Amazon Studios Jumps into Production of Original Movies for Theaters, Prime Instant Video

Today’s Big Six – the major studios that blossomed during the 1930s and 1940s – continue facing upstarts who are leveraging the Internet to grab younger audiences raised on streaming, not movie ticket buying. On Monday, the challenge of bidding for the best directors and scripts got more competitive, as Amazon Studios announced that it will begin to produce and acquire original movies for theatrical release and early window distribution on Amazon Prime Instant Video.

The Internet giant has already changed the game radically for the book market, while upending much of the retail market for just about anything else you might buy. Now, its Santa Monica-based subsidiary will start regular feature production this year with plans to offer a dozen “prestige” movies each year written from original scripts.

Amazon Studios has already won double Golden Globes for the transgender comedy series Transparent. Meanwhile, established directors like Woody Allen have already signed on to produce an original series.

The studio is also opened up the creation process by soliciting “unique stories, voices, and characters from top and up-and-coming creators” according to a company press release available on its Hollywonk site.

Amazon’s feature films will premiere in a cinema and then appear on its Prime Instant Video service within four to eight weeks. Making the features available for on-demand so quickly could greatly erode the usual four to twelve month gap between a film appearing at the cinema and its DVD or online release.

Amazon Studios creative development will be led by familiar name – long-time, independent film producer Ted Hope. Hope co-founded and ran the New York-based production company Good Machine, which produced films such as Eat Drink Man Woman and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. In a prepared statement, Hope said that Amazon Original Movies will be associated with “films that amaze, excite, and move our fans, wherever customers watch.”

Amazon Studios head Roy Price was also quoted as saying that their program will benefit filmmakers “who too often struggle to mount fresh and daring stories that deserve an audience.”

About Dan Ochiva

New York City-based journalist and NYCPPNEWS founder Dan Ochiva writes and consults on film, video, and digital media technology.

Kami Asgar and Jessica Parks are post-production heavyweights who work with major studios, namely Sony. As a sound designer (Asgar) and as a post executive (Parks), their collective resume touches on everything from Apocalypto to Grandma’s Boy to Venom.

Parks has recently shifted her focus from supervisor to hands-on sound design, and we talk about how it’s never too late to pivot on your career path and find the thing you love doing wherever you are in life.

Click on this link to read the rest of the article on No Film School’s site.

The coronavirus relief package that Congressional leaders agreed to this week includes grant money that many small proprietors described as a last hope for survival.

For the music venue owners, theater producers and cultural institutions that have suffered through the pandemic with no business, the coronavirus relief package that Congress passed on Monday night offers the prospect of aid at last.

To read the full article on The New York Times’ site, click here.

Phase 4 production guidance is available on the Film Permit website. All production activity, whether it requires a Film Permit or not, must comply with New York Forward Industry Guidance.

For more information see, please refer to the State Department of Health’s Interim Guidance for Media Production During the COVID-19 Public Health Emergency. Please review the guidelines and FAQ before submitting permit applications. The Film Office is operating remotely, so please allow additional time for Film Permit processing.

The above paragraphs contain links to the various FAQ – just mouse over the relevant words.

NVIDIA Research has invented a way to use AI to dramatically reduce video call bandwidth while simultaneously improving quality

What the researchers have achieved has remarkable results: by replacing the traditional h.264 video codec with a neural network, they have managed to reduce the required bandwidth for a video call by an order of magnitude. In one example, the required data rate fell from 97.28 KB/frame to a measly 0.1165 KB/frame – a reduction to 0.1% of required bandwidth.

To read the rest of this article on Petapixel, click this link.

Law360 (October 9, 2020, 5:22 PM EDT) — The Motion Picture Industry Health Plan’s board can’t be sued under ERISA for allegedly flouting its duties when it relaxed plan rules in response to COVID-19, a California federal judge has ruled, nixing a proposed class action filed by two cinematographers who still couldn’t qualify for benefits.

In an order entered Thursday, U.S. District Judge R. Gary Klausner granted the board of directors’ motion to dismiss Greg Endries and Dee Nichols’ Employee Retirement Income Security Act suit accusing board members of breaching their duty to treat all plan participants fairly.

Endries and Nichols, members of Local 600 of the International Cinematographers Guild, said in July that the board left them and others “out in the cold” in its attempts to address the problems COVID-19 caused for plan participants.

But Judge Klausner agreed with the board’s contention that the case, which alleged a fiduciary breach, should be tossed because plan administrators don’t act as fiduciaries when they amend health care plans.

Read the full article on the Law360 site by clicking here.

Anthony Russo and Joseph Russo photographed at the PMC Studio in Los Angeles for the Variety Playback Podcast.

The Russo brothers, directors of the all-time top grossing film “Avengers: Endgame,” quietly secured a roughly $50 million cash infusion for their production company AGBO from Saudi Arabia earlier this year, multiple sources tell Variety.

In a deal brokered and closed at the beginning of the pandemic, the Russos received the investment from an undisclosed Saudi bank in exchange for a minority stake in the brothers’ Los Angeles-based shop.