The world's most influential media, entertainment & technology show
RAI Amsterdam | 13 – 17 SEPTEMBER 2019
Over the five days of the conference over 1,400 delegates and guests from across the globe will hear from our outstanding line-up of 400+ speakers, enjoy fantastic networking opportunities and be inspired to embrace the changes in our industry.
Combining a world-class exhibition with free-to-attend feature areas and events, the IBC Exhibition provides the perfect platform for you to network and build relationships with suppliers and customers, discover the latest trends and technologies and drive your innovations and strategy.
5 Days
1,700+ Delegates
400+ Speakers
100+ Sessions
Comcast-backed Sky has confirmed it will double its Europe-wide investment in the development and production of original new content.
Over the next five years Sky’s output in original content will more than double from its current commitments.
The announcement was confirmed after the success of Chernobyl, which the company said has been the most successful original production to date.
Sky also pointed to its record number of Bafta winners and several other European successes such as Das Boot and Gomorrah as successful case studies for audience success.
Sky Studios chief executive Gary Davey said: “This exciting new venture is perfectly timed to meet the growing content demands of our customers.
“We look forward to working with the whole creative community, from individual creators to the big independent producers to produce more of the original content our customers love.”
Sky Studios will produce and develop original content across all genres, with a focus on drama and comedy and said it will ensure the commissioning emphasis is focussed on quality.
Sky Studios plans to double the amount of originals currently produced by Sky and will work in close collaboration with local Sky leadership teams.
Next month the production on Sky Studios’ first international project will begin, a six part drama called The Third Day, a co-production with HBO and starring Jude Law.
In the company statement it said the original productions success with its NBC and Universal partnerships position the company strongly to expand its leadership team and business as a global, profitable and strategically important pillar in the industry.
Sky Group chief executive Jeremy Darroch said: “This is a transformational development for us. Sky Studios will drive our vision to be the leading force in European content development and production. Our ambition is to make Sky Studios famous for quality content and a place where Europe’s top creatives will want to do their best work.
“Being part of Comcast enables us to increase our investment and to maximise the advantage and leverage of the Sky Group and our partners, NBCUniversal. This is a clear signal of Comcast’s belief in our commitment to producing the best original content in Europe.”
Sky has 23.7 million customers across seven countries in Europe and was recently backed by Comcast.
Comcast outbid 21st Century Fox in the acquisition of Sky last September after months of bidding back and forth. The auction saw the final bid at $22.65 per share, valuing Sky at $40.1 billion, more than 25% higher than its previous offer.
As the digital streaming giants expand and gain audience traction, Sky was investing steadily into more content.
According to Variety a large proportion of its budget goes towards sports rights with original dramas and films factored in to market to its key territories which include the UK, Germany and Italy.
Joseph Heller’s 1961 novel Catch-22 is set in World War Two, but it’s clear that the makers of the first television adaptation - including series executive producer, director and star George Clooney - believe its satirical take on the insanity of war is just as relevant today.
It follows a US bombing squadron whose leaders continually raise the number of missions their men are required to fly before being sent home, resulting in no one being sent home.
The only way out is to claim insanity, but a request to be removed from duty is proof of sanity, hence the bureaucratic rule Catch-22.
“The very idea of war is absurd,” says cinematographer Martin Ruhe, ASC. “For anti-hero Yossarian this is simply about life and death. The stakes could not be higher. But for characters like Milo, war is a huge business opportunity. This is not just absurd; this is how war is.”
While Yossarian (Christopher Abbott) rages at the sheer insanity of it all, his problems are compounded by characters in his own army including the profiteering Milo Minderbender (Daniel Stewart), mediocre commander Major de Coverly (Hugh Laurie) and parade loving Lieutenant Scheisskopf (Clooney).
Ruhe had previously lensed The American, a taut thriller set in Italy starring Clooney and produced by Grant Heslov. It was Heslov and Clooney who approached Ruhe to photograph Catch 22.
“They wanted it to look like something shot in World War Two, so I did some research mainly into period colour newsreel and high contrast footage,” Ruhe explains. “I shot some stills and played around with the look in Photoshop. The obvious decision would have been to shoot 16mm, but film cameras are not too practical, particularly for manoeuvring inside planes, so we had to find a look in digital that wasn’t too clean.”
