California Falls to #6: What's Driving Film Production Elsewhere?

Is America losing its grip as a film production powerhouse? We break down surprising survey results revealing the top global production hubs - with the U.S. notably absent from the top five. 

We also dive into Promise AI's acquisition of Curious Refuge and what truly AI-native production studios might look like compared to traditional VFX pipelines. Plus, discover how a simple $70 RGB color sensor could become an essential problem-solving tool for virtual production sets.

Transcript

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In this episode of the Denoised podcast, we're going to break down the results from the ProdPro production survey, promise AI, what does the AI studio, the feature look like and how an RGB color sensor for your phone could come in handy for virtual production. Let's get into it. Welcome back to Denoised podcast. I'm Joey Daoud I'm Addy Ghani. Welcome back. Yeah. Good to see you. So let's jump into it. We've got these results for a survey. They came out in January, but we never really talked about them. And I think it's interesting because it ties into a lot of what we've been talking about of, uh, well, LA survive as a film production hub of the future. So this was a survey from ProdPro. And they surveyed 150, uh, studio executives and asked them what their top five most preferred production locations were. And going in reverse order for the countdown, uh, number five was Australia, number four, Central Europe, number three, Vancouver, number two, United Kingdom, and number one, Toronto. Oh, come on, where's America, man? As you might have noticed, the U. S. was not on this top five list. However, California did come in number six, uh, followed by Georgia, New Jersey, and New York. So, within America We're number six, baby! California was number one, globally. California is number six. Wow. I, I was not expecting this, you know, even given the current state of everything going on in LA, I was not expecting to not even be in the top five. Yeah, not to not be a top five ranking to be outranked by Australia. I mean, to, to be fair, Australia has just gone above and beyond to Canada has one in three. They've got Toronto and Vancouver. I'm curious why Montreal is missing from here because Montreal is missing. The third leg of Canada, right? Well, maybe thereafter, New Jersey, perhaps. Yeah. It's still in the top 10. Uh, the other interesting stat also slightly sad. The survey also revealed pessimism among industry crew members with an overall negative sentiment rating of negative 23%. Australia was the only production hub where 50 percent of crew members expressed optimism about the industry's future. In contrast, California had a particularly low optimism rate with about only 10 percent of respondents feeling positive. Yeah. I mean, not surprising there, like the reason we cover. Tax incentives and stuff like this is because things are moving so fast. We're in such a dynamic environment and it's so important for a lot of people that listen to this podcast and their future and where they're going to live, where they're going to raise their family to look at the stuff, right? Cause it's shifting. Yeah, yeah, 100%. We've talked about like the tax incentive because I mean, that is the fuel that that's the incentive to keep productions either in California or where they decide to shoot to a lot of these top competiting locations, uh, have either just lower cost for production or good tax incentives. United Kingdom's number two. We talked about they had announced a 40 percent tax refund for productions there. That's competitive. You know, Canada's had tax incentives. I'm assuming Central Europe Does or just a lower cost in general? Well, the crazy thing here is I remember during the strikes when, uh, obviously all production paused, all of these places were affected. It's like a ripple effect across the world, uh, from the decision making and the sort of nuances of LA. So although. We're number six here, you could bet that everything that happens in California is going to affect the top five, right? It's still talking about production. Yeah, which we've pointed out before like production is one part of the process But like the writing the producing the funding a lot of that is still I mean we came action in California in LA We came very close to another pause with the Teamsters, right? I mean, it wasn't as drastic as SAG and WGA. What if there's another pause six months from now on some, perhaps an AI related thing? What happens to everybody that moved to Toronto? What happens to people that are in London waiting for work to come? Yeah. But are you seeing More local industries build up where like it's the entire like you think about the Korean produce shows where you know the entire production like the creative everything is happening in Korea, it's a show and then it's either acquired or produced by like a Netflix or someone from the start and then when like a strike or something does happen here. They fill up their slates by producing more content in other countries where the entire creative pipeline is that entire country, completely separate unions, completely separate system, and then basically just completely bypassing the U. S. System. 