by James Mathers
Cinematographer and Founder of the Digital Cinema Society
(Excerpted from the February/March 2025 Digital Cinema Society eNewsletter)

Tales From the 2025 HPA Tech Retreat Told at a Difficult Time in Hollywood…But Don’t Blame AI

The mood in the entertainment industry has been quite grim of late, especially in what we refer to as Hollywood.  So it seemed like a nice opportunity to get away to the desert a couple of hours outside of Hollywood to once again attend the annual HPA Tech Retreat.  It is a very high level gathering that brings together a core group of technology leaders to share with each other challenges, solutions, and innovations in motion picture production and post. Now celebrating its 30th year, and with the welcoming of a new HPA President, Kari Grubin, (the first woman, I might add,) this year’s Retreat seemed poised to be an uplifting break from the current malaise of the local industry.  

It was certainly nice to see Kari take the reigns and visit with old friends, but there really is no escaping the reality that the media and entertainment industry is going through a gut-wrenching metamorphosis which most of us are ill-prepared for.  In the words of Mark Chiolis, kicking off the TR-X: Affordable Production session, “I don’t know of any other generation in Hollywood that’s been confronted with such a tectonic industry shift in such a small period of time.”

Never one to sugar coat or quietly accept the status quo, Michael Cioni followed with an eye opening keynote that asks, “Is This The End of Hollywood?” The answer to his question is NO, but he made the point that the traditional media and entertainment industry needs to pay attention and quickly adapt as necessary. 

Cioni makes the case that Hollywood needs to leave the safe confines, or “moat,” as he refers to it, having created barriers to entry, and instead embrace the creator economy. He argues that the rise of platforms like YouTube and the proliferation of user-friendly, low-cost production tools have democratized content creation. This has led to a new media landscape where creators can produce and distribute content with minimal friction, unlike Hollywood’s outdated, complex, and expensive processes. He uses as an example, productions created with the iPhone, and even fairly seamlessly intercuts identical shots captured with an iPhone and two much higher end cameras. However, it is a lot more about access to distribution than access to acceptable acquisition tools.  (A YouTube link to Cioni’s entire 30 minute presentation follows this article and I recommend you find the time to view it.)

50% of YouTube is now consumed on a TV as opposed to a mobile device, and the barriers to entry have been broken down. Previously, trying to launch a TV series in the traditional manner would have meant approaching one of a handful of networks through a labyrinth of gate keepers.  Contrast this with Jimmy Donaldson, best known by his online alias “MrBeast,” who built up a huge YouTube following with more than 340 million subscribers. This got the attention of Amazon, who partnered to create one of its most successful series to date. “The Beast Games” scored a reported 50 million views in just the first 25 days on the Amazon platform.

Speaking of “The Beast Games,” in another great Tech Retreat presentation, attendees were treated to a behind-the-scenes look at the workflow for this extremely complex YouTube/Amazon Prime series.  In this session, Tony Arratia of Key Code Media, and Joshua Kulic, Head of Post Production of MrBeast did a deep dive into “Beast Games Episode Zero,” detailing how they managed a large-scale multi-cam reality TV contest series with over 1,000 mounted GoPros and dozens of handheld ARRI Alexa Mini LF cameras.  They managed ingest with fast turnaround for editorial on a show with 25 on-site editors, and a whopping 2.5 PB of solid-state shared storage.

Although greater access to affordable high quality tools and more paths to distribution are creating intense competition, AI seems to wrongly get the blame for our diminishing livelihoods.  That is a notion that was meant to be dispelled in an annual day long HPA Supersession entitled, “The Evolving Human Role in AI-Driven Film and TV Production and Post-Production Workflows.” Led by current HPA President Kari Grubin and Past President Seth Hallen, a variety of guests throughout the day delved into how AI can instead be harnessed to help overcome the current sad state of our industry. They emphasized that the real power of AI isn’t about replacing human creativity, it’s about amplifying it.

David Slade, an acclaimed director of feature films including Hard Candy, 30 Days of Night and The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, and television episodes including Breaking Bad and Black Mirror gave a traditional filmmaker’s perspective with a short film sample of his experimental use of AI.  He shared that, “It’s not the AI that makes the film. It’s the human with the idea and the structure.”  Walter Woodman of Shy Kids showed off the hilarious comedic short and behind the scenes of “air head” which made extensive use of AI storytelling.  He also shared some of the online backlash they received.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=G4wJ4WeJrz4

For a comedic look at some of the challenges and opportunities faced by the visual effects community, Chaos Innovation Labs presented “Ray Tracing FTW.” In a classic Western themed spoof, they integrated the latest visual production tools featuring well known VFX pros as on-camera talent with cinematography by our own Richard Crudo, ASC. 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vET6sHCq87o