The story is set on tiny Italian island Pianosa and shot on location in Sardinia and areas around Rome where the Mediterranean light helped Ruhe to find a look that exuded baking heat.
“We wanted this yellowish feel – to really feel the heat,” Ruhe explains. “It’s permanently hot, people are always sweating, it’s not a pleasant place. We added film grain for a richer texture that conveys the feeling of heat.”
“I wanted a small compact camera so we could shoot as much as possible in the planes”
The show’s producer, Hulu, also required a 4K finish which led to Ruhe’s choice of ARRI Alexa Minis. “I wanted a small compact camera so we could shoot as much as possible in the planes. We had the fuselage of a real WW2 bomber (in a studio in Rome) to do all the flying shots with actors.”
Even more compact 4K Flare camera heads (designed by IO Industries) were mounted to the planes used for aerial work.
Ruhe shot using Cooke S4 Prime lenses which yielded aesthetic aberrations and flare as well as using zooms in reference to the films of the 1970s such as Robert Altman’s M*A*S*H.
“We’re using the zoom to draw attention to something, for example to pick someone out in a crowd and to follow them for a time. It’s not very subtle and I don’t usually do it, but it worked here.”
A major scene in the fifth episode involves an attack by German planes on the army base (arranged by Milo to boost the value of the planes remaining after the attack). Shot at night, Ruhe used HMI lights and gels to give a bluish-green hue for moonlight and then worked with illuminations from the explosions as planes are destroyed across the airfield.
“The shoot felt as big as a major feature and the way the story was treated felt like doing a film, but we were cross shooting several episodes at a time. On one day we’d be setting up multiple scenes in one location for different episodes with different directors, which is a big difference from a feature.”
Unlike the novel, the series unfolds chronologically from 1942 to roughly 1944, but the series retains the chaotic energy and sense of madness.
It’s rare that a national newspaper praises the cinematography but UK’s The Guardian did in its review: calling the adaptation “immediately impressive – visually deserving of a bigger than a laptop screen – with a cohesive, arid palette and shots ranging wildly in scope from resonant closeup to sweeping landscape.”
Clooney directs two episodes with Ellen Kuras (perhaps more familiar as a cinematographer on features like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind) and Heslov (who produced Argo and Good Night, and Good Luck directed by Clooney) also directing two each.
“George and Grant were effectively working as showrunners plus directors. You must move fast with George. He is quick at making decisions and he’s also very visual which surprised me. He knows how the camera moves and how to direct actors and he’s very experienced all of which makes him very easy to work with.”
Bird’s eye view
Ruhe was also reunited with the mainly Italian crew with whom he had shot The American.
“There’s something nice about going to places and working with the local crew – and these guys are fantastic,” Ruhe says. “You learn more because there are always so many ways to do things. You pick up things you didn’t think of.”
Also tricky was managing the considerable amount of airborne action. Ruhe tried to do as much in camera and in the air as possible.
“There are only so many Mitchell B-25 bombers left in the world, but we had one and a Douglas DC-3 for a few days. We tried to get as much mileage out them as we could, with camera mounts on the body and interior for aerial sequences. We also shot from a helicopter, but we had to turn over a lot of plates to VFX to enhance these scenes.”
“There are only so many Mitchell B-25 bomber in the world so we tried to get as much mileage out of them as we could”
DNEG was the sole VFX vendor delivering 717 shots across 105 sequences under supervision of Brian Connor out of Vancouver and Dan Charbit supporting Connor from DNEG’s Montreal office. Matt Kasmir was the on-set VFX supervisor for Hulu. Work included CG planes and military vehicles, water/ocean and beach extensions, sky replacements, CG flak, ground smoke, fire FX, CG clouds and destruction matt paintings taken from aerial photography.
Ruhe shot to prominence photographing Control, Anton Corbijn’s 2007 biopic of tragic Joy Division singer Ian Curtis. He also shot Michael Caine thriller Harry Brown (2009) and American Pastoral, the directorial debut of Ewan McGregor. Before Control he was a renowned pop promo director working with the likes of Depeche Mode, U2 and Coldplay and today juggles feature and TV work with commercials.
“For me, shooting commercials is useful because there are technical things you can learn and new gear to get to know, plus you meet new people,” he concludes. “But I love doing that with actors, which you can’t do in music videos. For me, the highest discipline and the best thing you can do is to tell a story.”
