HITS

COVID-19 has delivered a major blow to movie theatres, which may need new business models and programming innovation to fully recover even after the pandemic ends.

Magic Screen and Geppetto, new technologies that are being used to reintroduce Bobby, the title character from Howie Mandel’s 1990s animated TV show Bobby’s World, reimagine the moviegoing experience and could be just the thing to help the theatrical business in a major way, according to Mandel, Microsoft Azure and tech company Super 78 Studios.

Speaking during the celebrity keynote panel discussion “Reimagining the Moviegoing Experience” May 12 at the annual Hollywood Innovation and Transformation Summit (HITS) Spring event, Mandel said: “The key is how do we immerse the audience in this technology” and make it something you just could not get at home, and Azure, Super 78 and chip maker Nvidia “did it.”

During a special interactive unveiling, actor, comedian and producer Mandel used Magic Screen to engage with the HITS audience.

Magic Screen is a joint venture between Mandel’s production company, Alevy Productions, and Super 78.

Technology partners Microsoft and Nvidia, meanwhile, supply the hardware and software to power Geppetto, a proprietary real-time animation system built by Super 78 that renders the 3D version of Bobby.

Super 78 has been focused on Geppetto for the past 10 years, according to Brent Young, its president, creative director and founder. The Los Angeles company creates and produces live action, animated and graphic content for theme parks, museums, aquariums and other places around the world.

Super 78 has long wanted to expand the use of Geppetto into movie theatres, Young said, noting that theme parks have long served as something like a “petri dish” to experiment with new technologies.

James Cameron, for example, used 3D technology in the short film T2-3D: Battle Across Time that was shown at Universal Studios theme parks, Young noted, adding that the filmmaker later went on to use the same technology in the movie Avatar. Several years earlier, Walt Disney used technology at its theme parks that went on to be deployed at movie theatres, Young said.

“This is just the next evolution of that,” Young said. His company had been searching for a few “missing pieces” over the past 10 years that would help bring Geppetto into movie theatres and Microsoft Azure’s cloud technology turned out to be one of those missing pieces, he explained. Initially, the technology required a lot of gear, including “stacks of computers” and “walls of servers,” he noted.

Now, however, “we’ve been able to shrink down the technology” into a much smaller form factor using Azure technology, he said.

An animated Bobby said at the start of the presentation: “In the 90s, Howie would come up with an idea, he would record it and then we’d send it away for six months. But now it’s recorded, written and produced in real-time.”

When doing the show in the 1990s, “one of the biggest disappointments internally that I really didn’t share” was that Mandel and others who worked on the show would write something that was funny and “in the moment,” they would then go into the studio and record the voices, and then they would send it off to Taiwan to be used by the show’s animators, Mandel explained. “It would take six months to get that video back to us,” he recalled, adding that, by that point, “some of the material did not work” anymore.

“This is a very exciting time,” Mandel said, explaining that, over the years, he had been approached about potentially relaunching Bobby’s World. But he was never really sure how he could relaunch the show until he met the folks at Super 78 and saw their technology, he recalled. Mandel explained to them that he would be interested in producing Bobby in real-time with Super 78’s technology and they told him they were working with Azure to do something like that for theatrical movies.

Mandel conceded he was not a tech expert, joking: “Ever since RadioShack closed, that was the end of technology for me.”

A “Next-Level” Experience

Mandel demonstrated how he could supply his voice to Bobby and control the character on screen regardless of where he was. What this would allow, therefore, is him being able to see who is in the theatre audience and have the character address them personally from the screen. This could be used for an ad, a game or even the movie itself, he noted, adding: “I think this is next-level.”

The technology can make a live event out of a cinema experience and Mandel just loves that, he said, noting that, after all, he started as a comic and loves being able to interact with an audience.

This technology, therefore, leaves other technologies, including 3D, “in the dust” when it comes to interactivity, Mandel said.

It can create viral experiences that people will talk about if they see it used in a theatre, for example, when an audience member is roasted and asked to leave the theatre by Bobby or another on-screen character, Mandel told viewers.

“Right now we need – everything, whether it’s television, film or whatever – we want these viral moments,” Mandel said. And when it comes to cost, “this is not even close” to the huge expenses required for theatres to use surround sound, he noted.

Azure’s cloud technology is specifically what makes it possible for an on-screen character to interact with a theatre audience anywhere in the U.S. or globally, according to Joel Sloss, senior program manager at Microsoft.

Super 78 is “virtualising your animation and the workstation that renders it” so that “everything can be run in real-time,” Sloss noted, adding Mandel can also switch from theatre to theatre on the fly.

Just the Beginning

Animation is “just the beginning,” Young said, noting the technology can also be used for live action. Nvidia’s latest graphics cards are making it possible to do things not previously possible, he also pointed out.

How the technology can evolve is “boundless,” according to Mandel, saying it  “eventises” movies. Everybody he knows in the entertainment industry will be interested in this technology, he said.

Mandel went on to provide an improvisational demo with the animated Bobby. “I’m going to make a gazillion dollars,” Mandel as Bobby said when asked what he will do now that we have this technology.

Asked if he was excited to be in a movie theatre and be able to see the audience, Mandel as Bobby said: “Excitement is not even the word. You hit the buck right on the nose,” he said, touching his animated nose and joking that he has to pick it.

Although the goal for now is to bring the technology to movie theatres, Mandel said an expansion of it to the home makes sense down the road.

With these technologies, Super 78 and its partners can bring joy again to audiences that has been lacking as a result of the pandemic, Young said.

HITS Spring was presented by IBM Security with sponsorship by Genpact, Irdeto, Tata Consultancy Services, Convergent Risks, Equinix, MicroStrategy, Microsoft Azure, Richey May Technology Solutions, Tamr, Whip Media, Eluvio, 5th Kind, LucidLink, Salesforce, Signiant, Zendesk, EIDR, PacketFabric and the Trusted Partner Network.