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a blog of links related to computer animation and production technology Sponsored by ReelMatters.com
Category: ves
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The modern phenomenon of the two days weekend break
www.bbc.com/worklife/article/20200117-the-modern-phenomenon-of-the-weekend
“The idea of reducing the working week from an average of five days to four is gaining traction around the world.
“There are a number of parallels between debates today and those that took place in the 19th century when the weekend as we now know it was first introduced. Having Saturdays as well as Sundays off work is actually a relatively modern phenomenon.
“the weekend did not simply arise from government legislation – it was shaped by a combination of campaigns
“Religious bodies argued that a break on Saturday would improve working class “mental and moral culture”…. and greater attendance at church on Sundays.
“In 1842 a campaign group called the Early Closing Association was formed. It lobbied government to keep Saturday afternoon free for worker leisure in return for a full day’s work on (Saint) Monday.
“a burgeoning leisure industry saw the new half-day Saturday as a business opportunity… Perhaps the most influential leisure activity to help forge the modern week was the decision to stage football matches on Saturday afternoon.
“The adoption of the modern weekend was neither swift nor uniform as, ultimately, the decision for a factory to adopt the half-day Saturday rested with the manufacturer. Campaigns for an established weekend had begun in the 1840s but it did not gain widespread adoption for another 50 years…. it was embraced by employers who found that the full Saturday and Sunday break reduced absenteeism and improved efficiency.
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The Mill opens new offices in Berlin
www.themill.com/stories/the-mill-opens-new-studio-in-berlin/
Greg Spencer will lead a multi-disciplinary team of artists in his role of Creative Director.
Justin Stiebel will be continuing his role as Executive Producer at The Mill Berlin and will be managing client relationships as well as all new business enquiries.
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DNeg possibly charged with fraud
An Oscar-winning visual effects studio aiming for a £600 million stock market flotation has become entangled in an alleged scheme to defraud the taxman.
DNEG, which has worked on films such as No Time to Die and Captain Marvel, could have to pay HM Revenue & Customs more than £10 million in back taxes and penalties.
https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/visual-effects-studio-reveals-tax-raid-vjb3pj8s3
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MPC closing Vancouver in favor of other locations
dailyhive.com/vancouver/mpc-studio-vancouver-shut-down
vancouversun.com/news/local-news/moving-picture-company-closes-vancouver-studio-report
The letter states that MPC’s Vancouver studio will “cease operations effective immediately and refocus its geographical presence to other locations.”
“This decision has not been taken lightly,” states the letter, noting that “more attractive opportunities in other locations have created a challenging environment” for the company to sustain its Vancouver office.
MPC is owned by French multinational corporation Technicolor, which provides various services in the media and entertainment industries.
Technicolor operates several other VFX brands including The Mill, Mr.X, and Mikros.
The letter also states that MPC and the other Technicolor brands will continue to expand in other cities including Montreal, Paris, Adelaide, LA, and Toronto.
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What the Boeing 737 MAX’s crashes can teach us about production business – the effects of commoditisation
Airplane manufacturing is no different from mortgage lending or insulin distribution or make-believe blood analyzing software (or VFX?) —another cash cow for the one percent, bound inexorably for the slaughterhouse.
The beginning of the end was “Boeing’s 1997 acquisition of McDonnell Douglas, a dysfunctional firm with a dilapidated aircraft plant in Long Beach and a CEO (Harry Stonecipher) who liked to use what he called the “Hollywood model” for dealing with engineers: Hire them for a few months when project deadlines are nigh, fire them when you need to make numbers.” And all that came with it. “Stonecipher’s team had driven the last nail in the coffin of McDonnell’s flailing commercial jet business by trying to outsource everything but design, final assembly, and flight testing and sales.”
It is understood, now more than ever, that capitalism does half-assed things like that, especially in concert with computer software and oblivious regulators.
There was something unsettlingly familiar when the world first learned of MCAS in November, about two weeks after the system’s unthinkable stupidity drove the two-month-old plane and all 189 people on it to a horrific death. It smacked of the sort of screwup a 23-year-old intern might have made—and indeed, much of the software on the MAX had been engineered by recent grads of Indian software-coding academies making as little as $9 an hour, part of Boeing management’s endless war on the unions that once represented more than half its employees.
Down in South Carolina, a nonunion Boeing assembly line that opened in 2011 had for years churned out scores of whistle-blower complaints and wrongful termination lawsuits packed with scenes wherein quality-control documents were regularly forged, employees who enforced standards were sabotaged, and planes were routinely delivered to airlines with loose screws, scratched windows, and random debris everywhere.
Shockingly, another piece of the quality failure is Boeing securing investments from all airliners, starting with SouthWest above all, to guarantee Boeing’s production lines support in exchange for fair market prices and favorite treatments. Basically giving Boeing financial stability independently on the quality of their product. “Those partnerships were but one numbers-smoothing mechanism in a diversified tool kit Boeing had assembled over the previous generation for making its complex and volatile business more palatable to Wall Street.”