There were a full four days of conference sessions going on in the main ballroom, and I can’t really do them all justice describing them in this brief article, but here’s a few that got my attention. With cinema production as slow as it has been lately, I’m paying more attention to live production, so I enjoyed Live Event Tech: Tours, Festivals & Residencies – IMAG to Streaming moderated by Mark Chiolis of Mobile TV Group. It featured Jim Toten and Jeff Carman sharing their experiences handling tech on recent huge concert events. There was also Mark Schubin’s famous Technology Year in Review with interesting short tidbits and statistics from the previous 12 months. Renard Jenkins of I2A2 Technologies, Studios & Labs presented on The Evolving Human Role in an AI World, and Erik Weaver of the Entertainment Technology Center at USC, complex workflow expert Dane Brehm of Cintegral, Martin Christien of iodyne, and independent film producer Sarah Ivy, presented on the workflow challenges of Leveraging iPhones in Professional Production.

An annual tradition at the Tech Retreat is what they call “Live Without a Net,” a group effort among volunteers to put some of the technologies being discussed to the test in a daylong practical demo.  This session was previously responsible for creating such epic projects as “Lost Lederhosen,” where they tested virtual production and cloud workflows. This year, it was all about AI tools for everything from script writing, to animation, video editing, and visual effects. The idea was to use AI driven tools to complete traditionally labor intensive projects within a single day that would otherwise have taken far longer. Results, as expected, were mixed, but the examination of the process was enlightening.

I always find lots of interesting technology to explore in the Innovation Zone. The Studio-B&H did what they do best; they brought together a variety of technologies to seamlessly provide practical solutions. They integrated technologies from Disguise, Cuebric, Rose Visuals, ZEISS Cincraft Scenario, Cooke lenses, and ARRI Lighting, among others in a demo showcasing AI in Virtual Production.

It was also nice to see the tremendous progress that has been made by Elliot Mack and his company Lightcraft Technologies.  I worked with one of his early virtual production systems some 13 years ago on a TV pilot.  At that time, a lot of compute power, high end cameras, and metadata enabled lenses were required, along with extensive prep including rigorous installation of tracking makers, and precise lighting of blue or greenscreen.  Now a mobile device such as an iPhone is all that’s required to automatically capture tracking data and provide realtime pre-vis. https://lightcraft.pro/

The Innovation Zone also afforded me the opportunity to sit down with Adobe’s Karl Soule, who walked me through the amazing AI abilities being worked into Adobe Creative Cloud. Premiere’s Generative Extend feature now allows editors to create footage with AI from preceding frames and extend a shot that may have been cut short for whatever reason.  The lip syncing abilities are also quite impressive, and together with dialogue transcription and translation, it is easy to see how future dubbing can become pretty seamless, even in foreign languages.

I met an interesting fellow named Marcus LeVere, a tech startup co-founder/VFX Supervisor on high profile productions such as the Halo and Home Before Dark TV series.  His latest venture is a mobile 3D face scanner with the mission to use advanced Machine Learning technology to create cinematic-quality digital replicas for such use as stunt double facial replacement, or for actors, athletes or other famous personalities to record and control their likeness to then be licensed for future use.  The company is known as Savepoint and they are part of the Trusted Partner Network which gives users assurances of data security to avoid unauthorized misuse.  Check it out at: https://www.mysavepoint.com/

This year, the Innovation Zone debuted a stage offering short tech presentations of innovative technologies curated by HPA Board Member James Blevins.  I got the chance to catch another presentation by Michael Cioni, this time covering his own technology. Strada is an AI-enabled cloud platform startup serving creative professionals that he founded with his bother Peter Cioni. Every time I get a chance to check in on the brothers, they are offering new features to save creatives the drudgery of non-creative time-sucks like transferring, transcribing, transcoding, and tagging footage. 

Annually attending the HPA Tech Retreat for DCS is one of the highlights of my year and I again left inspired, educated, and looking forward to innovations to come. One important lesson I learned is that AI should not be feared, but instead harnessed to expand our creative horizons. I’ll end with a quote that was posted between presentations at the Retreat that speaks to humans’ innate need to create, something lacking in AI. It is from a man I had the privilege to know personally, one of the fondest memories from my childhood acting career.

“We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we’re curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths.” — Walt Disney

Attending the HPA Tech Retreat each year helps me to discern the technology paths that lie ahead and wait to be explored.

View Michael Cioni’s Keynote Presentation:  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xJByD5mAQqA