EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

MEDIA CREATION BY 2030

The media industry has seen tremendous technological advances and achievements in storytelling over the last 10 years. Still, major challenges and inherent inefficiencies in production and distribution workflows threaten to limit future ability to continue innovation, reduce production time and expand output. Historically, storytellers and creatives have been the beneficiaries of new technological innovations. Within this document, MovieLabs and its member studios have laid out a bold vision for the future state of technology in filmmaking during the next 10 years, with a call to action for the industry to collaborate by appropriate means to achieve shared goals and continue to empower future storytellers and the creative community. We describe future technological advances that will enable seismic changes in media workflows with one objective in mind – to empower storytellers to tell more amazing stories while delivering at a speed and efficiency not possible today.

Creatives are constantly challenged to achieve more with less time and stretched budgets. Within our 2030 Vision, we have included ways to use emerging technologies to provide more “time” to filmmakers to make the creative choices they want to make and to be able to iterate more times to reach their ambitions for every production. That does not mean every technology is applicable to every title, and filmmakers will independently decide what to take from this paper and how to apply it to their individual productions. HDR is a similar use case – a new technique and workflow that filmmakers can choose to use to create dynamic realism or deliberately dial back if they want a muted or flat look. Not every filmmaker will want to utilize every new technology we describe here, but they will have more options and tools from which to choose.

There are 10 foundational principles in this document, each an element of the 2030 world we envision, and each accompanied by an overview, examples and broader implications for the future. By publicly laying out these principles and the supporting documentation, we hope to lead an industry dialogue with relevant stakeholders and fuel innovation to encourage companies and organizations to help deliver on these ideas for the benefit of the ecosystem. At a high level, these principles envision a future in which:

All assets are created or ingested straight into the cloud and do not need to be moved.
Applications come to the media.
Propagation and distribution of assets is a “publish” function.
Archives are deep libraries with access policies matching speed, availability and security to the economics of the cloud.
Preservation of digital assets includes the future means to access and edit them.
Every individual on a project is identified and verified, and their access permissions are efficiently and consistently managed.
All media creation happens in a highly secure environment that adapts rapidly to changing threats.
Individual media elements are referenced, accessed, tracked and interrelated using a universal linking system.
Media workflows are non-destructive and dynamically created using common interfaces, underlying data formats and metadata.
Workflows are designed around real-time iteration and feedback.

Many of these trends have already started and may be delivered earlier in our 2030 time horizon, but we are extrapolating from edge cases today and looking for how to enable these future use cases to be available for all productions, regardless of budget. By laying out this comprehensive view of the future, we hope to avoid the fragmented and piecemeal approach to the digital migration that largely resulted in a change of storage medium but no major improvements or efficiency gains in workflow. By approaching innovations like cloud-based workflows in a systematic and intentional way, the industry can enable changes that will improve the creative process for all participants.

This white paper further explains the principles outlined above and articulates practical use cases that demonstrate how the principles will come together to promote benefits for all. MovieLabs plans to publish additional documentation to apply these principles in real-world scenarios.

The goal of this white paper is to describe a vision for the future of media creation that enables new content experiences limited only by our imaginations. It aims to start a broad technology conversation among industry stakeholders to create efficiencies, expand output and save creatives time to do what they do best. The ultimate improvements may result from a variety of means, including industry best practices and standards and/or innovation at individual companies. Given the 10-year event horizon, it is premature at this point to opine on the means to implement all improvements. This will evolve over time during the course of discussions with relevant stakeholders. Importantly, during this entire process, each company involved will make its own completely independent business decisions. Each will unilaterally determine how it plans to innovate and, most importantly, with whom it plans to do business. For legal reasons, no party involved in the process will discuss with whom they plan to do business or on what terms.