detail, a vision of what the studios should aim for with technology roadmaps. The proposal was designed around ten fundamental principles, with cloud a key component in almost all of them. Indeed, the very first principle is: “All assets are created or ingested straight into the cloud and do not need to be moved.” MANAGING TECH & CHANGE The year 2030 was picked not as a fixed goalpost, but to set a target that would permit some imagination and experimental thinking to come into play. “When people talk about the future in terms of a couple of years ahead, there’s a worry about whether they’ll be ready, whether the technology will be available,” says Turner. “But if you blow it out ten years, you get past people worrying about how they’re going to make the change, to thinking about what’s possible.” Switching to new modes of doing things, no matter what benefits they may promise, can be a challenge for the risk-phobic film business. Turner sees the transition to the fully cloud-enabled movie studio happening in two stages. “A lot of the work in the front half is going to be about technology. While the back half is more related to change management and altering the way people do things. We have to incrementally introduce the
MAYBE WE COULD FIND NEW WAYS OF DOING THINGS
technology, so people know that they can trust it – and be willing to risk a huge budget on something new.” Turner points to the pandemic catalysing the wide acceptance of off-premises working – a necessary, but not sufficient condition for embracing cloud. “People used to say, ‘I have to go to an office, I can’t work from anywhere but my desk, I need to have all meetings in one place.’ Suddenly, people were working from home or their garage, realising that you actually can run a production workflow from around the world.” This new respect for remote working was still far from the 2030 Vision of a studio in the cloud. In fact, a lot of the transitions were based merely on remote accessing on- premises machines, and not actually working in the cloud at all. “But, from a change management point of view, it got people thinking about how technology could enable us to keep working. Maybe we could find new ways of doing things, and not be as stuck in our methods as we always have been.” STUDIO COLLABORATION Until recently, each studio has had its own – somewhat siloed – approach to cloud. Sony’s Ci cloud platform
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