stereo 3d broadcasts, Lenz says Sky subscribers won't require new Sky set-top-boxes. He added that the transmission structure to deliver 3d is the same as HD, so there’s no need for Sky to make any costly infrastructure changes either.
Lenz says the same stereo 3d broadcast works with all 3d TVs, so “you shouldn’t be alarmed by any talk of format wars”. He compared the option between active and passive screens (the two different types of 3d TVs available to consumers) as similar to choosing between plasma and LCD.
Whichever you go for, the screen will be able to display all 3d broadcasts so, says Lenz, “The format war is really just hype.”
Paul Gray, director of European TV research at consultancy company DisplaySearch, who was up next, talked about the price of 3d TVs, which, at around £1,700, he says, will remain a niche interest until prices fall to the £800 mark. This will happen, Gray believes, “very, very rapidly”, at which point 3d sets will then grab around a 10% slice of the TV market.
A few speakers later came Tony Mattera, director, Digital Switch Over Network Design at Arqiva. He explained the pros and cons of the different means of getting stereo 3d content through terrestrial TV. It’s technically possible already, using the existing transmission infrastructure, by transmitting the left and right image side-by-side, he explained.
But the limited bandwidth available for terrestrial broadcasts makes this option (which would mean having a dedicated channel only viewable on 3d TV sets) an extremely inefficient way to do things.
Instead, Mattera says, the focus is on looking to transmit 3d and 2d at the same time, using a system called ‘2d plus Delta’. This makes it possible to transmit a 3d version without using additional bandwidth. Essentially, it works by transmitting the 2d version complete with additional data so conventional TVs display the 2d picture and 3d sets utilise the extra information to create a stereo 3d image.
The system just requires a new encoder at the transmission end before it can be transmitted through existing infrastructure, so again, this wouldn’t be a massive upheaval for those companies providing transmission services.
Mattera acknowledged there are potential issues as to whether ‘2d plus Delta’ impairs the quality of the stereo 3d image, but says it depends on the content and that Avatar, for example, would work “quite effectively” transmitted this way.
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