'Joker, Folie a Deux' & 'The Penguin', PlatePros Founder, David Smith

0:00David SmithFor the, for the subway sequence in the first Joker, that we actually did, in terms of a bit of a first, we knew that there was going to be, the stunt action, the gunfight and the fight that leads up to it. And we knew that the style of acting that Joaquin was interested in pursuing for the character was gonna be very, improvisational and very immersive. So we did everything that we could to make the environment dynamic. We actually built it. Instead of... We were actually originally approached to go film plates from a subway, which we've done for other movies and is a fairly common technique. We do our array photography on a subway train with the windows out, and we film those environments. But because they never left the tunnel or the stations, we, pitched the idea, rather than shooting plates, that we would actually create an ani… a set of animated stills.

1:07Jawad MirThank you so much, David, for joining. It's totally different kind of an episode for us, which I'm glad that Janine got in touch with us. You know, speak to directors, production designers, visual effects, like you name it, right? But what you guys have started is along the same line, but it's not. So, I think your company's called Pla… Plate Pros.

1:31David SmithYes.

1:31Jawad MirYou know, please do tell me about it, and then we can dive into some of the films that you guys have worked on, including Joker II and, Penguin, and, the Presumed Innocent series on, Apple.

1:43David SmithYes. Yeah. Amongst many others. Yeah.

1:47Jawad MirYes.

1:47David SmithPlate Pros, we're a, production services company primarily, and a stock footage library. So as, on both counts, the majority of our work really is around doing array photography, that is used usually for VFX elements. So, a lot of what we do works around vehicle work. So if you have an actor driving in a car, everything that's happening outside that car, comes from us because usually that's being filmed on either an LED stage or for green screen use. So when we're doing what they call poor man's process, or sometimes they call it rich man's process, we're, we're essentially simulating the driving process, by placing, the actor into an environment that's different than where they actually are. So usually it's on a sound stage. And then we have a crew that has gone out into the world and filmed three hundred and sixty degree moving environments for their use. So that provides the environment that the actor is driving through.

2:48David SmithAnd then s… as a, as a library, we also have that same content, but presented in ways. We've gone out into the world and shot that content in advance, and now you can go onto our website, browse through the locations that we've filmed, and license that as a piece of stock footage so that you can have your actor driving in Washington, DC, or in Toronto, or anywhere in the world, that we've already filmed. So, we offer it as stock footage as well.

3:17Jawad MirThat's pretty neat, and interesting because I... I mean, when you were talking about three sixty, one of the things that comes to mind, this is an older film, almost twenty years old, which I can't believe it's that old. Have you seen War of the Worlds, Tom Cruise?

3:33David SmithOh, yeah. Absolutely.

3:33Jawad MirSo there's this sequence when there's leaving the town, and they're in that van, and the camera…

3:38David SmithYeah.

3:38Jawad Mirkinda goes around.

3:40David SmithYeah.

3:40Jawad MirYou know, in and out and three sixty. And how it… I thought that was one of the best sequences I've seen. Now, in terms of all the technology, the way that's sort of moving forward with AI and stock and…

3:55David SmithYeah.

3:55Jawad Miryou know, the practicality of things is kinda shifting away.

3:59David SmithSure.

4:00Jawad MirH-how do you guys... Do you guys, do you keep that in mind that, you know, so that the audience doesn't feel that disconnect… from the characters that they're trying to root for from beginning to end?

4:13David SmithYeah, absolutely. The,.. It's funny 'cause I have, I have another Tom Cruise movie that we use as kind of our litmus test, like our bar. If you remember the first, Jack Reacher film.

4:27Jawad MirYeah.

4:27David SmithThat he was, that he was, famously the star of. But it was really interesting because with that film, the stunt driving and the chase sequences, you know, Mr. Cruise is a very accomplished stunt driver himself. So they were really careful to show you that it was him doing the driving through the entire sequence. And it was, that was all shot practically, all shot for real, actual stunts, actual cars, real crashes. And the level of believability of that is something that we strive for with our artificial processes. We wanna make sure that we're providing the content and the techniques and the technology to try and reach that high bar of saying, "Okay, this was, this was as real as it gets. Now, how can we make our artificial processes..." Because not every actor is Tom Cruise. Not every actor has those skills, those capabilities. But we want to have the ability for the audience to place that character in the world in a way that they might not physically be able to in reality.