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Double Negative pulls plans of listing on Stock Exchange
DNEG said last month it was looking to raise £150m from a float on the LSE’s Main Market. This valued the firm at more than £600m.
But yesterday it said it has decided to postpone the listing due to ‘ongoing market uncertainty’.
The London-based group added that it had received ‘a strong level of interest from investors’ and still intends to go public once market conditions improve.
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MovieLabs and Hollywood Studios Publish White Paper Envisioning the Future of Media Creation in 2030
The main limitation that our technology future forecasts is a challenge in speed while supporting valid data to the user base.
Generally speaking, data can change after being stored locally in various databases around the world, challenging its uber validity.
With around 75 billion users by 2030, our current infrastructure will not be able to cope with demand. From 1.2 zettabytes world wide in 2016 (about enough to fill all high capacity 9 billion iphone’s drives), demand is planned to raise 5 times in 2021, up to 31Gb per person.
While broadband support is only expected to double up.This will further fragment both markets and contents, possibly to levels where not all information can be retrieved at reasonable or reliable levels.
The 2030 Vision paper lays out key principles that will form the foundation of this technological future, with examples and a discussion of the broader implications of each. The key principles envision a future in which:
1. All assets are created or ingested straight into the cloud and do not need to be moved.
2. Applications come to the media.
3. Propagation and distribution of assets is a “publish” function.
4. Archives are deep libraries with access policies matching speed, availability and security to the economics of the cloud.
5. Preservation of digital assets includes the future means to access and edit them.
6. Every individual on a project is identified and verified, and their access permissions are efficiently and consistently managed.
7. All media creation happens in a highly secure environment that adapts rapidly to changing threats.
8. Individual media elements are referenced, accessed, tracked and interrelated using a universal linking system.
9. Media workflows are non-destructive and dynamically created using common interfaces, underlying data formats and metadata.
10. Workflows are designed around real-time iteration and feedback.
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Scorsese’s New Mob Epic, ‘The Irishman,’ Has Netflix and Theaters Distributors at Odds – The online feature streaming battle
www.nytimes.com/2019/08/21/business/media/netflix-scorsese-the-irishman.html
When Martin Scorsese signed with Netflix to make “The Irishman,” the star-studded epic scheduled to have its premiere on the opening night of the New York Film Festival next month, he put himself in the crossfire of the so-called streaming wars.
A crucial sticking point has been the major chains’ insistence that the films they book must play in their theaters for close to three months while not being made available for streaming at the same time, which does not sit well with Netflix.
More than 95 percent of movies stop earning their keep in theaters at the 42-day mark, well short of the three-month window demanded by major chains, according to Mr. Aronson. That suggests the need for change, he said.
Having built itself into an entertainment powerhouse by keeping its subscribers interested and coming back for more, Netflix does not want to be distracted by the demands of the old-style movie business, even as it makes deals with legendary filmmakers like Mr. Scorsese.
Oscar eligibility is not much of a factor in how Netflix handles the rollout. To qualify for the Academy Awards, a film must have a seven-day run in a commercial theater in Los Angeles County, according to rules recently confirmed by the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences’ board of governors; it can even be shown on another platform at the same time. Still, there is an Academy contingent that may look askance at Netflix if it does not play by the old rules for a cinematic feature like “The Irishman.”
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ILM to Open New Studio in Australia
The studio is opening a new studio in Sydney to better serve its clients and complement its current operations in San Francisco, where the company is headquartered, Singapore, Vancouver, and London.
“Sydney is an ideal location for our fifth studio,” noted Rob Bredow, Executive Creative Director and Head of ILM, adding, “there is abundant artistic and technical talent in the region which are both keys to ILM’s culture of innovation. It’s particularly exciting that the first film our new studio will contribute to will be Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker.”
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Annapurna Pictures Headed for Bankruptcy?
www.awn.com/news/annapurna-pictures-headed-bankruptcy
Annapurna Pictures, the film production, distribution and financing company founded in 2011 by Megan Ellison, daughter of software giant Oracle’s billionaire founder, Larry Ellison, is reportedly attempting to restructure a $350 million credit line secured in 2017 that the company either has or is about to default on.
Megan’s brother, David Ellison, is also in the entertainment business, though by focusing on tentpole properties, has had a much more profitable go at it; he is the founder of Skydance Media, the producer of the recent Mission Impossible hits, the Terminator sequels and the upcoming Top Gun: Maverick starring Tom Cruise.
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Netflix announces dedicated UK production hub at Shepperton
www.bbc.com/news/entertainment-arts-48854876
Netflix plan is to create a dedicated UK production hub, including 14 sound stages, workshops and office space at the site owned by the Pinewood Group.
The deal, believed to be in place for 10 years, will see the Netflix production hub take up 435,000 square feet of the studios.
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Disney to release 4 Fox animated features and one cg/live-action hybrid, but the future of Blue Sky Studio remains in question
Disney has not announced any Blue Sky titles beyond Nimona in 2021, which creates uncertainty about how (or if) they will integrate the Greenwich, Connecticut-based Blue Sky into the Disney brand. The waiting game about the studio’s future will continue for the time being.
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