100%. 100%. Yeah, we saw that with strikes with, you know, Netflix investing in Korea right around the same time. I remember, uh, A lot of the Spanish productions were really taking off, uh, stuff in Barcelona and Madrid and stuff. So yeah, I think the minute there's any type of friction, uh, because it's a free economy, if you will, you know, you'll just move into places that don't have any friction. Yeah. And these are content machines, like they need, especially in the streaming age, they need to keep putting out new content to keep the subscribers. And Joey, you and I need to put up a new content game. Everything is a content game now. Everything is a content churn. Yeah. Twice a week, ladies and gents, every Tuesday and Friday. Yeah. And so if production's held up here, they got to get it from somewhere else. Yeah. And that gives, you know, these other countries a chance to take the lead, which they have done here and, and, and surpassed the U S and preferred. I mean, this is, I don't know, I'm a bit curious what the factors were of like, you know, what makes it preferred location, but whatever it is. Yeah. My guess here is, is, is the, is the quality of life, uh, the income versus the cost of living and all those. things that you generally don't think about in a production. I'm sure, you know, Toronto is a lovely place to visit for me. I'm sure it's a great place to live if you're an American and a lot of American talent is probably emigrating out of the U. S. to go to one of these top five places. Yeah. And all these places, look at them offhand. It's like, I know they have, they have the infrastructure too, that you need for high end film production studios, the equipment, the cameras, like it's. They have the infrastructure, you know, it's not like you have to ship stuff in if you're shooting in, like, I don't know, Dominican Republic or something. Yeah, all five of these places have been shooting films for at least a decade, maybe two decades. So, yeah, I think, uh, you could make a tier one film anywhere of these lists. And then, of course, it go, you know, it just gets easier and easier. So if you want to shoot a commercial, it's way easier to do that than to make, you know, a hundred million dollar meal. Yeah, because the infrastructure, the talent, the BTL is already there. Yeah. Yeah. All right. So other story kind of ties into what is this changing landscape look like? Um, there's an article about a new AI content studio called promise. And so they opened up in November last year. It was created by George Strompolos, former fullscreen CEO; Jamie Byrne, former YouTube content executive; and Dave Clark, a commercial director and AI filmmaker, who was also talking at HPA the other week, and he was talking a bit about promise their sort of an AI content studio. But the thing that was stood out to me that was interesting with how they're tackling this is, uh, they're developing a proprietary AI production system that they're calling Muse. And this is an interesting model, and I think sort of the kind of key way to think about creative technology. How much do we know about Muse? We know as far as what I know about it, and Dave talked a bit about it at HPA, but this was also when I was doing that live editing demo and I was on the side of the room, so I was only half paying attention to anything that day. And I wish I would post the recordings of these, but the way that it was sort of described was it's a. AI system that they're building. I'm not entirely sure what that means if it's like a very like fancy comfy UI platform or something like even more proprietary. But the gist of the idea was building out a pipeline and going back to our last episode what we're talking about with like nodes and pipelines and flora. Building out a pipeline, connecting all of the models, whatever their workflow is, but building it in a way where when a new model comes out, which it does all the time, they don't have to rebuild their entire workflow. They can just swap out the model. Like, okay, this thing was using, uh, you know, Claude 3. 5. We're now like ChatGPT 4. 5 has come out and we found a better, so we can just change the model in our little workflow. But everything else we can keep the same. We don't have to like revamp our entire process. We can just like change models and swap things out and consistently improve how uh, they're creating things without having to like rebuild everything. Yeah. To me, it feels a little bit like how VFX houses have their own proprietary pipelines. So for example, if you worked at Weta, you know, for 20 years, you come over to ILM, you're not going to wreck. Recognize any of the tool. You're like, oh, okay. I, I get it. That you're, and so does this look like their custom built tool? Like what is when they're like, oh, we have a proprietary system. How, what does that look like? Yeah. To me, uh, I don't know if calling Promise an AI studio is the correct moniker. I would go more with ai, VFX shop. AI driven AI technology company, perhaps