5:28David SmithAnd so we use that movie as kind of our, you know, the lighthouse on the horizon that we wanna try and reach. And so a lot of what we're trying to do is, to remove as many of those tells of the artifice. We're, we're... You know, we like to, look to magicians and the sleight of hand that they are able to Help the audience go on a journey of belief. We wanna do the same thing, and we wanna be able to use all of these techniques and tools to be able to try and, hide all of the little things that we're doing to make it feel more believable. And every year, every new piece of technology that comes along is just helping us get closer and closer to that, to that final result that we're after, which is that it's completely believable. You know, in recent years, LED technology has come a long way, and the use of LED screens for filmmakers as virtual environment, as a lighting environment, has really started to help in that process.

6:35David SmithBecause with green screen, you're relying on the compositor to be able to marry the foreground and background together. And usually what's happening on stage is you're using, moving light fixtures, and sometimes it's as simple as a grip waving a branch or a flag in front of a light to give some movement to the light. With LED now, we're actually able to light the scene with the plate itself. So if in the plate you're driving... And the plate is, when I say plate, I'm referring to the background image. That's the, that's the footage that we've provided. So that background footage, let's say you drove past a yellow street sign. On an LED stage, that yellow LED is going to move by, and you're gonna get a s… ever so subtle yellow cast on the actor for that moment that it goes by. If you're driving past a big white truck, you'll feel that light. So we're actually lighting the actor with the plate, and so the light moves in the same way as it would have if we were shooting it practically. And that goes…

7:35David Smith... A long way towards helping to make it a much more believable end result, because you get the sense that the environment is actually impacting the character. And the actor now, instead of green screen where you're just looking into a big green void, you have the full 360 light environment of moving footage around you. So your eyes naturally will land on that, you know, the young lady walking down the sidewalk. Well, maybe the actor's eye catches them as they drive by. Those little moments that would happen in reality oftentimes wouldn't happen on stage. Now with LED, the, all of that believability, that subtle nuance starts to come back in again.

8:14Jawad MirThat's interesting that, you know, you talked about, LED screens, and they've only been around for less than five, six years, maybe a bit longer, but in terms of being more…

8:22David SmithThey've been pop… they've been around for a while, but they've really gained popularity in the last…

8:25Jawad MirYeah. That, they have become more popular in the last six, seven years. So, you know, you look at the evolution of all this, right? So you have blue screen, green screen, y… you know, visual effects in general. Then you have LEDs, and now, you know…

8:39David SmithYeah

8:39Jawad Mir... Your technology. Obviously everything changes over time.

8:44David SmithSure.

8:45Jawad MirDo you... W… as you were talking, it just kind of f… it came, a thought came to my head, okay, what's the next step, or for the next 10 steps…

8:53David SmithSure

8:53Jawad Mir... Where we might be able to live, shoot movies where you create an environment similar to what you would see on Star Trek Holodeck.

9:02David SmithSure.

9:03Jawad MirRight? Like, where you're actually in that time and space. Do you see that? I mean, obviously there's a lot of other elements involved, like science and, you know, time and everything.

9:12David SmithSure.

9:12Jawad MirDo you see that being somewhat of a reality down the road where the, it will get to that point?

9:19David SmithYeah. I mean, we're, we're definitely seeing, a lot of research and development, a lot of white papers, a lot of university research is moving toward, w… what w… what we're starting to call immersive entertainment. So where you're…

9:34David Smith... You're able to, essentially blend the worlds of what we've become, what's, what's become normal in video games and narrative filmmaking, and we're finding that the techniques of those two are merging. And so whether that's you as an audience member having the opportunity to enter into the world of the story, or for us as filmmakers to be able to leverage real time video game capabilities to make a more immersive world for the performers to work within, even though we're still presenting it in a traditional linear format, to the audience. So those techniques, I think there's, there's two different ways that those ideas are starting to take hold, in entertainment. And, so things like the new headset from Apple, that we're, we're, we're starting to see the idea of spatial computing, that we're bringing the virtual, dimensional world into our physical world.

10:36David SmithThat opens up some interesting creative possibilities for storytelling. So that's one whole branch is how do we get the audience into the world of the story. And then the other branch is how do we leverage these tools as new filmmaking opportunities and new technologies for filmmakers to make stories in a, in a... Sometimes it's for efficiency's sake, sometimes there's just no other way to do it. And so virtual production is the overarching term that's come to be popular for the filmmaker side of that equation. And so what's been interesting is seeing the techniques and technologies that were developed for immersive filmmaking... I'm sorry, for, yeah, for making im… immersive video, and finding ways to leverage those in production as well. And so virtual production really is kind of taking the i… the immersive video, volumetric video, and video gaming, and all of those techniques, and finding ways to bring those to bear on set. And it's, it's exciting. It's, it's daunting. It's, there's a lot of moving parts.

