Exclusives

If you want to make your film production life easier, you’re going to need the right tools. And the right partners.

That’s according to Lulu Zezza, physical production executive for New Regency, who shared how her production company has built up a hybrid, cloud-based motion picture workflow, lowering duplication of information and enabling simple policies, without hurting the creative process.

“Over the last six or seven years, the processes we’re using, within all our divisions, all our locations, all our film crews, have been problem-solving based on immediate [solutions], without looking at the big picture,” she said, speaking May 25 at the Hollywood IT Society’s (HITS) “Holly-wired: Where IT and Entertainment Meet” event in Los Angeles. “We’ve ended up with literally chaotic storage.”

The first obstacle that any film or TV production encounters is the fact that pieces of the content are either being produced or accessed all over the world, “and we’re working with new crews, new teams all the time,” Zezza said. And because the crew is short-term and new every time, they tend to bring their own systems to the table, and expected to be productive the moment they arrive, with no training on previous systems. And that means concise policies need to be in place.

“When you try to enforce a policy or make your company compliant with regulations, and you’re suddenly facing the legal department, the finance department, the production department, the creative department, all working on different platforms, different policies, different rules, it becomes difficult to protect your content,” Zezza said. “We decided at Regency to bring order to that, and [adopt] a single system based on policy and methodology that should apply across our entire business process, whether it’s our internal finance department or our production crew, and to bring all the information into a single managed and protected environment.”

And that motion picture workflow has a ton of pieces. There’s 5th Kind to help with digital dailies, SyncOnSet for asset management, Microsoft’s SQL Server for data warehousing and Office 365 for email and office docs. Media editing? New Regency looks to Avid. File sharing? Egnyte. And the off-site workflow goes through Microsoft Azure’s cloud platform.

Zezza called the collaborating companies an “amazing pool of intelligence” and specifically praised Microsoft and its contributions. “Microsoft … offers systems that are familiar, that users are accustomed with. We’ve all used Word and Excel … doesn’t matter if it’s Mac or PC. The second attraction was Azure and the data centers around the world, being able to geographically locate everything,” she said. “It’s a good, home base to start from.”