All change - what again?

How the Film and TV evolved and how we will probably need to evolve again..

When I wrote Pt 1 of “Switched off”, I hadn’t intended to cover this aspect of the industry, but actually, it’s quite an important part of the history of film and television. More importantly, it possibly holds a key to the future of the industry and how we mitigate the crisis we now face.

I have always had a fascination with technology, one that was probably kick-started in 1978 when my dad bought home a Commodore PET computer, allowing me to spend the weekend playing Moonlander.

My dad was also responsible for getting me into photography. Merging technology with photography led me to find the TV industry and a career which has managed to sustain me.

In July 1988, along with a very cocky innocence-of-youth, know-it-all attitude (for which to many people I apologise!), I left Ravesborne College of Design and Communication with a merit pass in Television Program operations. The course taught (as the name suggests) the craft skills needed to make TV, and at the time, as far as I can remember, it was the only one of its kind in the country.

As I entered into the heady world of work in London’s Soho— which at the time was the hub of the industry— my head was full of knowledge about how to set up reel-to-reel videotape machines and cameras that used vacuum tubes and purely analogue audio recording.

Being at work in these electronic playgrounds was heaven, surrounded as I was by large banks of specialist hardware from companies with names like Ampex, Grass Valley, Aston, etc., all in big rooms and studios that allowed us to make TV shows— or as it turns out, activate the Death Star*.

The industry was 99% analogue, but the word “digital” was starting to be uttered under hushed voices, and I am not sure anyone really understood the seismic change that was about to happen to the industry, the effects of which are far-reaching and still working themselves out today.

Of course, being so closely tied to technology, adaptation is nothing new to the film and TV industry; indeed, the industry wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for the inventions and experiments of the likes of Marconi and Edison.

From black and white to talkies and then into colour and then into widescreen and high definition, in its relatively short life, film and TV have taken the changes and advances in technology in their stride. The best auteurs pushing these technical developments to the limits to exploit the new ways of telling stories.

Even relatively small technical changes had big impacts. The shift from standard definition to high definition (going from 625 lines to 1920 lines) didn’t just require new cameras. Many shows like news and soap operas were forced to rebuild their sets because the cracks in the old ones would literally show up. Make-up artists and wardrobe departments had to refine their craft so their work would now shine under the glaze of the new cameras.

Of course, computers had already found their way into many parts of the industry, changing the way news broadcasters presented news stories with animated graphics. Along with Paintbox, edit systems called Harry and Henry changed what could be done in an edit suite, allowing all manner of creative ideas to flourish. But these systems were unbelievably expensive, built out of bespoke hardware, and which took up large amounts of space in machine room racks.

Coincidentally, some of the biggest names in this part of the history of television were British. And the biggest of them all was Quantel, a company that started in the mid 70s and would until the mid 2000s dominate the global industry. All from a modest factory in Newbury— but that’s a story for another day.

Oh, and there was this one company with a weird name that no one had heard who developed software that would allow the user to manipulate photos. I wonder whatever happened to them. I think they were called Adobe or something like that.

Sometime in late 2001, someone gave me a CD with some cracked software on it. I put the disc in my laptop, and within a few minutes of playing with it, I was hooked— and my jaw wide open with shock.

The laptop was an Apple G3 PowerBook, and the software was Final Cut Pro.

The reason my mouth was wide open was simple. As I sat in my front room and messed around with the demo footage, I had the overwhelming realisation that the office space in soho I and my business partner rented - or rather the kit in that was in it a tape-based edit suite was dead.

Non-linear editing was not new at this point, but it was still reasonably in its infancy, with many of the early systems such as Lightworks, Purple Fast, and Media 100 and Avid jockeying to be the frontrunner.

The revolutionary thing that changed so much with Final Cut Pro was quite simple and easy to miss. This laptop and a big hard drive were all I needed to edit a programme. There was no more need for hundreds of thousands of pounds of bespoke dedicated hardware. Just an off-the-shelf laptop, some hard drives, and a few GB’s of software. A new tape format, DVcam (similar to the domestic Mini DV), was a digital tape format— so instead of the analogue waveform, the information was stored as binary data. This meant all you needed was a cable and a new port on the computer, Firewire 1394, to move the data from the tape deck (costing only a few thousand, not sixty or seventy thousand) to a computer. Of course, the quality wasn’t amazing, but it was good enough for lots of uses— especially news. The fact it could run on laptop was also amazing. A mobile edit suite was now a bit of carry on luggage, not massive flight cases with delicate kit inside.

Since then, digital production has jumped in technology to give us the amazing 4K and 8K technology we have today and in the process rewritten the way the entire industry works and what we can do. We can now use digital metadata to track the progress of a production, carry technical data from shoot to edit and make sure the programme airs at the right time.

Every aspect of what we do, how we write, shoot, edit and even transmit pictures has changed. Five or so years ago there were two ways of sending live pictures, either via specialist microwave kit or satellite, now it’s possible to send live pictures from your phone or with satellite systems from Starlink.

