CDSA

At the May 19 Hollywood Innovation and Transformation Summit (HITS), held at the Universal Hilton in Los Angeles, and online via MESA’s virtual platform, the MESAverse, attendees will be presented with the largest agenda in the history of the event.

The theme of the event covers the widest selection of topics around the innovations and transformations that have occurred across all of content creation and distribution, their advanced workflows and technology requirements, and the data implications across the complex networks of platforms required to drive virtual production and metaverse experiences.

Here’s what attendees can expect:

• Following welcome remarks by Sinan AlRubaye, chief experience officer, and Ihar Heneralau, co-founder and CEO, with ICVR, the opening keynote will be Jeff Julian, creative-futurist, designer, and founder of boutique consultancy Lab5 Systems, with the topic “Design at the Speed of Innovation,” a discussion around future design thinking and an update on the exponential acceleration of a “t-shaped world” in a future dominated by artificial intelligence.

Julian is at the forefront of the next generation of design thinking and is no stranger to the HITS community, having worked with many of Hollywood’s ‘A-list’ directors, including Steven Spielberg, Ridley Scott, David Fincher, and more, along with top brands ranging from Apple to RED Digital Cinema, Samsung to BMW.

• “The Impact of IT Across the Studio Org” will feature Christina Aguilera, head of technology workflow and strategy for Amazon Studios, and Theresa Miller, CIO with Lionsgate. This session sets up the day’s proceedings with a CIO-level strategy discussion that addresses the challenges our industry faces at the dawn of post-COVID content production and distribution.

• Jonathon Lee, head of media engineering and innovation for Amazon Studios, presents the innovation keynote of the day, “Building the Future in an Innovation Lab.” This presentation takes us inside the Innovation Lab at Amazon Studios to look at the methodologies and focus for spearheading new development on both the production and distribution sides of their business. What makes a Lab one of the critical elements in a studio’s strategy for driving experience with creatives, throughout the enterprise or with the end consumer.

• Attendees will then be able to choose from six different tracks of breakout sessions, where industry experts share innovative ideas, processes, or perspectives in an interactive and intimate way with the audience who are free to choose which topic/area they find most interesting.

Covering nearly 20 sessions, the breakout tracks include:

Track 1: Metaverse
Track 2: Cloud + Architecture
Track 3: Production + Workflow
Track 4: Data + Analytics
Track 5: Audience + Insights
Track 6: Standards + Automation

To see the session descriptions for the breakout tracks, click here.

• Following lunch, the HITS Spring programme moves to three concurrent sessions in the afternoon addressing Metaverse, IT, and Virtual Production.

• Kicking off the Metaverse track will be “What the Metaverse Means for Hollywood” with ICVR’s Sinan AlRubaye, and Guy Finley, president and CEO of MESA. This session cuts through the clutter and defines the metaverse in terms and case studies that our industry can easily understand. Learn the background and what today’s market means moving forward as well as the design experience and where the future is heading as studios embrace the concept and integrate it into their (multiple) product offerings.

• “Moving from Reality to the Metaverse (and VP!)” will be with Jiggs Love, CEO of The Scan Truck. The Scan Truck is a mobile photogrammetry studio that offers the most cutting-edge technologies to deliver you the highest quality 3D assets for your Feature Films, VR Productions, Video Games, TV, Commercials and more. Their state-of-the-art system features over 200 DSLR cameras to capture the uppermost, photorealistic models and this session gives you a deep dive into how creatives are leveraging the technology and will discuss the portability of these hyper-real assets as they move through various production chains.

• The panel “Particle Ink Metaverse: A New Era at TED Conference 2022” will feature ICVR’s Ihar Heneralau, and Cassandra Rosenthal, founder and co-CEO of Kaleidoco. This session digs deep into the first-ever, location-based mixed reality experience to synchronise thousands of devices for a LIVE experience. Particle Ink has created a mixed reality universe bringing to life interactive adventures in both virtual and physical venues. This pioneering broadcast utilised Unity’s emerging technology to add an augmented reality layer for TV viewers. Learn how creatives are pushing the envelope around experience in this engaging panel discussion.

