Entertainment Technology Center Inaugural Digital Town Square
“On-set Workflows: Pain Points, Opportunities and Indicators for the Future”
Case Study Panelists:
- Steve Barnett – vice president, feature post production, 20th Century Fox, “Life of Pi,” “Avatar”
- Gigi Coello-Bannon – supervising producer, “Criminal Minds”; co-producer, “Carnivale,” “American Dreams”
- Anette Haellmigk – director of photography, “Game of Thrones” (Season 3), “Big Love” (season 3 – 5), director of photography/second unit, “Starship Troopers”
- Eric Steelberg, ASC – director of photography, “Juno,” “(500) Days of Summer,” “Up in the Air”
Additional Panelists (subject to change):
- Larry Chernoff – ceo, MTI Film
- Dan Lebental, A.C.E. – editor, “Iron Man,” “Iron Man 2,” “Elf”
- Stephen Sommers - director
What: Symposium examining the challenge of designing and executing optimal on-set workflows for feature film and TV productions. Discussion will focus on the questions that filmmakers ask to clarify the requirements of a project; the demands placed by tent poles, independent motion pictures (medium to micro-budget), premium TV dramas and episodics; and the plethora of new solutions on the market. Effort will be made to determine if there are patterns and commonalities across specific kinds of projects and, if so, to begin to identify those benchmarks. A white paper will be published detailing the event’s findings.
Who: Both the speakers and audience will be comprised of studio production and postproduction executives; top-tier above and below-the-line filmmakers; union, guild and association leaders; postproduction company executives and their principal creatives and technologists; entertainment technology company executives and senior technologists; and student filmmakers.
When: February 7, 2013
Participation: Registration will be on an invitation, space available basis. Safe harbor principals will apply—there will be no media coverage—and the audience makeup calibrated to support a thorough, balanced and open dialogue between constituencies invested in the topic.
Why: Because digital technologies are upending production, because of the plethora of new solutions, and because of a lack of established best practices, filmmakers, studios and networks almost always reinvent the wheel when they design the workflow for a feature film or TV shoot. Decisions about dailies, color space, file formats and backups, on what needs to be done and where and when it should be done, are made without data from similar projects, without the necessary clarifying information and without knowledge of all the options. The goal of this symposium is to define choices, shine a light on the underlying reasons behind the selection of one route over another, and explore whether there are optimal on-set workflow solutions for projects that face similar challenges.
Sponsored by 