The broadcasting of TV programmes can now be run from a small computer with a big hard drive attached.

In fact, I have a hard time trying to think of another industry— other than maybe the newspaper industry— that in the space of a couple of generations had undergone such a transformation.

Some of these changes were quite slow but others were quite sharp. The Tsunami of 2004 caused a global shortage of the main tape format at the time, HDCAM SR, which accelerated the shift towards electronic file-based delivery of TV shows to broadcasters.

Covid played a big part in propelling these changes as well as all of a sudden programme makers - who had no real cause to think outside the box - realised they could work remotely over the internet. Instead of flying to a location to interview someone, now production’s could find a local crew who could plug their cameras into a computer so the interview could happen remotely. The gigabytes of camera files being sent after the event via the internet. No more shipping hard drives. Editors and Directors could be in their own homes five, ten, hundreds or thousands of miles apart but work as if they were sitting next to each other.

Advances in technology have also opened up new avenues of work that didn’t exist a few years ago, with webcasting and streaming being the obvious examples.

Those changes borne out of the global health crisis have become part and parcel of how we now work today. I have done interviews in London where the director was only a few miles away, but thanks to technology they joined the shoot remotely.

How beneficial all these changes have been is arguable. Sure, technical quality has gone through the roof. Programmes can be made much more easily - and crucially cheaper. New cameras are more sensitive so they need less light, auto-focus is now actually really good. To buy an edit suite would now cost less than the tape stock that was required to make a landmark one-hour documentary 20 years ago.

Even the humble light has changed; virtually gone are tungsten lights, replaced by high-power LED lights that use a fraction of the power and can be controlled remotely by an app on the phone and when needed flash like a police car.

But the suits high up have been quick to exploit these changes for their benefit— or rather the benefit of the shareholders - as well.

The changes in camera technology have led to the rise in factual TV of the self-shooting producer/director. Instead of a crew of five or six turning up to shoot, it’s now a crew of one or two, who are working longer hours and twice as hard but not always for the better. But they are much cheaper.

Health and Safety is one area where there is much concern about these changes. On some news shoots, it’s often just the camera operator and the reporter— as, depending on the story and the location, the satellite truck and its operator are replaced by a bag containing a box that sends the signal over the mobile phone network. This leaves them at the mercy of the public.

In the US, there have been quite a few hold-ups at gunpoint, and the crew relieved of their equipment.

Crucially, by reducing crew sizes (in both studios and locations), valuable training routes into the industry have been removed.

To cope with all these changes, the industry has had to re-educate itself. Virtually all the analog knowledge I learned in the late 80s is redundant. Instead, we have had to learn about Bayer sensors, rolling shutter, LED light spectral response, Codecs, transport protocols and computer operating systems. Talk is now not of lining up VTRs but what software is better and whether this firmware update is worth it.

The techie nerd side of me is still in heaven. I like many of my friends marvel and rejoice at what we can now do, extolling the virtues of different codecs or cameras to our colleagues and production teams, boring people with how much easier their life would be if they just tried this software or this app. Why every production isn’t using the Movieslate app on an iPad I’ll never know. And drones - blimey they are amazing aren’t they!

When I had a programme idea decades ago, making it would have been a herculean task. Now I have the kit I need sitting here waiting for me to come up with the ideas.

And now another change is coming along so fast and furious that it threatens not just to rewrite the rules but to throw the book out and force us to start again. I mean, of course, AI. AI will disrupt our industry in many ways that we are yet to think of.

So, where does that leave us and what’s the point in writing all this? I suppose if anything, it’s to give people a bit of hope.

The heart of what we do has not changed; what links documentaries, news, sport, and drama is that they are just different ways of storytelling. And thankfully, the world still wants to hear those stories; they want new ones and old ones, funny ones and real-life ones.

I do not know how the industry will shake out, and actually, I would not believe anyone who tells you they know where we will be in three years, let alone ten years’ time.

But we need to survive, which means as someone once said, adapt or die.

Adapt, change, embrace new ways of working…… Well knock me down with a firewire cable. If you have been in the industry for more than ten years in any role, you have probably done that more than once; in fact, you have bought the T-shirt, the special release DVD box set, and the director’s cut DVD with the making-of documentary.

So whilst I do not have the answers to what comes next, I do know this: At the heart of the film and television industry are a bunch of incredibly creative individuals who for decades have taken change in their stride. A big part of our job is problem-solving and finding creative solutions to a multitude of problems.

The problems are not all of our making. Some of the problems are caused by societal changes, some are caused by financial pressures. But If there’s any industry that can solve these problems and come out of this crisis potentially stronger and greater, I think it’s this one - because we’ve been adapting and changing since the first movie camera rolled film through its gate.

* The Death Star in Star Wars, it turns out, was controlled by a Grass Valley GVG300 vision mixer, or rather, someone on the production team realised it had the requisite amount of buttons and a lovely-looking fader. And so that sequence was filmed at a TV station.