February 11, 2021

The Hollywood Tech Tricks Getting Film Crews Back on Set (wired.com)

IT’S NOT SURPRISING that Hollywood has been hit hard by the Covid-19 pandemic. After all, movie sets typically require hundreds of people coming together from all around the world to work in close proximity to one another. Early in the spring of 2020, production effectively shut down until further notice. But slowly, quietly, new movies—movies that were filmed during the pandemic—have begun surfacing. How? Filmmakers found ways to adapt, and now they’re getting even more tools to help them film safely.

Not every movie needs high-tech solutions, of course. Smaller films, like Netflix’s Malcolm & Marie or the recent Sundance flick How It Ends, are able to get by with smaller, quarantined crews. But for bigger, more complicated projects—the kind that need visual effects and lots of extras—tech is filling in the gaps on socially distant shoots.

By: Brent Rose

Continue Reading at wired.com

Hollywood’s Union Leaders Call On Congress To Enact Laws Advancing Diversity And Equity In The Arts, Entertainment & Media (deadline.com)

Leaders of the Hollywood’s unions today outlined their legislative agenda to advance diversity, equity and inclusion in the arts, entertainment and media industries, including a call on Congress to pass a flurry of legislation to increase federal arts funding; establish diversity objectives for grant recipients; to leverage federal tax incentives to encourage diverse hiring, and to protect the rights of unions to organize nonunion workers.

“As unions, we hold a fundamental belief that diversity is a strength,” the leaders of SAG-AFTRA, the DGA, IATSE, Actors’ Equity, the WGA East and several other union leaders said in a joint statement. “We work inside and outside the traditional collective bargaining process to create more and better opportunities for underrepresented people. Smart policy solutions aimed at creating diverse talent pipelines, incentivizing diversity in hiring, and supporting collective bargaining will help our workplaces and our industries move forward.”

By: David Robb

Continue Reading at deadline.com

What does Covid mean for the future of pandemic movies? (theguardian.com)

Of all the things this wretched disease has taken from us, the pandemic movie ranks among the least essential. But, for a few years at least, we should brace ourselves to elbow-bump the genre goodbye.

In 2021, we all know exactly what a pandemic is. And, for the most part, it is nothing like the movies. The undead do not roam the streets. Infected monkeys are not leaping from host to host. The vaccine was created without Brad Pitt having to tiptoe gingerly through a zombie-infested laboratory. As tragic as Covid has been, it has manifested itself mainly in the form of endless drudgery, with everyone stuck at home or following arrows around supermarkets. Unless there emerges a bizarre public hunger for films in which tired parents try to connect their tablets to Google Classroom during a phone call with their boss, it is hard to think that anyone will want to watch the reality of this pandemic reflected back at them.

By: Stuart Heritage

Continue Reading at theguardian.com

Mogul Leverages Chainlink to Empower Transparent, Decentralized Film Financing on the Blockchain (finance.yahoo.com)

Mogul will integrate Chainlink, the market-leading blockchain oracle network, to bring more transparency and accessibility to film production and financing. Mogul to use the Chainlink Network to bring off-chain movie budget and profitability data onto the blockchain, enabling the disbursement of audited, fair-market profit sharing with investors in a more efficient, transparent, and accurate way than ever before. Mogul will also make use of a Chainlink ETH/USDC decentralized Price Feed to ensure users receive fair market exchange rates on all ETH profits derived from USD-denominated budgets.

Mogul’s vision is to be an innovative and progressive film financier and production company leveraging blockchain technology for voting, investment, and rewards. With our proprietary platform, we are looking to engage audiences and investors through the entire script-to-screen process, with the mission to promote investment transparency in independent film financing.

Independent film financing is opaque, hard to access, lack standardization, and has costly closing costs; all of which are great use cases for blockchain technology. By using a transparent and efficient blockchain-based system for film financing, Mogul can produce films at a lower budget rate than traditional models. In addition, Mogul’s unique rewards system using STARS allows independent projects to curate an audience for their film at the script level, helping Mogul and film distributors better predict a film’s expected ROI using early fan sentiment indicators.

By: Barry Ben-Asher

Continue Reading at finance.yahoo.com

Below The Line – Guest Editorial: Inoculating Your Film From COVID in Seven Steps (btlnews.com)

Recently, a modest-budget movie production shooting in New Mexico was temporarily shut down for four days as a result of COVID-19.  The producers thought they were doing everything right, testing on a regular basis and even performing extra rapid antigen tests on cast and crew that all came back negative, but due to a delay in the lab reporting to SAG-AFTRA, the Guild had no choice but to shut down the production.  Until this shutdown, there was no COVID-19 outbreak on set or even a positive test result, but because the production did not strictly adhere to the Guild-mandated protocols, it was shut down, losing precious time and incurring significant additional costs.

More specifically, a series of unanticipated events led to the shutdown, but they could have been prevented had the producers been prepared.  First, the contractors supplying testing materials to the production lacked sufficient testing materials, which led to some personnel not being tested on the specific day required by the Guild protocols. Second, the Veteran’s Day holiday fell on a Wednesday, and the lab was closed, which resulted in some crew members’ test results not being confirmed by the lab on time. SAG requires that 100% of personnel in Zone A (more on that below) test negative, and the production’s testing lab could not provide the test results for Zones A and B quick enough to avoid a shutdown under the SAG rules. In other words, the lack of testing and timely lab results shut down production and not COVID-19 itself. This article is not a referendum on the Guild or its practices but rather a guide to filmmakers on steps to take to navigate productions through these uncertain times and help prevent an unexpected shutdown and significant loss of time and money.

By: Harris Tulchin, Kyle Moser, Pamela Billie

Continue Reading at btlnews.com