“I don’t say virtual production so much anymore, as much as real-time production, real-time workflows,” Christina Lee Storm tells Lori H. Schwartz in an interview ahead of NAB Show New York. Watch their full conversation (above).
Lee Storm will be featured on the The Virtual Production Revolution: A Real Time Love Affair panel and will participate in the Leveraging New Tech For Storytelling networking session.
“When I think about virtual production, I think much, much more holistically,” Lee Storm says. “It’s six different attributes that all come together to really help a creative, help the filmmaker, and their process.”
She adds, “Virtual production is not just like a volume or a stage, and there’s still a little bit of a lag on education on that.” Rather, Lee Storm explains, “It’s part of a mindset of collaborative real time workflow.”
Lee Storm is noticing improvements that “optimize workflows.” But she finds collaboration tools particularly exciting because they enable “creatives to, sort of, be in a place, be in a sandbox to work together.”
“There’s so much going on with real time pre-vis, and things like that, and how that’s going to sort of evolve and change and shift,” Lee Storm says. She notes that animation is further along with using this type of technology and could provide a roadmap for how this may progress.
“There’s still lots of challenges. Again, it’s emerging tech. And really, I think, at this point, we can have some best practices,” she says.
Gen Z Is Changing Everything
Also emerging, Lee Storm says, are changes in M&E advanced by Gen Z’s preferences.
“Their viewpoint of entertainment is totally different. It’s much more holistic, it’s much more fluid. It’s going between apps, spaces and things,” Lee Storm explains.
Because of these shifts, she encourages us to think of “the entertainment umbrella,” which Lee Storm says is “basically being a little bit more holistic of how we view entertainment.”
“Some of it is disruptive,” she says, noting the shift in which IP is now considered a launch point. It’s no longer limited to film – although that’s still viable – but they can now look to gaming, user-generated content, social media, or even live entertainment.
Lee Storm describes the influence of both TikTok and live entertainment as “huge,” noting an interesting interaction “between live and digital.”
Additionally, she says, “This is all sort of pointing to also Gen Z really wanting to be much more participatory, as well as interactive and immersive.”
Interactivity and immersive technology is “taking that next step of storytelling,” she says.
WHERE IT’S AT: NAB SHOW NEW YORK INSIGHT THEATER
