Mark Turner, Project Director of Production Technology at MovieLabs, chats with Michael at NAB about the 2023 Vision and their goal of bringing a more efficient workflow process to the entire industry.
Michael: Hi, Michael Kammes here from Shift Media, booth N1875, and on the show floor today, we’re talking to folks who make a difference in our industry. And today, we’re talking with Mark Turner of MovieLabs. Mark, thanks for joining us today.
Mark: Thank you. I’m busy with making a difference. It’s good.
Michael: Excellent. So MovieLabs. There has been a lot of buzz about it. I’d like for folks, the uninitiated folks, to kind of understand what MovieLabs is. Can you explain to our folks out there what MovieLabs is?
Mark: Sure. MovieLabs is a joint venture, technology joint venture, of the major Hollywood Motion Picture Studios. And we’ve actually been around for 15 years now. Started out in distribution technology. We’ve been moving up the stack and now are doing a lot of work in production. That’s where people are hearing about it now, the 2030 Vision. There’s a MovieLabs paper that came out in 2019, which is very focused on where do we need to get to to make a more efficient workflow process. Because let’s face it, our industry is not scaling well, and we are gonna be asked to do more and more scaling, and our old a hundred-year-old workflows are gonna fall apart. So we need to find a better way of doing stuff. So the studios, through MovieLabs, have put out their paper. It is the common studio viewpoint.
Michael: They got a whiteboard and said, this is where the industry is going. This is where we need to go.
Mark: This is where we should all get to, not just for the studio’s benefit, but for everyone. All boats will rise, right? We will not be able to scale this industry if we don’t sort of get to this place. And it’s very cloud-based focused. But there’s a lot of work to be done, which is why we blew it out ten years. There’s workflow implications. It’s training implications. Like, this is a big change, and it’s the change we never really did when we went from analog to digital. I mean, we went from analog to digital, we changed the cameras, changed from moving things in film cans to hard drives, but the workflows really didn’t change. And we’re doing a pivot into the cloud. That opens up a whole bunch of new technologies. Like, this is our chance now to change the workflows and really get a more modern media workflow system running. And if we don’t do it now, we’re gonna miss the boat.
Michael: I love the organization of the paper because it was actually broken out into many principles, ten different principles. And we’d be here all day if we talked about all the nuances of the ten principles, so maybe you can make that a little bit more digestible.
Mark: Yeah. So the ten principles, they break down into three areas. That’s an easy thing, right? The first five are all about cloud foundations. So the first couple really talk about the idea that all the media created coming outta the cameras should go straight to the cloud and then stay there, which is critical, right? Because what we do now is we create media, and then we send it to someone, and they do some work, and then they send it to someone else, and they do some work. They send it, send it, send it, and they duplicate it and copy it. And we ended up with this proliferation of content, and we need to stop that. So the idea is we put everything in the cloud, there’s a single source of truth, and then people come in and remotely work on that.
So, you know, the second principles talk about applications coming to the media instead of the media moving to the applications. Media is big. Applications are small. We should stop moving media around the place and move applications to the media. And there’s some stuff about archiving in there, but the first five are all about this sort of cloud foundation. And then on top of that, we’ve got security and identity, which is this idea of, okay, now we’ve got everything in the cloud that’s inherently connected to the internet, bet I could fix security while we’re at it. Um, so there’s this specific work we’ve been doing in our security, and that’s foundational as we did that work first. And then on top of that, a cloud foundation, a good security platform, now we can start talking about software-defined workflows and getting really interesting, clever abilities to automate things, move things through the pipeline faster.
It’s metadata in there. There are ontologies in there. There’s the ability to sort of create more interesting pipelines on how applications are talking to each other. So we have to do all of them together. It’s not like we’re waiting, you know, until 2029, and we’re gonna drop this solution on the world. We have to do the work now. That’s why we’re here. There are companies right now that are demonstrating parcels of 2030 Vision, like, right here today, which is great. You know, SaaS platforms like this – great, we’re all for that. We’re all for open AI, APIs, and, you know, the ability to interconnect things. So that’s what you know we are here for, is what bits can we do now so that we can check them off, and we’re looking for the gaps. What still needs closing, and where does technology or training or some new processes need to be fixed? And that’s what we are here to do.
Michael: That brings up a really good point because the paper was originally released in 2019, and since then, it’s felt like a decade because of various things that have happened in the world. But I’m sure over the past almost four years, there’ve been some things that have needed to be updated. Right? So there’s been some updates from the 2030 Vision released in 2019.
Mark: There have been new releases. We haven’t changed the principles, right? The principles are fine. Someone asked me last week, have we changed the principles? I was like, I don’t feel a reason to change the …
Michael: No asterisks at the end.
Mark: No. Because they were aspirational anyway, right? They were big, and they weren’t specific. And MovieLabs does not dictate technology to anyone. You know, the studios can’t and should not be doing that. What we do is set direction and say, if we all got here, could we make a better world? So, no, we haven’t felt the need to change anything.
Michael: But there’ve been updated papers.
Mark: Yeah. We’re releasing new content and doing work as well. We’re actually now, you know, writing code and actually deploying tests and putting different companies together and making things happen. So yes, we’ve put out a paper on our software-defined workflows, which defines that concept and then goes deep into what’s required. We’ve done a lot of work on security. So the last part of what we call the Common Security Architecture for Production, which is a five-part architecture…
Michael: That lower third for that is gonna be unwieldy for you!
Mark: See, we call it CSAP. That’s easier. Add that. So CSAP part five just came out. There’s one more that’ll come, but that takes this sort of cloud well-understood security concepts that work, IT people use ’em every day, right? Cloud is used for government. It’s used for military. Like, the cloud is a very inherently secure place. We can make that work for media workflows. We just need to sort of approach things slightly differently in our heads. CSAP is about, how do you take sort of well-established, current technology that works in the cloud and apply it to production? So it’s a whole architecture. People pick it up, use the technologies today and actually build a new security system.
Michael: That’s actually pretty interesting. You said people just pick it up, and I think what’s interesting is because you’re putting out these principles and putting these kind of guidelines, it’s where folks should end up going. The 1,700 manufacturers that are here at NAB, how do they approach MovieLabs or how do they say, “You know what, we like where this is going. How can we get on board and contribute to that?” What is the usual process there?
Mark: So, you know, MovieLabs are not a standard-setting body. We’re not out certifying things. The paper is public. It’s designed to be out there. People can read it. People can download it. We have got companies that are writing blogs about what it means to them. Google this week just published something about how do you take the CSEP principles and apply it on Google Cloud today. Amazon just finished a three-part blog series about exactly the same thing. How do you take that security thing and map it today to stuff you can buy off your Amazon marketplace? So any company can get involved.
Michael: But there’s gotta be common directions and not just the principles.
Mark: And that’s all that MovieLabs is doing. Right? We are just funneling everybody in the right direction. And the Vision is a vision. It’s a roadmap. It’s like, here are the things we think we have to get done. But we’re not building products. We won’t build products. We’re not for that. We want everybody else to go and build the products. So we’re just gonna make sure that it, you know, if you’re gonna do that, could you do it in this way so it will work with other things upstream, you know, or downstream. Or we can pass data backward and forwards and stuff because we’re looking at this bigger picture than any one particular part. But yeah, the more implementers, the more vendors, they can ping me, look it up online, follow the blog series and follow us on LinkedIn. That’s my biggest thing to people.
