WHY THE PRODUCTION STUDIO IS SO IMPORTANT

Hello, this is Les Goldberg, and welcome to The Road Ahead. The Road Ahead podcast is dedicated to the future of the live events business, bringing together industry experts. Hello, production world, this is Les Goldberg and The Road Ahead. Today I have three amazing guests. And our first guest is Matt Bishop, who's the senior technical director for InVNT. Our next guest is Matt Hayes, who's the director of product development for the Brainhub at ETP company. And I also have Joe Finlayson, who is with Ross, and he is the product specialist. And guys, welcome to the show. Thanks for having us. Thanks, guys. Today we're going to talk about studios. We're going to be talking about the whole idea of why studios have become so important, and whether that's a studio that's in a permanent location or a studio that we have to, you know, build on site. And so I'm going to throw the first question to Matt Hayes. And Matt, I want you to answer this question and explain why have studios become so popular in this COVID world we're living in? I think at the end of the day, it really comes about distance and being able to produce something fully. So being able to get scenery put together, be able to have an environment, be able to bring, you know, guests into the space, both either virtually or in person. But being able to have more of that collaborative feel in this COVID time, that's really what it comes down to do. You know, from a manufacturers perspective, Joe, have you seen an uptick in the need to build studios or activity in studios? Yeah, I think so. Definitely with setting up augmented reality has been something that has been an uptick with in the, I guess, what would be an economic downturn. There's been less audiences. There's been more of a focus on bringing the virtual world to add more things to, more engagement, to what would be the normal output. So. So I'll throw this to Matt Bishop. Matt, I have seen you actually at our studios, and I think you're actually the show setting up another studio today, virtually on site. That's correct. What is your experience when it comes to why studios have become so popular? Do you think it has something to do with whether clients are comfortable in their own environments, and we're having to go to their environments? What are your thoughts? Well, in the current environment, people are they definitely seem to be more comfortable in their spaces than going to other people's spaces. They feel like they have a level of control over it from an environmental standpoint. And so the the level of expectation they can have on the safety of their, their employees or guests that they have participating in the in the event is something that they feel like they have a better, better hand on when they're in their, in their space. So, so people are comfortable and they feel safer in their world and their their space. Correct. So they're not traveling. So, you know, whether they go to the studio or we bring the studio to them, ultimately, it's all about how people feel of, you know, they have to feel safe and they can probably add the some type of protocols. So back to you. Matt Bishop and I'm going to ask you first, what are the key elements of of a functional studio in your opinion? Well, in I don't know that there is a. There's certainly isn't a carbon copy of what each of them will look like because every environment and every requirement is different. But I think the, the, the essence of what makes it good is a is a functional and efficient workflow where the where the crew and the gear can all work seamlessly together, where you don't have logjams, whether it's in technology or in how people can receive, disseminate or transfer information or content. So having, you know, having a seamless, smooth and efficient workflow inside the space for both the gear and the people I think are the is the foundation to of what you would go for on any environment that you're trying to put together. I will throw this the same question to Joe, and Joe, from a manufacturers perspective, what do you see the important elements of putting together a functional studio? And from our perspective, the important elements of putting it together has been, yeah, the ability to do things remotely has definitely been a big thing in this climate. So if I just take this to, I guess Sunday Night Football is something that we've been working with NBC on and our clever guys at rocket surgery, they've put in a system in place that they could actually operate this show from home. So they have systems in place where they could be in their own home, checking on all the feeds and using the system, even with the talkback unit as well. So from the functionality point of view, it's changed to having the ability to work remotely with all of these systems has been kind of a really key focus for us recently. So so you have a studio environment where some of the technicians can log in and operate some of the devices without actually have to be physically there. Yeah, correct. That's exactly how it's been running. You know, a lot of the virtual world we've been living in, a lot of the technicians have been logging in, but they're so dependent upon the internet for success. So, Matt. Hey, is the same question. We're building a studio. What are the important pieces that have to exist for the studio to be successful? I definitely agree with Matthew when it comes down to workflow, but really what it comes down to is what is the client trying to achieve? So it's figuring out what the input is going to be. You know what, we're installing the space. Sometimes it's a pre-record space. So it's not needed to be as expansive as a full broadcast or some projects that we're doing. It's multiple channels, it's multiple transcripts, captioning. So from and so on. So the first question at the end of the day is what are we trying to achieve so that we can put together the right workflow and the right tools. Got it. You know, whenever I've seen any of these virtual events or studios, I see this massive amount of computers that is just almost a requirement. There's laptops everywhere and and there's a lot of connectivity, and everyone seems to have their part in that whole element. So I'm going to switch this and I'm going to throw this back to Matt Bishop. And this question is how are studios being used? Are are we are we using them in the. When people think about studios, they're talking about a traditional we went to a TV station or a production studio and they're producing a video of some sort. But how are we using these studios in a virtual world? Is there anything different about it? Yeah, there's there's certainly different things about