a studio, of course, entails not just, uh, creation of the content, but also, uh, hiring talent, uh, running a business distribution, a legal department, all those types of things that make a studio up, uh, having, uh, real estate, you know, things like that. So this is definitely. A glimpse into the future. I mean, Promise is, of course, not the only player in the space. We also have somebody called Asteria Film, who I think more or less is a competitor to them. And they're also building completely generative native AI pipelines versus the hybrid approach that a lot of the VFX companies are taking. And what do you see as the hybrid approach? Like a combo of using AI tools and traditional tools? Or they're Eventually everything funnels into a CG environment. And, uh, there is a augmentation perhaps, but I would say it's still driven very much by a traditional computer graphics world. Yeah, and I would be curious. I mean, I would be shocked if like there wasn't some other traditional compositing or something in promise or these other. AI centric studios that still doesn't come down to like, we got the outputs. We got to combine multiple outputs. I mean, that was a huge part of the process with, uh, airhead and the kind of original source film when they were talking about like how that's the balloon, the balloon. Yeah. That was like the very first store ashore and it was like, looks really cool, but they used after effects a lot to take multiple outputs, you know, from what they would get. And then they would have to like combine use traditional techniques to composite. The best parts of multiple shots and a single shot. You're probably using something like Nuke, which is industry standard for compositing. There's no AI. It's all hand done by a compositor. Yeah. So maybe it's a lot of time on the back end to generate the assets, but you're still stitching everything together. But there may be a difference between Promise where I'm just guessing here, guys, Promise. If you want to reach out and give us a tour, we'll love it. Dave, uh, and both of us are connected on LinkedIn. Perhaps Promise is 90% AI driven with 10%. Right. So kind of flipping traditional studio. Maybe they're using a little bit AI to generate some elements, but bulk of the work is done in Nuke or compositing and the new AI studios are flipping that. It's kind of like, maybe like a Tesla versus a Ford where Ford makes a couple of cars. That's ev Is this another analogy? Yeah.. I'm full of these, man. Yeah. Whereas a, a Tesla is a native EV company just, just makes electric cars. They'll never have a internal combustion pipeline. Mm-hmm. Versus Ford. That's, they're making two different types of cars. They know ev is kind of the future, so they've invested in it, but, uh, not every car out of Ford is NAV. Yeah, maybe it's like something like that. But yeah, I'm curious and I'm curious to see what types of content start coming out of these sort of AI first or AI driven studios because I feel like the initial stuff is more like an ad agency or we saw this Coca Cola commercial at the holiday AI ads last year. Low hanging fruit. Yeah, commercials, music videos where you know they want to be experimental or try something different or the first to kind of Try out this commercials, take a lot of creative liberty. So do music videos. They're more open to new technology. I think we saw a Gazi and splat Coca Cola commercial the other time. Even it was a constant. Yeah, yeah. It was really, I'll forward it to you. And then during the early days of VP, you saw McDonald's and a bunch of other brands release VP. Driven commercials out there. So I think that's the right space to play in for a generative AI at the moment. By the time they get to film TV, that's probably a couple of years out. Yeah. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if we start seeing something this year, maybe a short film or something that has like. Consistent characters, something that's a bit more in the narrative space that feels good. I don't know, for lack of, I don't know how else to describe it, but doesn't, feels less AI y. Yeah, I think the trick and the magic to having a product that they output that is going to be critically acclaimed and accepted by the mainstream is to not generate the humans. So keep human performers intact, get your background done by AI, get all of the VFX done by AI, but we humans look at other humans all day long. Our eyes are so dialed in. Our lizard brains are wired to detect oddities and be like, ooh, something's wrong with this thing. So the minute you want to entertain human beings, don't put digital human beings in front of those eyeballs. And if you do, you have to be careful about that and make sure. Yeah, or maybe it's some factor of a human driven performance. Was something like, uh, runways act one where you're able to kind of translate a lot of the performance into other character, but you're still getting a lot of the essence of the human performance. And look, this, this team is obviously, you know, they're not amateurs. They know what they're doing. So my guess is it'll be in that approach where it's still a human