Fake it to make it: Virtual production for film & TV

Special effects that create computer-generated characters and backgrounds are found everyday in the gaming world and they have been standard fare in higher end Hollywood productions for years. But now, using a combination of more affordable technologies and open source real time 3D game engines as a foundation, these techniques are starting to move closer to mainstream film and TV production.  With networked laptops, game engines that can render high fidelity worlds, and a late model iPhone most everyone can experiment with these new technologies.

The guests on this episode of the Now & Next podcast are producer Andrew Scholotiuk and director Dylan Pearce. They have a sizable portfolio of feature films, TV shows, and games to their credit, along with a Lumiere Award for advancements and innovation in digital filmmaking. 

According to Andrew, it’s not just the technologies involved in virtual production, but the completely new ways of approaching the work that are exciting. “It’s going to allow for new partnerships, new ways of working either within a region or to connect and produce and create without boundary. This isn’t just about transposing what we did in the past into this new technology, but what can we do with this new technology that we’ve never done before.” 

And while there are always costs and learning curves associated with new technologies, Dylan points out there is an indie way to approach virtual production, using green screens, game engines, inexpensive tracker systems, and even iPhones to obtain superior quality content that used to only be feasible with big studio budgets.

In this episode, learn more about: 

• The role video game engines play in virtual production (01:15)
• Andrew and Dylan’s current system for virtual production and how it works (03:24)
• To what extent virtual production can help with rising costs under COVID-19 restrictions (09:25)
• Indie ways to get into virtual production (12:24)
• The skills needed to get into virtual production (18:10)

Canada Media Fund / Fonds des médias du Canada · Virtual production techniques for Film & TV: Unlocking the potential.

Download a transcript of the episode

Dig Deeper:

Read Edmonton 3D filmmakers win major Hollywood award on CBC to find out more about Andrew and Dylan’s Lumiere Award for 3D film
Toronto will soon be home to Pixomondo’s virtual production studio. The new facility is said to be the largest of its type in the world
Discover the potential of Unreal Engine 5 in developing virtual sets that appear larger than life;
Read Virtual filmmaking takes center stage in reopening Hollywood in the Los Angeles Times
Read Virtual Production And The Future Of Filmmaking—An Interview with Ben Grossmann, Magnopus in Forbes
Read The filmmaking technology behind ‘The Mandalorian’ is straight out of the Star Wars universe on Quartz
Read TFO Is Using A Video Game Engine to Make TV, And It’s Working by Patrick Faller on CMF Trends
Watch What Is The Uncanny Valley? by Mashable Explains on YouTube

The podcast is back for Season 3!

In the tradition of the rock radio double shot, Now & Next, the podcast I host, just dropped 2 episodes  for the launch of Season 3. (By the way, if you haven't yet subscribed to the podcast, you can do that here.)

In Episode 1, Toronto-based serial entrepreneur Alex Kolodkin joins me to talk about how to make production as safe as possible while still in the midst of a pandemic.

After months of complete shutdown, film and TV production has now resumed in Canada’s major filming centres of Vancouver, Toronto, and Montreal. Not surprisingly, there is a ‘new normal’ in place.

While there have always been health & safety consultants on set, Covid-19 safety requirements are a lot more specific and constraining. Hint: they are more than just a matter of frequent hand washing and mask wearing. For example, “sneeze etiquette” is now a thing.

On top of physical distancing among actors and crew members, new guidelines now apply to everything from bathrooms and food to the number of consecutive hours spent on set or location.

In BC the term ‘depopulating the set’ has been coined. It refers not just to limiting the number of people on set to the strict minimum, but also to new practices such as directors working remotely and following along on monitors as well as camera operators filming from cranes when possible.

Meanwhile in Quebec, there are new limitations on shootings involving close physical contact between actors, be it love scenes or fight scenes.

To help on-screen and off-screen talent adjust to such changes, Alex Kolodkin started the virtual company Safe Sets International. Since June 2020, they've been providing education and delivering certification for on set safety.

In this episode, you'll hear about:

• What it’s been like for actors Andrew Bee and Ethan Berkeley-Garcia to go back to work (02:20)
• The most high-risk situations and the new basic drill for people arriving on set (05:35)
• The biggest resistance points to safety protocols on set (11:02) 
• What motivated Alex Kolodkin to create Safe Sets International (12:35)
• The flip side of COVID-19 safety protocols when it comes to production sustainability (15:06) 

Canada Media Fund / Fonds des médias du Canada · How to practice ‘Safe Sets’: TV & film production during Covid-19

Download a transcript of the episode

In Episode 2, I'm joined by award-winning actor and founder of Reelworld Film Festival Tonya Williams to talk about ways to achieve meaningful and long-lasting racial representation in front of and behind the camera.

Canada is among the world’s most culturally and racially diverse countries. But what we see on the streets is rarely reflected on our screens. That’s why Tonya Williams, best known for her two-decade role as Dr. Olivia Barber on the long running-soap The Young & The Restless, has made it her mission to bring increased racial and ethnic diversity to Canadian TV and film productions.

Her first step toward this goal was founding the Reelworld Film Festival back in 2001. The initial objective of the festival was to showcase Black actors, writers, producers and directors in Canada. It has since expanded to include Indigenous, Asian, South Asian, Middle Eastern, and Latinx talent.

The festival’s 20th anniversary is coming up this October 2020 (14th-19th) and will be taking place online. Its newest feature, launched this summer, is an online database called Access Reelworld. It helps match racially diverse on-screen talent with writers, producers, and directors. Williams believes that now is the perfect moment for this kind of industry tool. The technology needed to build such a database has recently become much more affordable plus inclusion and equitable representation are top of mind priorities for producers, writers, directors, and networks.