it. In the up until this point, we're starting to see more hybrid events now where people are participating live with, with the audience being remote. But for the most part of this last year, most of the most of the people that were participating were remote. And so the studios were more of a control space in a control room than they were a typical functional studio where you have cameras pointed at a at a set and the people are working on their, the, the people were in their homes and, and then making those connections to us. And what I, what I found is we've done we've done it both ways where the entire crew was remote and then we've done it at your space in other spaces where the crew is present and working together, which I have found to be a very important element to the whole thing. The you can't replace the ability to look at the person you know who, even if they're six feet away from you, there's still next to you being able to look to it and see, you know, something's not working right, but you can look across the room and you can see who's working on it, what they're doing. You can have direct communication without without employing technology to be able to say, hey, what's going on over there? Do you need any help? Can we get you anything? It's it creates a an entirely different environment than when everyone is completely remote. So the the control room element has been the thing that the studios have predominantly been for us up until this point. But like I said, we're just now getting to the place where people are willing to venture out a bit more and participate, and you're seeing it on TV as well. You know, it started out that all the newscasts were, you know, people from home calling in or, you know, in television shows all calling in, and now you're seeing that they're going back to their sets, they're not having a live studio audience and so forth. But you're starting to see things looking more like TV, and you're starting to see shows look more like the shows that we've typically done, just sans the thousands of people that we are accustomed to having involved in in our live events. So. So, Matt Hayes, I'm going to jump on what Matt Bishop said. And are you seeing in our we have a number of studios. Are you seeing more people actually build physical sets in our studios or, or use them in the control room environment? Like like my bishop said, what are your thoughts? I really have seen a mix of the two. So we've been actually been calling the the remote control room a production hub. Just so that doesn't get confused between a real studio environment with a master control room and that remote capability. What we're seeing a lot of that remote capability is not just a controlling a studio remotely, but sometimes it is controlling multiple studios. So to the degree where we're talking about right now, where it's, you know, people are interested in, okay, coming into a space, sometimes they're not willing to travel to a space, but you might be able to have 5 or 6 studio spaces with cameras set up across the United States or internationally, and you bring those into a central production hub or control space. So that way the team can work together. So we're seeing those. We're seeing definitely more virtual people are calling in from home. But still the team can work together in an environment. And then we're jumping over and we're seeing, you know like Gambit, really, when it comes down to we're seeing small setups for like, you know, a more regional kind of, you know, quarterly meetings and stuff like that with just hard, scenic or simple LED walls all the way up to big, complex things that we're used to seeing at live events of giant LED walls or bringing in mixed reality, extended reality, augmented reality, doing all kinds of crazy things that we wouldn't have even been able to do at a live show now. So, Matt, I want to ask this question to you back as a follow up. Matt Hayes, do you think we're experiencing more people that are coming in to the live studio versus everyone at home? Has that transition begun? Kind of, as Matt Bishop suggested? I think it's it's a pretty even split, right. The second we are seeing more requests and pickups for live studio work, but also we're seeing clients kind of adjust what their their expectations and needs are in these times. So they're realizing there are some things that don't need that full studio, and they're using that budget towards other projects, and they're really expanding out on those bigger projects to be able to do some really interesting things. I'm going to throw this question to Joe, and Joe, have you guys seen the more activity of of people coming to studios and, you know, the in person talent and that that happening more now in the transition now we're going through. Yeah definitely. It's since since March to kind of April May time it was definitely nothing is going to happen then. But beyond that moving into the end of June and July, I've even worked on a couple of live events myself in, in Montreal at an award show on Canada Day, and that was a it was like full, full crew. Everyone had their masks on, and everyone had their kind of spaces and their desks and socially distanced. I think right now everyone's kind of way a lot more aware of what needs to be done to kind of to get the disease under control. So kind of just having that socially distancing in place has been, I think, comfortable for people to come back in. They understand that, that everyone needs to sanitize and keep everything under control, and everyone's been really respectful of that, which has been been really good and obviously based in Canada. So it's maybe slightly different to some of you guys in the States right now. But I think, again, we're probably going to move into something where we have less people as we hit into winter. So we will probably see more webcams on TV again and lose a bit of quality. Definitely, because it's going to pick up again. We all see the evidence of what's happening, and so I think we had a nice summer, got us back into the studio and everyone had fun, but I think it's probably going to revert back a little bit into what we were seeing earlier in the year. Well, Joe, I hope that isn't the case. But you know, everyone here has a, you know, the future. We're opining. I'm going to throw this to Matt Bishop, who's actually on site right now. And we caught him just in a snippet of time here. Now, how important is the safety protocols for your crew on site? And, you know, for the clients and for the whole production process? Well, for me, it's essential. I take the responsibility of asking people to come out and and work with me on a show very seriously. You know, these people