• The keynote “What the Metaverse Means IRL” with ICVR’s Sinan AlRubaye, and Elliot Ordower, co-CEO and founder of Well Played Studios, takes us to the front lines of development and experience for the metaverse. How big is the market and how quickly will we get there? What strategies are companies adopting across the various engagement models for metaverse, AR or VR projects and how quickly should we be looking to see success? And what does that success really mean when our economy is driven by scale and engagement?

• “How the Metaverse will Transform your Meetings” will feature ICVR’s Sinan AlRubaye, and MESA’s Finley. Our business interactions during the pandemic became increasingly “local” while expanding globally thanks to the new collaboration tools (known as UCaaS) but what is the next step in creating truly compelling, immersive experiences at work. Levering gaming tools and Hollywood sensibility, this session offers a “Show & Tell” of this innovative new platform!

• “The Future of Storytelling” will feature Lori H. Schwartz, CEO and founder of StoryTech, Eric Shamlin, EVP and global head of entertainment for Media.Monks, and Seth Shapiro, chairman of the NAB Web 3 Advisory Council. Media.Monks is a digital-first marketing and advertising services company connecting the dots across content, data and digital media and technology services. Working in partnership with innovators across multiple metaverse platforms, and with leading influencers and celebrities, they create the most cutting-edge experiences in AR, VR and Metaverse. This panel discussion features the leader in building these experiences in conversation with the chairs of NAB’s National Advisory Council for Web3 who are providing guidance and expertise in developing educational content about new technologies, content models and consumer behaviours driven by the next generation of the internet.

• The IT track of sessions kicks off with the keynote “NFTs 101: Who, What and Why Should I Care?” What are NFTs, how do they work and why should I care? Join us as we demystify the metaverse by providing the basics on NFTs and the blockchain and fill you in on the opportunities, challenges and concerns in this space. We will give real world examples of how this emerging market has exploded over the last year and why NFTs are here to stay in Hollywood and beyond. Jenefer Brown, EVP and head of global live interactive and location-based entertainment for Lionsgate, and Eva Feder, SVP of business and legal affairs for Lionsgate, will discuss.

• The panel “Innovation Through Community Collaboration and POCs” will feature Kari Grubin, project director for SMPTE’s Rapid Industry Solutions On-Set Virtual Production Initiative, Seth Hallen, managing director of LightIron, Chuck Parker, CEO of Sohonet, and Erik Weaver, head of virtual and adaptive production for the Entertainment Technology Center at The University of Southern California (ETC@USC).The Hollywood Professional Association is the premier community for production and post-production individuals, businesses and technologies. Anchored each year in their legendary “week in the desert” at the HPA Tech Retreat, this community provides fertile ground for cutting-edge collaboration as they regularly host Proof-of-Concepts that engage dozens of member companies and hundreds of participants. This session gathers the leaders of HPA with the champion of their latest POC to discuss the impact that these revolutionary “projects” have made to our industry.

• “A Whole New World: How Disney is Meeting Today’s Challenges and Solving for Future Obstacles” will feature Mike Czabala, director of accounting for Disney-ABC International Television and Liz Schwan, VP of global enterprise account management for Whip Media. Disney is leveraging new ways to streamline procedures and eliminate manual processes to optimise revenues and improve financial operations to meet today’s high-volume, high-velocity content world. This session will discuss the companies’ partnership and evolution which has spanned over a decade; from manually managing financial operations for transactional home entertainment in 2011 to managing all the complexity of linear, transactional and streaming revenue and content cost management across Disney owned platforms.

• Jessica Graves, founder of Sefleuria, will present “Building a Framework for Ethical AI.” Artificial Intelligence has come a long way since its early introduction into mainstream IT. This presentation looks at the frameworks driving AI and how they integrate with the algorithms driving increased usage. With increased usage and use cases, it is critical to infuse ethics into the decision-making being performed across any AI integration.

