Preface

In February of 2011, I found myself in London’s Waterloo station, surrounded on all sides by a Microsoft marketing campaign. “The Cloud Is Coming” (or words to that effect) it proclaimed, “Are You Ready?”

I was struck by this for two reasons. Even in 2011, the Cloud had been around for several years in one form or another, although perhaps few people not connected to the computer industry in some way would be aware of this. But more importantly, I wondered why anyone would care. Microsoft didn’t seem to be trying to sell a product, just a nebulous concept that didn’t really belong to anyone in the first place.

Four years later and the “Cloud” has started to mean something to a much wider audience. For many it signals greater convenience, and for still others it’s an extension of freedom to work in different conditions and locations. In some respects, the Cloud is as synonymous with mobile computing as it is the Internet, and as such represents the ability to be connected to everything and everyone at all times (the flip side of this being that it can become ever more difficult to get away from those same things when it’s time to take a break).

The entertainment industry can represent one of the best testing grounds for new technologies and methodologies, even as the industry itself is extremely resistant to change. Tight deadlines and large budgets mean that at any particular moment, predicting the exact result of doing something, coupled with the ability to do it quickly, is paramount. This means that any improvements to either are both needed and welcomed, but it also means no-one wants to try anything that is too different from how they’re accustomed to doing things, and few people are willing to try anything that has even a slight chance of failure. New ways of doing things have to be battle-hardened and simple to grasp.

It’s for that reason that the Cloud, as was the case with digital photography, has taken such a long time to work its way into modern filmmaking processes. In 2014, I found myself in the very fortunate position where this was starting to change: working with the members of the Warner Bros. studio who were insightful enough to see the benefits that modern technology could bring and bold enough to try and make it succeed despite the teething problems and almost overwhelming opposition to the changes it required.

And succeed it did. I’ve personally experienced the change of attitude amongst the people working round the clock to get a production finished on time, from being rightly skeptical and weary of technology and workflows that will supposedly make their jobs easier, right through to the realisation of what can indeed be accomplished, and how things they just considered to be aspects of their day-to-day jobs could be streamlined or even fully automated—not to make them redundant, but to free them to be able to make all the decisions that machines can’t; in short, to allow them to do the parts of their jobs that they enjoy the most.

As I was writing and researching the material for this book, I was delighted to discover that there’s a much greater breadth of services available than I’d assumed to tackle the various challenges faced by many productions. It’s easy to imagine Google Docs and Spreadsheets being used across productions, but things like collaborative video editing (powered by the Cloud), things I’d assumed to be in the distant future, were in fact already making inroads in more agile broadcast environments.

Change can be difficult, and certainly it’s hard to switch to the Cloud when it means giving up on tried-and-true approaches, but as challenging as it can be, there are gains to be made, and these will only get better over time. The future is ahead of us; hopefully one that allows better communication, with less time doing busywork and more time spent on creativity.