Cause there’s constant new thinking coming out of MovieLabs. And we’re also running this showcase program, which came out of IBC last year, where we’re actually taking case studies. We’re working with the companies who implemented a solution that demonstrates the principles today. And then, we posted them on the MovieLabs website. So, you know, you can go and look right now, and you can look up archiving use cases from Disney, which they did with Avid. You can look at interesting workflow things that Skywalker have done, and you can say, all right, I’m interested in how do I build a new security workflow ontology system, and we found someone who’s already done it. We’re gonna work with them, write a case study, and publish it online. Like, all boats will rise if we share our knowledge.
Michael: I love the fact you specified that there’s no certification. To be very transparent about that. There’s another company that also doesn’t do certification but is very important to our industry, and that’s the MPAA and their TPN+. That program just came out, and I’m curious if there were any discussions or back and forth on how the two bodies may work together. Because the TPN+ obviously is making sure that things that are being looked at, someone’s facility, kind of adhered to some of the best practices of the industry, which MovieLabs is obviously influencing.
Mark: Yep. I mean, so we know the TPN goes very closely…
Michael: But there’s no TPN certification. They’re very clear on that. There’s an audit.
Mark: There’s an audit, and we won’t do that. So we would look to organizations like TPN to go and audit. So whether someone’s done a good version of the MovieLabs architecture, ours is an architecture. We would hope everybody implements it in a good way. But we’re not going to get measuring. That’s not the role of MovieLabs. That’s what TPN is for. And that’s great. That’s, you know, we’ll get to a point probably in the next year or two where they can look at what we’ve built, or what we’re proposing, and they can look at that. How do you map that into either TPN+ or a different version of it? That’s a TPN question.
Michael: I’m sure we’re all tired of talking about the pandemic, but some technologies obviously were accelerated during that process. So did you see gaps or similar other technologies that just, wow, we didn’t see that coming during the pandemic that has since caused some of these different papers to be updated?
Mark: No. Someone suggested that we caused the pandemic to try and prove that a cloud-based workflow would be a good idea. I would like to put that to the bed. That is not true.
Michael: If you had that kind of power, I’d like to talk to you after this interview.
Mark: So the pandemic proved a few things. One, it proved that people can actually work remotely, which for a lot of creative jobs, a lot of people were like, “We couldn’t possibly do this remotely. How can that ever work?” And then, all of a sudden, in two weeks, they were doing it. Right? So for creatives, it kind of moved a lot of the mindset to, “Yeah, we can do this job remotely,” which is great. Because a lot of the Vision has this idea that you can work from anywhere cause everything’s in the cloud. So we were kind of there, but we’re also not declaring success because we had two years of people working from home. Working from home and the Vision were not the same thing, right? So it was a lot of rush jobs to get people to go and move media to go and work from home, and they were tending to do it in an isolated place and then sent the media back to central office. That was not the same thing that we were talking about. So it moved us a little bit further forward in mindset, at least. But it didn’t necessarily fix all the technology problems we needed to get fixed to make a permanent change to an entirely cloud-enabled workflow where everything goes in once, and it stays there and doesn’t keep moving in and out and backward and forwards. That’s inefficient. We don’t wanna do that again. That was, see my earlier point of analog in digital. So progress. It was not a good thing, it was a disaster, but we’ve pivoted to make it at least learn some lessons out of it.
Michael: In terms of progress, I wholeheartedly buy into the Vision, a lot of folks here do, but there’s gotta be, I don’t wanna say naysayers, but folks who are digging their heels in. Aside from the obvious, “Well that that’ll take too much time” or “That will cost too much money,” what are some of the objections that you’re hearing from the small group of folks? And how do you typically respond to those?
Mark: I think what we hear from people is it’s gonna be hard. Which that’s why we gave ourselves ten years. We are a very rare industry where we’ll spend a hundred million dollars on a single product, right? And have two and a half thousand people working on that product for 18 months. A lot of whom are freelancers. And then, you know, they walk out the door. You know, if you went to Ford and said, “Hey, why don’t you make a new car cost a hundred million dollars, and we’ll just make one of them, and then the whole team manufactured it would just break it apart again.” And they [say], that’s crazy.
Michael: I’d like to be in that pitch meeting.
Mark: But we do that, and that’s the complexity, right? We have a lot of people that are not employees that we need to put together. We need a lot of tools. A lot of tools have custom plugins. You know, we have to make that whole ecosystem work in a way that you can swap in and out components, right? And this idea of a software-defined workflow is that I’m not locked into this pipeline. I have to do it this way. You know, we started production this way. We can’t possibly make a change. Like, if midway through an 18- or 20-month, 24-month production cycle, someone comes up with a great new technology, you should be able to drop in it. Like, if you say that to someone right now, a producer will go, don’t touch anything; it’s working.
Software can fix that, but there are a lot of people to be involved. So largely, what we have is skepticism that we can pull this off, which, as we get more momentum, I’m less worried about. And then the other one is change management, which is, okay, you build the best technology in the world, but if no one uses it, or no one knows how to use it, or it’s super complicated to use, then we failed. So a lot of my work is actually about, okay, can we bring the people along as we’re doing the new technology? So, you know, we are not gonna get to the end of 2029 and say to people, “Hey, there’s a whole new solution out there. Well done. Here. Go.” And they’ll go, “I don’t wanna use that. That doesn’t do what I wanted it to do.” No, don’t work like that. So we’ve gotta get people on technology to move in parallel.
Michael: If we move a little bit more topically, obviously, the big buzzword is machine learning, AI. How do you feel that may influence any of the ten principles or at least some of the updates since then?
Mark: I’ll tell you the high-level viewpoint we got of it, and it’s mentioned in the original paper, which is that there’s gonna be a whole bunch of AI tools. We predicted then in 2019. Some of them are gonna be very useful. What will be the most important thing that we think we can help with is a common data format for them to learn from. And to understand, you know, if you’ve got a particular data model, who owns that model? Who created that model? A lot of innovation will appear if we can all standardize the data that flows underneath it, right? Then you can do creative things with workflow, and you can plug in different applications. So we built this ontology, the ontology for media creation. Again, it’s in multiple parts because it’s designed to be extensible, and that’s all up on the website.
You can go look at it, but it defines basic terms that we need in our industry that other people don’t. You know, we have characters and actors that are related to each other, and they’re mentioned in a script. And you end up with these very large data models when you start going, “Well, wait a minute, I’ve got a shot, and we’ve got a shot. There was a take, and the take had these actors on stage in it, and they were portraying these characters. Um, but one of them had a stunt double in as well, and that was also portraying the same character.” So we get very complicated data models that come, all of which are custom for every production right now. And we think a lot of software and a lot of tools will be a lot more useful if we can actually all standardize the data so that everything is actually being able to innovate on top of that.
So that’s a big part. And AI, one benefit from that is that you can actually then have it understand context, which a lot of the excitement right now is about natural language processing in that you can tell it what you want, and it’ll go and create it. That still struggles if you don’t give it the right context to understand what the language is. You know, if I say “shot” to something at ChatGPT, it might think guns. We weren’t talking about that. It doesn’t understand the context. So we need to give these tools context we had to make them useful for us. So there’s a lot of work to be done in AI yet as well to make it a truly useful tool that isn’t a gimmick.
Michael: At the annual HPA Tech Retreat a few months ago, a multi-day event, at almost every session, every discussion, MovieLabs was discussed. Not just discussed, it actually had a place of prominence on the screen. HPA, a lot of times, is very much feature film, larger budget broadcaster, cable television oriented. And I would love for folks who are more independent to kind of know where MovieLabs fits in for them when they’re not working on those types of shows.