Telefónica Business Solutions has announced its strategic partnership with Google Cloud to accelerate global organisations to adopt the cloud and offer flexible working.
The new agreement aims to help companies transition to the cloud in a move to reduce operational costs and advance the digital transformation of businesses.
The Spanish-based telecommunications firm announced today it would further enhance its cloud offerings which already include “the most relevant public clouds in the market,” adding to its catalogue the Google Cloud Platform, G Suite, Google Cloud Interconnect and Chrome Enterprise.
This partnership aims to deliver customers an integrated solution design to enhance the security and communications for companies to customise their end-to-end experience.
In addition, Telefónica’s multicloud portal enables companies to simplify the complexity of their hybrid cloud environments including public, local and private clouds, unifying them into a single, simple, secure and flexible management environment.
Google Cloud vice president EMEA partners and alliances Sebastian Marotte said: “The alliance between Google Cloud and Telefónica Business Solutions provides our clients with a simple, secure and open approach, allowing them to take advantage of the benefits of the cloud in the best way that meets their business needs.”
The agreement is a global movement and builds on the local partnership signed by Telefónica Spain last year with Google for the marketing of G Suite.
Google Cloud and MediaKind unite
During NAB this year MediaKind announced its partnership with Google Cloud to enable MediaKind’s entire portfolio of solutions to operate on Google Cloud Platform (GCP).
MediaKind and Google Cloud have previously collaborated on projects including the world’s first 6K tiled 360-degree live sports streaming of a basketball game in Germany last December.
MediaKind’s software-based video solution was used to control and operate the traffic flow, while GCP was leveraged to enable flexible, scalable and self-healing cloud processing operations on dedicated dashboards.
Google’s suite of collaboration and productivity applications enable companies to integrate the cloud into everything they need to create a virtual workplace.
According to Telefónica combined with Google Cloud the professional communications and telephony services will allows users to work securely from anywhere in the world, at any time.
Telefónica global B2B director of products and services Hugo de los Santos said: “Our customers demand a complete multicloud offering that allows them to use the most appropriate products and services from each cloud.
“Those offered by Google Cloud also perfectly complement our cloud product portfolio and will help us improve our value proposition to companies by distinguishing themselves through their Artificial Intelligence and machine learning capabilities.”
Telefónica announced that going forward, the global framework of the agreement means it will promote in all countries where it operates Google Cloud Platform public cloud services, the infrastructure interconnection solution Google Cloud Interconnect, Chrome Enterprise as well as Google’s G Suite which includes the most relevant business tools companies require to work easily in the cloud.
Netflix has confirmed it will expand its operations on the ground in Australia to compete with local streaming services.
The US technology giant has reportedly hired local staff as it attempts to fight back to maintain its dominant position in the Australian streaming video market, according to The Sydney Morning Herald.
Former Twentieth Century Fox head of publicity Sarah Haines has taken on a new role as head of Netflix’s Australia and New Zealand publicity for originals.
Netflix has also hired the former LinkedIn director of public policy for Asia Pacific and Japan Nick O’Donnell as its local director of public policy.
The head office “could signal the business has plans to back more original Australian content,” after it launched its first Australian original Tidelands last December and backed Chris Lilley’s 10-part mockumentary series Lunatics.
The initial office will house around 10 employees based in Sydney.
Netflix first started streaming in Australia in 2015 and is believed to have lost customers to the expanding local subscription video-on-demand offerings including Foxtel and Stan.
The Netflix Australia library includes 1.6% local content compared to 11.1% of Stan, RMIT research from 2018 shows.
It is estimated around 11 million Australians have a subscription to Netflix, according to Roy Morgan with its local rival Stan having around 1.6 million subscribers, however, no official numbers have been released by the firm.
The imminent arrival of the Disney+ streaming service, Netflix is facing greater competition, in Australia and across the globe.
Read more Disney+ predicted to take on Netflix and Amazon
The Australian screen industry and production groups have pushed for regulators to impose quotas on video streaming platforms requiring them to ensure a minimum amount of local content is created, similar to those placed on free-to-air television broadcasters.
Disney’s streaming service will rival Netflix with 160 million subscribers, according to JP Morgan research. Its also tipped to be cheaper in Australia with analysts estimating a fee of $10 for the monthly subscription.
Read more Netflix eschews Apple alliance
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