On this episode of Now & Next Tonya also discusses how she defines success for the various initiatives she is driving and what she sees as the important work that still needs to be done.

In this episode, you'll learn more about:

• Rachel Lui’s experience as an Asian actor (1:54)
• How Tonya Williams' goals for Reelworld have changed over the festival’s 20 years (2:54)
• Inspiring data collection and leadership hiring initiatives from the U.K. and the U.S. (5:52)
• How the Reelworld Producers Program intends to solve the lack of representation of Canadian Black, Indigenous, People of Colour producers (9:02)
• Why Tonya and many others are not fans of the acronym BIPoC (12:10)
• The story of how the Access Reelworld database came to be (16:45)

Canada Media Fund / Fonds des médias du Canada · Access Reelworld is Making On-Screen Diversity Easier to Achieve

Download a transcript of the episode

Is the creative economy about the 1 percenters too?

This post is a follow up to one from last month that examined the overlaps between content creation and curation as new digital technologies take the place of the first generation of social platforms. 

Below, is Part 2, co-authored with Jad Esber, one of the co-founders of koodos, a VC backed startup that's  building tools to fill the gaps between consuming, creating, annotating, and categorizing online content.

And now, the hopefully awaited sequel to last month's post...

The internet has enabled us to pursue our passion and turn that into a financial reward of some kind, and that can be anything from making a bit of money on the side to making a decent living; see much-hyped Passion Economy. But -- it’s still a game for the 1%. 

People creating physical products and selling on Etsy and Shopify are prime examples of the commercial side of the passion economy. What could previously only be done at the level of a craft market can now be done on a global scale, and that's the case for the millions of people around the world selling their wares on those sites.

So when you look at creators using online tools to post creations to sell or monetize (whether, e.g. that's Etsy sellers or YouTubers or creators on Twitch etc.) the overall picture is another story of the top 1% of the 1%. A study done last year showed that there are about 17 million such creators in the US, with aggregate earnings of $7B, but fewer than 1% of those 17 million earn $10,000 or more per year.

Of the 30 million+ YouTube channels only about 20,000 or so have a million subscribers or more, which is where one needs to be to be 'in the game', so to speak, and in that 20,000 figure are the broadcasters and media organizations and recording artists who are already major brands, with infrastructure and marketing budgets, so that's now a really challenging place to make one's mark.

Above is an example of the distribution of views on YouTube for 2019, from Pex.com. I think people tend to think there are more YouTube stars or YouTube millionaires than there actually are, but the numbers show that close to 90% of videos posted get under 1000 views and not even 3% get between 10,000 and 100,000 views. And to get over a million views puts you in the 0.1%. I think people think there are a lot more PewDiePies out there than there actually are and these numbers back that up.

The bright side of these stats is that there are hundreds of thousands of people in the US alone able to earn at least a nice 'side hustle' level of money, if not a living, doing things that were either not doable from a logistical point of view or not feasible in the sense that a broadcaster or publisher was probably never going to give them the go-ahead to do a show or write a column.

Is there any good news? Yes there is. The GDP of the creator economy is expanding. 

1% of artists are getting 90% of streams. But, the more important stat is that that 1% is now 16,000 artists and the 99% represents about 160,000 artists. A huge uptick compared to the previous world. We’re seeing:

• More & more consumers becoming creators and curators (with greater incentives & easier to use tools)
• Better methods to monetize creative output online 
• An increased willingness to pay online creators

In terms of how these dollars will be distributed, we will likely see a flattening of the head, with wealth being distributed more equally across creators. However, only slightly.

We’re seeing an obvious shift to a more creator-centric model. Patreon estimates that their creators will be earning at least $1 billion a year. A story about AWAL recently reported that somewhere between about 100 and 300 of the artists on AWAL earned over $100,000 last year and that AWAL's parent organization, Kobalt, believes there could be as many as 100,000 artists in this tier in the next five 5 years.

Markets naturally pick winners and talent is distributed by a very skewed power law. Most people only want to see content from the best creators. And we generally have similar assessments of what the best is.
However, what constitutes content, talent, and even creation, has never been more voluminous or varied. And at the center of all of this is the question of taste.

For the first time, possibly ever, we're seeing all tastes represented, expressed, distributed, and consumed. Wattpad is a good example with its (very) long tail of sub-genres. Everything from Christian zombies and vegan vampires to angry mermaids, and more recently angry mer-men. 

TikTok is another great example. They’ve helped to keep a huge range of distinct subcultures, with their different tastes, separated. And in the words of Eugene Wei: “one person’s cringe is another person’s pleasure, but figuring out which is which is no small feat”.

With platforms’ higher resolution of taste preference, creators have more opportunities and more choice between monetizing by earning a little off of each fan from mainstream content or earning a lot off of deeper connections with a smaller set of fans through niche content (see e.g. SignalFire’s recent report on the economy of creators).

In the end, it comes down to curation. Curation involves multiple vectors, and taste is the term for the component vectors of curator preference. As soon as taste enters the definition of talent, so does distribution and market segmentation. The idea that creation is for the 1% and the winner-takes-all dynamic relies on creators being judged simply by an excellence (or talent) standard. And curation only determines the size of the pot. But when creators are judged by a taste standard, curation and creation are intertwined. And we’re seeing more of that now than ever - and with that, we’ll see large welfare gains and more opportunities for people to make money creating and curating online.