Mark: You know, MovieLabs is owned by the studios. They produce a huge amount of episodic TV, right? Just to be clear, they are not just making movies. So episodic TV has always been included. I think one of the reasons why you saw it mentioned a lot, but it’s not MovieLabs that’s mentioned. It’s the Vision that’s mentioned. The Vision has been democratized, and there are a lot of companies that now have it as their vision, right? It’s their strategy. It’s, “This is where we are going, and the studio said they wanted to get there.” Hell, that’s what we wanna go to too. So it comes up a lot because I think a lot of people, it landed at a time when a lot of people were going, they needed direction. They’d heard about cloud, they’d send some bits of this, and it just put everything together on a nice little packet.
People went, “That’s it. That’s what we’ve been talking about. That thing.” If you look at those principles, you could apply those to a webcast at a conference. You could apply those principles to making a student film, making a 30-second commercial, you know, making a YouTube video. I mean, they are pretty foundational for all types of media. And actually, there’s some cloud companies that have been talking about them. They’re pretty useful in any creative industry, actually. They’re pretty good high-level principles for everybody to work for. We may create tools for the very high-end that can afford, you know, 25-million dollar visual effects budgets and given builds of amazing virtual production technologies. But if we do it right and we create enough scale, those innovations will fall down to everyone, and you will be able to do, you know, virtual production on an iPhone.
We’re seeing begin bits of it now, right? You can start doing swapping out backgrounds and stuff. Even five years ago, that was unheard of. You know, you can get a visual effects company to go and do rotoscoping now, and we’re getting to the point where some of this technology is becoming democratized as well. So I think the Vision was published on behalf of the major studios, but it is not owned by them. And it is a vision for the future of creative industries in general. And I think that’s the way it should be perceived.
Michael: Lastly, where are the various places online where we can read the paper, read the updates, see video fireside chats, etcetera? Where can people learn more?
Mark: So MovieLabs.com is the best place cause it’s got the showcases on there. There are some video things that we put out as training. There are more of those coming up. The visual language, which we haven’t spoken about actually, but we have a whole visual language. We’re building workflows. All of that is on there. The ontologies are on there. And then the best way to find out updates is to follow us on Twitter or LinkedIn, and you can look us up on MovieLabs on LinkedIn, and we’re gonna start doing a newsletter soon as well. Because there’s so much stuff going on that sometimes we don’t even hear about, and we go, “Whoa, whoa, that happened?” So we’re gonna start putting together a newsletter. It just brings it all together so people can get one digest of all the things that are happening. But yeah, there’s a lot to follow. It’s going well.
Michael: Thank you so much for your time.
Mark: Thank you.
Michael: Thank you for tuning in. This has been Mark Turner from MovieLabs. I’m Michael with Shift Media.
Miss our interview with Terri Davies, President of Trusted Partner Network? Watch here to learn more about the TPN application process.
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Michael was privileged to sit down with Terri Davies, President of the Trusted Partner Network, at NAB to discuss the recently upgraded TPN program and the new TPN+ platform. Terri walks us through the application process and clarifies exactly what the program offers.
Michael: Hi, Michael Kammes from the Shift Media Booth here at NAB 2023. And joining us today is Terri Davies from the MPA.
Terri: Thank you for having me.
Michael: Thank you so much. We have a ton of questions to ask, so I hope all of you are paying attention. First off, there’s a three-letter acronym we’ve heard in the industry for years, and I want to talk a lot about it. It’s TPN or the Trusted Partner Network. Please explain to everyone what the TPN is, and especially what the relaunch of the TPN is.
Terri: Okay. So the TPN, Trusted Partner Network, as you said, is wholly owned by the Motion Picture Association, and it was devised back in 2018. It was launched to really reduce the number of security assessments that the vendor community had to go through for each of the studios. So some brilliant minds got together, and they pulled together this concept called TPN that basically leveraged the MPA best practices and built a questionnaire on top of it, which is, in essence, the TPN program. And then, TPN held that information. There were third-party assessors who validated the vendor’s answers, and TPN became that source of truth for the studios to go and one-stop shop for all security information from which they can make their own independent risk-based decisions.
Michael: Fantastic. And you said that was 2018, correct? So there’s been five years, there’s been a lot of things that have happened around the world since then. So what are some of the new features? Some of the latest concepts in the relaunch of the TPN.
Terri: TPN launched doing site assessments, meaning physical locations, and it was tremendously successful. The team did a great job. It grew enormously in the first 18 months, and then, of course, COVID hit, and all of those sites and locations that were so carefully assessed shut down. And everybody moved to the cloud, and at that point, the MPA best practices did not include application either in the cloud or on-prem. So the whole thing kind of ground to a halt. And unfortunately, you know, production stopped during COVID, but then it quickly spun back up again, and the studios had to scramble to get productions up without TPN being able to keep up and do app in the cloud or on-prem. So we have spent the last year redesigning the program and relaunching it. It relaunched on February 6th.
We’ve rewritten the MPA best practices. We’ve taken it from hundreds to 65, which means that the TPN questionnaire is also reduced from 400 plus questions to 135. We’ve built a new platform, as well, that we’ve cunningly called TPN+. We launched February 6th, and it includes app and cloud, as I said, but we also wanted to address the assessment fatigue and just the sheer fatigue around the subject of security in the industry. So if a vendor, especially an application vendor, is done SOC 2, for example, we now accept SOC 2 in the TPN+ platform. And the content owners can see that cause they should be interested in that. If they’ve done ISO cert, we accept that, and we built in filtering based on the ISO cert to pre-populate answers in the TPN questionnaire as well. So there are many, many new functions. Those are really the high level.
Michael: For companies that are interested in getting assessed by the TPN. What are usually the steps of that process?
Terri: So, they contact us, they sign up to TPN, and they get access to the TPN+ new platform. They then complete their profile services, sites, owned applications, licensed applications, any other documentation they wish to share, including non-TPN security certs. They then complete a TPN questionnaire, 135 questions or less. If we descoped it, if, for example, they work exclusively in the cloud, we’re not gonna ask them about physical tape meetings. At the same time, they schedule their assessments and negotiate that separately with a TPN-accredited third-party assessor, who then goes ahead and assesses their questions. They go through all of that to get to the end of the TPN assessment and earn their TPN Gold Shield.
Michael: And does the MPA end up listing folks who have done the TPN assessment on the website? So you can cross-reference that?
Terri: We do not put it on the website. There’s a growing registry in TPN+, we’re ten weeks after launch, and we have 400 companies signed up, just to give you an illustration.
Michael: That’s amazing. The assessors must just be going crazy.
Terri: They are. Well, this is another nuance about TPN. So we’ve also introduced, because one size does not fit all, of course, in our industry, and certainly, in my time at the studio, I would view a tentpole feature film pre-release security risk very differently than a syndicated rerun of a TV show. And there are many, many service providers out there who do one or the other. So we’ve also introduced a TPN Blue Shield at the self-reported level. So not everybody has to go through an assessment that may well be good enough for the content owners if this service provider is just working on library content.
Michael: I see. There are two main themes in our industry. Acronyms. And misconceptions. So what I’d like to talk a little bit about is, there are a lot of misconceptions about what the TPN is, what it isn’t, and I thought maybe you could explain some of those, including the term certification.
Terri: Yes. I would love to – certification or accredited or pass or fail or approved. That’s that nuance. So TPN do assessments. We report the results of those assessments, including remediation items, to the content owners. So the content owners can make their independent risk-based decisions. We do not pass or fail. We do not accredit. We do not approve. We do not certify.