driven cinematography, a human driven performance, just everything is boosted. Yeah, slight tangent. I'm gonna go off on one thing within the AI space that I feel like probably is a big issue that rubs people the wrong way about AI is when people create outputs that use existing characters. Or use other elements, uh, you know, a Batman, Star Wars, something, and then put it out there. And I feel like that stuff is probably what rubs people out of the wrong way. Of course. Like you're taking sacred IP, IP, IP that already, you know, people like it's a, it's a shortcut to the emotional investment we all have in these characters because these characters were built the traditional way with like. You know, a lot of handmade movies or outputs, a lot of creative experimentation. A lot of sweat. Yeah. So, you know, I want to see like AI used for original stories, 100 percent original creations. It's like you got the stuff in your imagination, like this is the way to get it out there. Not to do rehash of an existing character. Well, just a little bit of side story. Do you know the matrix story? Uh, when the Wachowskis originally pitched it to Warner brothers? Uh, no. Then you can talk about like the very first matrix movie. Yeah. So in 99. Yeah. And, uh, they had to rewrite the script, I think like 26 times, because each time they would present it in front of, uh, Warner brother execs, they just, nobody could comprehend the movie. I mean, come on. I mean, that's yeah. They're like, wait, there's another world error. Yeah. So they finally, the Wachowskis finally hired like a world class storyboard artist or something like that. And they were finally able to, on the 26th time or whatever, pitch it correctly and get the funding, get the approval. But, you know, that, like, what if they had promise back then or somebody like that? Or just all the tools now where you could like, okay, well, what if we could just build an animatic ish, like, with all the tools out there, and create a rough version of it or a trailer of our original vision so you could see. And we're trying to tell you after The Matrix came out, obviously a lot of, uh, inspiration, inspired movies came out, right? You have Underworld, which had the style of The Matrix with the lighting, the trench coats and the grid. And there's a bunch of others, but like that initial vision to screen was so difficult for them. And I feel like all the barriers now are more or less lifted. So we need the visionaries to come in and do their Yeah. And also with the movies that come out and the complaints that Like there's nothing original and it's all sequels and reboots. Yeah, I AI tools to like make the original stories, like on a barrier to make original stuff's going to get lower. I don't know if you get a chance to go to film festivals. I went to HollyShorts last year. HollyShorts is one of the more prestigious ones here in LA. Uh, they're Oscar qualifying. So if you win at HollyShorts, the academy. Like looks at yeah, so it's a good one to go to and I went to one of the days where, uh, the filmmakers showed their movie and then they came out to the front. They described to the audience like this is this was my vision. This is where. Dude, wonderful movies, amazing vision, there is no lack of talent, there is no lack of young filmmakers out there that can hit a home run. The question is, why aren't the studios not risking in investing? And maybe this is what we need like the Wachowskis, where it's like, okay, we got to like make the low, like the tools are out there to make something that looks good and you can get a good Trailer something to sell your vision. Yes, and maybe that's what we need to do now to like convince the the moneymaker decision makers I would say if there was a studio that just specialized in movie trailers like all they did was one minute trailers for young filmmakers to just come in and just Nail it. That would be incredible business. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I don't know how much money young filmmakers have to Yeah, but, but then you maybe do an equity share, right? Like, so if the movie does get funded, you know, you get whatever. Pick up the idea, right? Yeah. Option the idea. Yeah. Make the trailer. Try sell it. Film festivals. Uh, do you remember the LA Film Festival that used to exist? Yeah. Before they shut down? Yeah. Yeah, we have, uh, our short doc was in there, Dolphin Lover, about a guy that has a romantic love affair with a dolphin. It won Best Short Documentary, uh, at the festival. Awesome. Yeah, qualified for the Academy Awards. Oh, great. And then the festival shut down. I'm not gonna say it was from Dolphin Lover, but maybe it was. I think I told you this, I have a friend who saw your work and he was like, dude, you gotta watch this movie. I was like, I don't know about this. I feel like we should just google Dolphin Lover, it's on YouTube. Yeah, well, Space Ryder, the short film that I executive produced was at HollyShorts and that's why I was there. And, uh, we didn't win, so we didn't get the Oscar qualification, but, um, I got a chance to meet other filmmakers and pretend to be a filmmaker