An unexpected innovation that came out of MovieLabs’ conversations was a standardised visual language for describing workflows. “It started when we were talking about future production technology and infrastructure, and we were all drawing diagrams,” says Turner. “Every time we got a new diagram, it took us ten minutes to work out what the hell it was trying to tell us. They were all wildly inconsistent.” MovieLabs harmonised the symbology of workflow diagrams with a new, standardised set of diagrams and symbols, which was then published for the industry. Rather than a shape meaning anything the team wanted it to in the moment, circles would now refer to the context – a scene, location, character or prop. A hexagon referred to a A COMMON LANGUAGE FOR WORFKLOWS
ONTOLOGY FOR MEDIA CREATION v1.0
TASK
PARTICIPANT
ASSET
CONTEXT
RELATIONSHIP
Produced by asset to task Performed by task to participant Portrayed by character to participant
Write script Previsualize Create set Shoot Create editorial dailies Create VFX
WHAT THEY ARE Person Organisation Service WHAT THEY DO Director, actor Art department
WHAT THEY ARE Image, video, audio, data, physical thing WHAT THEY DO Concept art, storyboard, shot, VFX image sequence
NARRATIVE Scene, location, character, prop PRODUCTION Scene location, prop
Depiction Slate, shot
Depicted by prop to asset
CONSISTENT & RELIABLE COMMUNICATIONS, GROUNDED IN COMMON LANGUAGE HUMAN + VISUAL + MACHINE
workflow participant – a person or crew member, an organisation or service – and so on. MovieLabs updated its Visual Language for Media Creation (VLMC) and Ontology for Media Creation (OMC) at the beginning of this year, adding even better ways to describe workflows.
Standardising this not only makes for greater clarity, providing a ‘universal workflow language,’ but could eventually be used to literally build workflows in a digital space – with symbols not just describing a pipeline, but actually working as the commands that construct it.
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Learn more at: movielabs.com/production-technology/ontology-for-media-creation
from the very beginning of the content pipeline. MovieLabs’ job has been to help cross-pollinate these different forays into cloud, so each studio can learn from the best practices and discoveries of others. With the studios’ cloud strategy widely published, vendors, services and manufacturers now have their marching orders. And the studios are creating much more than just feature content – they are producing a tremendous amount of TV as well – and the precedents they set are likely to be adopted across the sphere. The 2030 Vision becomes not just a guide for the studios, but for the entire production sector. “If you want to move whole pipelines to the cloud, you can’t do it in isolation. A software-defined workflow requires connections between one application – and you have to talk to everyone else in the industry. We provide that forum.”
BRIGHT FUTURE Moviemaking is changing for customers and those behind the scenes
was an early success story, allowing content sharing across the entire organisation. Numerous studios focused on developing private cloud solutions, while others worked with the public cloud providers. Some experimented with archiving solutions, mastering workflows, or being able to ingest into the cloud
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