M+E Daily

There are several milestones showing that we are on track as an industry to effectively react to changing consumer demands and scaling global content creation, according to Richard Berger, Movie Labs CEO.

Interviewed by MESA CEO Guy Finley during the session “Transforming an Industry: MovieLabs 2030 Vision” May 23 at the Hollywood Innovation and Transformation Summit (HITS) at The Culver Theater, Berger provided an update on how his company’s Vision is unfolding.

In 2019, MovieLabs laid out a bold vision for the adoption of new technologies to aid in content production, post production and VFX. Designed to transform an entire industry, the ambitious plan speaks across the entire supply chain from production security and ontology and media creation to evolving video formats and investing in a unified industry approach to emerging technologies.

Berger pointed out during the HITS session that MovieLabs is a technology joint venture of the major Hollywood studios, started in 2006, and it’s focused on several initiatives over the years.

“It’s been a really interesting progression,” Berger said, noting he joined MovieLabs from Sony Pictures in 2017. “We were already doing some really great things and I think as we talked to our board – and our board’s made up of the CTOs of those studios – we were really talking about where we should go next…. And we really thought we had done a pretty good job on the distribution side.”

At that point, he said, “we decided we really needed to turn upstream and the timing was right to sort of look at pre-production, production, post-production, all the way up to distribution. So, really MovieLabs is about trying to communicate and realise that common technology agenda of our membership, our five studios.”

Although “obviously our members compete against each other … we don’t talk about the special sauce stuff,” Berger pointed out. “We talk about the things that make it better for everybody, and that’s really our sweet spot. It’s like the hard things that nobody can kind of do themselves.”

With the 2030 Vision, MovieLabs  is “rallying the industry around a common view of the future,” he said.

Pointing to the year that was chosen for that Vision, Finley said:  “When you’re transforming the industry, it’s hard because these things are big. It takes time. Nothing’s going to turn [around] in 15 days, weeks, even months. “

Berger agreed, explaining: “We set a 10 year horizon for this. And we did that for a couple of reasons. And part of it is because we know it’s going to take time to get there. But part of it was an exercise. When we talked to the studios about where we wanted the future to be, we needed to free ourselves from the things that were right in front of us, like the pain points that get in the way today. So imagine you could start fresh. What does that look like? So the 2030 Vision is not a prediction of the future. It’s what we want it to be. So now we’re out to go make it happen.”

“It’s like a roadmap,” Finley said. “And it’s a roadmap for everybody.” Finley asked: “Was it tough getting everybody to agree on that roadmap?”

In response, Berger said: “It actually wasn’t, which is why we knew we were onto something. I’d come from the distribution side when I was at Sony Pictures, and all the people I worked with across the other studios were more on that side. So I really didn’t know the production/post-production side as well.”

Reflecting back, Berger recalled going around and meeting counterparts at the different studios, noting it was “actually very easy to get everyone to align at a very high level, which was good.”

However, he went on, “then I think what we realised is if we all agree on this and we want to make it happen, we need to articulate it.” So that led to the creation of a white paper, he noted, saying that was a challenge “because you needed to actually go beyond just a principle and explain: What does this mean? What do we mean by it? What are the implications of this?”

Some probably looked at the 2030 Vision and said “I’ll deal with that in 2028,” Finley noted. But he said: “The pandemic [came and] everybody quickly started doing crazy things that we’d never thought we would do before because we had to do it. So I think it was good for it, to be honest, from a catalyst perspective.”

Agreeing, Berger said the goals of the MovieLabs roadmap got “a lot more attention when the pandemic hit because it was no longer a nice to have or a luxury; it was table stakes…. Now, working remotely is just one aspect of the 2030 Vision, but it got everyone talking cloud.”

The Hollywood Innovation and Transformation Summit event was produced by MESA in association with the Hollywood IT Society (HITS) and presented by Amazon Studios Technology, with sponsorship by Fortinet, Genpact, Prime Focus Technologies, Signiant, Softtek, Convergent, Gracenote, Altman Solon, AppTek, Ascendion, Coresite, EPAM, MicroStrategy, Veritone, CDSA, EIDR and PDG Consulting.