myself. You are a filmmaker. It was awesome. I mean, there's just so much talent all over the world. People that were there from Japan and from other sides of the country and so on. Yeah, I feel like with the digital revolution as well. It's like there's gonna be a lot. It's easier to make for people to make things. It's gonna be a lot more crap, a lot more noise. Yeah, but there's also gonna be a lot of like new things to pop out of that. I think we're gonna be in a few years. We're gonna be thankful that early visualization tools exist because we're gonna Yeah, yeah. Introduce ourselves to whole new universes and storylines that were never possible before. Yeah. Yeah. All right. And last one, uh, a new RGB color sensor. You flagged this one, Addy. So what this is geared more for, um, matching your paint colors at home. Yeah. You found this could have another interesting use. So I'm, I'm, I'm a gadget guy. I love my gadgets and, uh, especially stuff that plugs into the iPhone. So I have a FLIR. FLIR is like a thermal camera that goes on the bottom Forward-looking infrared. Yeah. Yeah. So you can like detect where all of your leaks in the house is, you know, it's good for like cold climates and really hot climates. So this one is along the same vein. This, it looks like a Bluetooth sensor that you point to and it gives you a RGB readout and then it actually gives you a color. Match like a color patch, then you take it to your hardware store and you can get the paint a lot of times. Uh, you just don't remember what kind of paint that was, and then you have to redo the whole wall. But this way, you know, does it definitely stick it on? Does it bypass the issue of like? What lighting is hitting the right? The luminant is probably super important. Uh, I think it says, uh, sunlight dependent. It's called the Nix Mini 3 and it's quite cheap. It's only 70 bucks. So when I first saw this, I was like, wait a minute. This is amazing for virtual production because nine out of 10 times we are doing physical to virtual match. And so yeah. You have a color value in unreal or whatever, that's a hex value. And then your production designer, your set designer, they have to paint and match. So why not do something like this? You know, where you have a better match from the physical to the virtual. Yeah. I mean, yeah. I love any device where you could, especially it connects with the phone. You ever use a, I think it was called Lumu. No, it's a light meter attachment that plugs into the originally lightning port. I think I updated usbc. Yeah. And I had a color meter, uh, checker on it too. But it's like 100 150 bucks, which is for light meter to get a dedicated light meter. That's good. Was like a few 100. That's awesome. It's great. It worked. Yeah. I mean, if I was like a cinematographer doing this day in day out, I would get a dedicated light meter. But for something out in the open room, it's like I just want to get a kind of quick measurement or like What's the value here? Or even like what's the color? What's the color temperature reading? Yeah, worked really well. And it's like a little small thing you can just keep in your bag and Pop it into your phone and I love little gadgets like that dedicated gadgets. Yeah, with this one, I think, uh, my recommendation to every virtual production studio out there, put 80 in, just keep it in your in your drawer of next to your computer in the stage. Anytime there is a practical set match issue with color, like. Whatever set piece, it's not brown enough as the digital set piece. Yes. You can go through a proper color calibration, past color management pass, and still have a little bit of an issue. This will be the shortcut that you need. So what's the current process now, if you're like, you're trying to match the current process now is if you do everything correctly, there shouldn't be an issue that's, that is literally the. The ideology that we teach is like, look, you know, Unreal has to output, uh, ACES 2065 or whatever. And your wall has to be calibrated to that. And then disguise or whatever media server has to be calibrated to that. By the time it comes out, it should be exactly the color you intend. And so you take that same color and you give it to your set designer. They paint the wall with that same color. It should just match, right? Of course, this is the real world and paint doesn't mix the right way and so on and so forth. So you got to have a little bit of, um, a hack if you will. And I think this is that when you're doing this prep, do you factor into like what types of light you're using on set that's going to hit the props and how that should look? Yeah, generally. I mean that, that, you're right. That is probably the number one factor is if it's a D65 illuminant or a 5600 K, but your unreal world has to be lit. In the same color temperature as your real world, even then you're going to have some discrepancy and the way you solve for that is with a camera LUT. So then you point the camera at a digital color chart and a real color chart and depending on the differences there, you load that LUT into your camera. Mhm. So that's how you account for it. Okay. And