Issue link: https://digital.copcomm.com/i/1469942
50 PRODUCTION SOUND & VIDEO – Summer 2022 posting a live photo to Instagram or scrolling through Twitter, became straightforward to build and easy for an actor on set to operate under the guidance of a Video Playback Engineer. In fact, the accuracy of the graphics was noticed by phone manufacturers and Magic Phone quickly became a preferred program amongst product placement teams in order to ensure the proper look and feel of the most popular smartphone brands. We made plans to license Scene Builder and Magic Phone to other Playback Engineers and companies, but our commitments to lm and television clients kept us too busy to devote the necessary resources beyond sending alpha versions of the programs to a few friends. And then COVID hit. Like everyone else, we were stunned by how quickly everything shut down. Between Wednesday, March 11 and Friday, March 13 all of our shows pulled the plug. My trip to London was canceled and no one knew what was coming next. Once we realized things were going to be locked down for more than "just a few weeks," we pivoted to the very large list of tasks on our internal project board. Adding functionality and exibility to Magic Phone and Scene Builder was Item #1 on our list. A few months into lockdown, we got an interesting call from Josh Levy, a Video Assist/Video Playback Engineer, with whom we've worked many times over the years. He had been contacted by an HBO project called Coastal Elites, which was going to shoot a series of remote sets with actors in their homes. They were looking for a solution which would allow them to stream secure high-quality video from location to the director and other stakeholders in real time. Josh knew we had been developing a remote camera software (which would allow remote control over certain camera functionality in addition to the standard video feed) and wanted to know if it could be modied to work for this use case. Video Supervisor Dave Henri, Director Steven Soderbergh, and Zoë Kravitz on set of New Line Cinema and HBO Max's thriller Kimi. Photo by Claudette Barius