Michael: I think we need to say that to everyone out there. There is no MPA or TPN certification.
Terri: That’s correct. That is correct. Yes. We simply do the risk assessment, and we report that to the studios because, you know, we have all of the big content owners, obviously part of TPN, there are more and more content owners joining, such as BBC Studios now, and every one of them has their own risk profile. We couldn’t presume to come up with a pass or a fail that would satisfy one studio on this end of the spectrum and another studio on this end of the spectrum. So we are simply reporting findings and remediation items to the studio so they can make their own decisions.
Michael: A big, I don’t wanna say player in the industry, but a huge concept is the MovieLab’s 2030 Vision. If anyone attended HPA, that was a fundamental point of every session. And the 2030 Vision outlines the ten principles of where the industry should be at that point. And I’m very curious how the ten principles, the pillars of the 2030 Vision, and the refreshed or relaunched TPN assessment. How did those kind of work together?
Terri: Yeah, so MovieLabs is a sister association to ours. We have common members, and the MovieLab’s work is fantastic. The work that they’re doing is terrific. So as we were rewriting the MPA best practices, it was really important that we had that 2030 Vision in mind. I should also add, you know, we have done so much to update the TPN program in the last year. Our real mantra is progress over perfection because if we held out for perfection, we never would’ve gotten it done. So we republished the MPAs practices in October. We’re publishing another update in a couple of weeks based on the ten weeks of learning we’ve had. Since we’ve launched, the 2030 Vision is like our Holy Grail, or our North Star is probably a better expression. It’s our North Star. We speak with MovieLabs regularly. We are very, very connected, and we will always seek their advice as we do each iteration on the MPF best practices to make sure we’re in alignment because by the time we get to the 2030 Vision, they’ll be onto the 2050 Vision and so on. So, we follow their lead in that regard.
Michael: This is phenomenal information. Where can more people go to find out about the process and just TPN in general?
Terri: So our website, www.ttpn.org, has all manner of FAQs and information. And there’s also a contact us button. If you can’t find the information that you need, please contact us. We really don’t want to be a faceless DMV. We want to be people in the industry that you can contact if you need further information. So please click that button if you can’t find the information that you need. And we’ll be glad to speak to you and answer your questions.
Michael: Terri, thanks so much for your time. This has been Terri Davies from the MPA. I’m Michael Kammes with Shift Media here at NAB 2023. And thanks for watching.
MediaSilo allows for easy management of your media files, seamless collaboration for critical feedback and out of the box synchronization with your timeline for efficient changes. See how MediaSilo is powering modern post production workflows with a 14-day free trial.
Ready for an even faster workflow? Our new integration with MASV enables accelerated uploads without compressing or splitting files. Collaborators can also upload to MediaSilo without needing access to your secure workspaces. Michael Kammes recently sat down with Greg Wood, CEO of MASV, to discuss the advantages this provides MediaSilo customers.
Michael: Welcome back. I’m Michael Kammes with Shift Media here at the NAB 2023 Show Floor, and today we’re joined by Greg Wood from MASV. Greg, thanks for coming here today.
Greg: Thanks, Michael. Thanks for having me.
Michael: We have a lot of things to talk about, but for the folks out there who don’t know, and I don’t know why you wouldn’t know, can you share with the folks what MASV does?
Greg: Absolutely. MASV is an accelerated file transfer platform. We have a global network, and we have the ability to deliver an unlimited volume of content anywhere in the world, really simply, really easily and very securely.
Michael: This year, one of the themes of our booth is integrations, and we are thrilled to announce that we have an integration with MASV. So instead of using the uploader included with MediaSilo, we now can use MASV. So what does MASV bring to the table that MediaSilo doesn’t?
Greg: Well, we’re a specialist in moving files. So if you need to ingest files, collect files from a whole bunch of contributors, or you need to simply deliver content in the fastest way possible via cloud, that is what we do. So that’s our specialty. And it makes sense for us to work with vendors like Shift and integrate with MediaSilo, because we want to help get assets into MediaSilo as quickly, as reliably and as effectively as possible. So, if you imagine where we fit in, like you can stand up a MASV portal. This is a webpage where anyone can drop content, and you can set up an automation that will take the files directly from that webpage through the cloud and put it right where it needs to go into MediaSilo. And that makes everything really easy, really fast. No fuss, no muss.
Michael: I hope everyone realizes just how powerful portals is because often you’re working with not just a team that you work with on a daily or weekly basis. You’re dealing with partners, vendors, contractors outside the ecosystem, and being able to give them a simple place to just say, drop your files here – it’s one less thing. You have to train these folks to learn how to use it.
Greg: And think about how we used to do this, right? We used to like ship drives around, and drives are never gonna go away, right? They’re just too handy and simple, right? But drives on-prem technologies like standing up a folder and inviting people to your folder in the cloud, right? That can get confusing. Am I in the right cloud? Am I putting the files in the right place? With portals, you literally have one page, it can be fully branded, all the instructions are more clear. They drop the files there, and [the files] get handed automatically into where they need to go. So it’s really, really simple.
Michael: Aside from the integration with MediaSilo, what else is MASV announcing at NAB this year?
Greg: We’ve had a really busy show. The biggest thing for us is that we are kind of a lingua franca for moving large files. So we can talk to a lot of different storage devices, both on-prem or in the cloud. And we’ve just announced that we’re now able to do that from cloud storage as well. So if you’re a user of S3 storage or if you’re a user of Wasabi, now you can take the files out of that storage in the cloud and deliver it, say, into MediaSilo, just as if you were sending it from your own computer at home, right? And so if those are really adopting true cloud workflows, it’s getting just so much simpler. Like we’re removing all that complexity that we had to use even two years ago. It was way more complicated to do this. And I think that’s going to accelerate the pace of cloud production.
Michael: You bring up a good point. Uh, one of the biggest stumbling blocks has been we have terabytes of data on-prem. We’re not sure how to get that to the cloud, or we’ve already parked terabytes of content in the cloud. Now we want to do more with it, but we can’t do a lot more with it where it’s sitting. So, being able to do something like an S3 transfer to MediaSilo, which is on AWS, makes it that much easier.
Greg: Well, and you’re really pointing out the real solution that MASV provides, right? Because it gets very, very complex to deal with where all your assets are. There’s a lot of uncertainty, and where there’s uncertainty, there’s security risk. Because if you don’t know where to track things down, you know that that’s going to be a problem, right? You have to make sure that the content is protected, your customers are protected. And so, what if you can create these really clear workflows, a clear path to deliver the content where it needs to go, you’re gonna be able to have greater certainty that your content is where it needs to be and secure. So that’s exactly the problem that we’re simplifying.
Michael: What I’m really curious about is, in our technology age now, there are a lot of comparisons. This is better than this because of this. I’m really interested to hear people who have come to MASV and who have stayed on MASV, they’ve undoubtedly tried other solutions. What makes them say, I want to stick with MASV, and here’s why.
Greg: Yeah. Well, I think most customers would come back and say that it’s simplicity. It’s a wonderfully easy interface. If you’ve ever sent an email, you can use MASV, right? Even setting things up, it is really quite easy. And doing an integration with MediaSilo, that’s probably the number one thing; it’s very fast. There was a time when people felt like sort of you needed to have a UDP solution on-prem, UDP dedicated internet links, all this sort of stuff to get great speed. And that’s simply not the case anymore. Like, we’re TCP-based and we can send at up to 10 gigabits per second if you’ve got a 10-gigabit fiber connection. And that just delivers files so fast. So speed is amazing. And then of course, the security, you gotta know where your assets are. We’re TPN certified. We’re ISO 27001 certified. And probably the biggest news for us this year – we just have achieved our SOC 2, uh,
Greg: Yes, exactly. So for companies who have to know where their assets are and keep their customer data private and everything, that is a huge achievement. So, those are the reasons why people use MASV, for sure.