are colleagues. A lot of them are friends, people that I've known for a long time, people that I haven't known for a long time. But all of those people have families and people that count on them and depend on them back at home. And so it's it's a it's a sobering responsibility to ask people to, to go into a situation that currently, currently is a is a bit frightening and that no one has all the answers for. So doing the things that we can do, the things that we know we can do, that will increase the chances of them being able to successfully perform their jobs and have that, and have that be done safely or, or paramount in a, in a fundamental part, in probably the most important part of my job right now, if we can't do it safely, then we can't do it. You know what? I like that that's like a tweet. We can't do it safely. We can't do it. So there's there's no compromising on safety. Hey, Matt Hayes, could you give us maybe an example of two of something that we've implemented in the studio environment? That was a safety protocol. I mean, definitely we're setting up, you know, thermal scanner spaces. Everybody's getting wristbands or lanyards based off of if they've been through that process. We are doing checklists within the spaces, some of the custom built outs. We've been building everything out in zones. So we've had separate crews that have built specific areas. So therefore there's no cross-contamination in that situation. We've also created separate entrances for talent versus crew so that we're keeping that separated, as well as eating spaces, you know, restroom facilities, everything along those lines. So depending on the the, you know, the size of the crew, how long there's going to be of a shoot. We've put different implementations in place, but we've even got certifications from some of our staff so that they are coordinators of the space and they are certified in COVID response. So a lot of cool things. So I'm going to throw this question to Matt Bishop and Matt. The question is our clients more interested in having you build a studio in their environment, or are they more interested in going to the studio? What do you finding as the trend? It's a mix and a lot of it is based on regional influences. You know, in in certain areas of the country getting access even to their own spaces. To be able to do a project like that is not feasible. So that's the first input. The first influencer is what's possible, like where you could do that if you wanted to. And then the second one is, you know, what are they. What are they. What's the preference of the individual companies. And it's been a real mix. Some of them would much rather come into into somebody else's space and not have the the impact of having crews and the responsibility of having individuals coming in and out of their space, you know, and it's it it previously has been more people didn't want us to do things in their facilities because of the name convenience. And now it's not just an inconvenience to have outside crews working in your space. It's also that they're taking a certain degree of responsibility for those individuals coming into their into their space, both for them and then the footprint of of influence that they, that they bring with them when they come into their space. So it's been so it's it's very dependent on the individual companies or, or organizations and what spaces they have. That's like the the show that we're at currently. The building has a theater built into the space. So it was a perfect scenario to be able to build out the studio in their location. Some people or some locations don't have, you know, three phase power and a space that is conducive to to the kind of things that we're doing or wanting to do. So there's there's a wide array of influences on what people would choose to try to do. So this next question is to Jo. Jo, is it difficult for presenters to get comfortable in a studio? And I'll say this, a studio that doesn't have an audience. Okay. And what have you found in that? In building studios and working with, you know, talent, on air talent especially, I would say nonprofessional talent, because we think about studios where sportscasters and newscasters work in there. But a lot of these studio environments we're talking about are where corporate executives have to show up. And do you have any experience about, you know, the ramp up for someone to get comfortable in that space? And, yeah, I guess there's a few kind of different levels to this question. And professional talent is professional talent. They've they're great with, with or without an audience. They normally used to working in that manner. And if we're on site then they do have a crew which can act as an audience as well to some degree. So with the professional side, they've been, they've been as they were and with the nonprofessional side. So when you're talking about the yeah, the, the executives of companies, I think not having an audience is sometimes more comfortable for them as well. So in some regards it's easier. There's less pressure on them. You're able to if you're not doing it live, you can do a couple of takes. So I do think it's taking some pressure off the the non kind of non-normal talent. People who are jumping into a situation to present something. So yeah we found like a mix of that. But it just depends on the person. Some people are more comfortable in different situations. Got it. So this question is to Matt Hayes, Matt, I know we've been doing a lot of projects where maybe the talent is looking at a, you know, a screen that has a lot of windows of people. It might be people participating or people that are watching or listening or or part of the they get a virtual audience. These presenters, have you found that to be a good experience for a talent or a bad experience? You know, jumping off what Joe said, I think it's the same situation where some people are good with it, some people are bad with it. We always go back to the client and say, you know this person, what are they expecting? And sometimes in some situations we've sent them back an image so that they're not seeing anybody else. They're they're just hearing them. It helps them feel more comfortable. And we've also sometimes set up so that they are getting a completely different view from everybody else. So there are pros and cons to being in this world where we see a whole window of little tiny people everywhere, a window of little tiny people everywhere. That sounds like another tweet. Okay, this is my last question. I'm going to throw it around and I'm going to start with Matt Bishop. Matt, will studios be popular in the future long after the COVID issue is resolved? Do you feel like we'll still