that's actually what the Sony Unreal plugin does. The RE Unreal plugin does for their individual cameras. And then Netflix's open VP Cal does it for any camera. Okay. To create those lots to match. Yeah. But still, this is like, like a quick thing where, Oh, okay. You want to check something, make sure that like, can we get that paint in that color? Go, go for it. Yeah. I think I'm really excited for the future. AI VFX shops, quote unquote studios. Uh, it is definitely what we need in this world, especially after the technical collapse and us questioning what the future of VFX world is. If it's not this, then I can't think of anything else. But I still think you need that combo right now of like the expertise and the knowledge of like what a professional pipeline needs and like how to deliver to that standard. And then with the early adopter open mindedness of being able to. Source out what tools are out there. What can, what can do things and how you can fit that I think the pipeline. We don't say this to VFX artists enough and they definitely deserve to hear this is you are the professional. You have the eye and you hold the quality bar and that's good regardless of what tool you use. Yeah, right. It only ultimately comes down to like, is it it. Your eye, your taste, your expertise in that knowledge versus your expertise in the tool. You spent your career looking at pixels and frames, and that is, that is the relevant skill that you bring to the table. Yeah, and that's something you can only also acquire with, like, years of looking at images and frames and knowing, like, what is wrong. Exactly. So don't feel despaired. You know, there is hope. Pick up a couple of new tools, sort of retool yourself to be ready for this new world. Your, uh, other skill sets will still come in handy, but you'll need to complement with new skill sets. Yes. Actually, speaking of skill sets, the one thing we did leave off about the Promise Studio was, uh, the other subheading of that new story was that they did acquire Curious Refuge. Ah, yes. Which is a AI training education platform. Yeah. And, like, clearly they're looking for that pipeline too, where it's like, okay, if they're building out the studio, they're going to need People versed in A. I. Tools. Yeah. And so that seems like a very logical acquisition. Yeah. I love a Caleb. I forget his wife's name. Husband and wife team puts out amazing YouTube content. I think you and I consume a lot of YouTube. So we're fans of other YouTube creators. Yeah. And this is how we've learned all these tools too. It was like either messing around with it or looking at other videos of what other people have done and that's it. Teaching about how they use it. I think the majority of the world is doing. And we do it too. So curious refugee is A refuge, if you will, of learning AI, you know, nurturing this new tool into things that could be beneficial to you and, uh, having them be acquired by promise shows that what they do can now be scaled, perhaps there's more investment and maybe the AI courses could be taught more frequently to more people. And then that young new Wachowski filmmaker out there can learn it and can utilize it. Yeah. Or even just from there. And it's like, well, we need more talent in the pipeline. I mean, kind of same issue with like VP or it's like, okay, you need more people versed in bad virtual art department type stuff. Exactly. Virtual production, uh, tool sets. Same idea here. And I've been talking to more and more like kind of professional AI creators or that are expanding. And it's like, I need people that know how to use come for you. I, you know, and it's like a very narrow skill set right now, like that. Nobody's come for you. I, but that also going to the skill issue, like have the taste and the skill set and the eye. Okay. To know, like, what's an acceptable output and what needs to be changed. And that's, I think, a very, especially if you're in VFX and, like, kind of going full circle. Like, if you have the eye, like, just learn the tool set because, like, you're the demand is going to be there. Exactly. And, uh, I think there is enough jobs for everybody because, like I said, the. Number of movies, the number of projects is just going up and up and up, the budget's reducing, but having said that, a lot of these tools can bring a new level of efficiency, so you could perhaps get to almost the same level of quality with a much lower budget and still hit those criterias. So I think the industry is not going to die, it's not going to be, you know, like we're still going to have great films and great movies, but this massive change management that needs to happen is happening. Yeah, it's the crappy transition period. I know. Yeah. Yeah. All right. Let's wrap it up there. Thanks everyone for watching as usual show notes and everything. Links to subscribe are at denoisedpodcast. com. I want to do a special shout out to our YouTube viewers. Please give us a comment and we're of course reading them. We're going to reply right back to you. So please engage with us. We'd love to hear from you. All right. Thanks everyone. We'll catch you in the next episode.