Michael: So there’s been a lot of changes in the industry. How has that influenced how MASV has marketed themselves? What has helped or what has hindered?
Greg: Well, I mean, there’s so many. I’ve seen so many changes and obviously the pandemic is first and foremost in everyone’s minds because it drove such incredible change in the technology marketplace. So, you know, obviously when everyone had to go home and work from home, you needed these remote tools, and of course, MASV was there to help people out. So that was a real boon to our business, and we learned a lot about what people really needed. We came up with some really wild features we wouldn’t have thought about otherwise.
We have a product, a tool called Multiconnect, where we can bond multiple internet connections and basically double your bandwidth by sending over two paths, all with software, right? Like that’s, that’s incredible. And just thinking about how much faster that makes everything. So, you know, the pandemic drove really interesting changes, but I think another thing is the consumerization of IT. Because, you know, we’re on our phones every day, and so many of the apps we use are so simple, and they’re a delight. And then we go to work and we’re supposed to deal with kind of a terrible user experience that hasn’t changed that much from what, the early 2000s or something, right? So, we really believe that you’ve gotta make tooling that is simple, fast, secure and reliable. I think reliability is the greatest feat of engineering you can have. If you can trust that app to just work, and you know how to use it, you don’t need IT intervention. That’s really been a really big trend for us, and it’s central to what we do here.
Beyond that, of course, the move to cloud. So cloud production [is] essential. And we help support that by getting all the assets to the cloud and from the cloud to where it needs to go. So I think those are the biggest things for us.
Michael: I think over the past few years, we’ve seen that folks are really embracing the concept of manufacturers and companies being transparent. Right? And what I mean by that is a lot of businesses, the trajectory of their businesses, based on where their manufacturing partners or technology partners are going, one of the things that MASV does is says, this is our roadmap. This is what we’re doing. And that kind of transparency helps clients and businesses decide where they’re going to go. So I’d love for you to discuss any of the features or the directions that MASV is looking for in their future.
Greg: We see cloud production only continuing to grow, and I think incredible things are possible. So our integration with MediaSilo is a great example of where we want to go in the future. There’s gonna be more integrations to come, for sure, with other vendors and all kinds of places. And the exciting thing about that is that once assets are in the cloud, so many things are possible. And we’re gonna see so much great innovation coming out of this event. We’ve seen so many great news items and new innovations coming out. So we really see the pace of cloud production accelerating. Obviously, there are all kinds of other ways we’ll continue working, and MASV can connect all of those things. We’re gonna continue to be the specialist at delivering files the fastest, in the easiest kind of way.
And probably the biggest thing that’s coming up right away is our improvement to portals. We’ve got this portals product we talked about already. We can drop those files onto it and automatically deliver the files where they need to go. Well, we have learned from customers over time, we love talking to customers. If you go on our website, you can talk to a human being right away, and [customers are] telling us, hey, it would be great if you could move this feature further up with the flow, and this would be more discoverable if you did this other action. So we’re really cleaning up portals and improving it to make it even easier and more accessible to more people.
And I think that’s how we love to do business. We’d love to hear customer feedback and turn around really fast. And, I mean, that’s how we connected with MediaSilo. We had customers telling us, “Hey, we wanna deliver our files into the review and approved solution at MediaSilo. Can we do that?” And, of course, we could. So that was great.
And then, finally, we’re a global company. We can deliver files as fast in Vegas as we can in Singapore or even in Africa. So we’ve localized our product recently into Japanese, German, Spanish, and Dutch, and in the future, we’ll be doing more of that and making that even better. So those are the big things we’re most excited about next.
Michael: One of the hurdles that people deal with when they get to the cloud is pricing. I don’t know how many megabytes I used this week versus next week? But you have a very innovative way of doing that. What is the pricing structure for MASV?
Greg: Yeah. It can be really opaque in our industry to know what something’s gonna cost. And it’s a foundational belief at MASV that our pricing matters and packaging matters. You should be open with that. So we are best known as a pay-as-you-go business. So we love usage-based pricing. We charge 25 cents a gig. And if you have a project where you have a lot of assets to deliver, you can actually prepay credits at a discount as well. And that works for everybody cause now you can pay less for an enormous volume that you’re sending, and then you can invoice, put that on your media delivery fee, or you can give it to your accountant to keep track of everything. It just makes it so much easier.
But it de-risks using MASV as well because if you’re gonna send a petabyte worth of data in the first quarter, and then in the second quarter you don’t have any projects planned, you don’t want to sign up for like an enterprise agreement, or an annual contract with one of the on-prem vendors or whatever. So, it’s all pay-as-you-go. So you just use it, we charge you, you don’t use it, you don’t get charged. So you can actually build all kinds of new workflows, whether the automations we offer or using our API, knowing that you’re not gonna get charged if you’re not gonna use it. So that de-risks it for the customer as well.
Michael: So, aside from watching this video, where can people learn more about MASV?
Greg: If you go to our website, massive.io, you can enter M-A-S-V or just the word massive. You can find everything you want, including a hundred-gig free trial, and you can set up all those automations, that’s completely unlimited. So you can really see whether or not it works for you and if you want to use it. And we hope people will.
Michael: Excellent. Thank you so much for your time, Greg. Thank you for tuning in. Michael Kammes with Shift Media from the NAB show floor 2023.
MediaSilo allows for easy management of your media files, seamless collaboration for critical feedback and out of the box synchronization with your timeline for efficient changes. See how MediaSilo is powering modern post production workflows with a 14-day free trial.
Alex Williams, the founder of Louper, sat down with our Senior Director of Innovation, Michael Kammes, at NAB to discuss our latest integration with the cloud-based real-time collaboration platform. They talk about why people choose Louper over the competition, and the features that make it so popular, even in the most unexpected workflows.
Michael: Hi, Michael Kammes here from Shift Media on the show floor. Today we’re with Alex Williams from Louper. How are you doing, Alex?
Alex: I’m well, Michael. Thank you for having me.
Michael: Excellent. We are so thrilled to have Alex here because one of our announcements here is that we’re integrating with Louper. Louper has been one of my favorite technologies in the past couple years because they enables review and approve in a live way, plus some awesome other features. So I don’t wanna steal your thunder. Perhaps you could just share with everyone – what is Louper?
Alex: Yeah. Right. So it’s live review and approve. You can play out of your NLE so you can review edit sessions, VFX reviews in real time in a web browser. And on top of that, you can also review assets. So existing media files, you can have synchronized playback of that inside the room. And everything works in the web browser with built-in video chat and text chat. And so it’s sort of a synchronous live review and approve tool to complement the asynchronous tools out there.
Michael: What I love, you brought up at the very beginning, was interfaces with NLE. So video editors, there are a lot of screen-sharing tools out there that say, we’ll just do a screen scrape, right? We’ll just do a screen share, and the quality is degraded. The color management is out the window. Sync AV is often not there. So being able to integrate directly within the NLEs, gives you that high-quality, correct frame rate. And I think a lot of people just glaze kind of over that. Can you talk a little about the tech specs as they are right now? Like, are we doing SD, is it HD, what kind of frame rates, what kind of data rates?