• The closing keynote of the HITS IT stage will be “Make Space to Lead” with Tutti Taygerly, leadership coach and author with Taygerly Labs. Do you find yourself in firefighter mode, rapidly moving from flare-up to flare-up? Are you continually context-switching between each urgent and evolving priority? Does it feel like you’re drowning in the quicksand of changing customer or leadership needs amidst this global context of uncertainty? From her personal experience as a design leader and her work as a coach to leaders in tech, our keynote speaker shares a leadership model that takes a systemic approach to leading those changes limiting patterns and focuses on flow states. Make space to lead across these four different facets of your leadership: Personal, Projects & Processes, People, and the Organisation as a whole. You’ll leave with tools & inspiration to try to shift your mindset towards spaciousness and build in permission to slow down to speed up. You’ll learn how to track your energy and time against impact as well as allow focus on both relationships and releases.

• The Virtual Production stage kicks off with the keynote “Introduction to Unreal Engine 5” featuring John Canning, director of developer relations, creators for AMD. Epic is incorporating Unreal Engine more directly into not just post-production for visual effects, but also the active filmmaking process, live broadcast and animation as the company remains at the forefront of virtual production. Unreal 5 is a fully production-ready tool has the best in-volume lighting engine to render in real-time the billions of polygons needed for photo-realistic imaging.

• “Animation Innovation: Behind the Scenes” will feature Canning, Michael Neely, technical account manager of M&E for Epic Games, and Enrico Targetti, virtual cinematographer of Reel FX. Prior to this project, the idea of rendering “inside-the-box” was thought to be impossible. Traditional rendering called for 40-60 hours per episode but shifting to this revolutionary technology improvement, the render time was decreased considerably across the episode. Additionally, using the engine took the creatives away from their frame-by-frame approach to visualise “on-set” like they would in a live-action feature. This panel discussion looks at the power of Unreal Engine in relation to an A-list title for animation.

• Canning, Henrique Kobylko, virtual production supervisor of Fuse Technical Group, and Cassidy Pearsall, applications engineer of ARRI Inc, take part in “Orchestrating Innovation on Smart Stages.” Production technology over the last three years has fundamentally changed the way we work and collaborate with each other. Cameras talking to lights rendering to the cloud through a complex network of platforms and workflows … Smart stages are now a reality as the IoT finally has entered the production process. Join this session to learn about these critical offerings and how they impact our long-term evolution of growth.

• “Evolving Entertainment Workflows to Mirror Game Development” will feature ICVR’s Heneralau and Amazon Studios’ Iverson. After making news during the pandemic with revolutionary production techniques utilising game engine backbone, virtual production is being hailed as the next “big thing” that will impact our entire, global industry. But before your company can make investments in hardware, software and talent, everyone needs to understand the big “why” and why it matters so you. This session showcases an Unreal Engine pixel streaming tool for managing 3D assets and environments from pre-production and throughout post-production allowing non-technical talent to share, review, and iterate on assets in an interactive cloud-based experience in real-time. This technology will become available and impact every category of content creation. It is not a matter of “if” rather “when” so start your journey by joining this truly innovative session.

• Heneralau will present “Managing Production Assets Across Global Software Teams.” This session looks at multiple pipelines using multiple platforms across collaborative workflows in production. Learn the latest innovations in data management from two perspectives: SMB vendors as they interact with large studio operations. How do we find a middle-ground and create best practices to evolve this fast-moving and complicated process? Join this session (and the one before!) to learn more.

• “Unity’s Approach to Virtual Production” will look at Unity’s moves in the M+E space that highlights investments and acquisitions to increased R&D across the entire company. From Unity Artistry tools including ArtEngine, SpeedTree, Ziva Dynamics to their Weta pipelines in support of Virtual Production, Unity is making bold moves in Hollywood. Attend this session to learn more about our industry’s future! Brian Gaffney, business development manager with Unity Technologies, will present.

The Hollywood Innovation and Transformation Summit event is produced by MESA in association with the Hollywood IT Society (HITS), Media & Entertainment Data Center Alliance (MEDCA), presented by ICVR and sponsored by Genpact, MicroStrategy, Whip Media, Convergent Risks, Perforce, Richey May Technology Solutions, Signiant, Softtek, Bluescape, Databricks, KeyCode Media, Metal Toad, Shift, Zendesk, EIDR, Fortinet, Arch Platform Technologies and Amazon Studios.

To register for the event, click here.

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