Saving Hollywood’s day
A New Zealand company is aiming to revolutionise the way Hollywood makes movies.
Born out of a need to find a way to share and store video securely and efficiently, Moxion allows film-makers to view and edit footage almost immediately after they have shot it.
Co-founder Hugh Calveley is now living in Los Angeles, where he’s trying to drum up business for the Auckland-based company he founded with Michael Lonsdale in 2015. He said they had seen how frustrating it was to have to wait for at least a day to see footage captured on-set.
‘‘We’re now used to being able share everything immediately in the digital world, but when you go onto a film set a lot of that disappears. So it was kind of obvious that we needed a way of getting footage captured from a camera and firing it up into the cloud as soon as possible.’’
Aware that Hollywood is something of a conservative place (Calveley described it as like a ‘‘container ship – it takes a lot to turn it’’), he knows that changing the traditional dailies process (of viewing on-set footage the next day) won’t be easy but they’ve been demonstrating Moxion’s practical applications and have come up with a catchy name that’s already drawn, interest, work and wry smiles.
‘‘What’s faster than dailies? Immediates. We even have a catchphrase: Immediates – like dailies, but a day earlier.’’
Calveley stressed that while it offered rapid two-way communication across different aspects of a film’s production, it was not the same as live streaming the camera feed. ‘‘That would be disastrous. With a live stream, there’s no intent, you don’t know if what the camera is seeing is the director’s vision or not.’’
One blockbuster that has already benefited from Moxion’s technology is Jason Stathamstarrer The Meg.
Shot in late 2016, the sci-fi action thriller was the first major motion picture to be filmed on Auckland’s Hauraki Gulf, as well as at the city’s Kumeu Film Studios, before production shifted to China.
‘‘The hero boat was meant to be somewhere in the high seas,’’ recalled Calveley. ‘‘So having another boat [to house the production staff] nearby wouldn’t have cut it. Normally you would have to have a big microwave link between the two boats so they could communicate.
‘‘But with us, we took the footage that was coming in from the short-range wireless transmitter on a helicopter and a boat, showed the pictures to the director and the director of photography, then put it up into the cloud, via Amazon Web Services, so it could then be pulled down again on the production boat.
‘‘That meant they were able to see what had been shot about 90 seconds after they had stopped recording. They heard ‘cut’ in their earpiece and could view something just a minute-anda-half later.’’
The technology’s capabilities also mean editors can be based anywhere in the world and far away from a ‘‘noisy’’ set. ‘‘And they can send the assembled footage right back to the set again, where the director can view it on the same monitor they’ve been using onset.’’
Having just wrapped working on Deepwater Horizon director Peter Berg’s latest collaboration with Mark Wahlberg, Mile 22, and with a ‘‘huge Hollywood movie potentially in the pipeline’’, Calveley said it is a ‘‘pretty exciting time’’ .
Delighted to have the support of the NZ Film Commission, he said it was important that New Zealand becomes recognised as ‘‘a technology source, not just pretty landscapes and good crew. Otherwise, if all we are doing is exporting our scenery, then we’re just doing the equivalent of exporting our topsoil. Leveraging the technology we have is going to be vital for our industry.’’
‘‘New Zealand needs to become recognised as a technology source, not just pretty landscapes and good crew.’’ Hugh Calveley