Alex: Yeah. So at the moment, it’s uh, 4, 2, 8 bit SDR, up to 4K resolution frame rates 23.976, 24, 25, 30. And we don’t process or compress that stream in any way. That’s a pass-through thing. So, whatever you stream at resolution frame rate is what the end user sees in the browser. And then, in terms of data rates, it’s anything from 2 to 20 megabits per second for offline editorial. And people use color reviews as well for SDR contents. And then, on top of that, you can also get a direct signal out of NLEs like Final Cut, Avid Media Composer, and Premiere Pro. Flame as well for online assets. That’s quite a popular one as well now. So you get the actual video frame out of that as opposed to a full interface scrape or anything like that. It’s a true signal.
Michael: So one of the things that we’re showing here is taking that technology and enabling Louper to plug into MediaSilo. So can you explain a little bit about how that integration works and what folks who already use MediaSilo can then use Louper to do with their assets?
Alex: Yeah, sure. So if you look at Louper as kind of the shell where you have your video chat, your text chat, everything’s live, and you know, at the moment, the content in there is a live stream on top of that. And with the MediaSilo integration, you can now connect your MediaSilo assets, video files that exist on MediaSilo, to Louper, and you can then have synchronized playback of those video files within the Louper room so everyone sees the same frame at the same time. There’s collaborative shared playback, controls, pause, play, sync, as well as onscreen drawing and annotations. So that sort of adds a real-time live review to existing assets, which is exciting.
Michael: So MediaSilo clients who are already used to the more traditional on-demand review and approve now can do joint screening sessions, for lack of a better term, for assets that are already sitting inside a MediaSilo project.
Alex: Yeah, exactly that. Yeah.
Michael: Excellent. So, I’m sure you’ve had some excellent growth since Louper started just a couple years ago. Have there been any unexpected use cases, like use cases you didn’t really imagine when you first developed the product?
Alex: Yeah, I mean, we’ve been so focused on our vertical and media entertainment and film industry that in terms of the types of use cases and the types of workflows, that said, there are some ways that people are using the product, which I didn’t envision. We spoke to a customer last week who works in visual effects, and they have VFX editors that use Louper for internal reviews. And from that point, they go, well, we’ve actually got multiple projects, multiple VFX editors, and we like to have an internal review every morning and have all the VFX editors streaming into the same Louper room and just switch between the live signals and do a 30-minute review with everyone on the team looking at that, and then switch over to the other VFX editors live signal without having to go to a separate room. We’ll start a new session, all remaining right there. And I think that kind of stuff is cool and stuff I didn’t expect, of having it really be this hub where everything can happen live and in real-time, and you can send signals into and out of it really, really quickly and easily.
Michael: So over the past few years, especially during the pandemic, a lot of solutions popped up that enabled live review and approve. And obviously, folks will try out each one. And when folks end up trying all the others and end up coming to Louper, what’s the main reason you hear is why folks said, yeah, that’s really the reason why I’m sticking with Louper.
Alex: The biggest thing is ease of use, setup and, especially on the client side, just having the ability to join via links in the browser. So on the client side, for people who are producers, directors, clients who need to join the session, they don’t need to register, they don’t need to sign up. There’s no real setup. It’s a one-click drawing in the web browser and that, people love that. That’s been the biggest, the biggest kind of, “Yeah, this is cool.”
Michael: Now, this is where you’re on camera, so I’m gonna try and put you on the spot. Just to see what I can get out of you. But can you talk about maybe what directions you may be looking at Louper going or what features you’re really looking into? Can you discuss any of that?
Alex: Yeah, I can. So the big one is support for 10-bit 4:2:2, 4:4:4 HDR streaming. We are getting a lot of interest from colorists and yeah, we support SDR and 8-bit 4:2:0. But really there’s a need there for 4:2:2, 10-bit, including HDR. So that’s something we’re working on actively. And that is one of multiple things, but that’s probably the biggest one that, you know, that we’re responding to. In terms of customer stories.
Michael: Where could folks find out more about Louper?
Alex: So on the website, Louper.io, l-o-u-p-e-r dot i-o. I’m also on Twitter @alex_willo_. And that’s pretty much it. Our website’s pretty extensive in terms of use cases and customer stories, and setup guides. It’s also free signup. So it’s super easy to get started and try it out and take it for a spin.
Michael: And for any MediaSilo clients, we’re now in beta with utilizing Louper to playback content to folks in real-time from MediaSilo. And we can also get you connected with Alex to talk about playing out directly from your NLE. Alex, thanks so much for coming. Thank you for tuning in. This is Michael Kammes from Shift Media at the NAB show floor.
MediaSilo allows for easy management of your media files, seamless collaboration for critical feedback and out of the box synchronization with your timeline for efficient changes. See how MediaSilo is powering modern post production workflows with a 14-day free trial.
Major South African production company adds third storage network
Boston, MA, April 05, 2023 – EditShare®, the technology leader that enables storytellers to create and manage collaborative media workflows, has added a third EFS-300 storage solution at Homebrew Films in Cape Town, South Africa. Homebrew is a leading producer of high quality television for the home and international markets.
Based in Atlantic Studios, Homebrew provides a complete production service, with its own 4k Ultra HD studio with audience seating as well as outside broadcast and single-camera shooting capabilities. It has long-standing contracts with leading broadcasters in South Africa, producing soap operas, drama, documentaries and popular entertainment shows. It is the home of MasterChef South Africa, and the installation of the third storage network was prompted by the start of work on the game show Deal or No Deal.
EFS is the open storage solution from EditShare. It is a software-defined ecosystem built on commodity hardware and designed for practical workflows, with the ability to scale from a single storage node to an enterprise cluster, with a single namespace for simple management. It incorporates EditShare’s FLOW media management software with dedicated metadata servers, and ensures content flows are managed and prioritized to deliver against the practical demands of busy facilities.
“EditShare has served us well over the last three years, and we were confident to continue investing,” said Jaco Loubser, CEO of Homebrew Films. “As we grow, remote editing and workflow automation tools become ever more important, and EditShare supports those well.”
The installation was provided by Protea, EditShare’s channel partner in South Africa. Protea’s James Macpherson said “We have a strong relationship with the team at Homebrew, and they know they can turn to us at any time for backup and support. In turn, we know we get the same level of support from EditShare, so this is a really solid offering for them.”
“We appreciate Protea’s ongoing support in delivering EditShare’s innovative solutions to Homebrew Films” added Said Bacho, CRO at EditShare. “Our EFS storage solution, in combination with Protea’s expertise, ensures that Homebrew’s growing media production needs are met with speed, scalability, and reliability.”
EditShare is a technology leader that enables collaborative media workflows on-premise, in the cloud, or in a hybrid configuration. With customer and partner success at the heart of EditShare’s core values, our open software solutions and robust APIs improve workflow collaboration and third-party integrations across the entire production chain, ensuring a world-class experience that is second to none. The high-performance software lineup includes media optimized shared storage management, archiving and backup, and media management, all supported with open APIs for extensible integration.
EditShare’s cloud-enabled remote editing and project management technology was recently recognized by the National Academy of Television Arts and Sciences (NATAS) with a prestigious 2021 Emmy® Award for Technology and Engineering.
Let’s face it: the traditional agency pitch is a drawn-out, sprawling, cumbersome process that has now spread throughout the creative industry.
From pitching on a client’s entire creative business to bidding on a specific project or campaign, creative agencies in advertising, marketing, experiential, PR and digital all dutifully invest time, creative energy and resources into frustratingly rigid dog-and-pony shows.