have this genesis for you doing this on site or people going, or is this a temporary phenomenon? I would think we're into a into an environment that'll be fairly similar to this with, with expansion and contraction, how audiences participate over the next year or so anyway. And then in the, in the, in the time after that, I think we're probably going to still see a great deal more virtual than we have before, just because it was it was something that people knew was there but hadn't really they hadn't transitioned to it as much because they didn't have the opportunity to to learn how to do it and to flesh out how to effectively do it and, and create their or communicate their messages throughout. You know, we the agency that I work for is a brand storytelling agency. And when we when this started, our mission didn't change. The platform changed. There's we did live events predominantly before as a live brand storytelling agency. But the the the company still needed to tell their stories. They still wanted to communicate to customers, to employees, to investors what they had going and what their plans were. And so we just had to pivot and find a new way with the with the technology and the and the capabilities that that were available to get that done. Well, now it's been done. And there there's been interesting results in that some they found greater effectiveness in some ways in communicating than they were in elements of being able to do it live. Not that it's an overall a more effective platform, but there are elements that they've been able to find success in, in doing that. And those are the things that are going to transition back and still be a part of the events. When they when they go back, they'll take the learnings of how they were able to expand their audience and how they were able to communicate more specific information in ways that they couldn't when they were in live scenarios, and fold that into the live experience moving forward. So I don't think that the that the concept of having streaming and virtual audiences or virtual contributions to, to live shows are going to be anything that are going to go away anytime soon. Got it. Well, yeah. I'm interesting. Joe, would you opine, do you think the studio activity and the experience kind of like what Matt said will will continue or will it change? Will we go back to traditional live stuff the way we used to do it? What are your thoughts? I think some will go back to traditional and the way that we know it, but I think mostly this has been a great opportunity for people to test out something they wanted to do for a long time. So yeah, I agree with with Matt on those things you said just then it's it's pretty much the the platform has changed in terms of once you've bought this technology or you've rented it a couple of times or something and you're then tied to it, because the flexibility and the enhancement you get from adding virtual reality or augmented reality to your to your show gives you revenue opportunities. It gives you a way to generate advertising money. It gives you so much more you can add to your show. So it's an enhancement. It's not something that's going to disappear once you've added it to your show. It's going to be very difficult to take it away. And because it's great to work with and if you've learned it, then you're going to keep using it. It's something that's it's great for people that work in TV. It's a new, exciting thing that, well, it's not that new or but it's still very exciting. It's it's just that, yeah, the, the higher adoption has been fantastic to see, especially from our side. Everything's great to watch at the moment. Well, Matt Hayes, bring us home. What are your thoughts? Will we still be doing it this way? We'll be doing hybrids. Will there still be this demand for the need for studios? I think really at the end of the day, this is open up a toolbox for, you know, every possible client out there where before, you know, if you said let's go virtual with this, a lot of them thought, okay, we're we already have two cameras or three cameras and the, the room that we're doing a live event or they were already going to a studio, we're just going to broadcast that out. But, you know, if we think about what that actually is, you know, you're in a room, you see a camera go to screen just for a second. But most of the time it's content. You're at home and you want to see that message. You want to see camera shots, you want to see the action and then it go to content. So I think from, you know, live events, I think it's now people looking at that message to Matt was saying earlier of telling that story in a unique way for the remote audience, as well as telling it in a different, unique way for the people that are in person. I think it's going to be, you know, the investment in the technology, just like Joe's talking about, hey, here's the new tool we've now discovered, and now we can utilize this in our, you know, all of our different programs and events. And I think that also, at the same time, clients are going to realize there were some events that are actually better, more on a virtual platform, and they're going to possibly take some things and go that route with it. And then there's some clients we all know at the end of the day are just going to want to do it the way they've always done it. And as soon as they can do it, they're going to jump over to that side and go back to live. So I'm going to do it the way I always have done it. That's your tweet now at least those are the clients. You know, guys today we talked about this world. We're in this virtual world and the studios and the tools that we're living in, and it's super interesting to see where we are today. If you would have told me six months ago that would have been the case, I would have went, I would have given you a I'm not really sure that's going to happen and who knows what's going to happen. But I will know this much that people have learned that these virtual tools and everything from augmented reality to share to, you know, all the virtual presenters and stuff, all of these tools are now in our toolbox and we can't unlearn them. So they become part of how we do what we do. And it's really like what Matt Bishop said. It's all about storytelling and people have to tell their stories, and we are part of the teams that help deliver that process. And so I appreciate all three of you joining us today, Matt and Matt and Joe, you guys are awesome. I look forward to seeing you in a ballroom, in a convention center, in a studio, or on a remote cam. Somehow, someway. And thanks again everyone. This is less Goldberg on The Road Ahead. Everybody great job. Thank you very much. Thanks, Les.