And talk about rigid: according to pitch consultancy ID Comms, today’s agency pitch process has been in place since the early 1990s. In other words, most consultants’ pitch templates are older than the internet.
Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, when accelerated changes swept through so many other industries, these archaic processes remained in place, keeping agencies tied to stagnant and unproductive methods of developing new business – while the rest of the world raced ahead.
Basically, we’re stuck with the traditional pitch.
The Creative Cost
Yes, the process is formulaic and time-consuming. Yes, the average agency surveyed in the industry report The OUCH! FactorTM spent 22.2 days’ worth of staff time last year on each pitch they entered (equal to one employee working one full month per pitch – 11 times a year). And sure, the odds of winning the pitch after all that work are around half at best, according to the same research. It couldn’t get any worse, right?
Wrong.
New studies have shown that the traditional pitch process actually feels like it undermines the core strength of an agency: creativity. With all the focus on jumping through hoops to present strictly formatted materials for every client who requests them, it has become very difficult for agencies to show what they actually do well themselves.
“We’re meant to be in the business of creativity, but the focus has shifted,” says MullenLowe Group UK’s Lucy Taylor in a Campaign Live article from March 2022 (Resetting the pitch process and bringing the soul back to adland.) “The average agency now spends around 2,000 hours a year working on pitches, time that’s often tacked on to the end of the working day.” With that kind of time required to address restrictive pitch requirements, it’s almost impossible to demonstrate real creativity.
Pitches can also be very stressful and lead to burnout, posing a serious problem for existing clients, who “need a healthy landscape with dynamic agencies and great creative work. That’s the lifeblood of our industry,” says Andrew Lowdon from the Incorporated Society of British Advertisers (ISBA), the trade body representing advertisers in the UK, in Marketing Week. After all, says Jemima Monies of adam&eveDDB in the Creative Salon, “New business should be a means of nurturing talent, rather than draining it.”
So how can you shift the odds in your favor when it comes to preparing for the dreaded pitch?
The Agency Reel: The Win Before The Pitch
Consider the basic criteria clients use to determine the fit of any agency— essentially, the admission price for you to compete:
You understand the client’s business, their vision and their immediate needs.
You have experience in their industry.
You have a recognizable roster of previous clients.
You have the right mix and level of capabilities.
You can personalize your solution to them.
It seems like an overwhelming list of things to demonstrate clearly. But with one creative pitch reel done right, you can prove to your prospects that you possess all of these characteristics before you invest valuable hours into a pitch. They can see right away that you’re a great fit for their needs and that you have creativity to boot. If a client loves your pitch reel, then you’re in the enviable position of only needing to confirm their impressions rather than having to prove that you’re right for the job.
A good reel will help pave the way into a prospect conversation before you’ve even spoken with them while leading with proof points they care about— giving them confidence to trust you with the brief. And reels are the most visually arresting way to show all of your work, from print to outdoor to experiential. Nothing jazzes up a static medium more than a video presentation with music. And nothing showcases your successes better than a video that tells the story behind the work. It’s a tool that can speak for you without you having to be there.
Better yet, a great reel will allow you to learn earlier in the process (even before the competition begins) whether the client feels you’re a good fit, so you don’t waste time pitching on work that you never had a chance to win anyway. Then you can determine whether to continue to invest or weed out the clients that aren’t a good match and instead focus on the next important project.
What’s important to note is this: the best reels reflect the specific client who’s watching it and demonstrate what you can do for their exact needs. That airtight resonance of your work with the client’s needs is what gives a reel the best chance at hitting every one of their initial criteria.
Bespoke Reels: Sizzle On Demand
Of course, every client is different. That means the best reel you can use is one that’s customized for the particular client. And creating custom sizzle reels professionally can get very expensive—up to $10,000 per minute of finished video, or more in many cases.
And that’s the conundrum: on one hand, a reel made just for the client you want to pitch will be far more effective and ultimately win more of the right clients for your agency or firm. On the other, it’s risky, involved and expensive to professionally create a bespoke agency reel each time when you have no idea whether you’ll land the project. And the more work samples and other elements you have to choose from, the more complex creating the perfect reel can become
If you’re going to engage with multiple prospects while trying to beat The OUCH! FactorTM odds, it makes sense to scale up your reel-building capabilities internally. Doing this will allow you to conduct business development proactively, respond more swiftly to requests, reduce the expense of customizing your reels and, most importantly, increase the “at bats” your agency gets by pitching as many clients as possible. Best of all, with the right tools, it’s possible to build reels quickly with the staff and resources you already have in place, using the content you’ve already created.
Check out the full guide to pain-free-pitch reels here.
The reel is everything. Whether you’re an independent rep hoping to get your future star on an agency’s radar or an executive producer with a director or editor ready to tear up the awards circuit, the first step is getting agency producers or creatives to take notice. And that means you need a showreel. But how do you make your showreels work harder and cut through the clutter amidst so much competition? We’ll help you make the most of your work by making the most of your reels.
A Digital Foot in the Door
When you first approach an agency or client, you often don’t even get the chance to talk to anyone. It’s only after you’ve sent a reel and they like it that you get to have an actual conversation about the talent you represent. So your reels have to do the talking for you. Think of them as a digital foot in the door.
Use Advertising Tactics To Cut Through the Clutter
Since a showreel is essentially an ad for one of your creators, it can be helpful to think of showreels in terms of both reach and frequency. On a basic level, reach refers to how many different people see your ad, and frequency is the average number of times each of them sees it. Most people just think about getting their reels in front of prospective clients, but that’s only part of the equation. Unless someone watches it two or three times (and preferably more), there’s a pretty good chance that they’re not going to remember it well enough to reach out to you and take the next step. So you’ve got to think about ways to get them to watch the reel more than once if you want it to bear fruit. That may be a matter of following up and asking questions about what they thought of particular spots so they watch them again while engaging actively. Or it may even mean sending the reel more than once and tracking whether or not it’s been viewed. This requires a bit of extra effort, but it’s critical to getting creatives to remember the reel you sent and who did the work.
There is a limit: you want to avoid inundating them with the same stuff over and over. But you’d be surprised how quickly the details disappear after just one viewing. So if you sometimes feel like you’re just sending reel after reel into thin air, keep in mind that finding ways to increase your viewing frequency could help crack the code.
Timing Is Everything
Sometimes getting people to react to your reel isn’t just a matter of having them watch it enough times. They also have to watch it at the right time. Say your reel showcases a lot of motion graphics; unless the viewer has an immediate need for motion graphics work, they may not respond to it, even if they like it. The fact that they viewed it is great, but you’ll still want to make sure that it’s fresh in their minds when they have a project that the work is a good fit for.
If you’ve done your homework correctly and have seen to it that people are viewing your reels, the next step is to do what you can to increase the likelihood that they’re seeing them at a time when they have a need and can take action. Otherwise, you’ll want to keep in touch and maintain an ongoing relationship until they do. Even if they don’t have a need now, they may talk to someone who does, and if you’re top of mind, that can turn into a new project.
Talent Alone Isn’t Enough
It’s a familiar refrain: “We need to see it on the reel.” No matter how talented, experienced or smart your director, editor, colorist or VFX artist may be, no one is ever going to just take your word for it. Prospective clients almost always want to “see it on the reel.” And by that, they mean that they want to see not just the flashiest or funniest work on your showreel but also things that are very similar to what they’re hoping to produce. This helps reassure them that your person can do the job. If you have a very similar project available to show, then by all means, include it. But sometimes, that kind of thinking is really a trap. Making a great reel requires more than just showing stuff that’s really similar to what the client is hoping to produce, even if that’s what they asked for.
It’s a Trap! (And How To Beat It)
While there are obvious reasons why agencies and clients often seek out reels featuring work that’s as similar as possible to their proposed ideas, there are also a number of drawbacks to this approach that they are usually unaware of.
Generally speaking, creative professionals take on jobs for one or more of the following three reasons:
The reel: They love the creative idea and think that the end result is likely to end up on their reels, where it can bring in new work.
The relationship: They want to start a working relationship with an agency or client in the hopes of establishing an ongoing flow of projects.
The money: The job is lucrative enough that it’s worth doing just for the paycheck.
In the best-case scenarios, all three reasons will be at play. But in the real world, that’s rare. More often, only one or two of these conditions are met. Generally speaking, agencies and clients hope that the creative merits of their idea are strong enough that a talented creator will want it on their reel. But creative professionals are a restless lot, motivated by variety, excitement and creative innovation. So if a client seeks out someone who has work just like their project already on the reel, chances are that person is only going to take it on for the money or to get in with the client for future projects. After all, if they already have something just like it on their reel, they don’t need it for that. And if they don’t need it for their reel, that means they’re doing it for one of the other two reasons. The risk in such cases is that they may just “phone it in,” creatively speaking. That’s why the practice of looking for reels that are just like the proposed project is a trap.
But all is not lost. The best creative agencies and clients are savvy enough to be aware of this and are frequently open to finding talent who can demonstrate the general skill set to do a great job, even if they don’t yet have an exact clone of the project on their reel. Those clients know that the added bonus of having someone really excited and creatively stimulated by their project is well worth any perceived risk in trusting it to someone who hasn’t done one just like it before. And that’s where building just the right showreel can help crack the code.
Picking Your Spots
So how do you decide what to put on the reel? The first thing to consider is what skills the client will be looking for rather than just what the finished product will be like. Will they be concerned with actor performance, how good their food looks or heartwarming storytelling? Does comedy or tone matter to the project’s success, or does gorgeous composition matter more? While you may not be able to show them their exact piece on your reel, you can show them things that required the same skills in their creation. Whether it’s for an insurance company or a delivery service, funny dialogue is funny dialogue. If the project requires that, try to include something demonstrating the ability to achieve that result.
In addition to demonstrating specific skills, you may want to consider budget and scope. Having worked on large-scale projects with lots of moving parts may be reassuring to a client with a complicated project. Meanwhile, flashy-looking locations and sophisticated visual effects may scare a client who knows they are playing with a limited budget. You may want to show work that managed to achieve a lot of impact without huge production investments. In the end, what you choose to put on the reel is about reassuring a prospective client that you have the knowledge and skills to make their project great, even if you haven’t done that exact thing before. You can also use a showreel to balance out or address any concerns you know the client has going into the project. Having your work do the talking is always better than just verbal reassurance.
Aim High
While you don’t want to scare clients with scope or make them think you are only good with huge budgets, it can be very powerful to show them what their work could be like. Especially with agencies and clients who are new to the game, you want to show off work that might be aspirational to potential clients. Make them see that you can take their work to the next level. So if you’ve got a spot that’s next level for them, use it to show them how good their work could be if they hire you.
Leave Out the Kitchen Sink
Building a great showreel can be a bit like building a great meal. You want enough courses to make everyone satisfied, but you don’t want to overwhelm with volume. And if every piece you choose to include is great, you’ll leave a fantastic overall impression. But if one piece is notably weaker than the others, that is what the viewer will remember. Better to have fewer and know they’re all good than to include a “weak link.” Leave them wanting to see more. Especially with new and developing talent, having a short reel is fine and far preferable to a reel of mixed quality with some flawed pieces that aren’t up to standard. As a guideline, people will assume you’re as good as the worst work they’ve seen from you.
Put Yourself In a Box (or Boxes)
While most creative talents crave variety and new challenges, this sometimes works against making the best showreel for agencies and clients. When seeking creative professionals for a project, ad agencies and clients usually have a specific vision in mind and want to find someone who’s a perfect fit for that particular job rather than a talented generalist. They’ll be looking for very specific skills, as well as genres and sub-genres of work. So having a really broad reel, while seemingly impressive, can be confusing or make them concerned about whether you really understand what they’re after. If you’re strong in multiple genres or styles, creating separate reels for each is fine, but it’s often a good idea to refrain from putting it all on one showreel (unless specifically requested). It may take more thought and resources, but if you’re truly multi-talented, try making distinct reels that demonstrate each of those disciplines and marketing them separately.
Make It Bespoke
Of course, every client and project is different. That means the best showreels reflect not only the general category they’re in but are customized for the particular client or even specific aspects of the project. The reel should demonstrate what you can do for their exact needs at the time. That connection between your work and the client’s needs is what gives a reel the best chance of getting you in the door. So the more customized you can make the reel, the better your chances of winning the job. The top people in the business make custom reels for each job they pitch on, despite the time and cost this may incur. And creating custom showreels professionally can get very expensive quickly: as much as $10,000 per minute of finished video once you’ve factored everything in.
Look the Part
Because your reels are the first impression you will make on many clients, it’s a bit like your resume or a first job interview. You want it to have a professional look and feel. You wouldn’t show up to an interview in your gym outfit or hand them a hand-scribbled resume. So make sure your reel is polished and professional-looking. Include company graphics or animation at the head and tail, and make the hosting page or presentation look good. If possible, you may even want to include their logo or customize the reel with a mention of the project. This is all part of making it feel like it’s the perfect fit for them.
Managing Your Stable
Most companies in the creative world manage work for a number of people. Whether you’re a production company, editing company, independent rep, post house, music house, color grading or VFX facility, or involved with other parts of the creative pipeline, chances are you’ve got a lot of work to pick from and a lot of assets to manage. Add to that the need to demonstrate a variety of skills and customize your reels for specific jobs, which means you’ll need to handle a lot of materials and keep track of them all. Having a reliable system for managing all of that is essential, or things can get messy pretty fast. It can also be a big time suck, so organization is critical when setting up a reel-building process.
Mitigating Costs and Time
While it’s clear that creating custom showreels is the best strategy for winning jobs, not everyone can afford the time and money it takes to do so. On one hand, a reel made just for the project you want to pitch will be far more effective and ultimately win more jobs for your talent. On the other, it’s a big ask to professionally create a bespoke showreel each time when you have no idea whether it will even get viewed. And the more projects and samples you have to choose from when building reels, the greater the challenge to managing the process efficiently.
If you’re going to be pitching on a lot of projects with a variety of different parameters or styles, it often makes sense to scale up your reel-building capabilities internally rather than relying on outside vendors. Doing this will allow you to be more proactive, respond more swiftly to reel requests, reduce the expense of customization, and, most importantly, increase the “at bats” your company gets by pitching as many projects as possible. Fortunately, there are now tools and options available that let you build reels quickly with the existing staff and resources you already have, using the content you’ve already created rather than going to outside vendors.
Read about how to optimize your reel-building system in our next installment.
The reel is everything. Whether you’re an independent rep hoping to get your future star on an agency’s radar or an executive producer with a director or editor ready to tear up the awards circuit, the first step is getting agency producers or creatives to take notice. And that means you need a showreel. But how do you make your showreels work harder and cut through the clutter amidst so much competition? We’ll help you make the most of your work by making the most of your reels.
Read about how to optimize your reel-building system in our next installment.