11:36David SmithThere's a lot of, new job descriptions and new positions in the, in the crew that we're f… just kind of learning how to, how to integrate. And you're, you're seeing we're needing to bring a lot of technologists to bear in a creative field, and that's always a challenging negotiation. Somebody who's used to, you know, coding all day and sitting behind a terminal… You put them in the high-stress, high-pressure environment of a film set and it's an interesting negotiation, and we have to…... We have to navigate that as a, as an industry. But it's exciting. It's, it's really... It's fascinating to see it all come together. And what was interesting was actually the role that COVID played in,.. The shutdown over the pandemic really kind of accelerated the process of bringing those technologies to set, because people realized that was,.. A couple of factors came into being, but virtual production was seen as a way to be able to minimize the number of crew on set and to...

12:36David SmithWe really couldn't travel very much, over the lockdown. And so being able to virtualize locations became a way to still shoot films…

12:46Jawad MirSure

12:46David Smith... Under those circumstances. And so pre-COVID, if you'd asked me how long I thought it was gonna take for virtual production to take hold, I would've said 5 or 10 years. During COVID, that quickly turned into, you know, 10 to 12 months. Like, it rapidly accelerated the process. Because you also had a lot of people that were otherwise would've been on set were now sitting at home trying to figure out the next thing to do.

13:08Jawad MirYeah.

13:08David SmithAnd so even just home tinkering to figure out how to make virtual production work, all of that, all of that time that went into those thoughts is now paying dividends on set.

13:19Jawad MirYeah. I find it, interesting you talked about, Apple VR headset. So I was... You know, I've tried it. I went to Apple Store, five, six months ago and I tried it out. It was, it was interesting. I mean, it takes a while to get sort of used to it.

13:34David SmithSure.

13:35Jawad MirBut I was just watching this video on... I think it was on Instagram or one of the social media platform, where somebody had created an app, or they programmed a certain thing where they put, they put... They basically showed what the person was what, was seeing.

13:47David SmithYeah.

13:47Jawad MirSo he or she were walking in the streets of New York. Now, this is the real environment they're walking in.

13:53David SmithYeah.

13:53Jawad MirAnd as he, this person is walking, with a f… click of a button or whatever, everything changes. The same people are walking. Their outfit changes.

14:03David SmithYeah.

14:03Jawad MirThe environment changes. So it goes from 2024 to 1800s…

14:07David SmithYeah

14:07Jawad Mir... Then to some futuristic time. Then it's snowing, then it's wind blowing. There's a hurricane, there's storm. And it's, it's interesting that how we're heading in that obviously you don't feel that environment, right?

14:19David SmithRight.

14:19Jawad MirBecause it's just visual. But that might come, too, and then the question becomes, everything around us is not real.

14:28David SmithSure.

14:29Jawad MirBut does that... You know, we live in a very strange times right now, because if you go to YouTube, for example, or social media, and even now if you look at the presidential elections, right, in general…

14:40Jawad Mir... Which I don't wanna get into the politics of things. But from audience standpoint, people really like authenticity.

14:48David SmithYeah.

14:49Jawad MirBut then we have this other part of the world where, you know, all the stuff that you're doing and a bunch of other companies are doing, not just in film, but in every aspect. How does that work where there's that and then there's this, and how do you bring those two together?

15:04David SmithYeah.

15:05Jawad MirAnd, you touched upon it, but I'm just speaking as an overall arch kind of a question.

15:10David SmithSure. I mean, I think for me, the connective tissue between those two, those two disparate ideas is story. If we're telling a compelling human drama, if we're telling a story that, you know, w… that's essentially... We're, we're storytelling monkeys. Like, that is…

15:31David Smith... The human race, the human condition, that's... You know, whether it's sitting around a campfire talking around, about the hunt or sitting in a, in a theater watching a projection or sitting at home and watching Netflix. I think story is such an important part of the human condition and of the ways that we process information, process our world, and understand how we fit into the world. Our lives are just the story we tell ourselves as we're living it, right? That is a big part of our identity. And the authenticity you're speaking about I think comes down to how authentic the emotional component of the story that you're being told is. So the amount of artifice in the storytelling takes a deep backseat relative to the emotion of the story itself. You know, if you watch a Pixar animation, you know, watch Up, and the o… the first two minutes of Up is maybe s… one of the best love stories ever told.

16:33David SmithNone of that is even close to real. That's all animated. That's all pixels… ... On a screen. None of those objects even ha… even exist outside of the imagination of the filmmakers and then the technology that they brought to bear. It couldn't be more artificial, and yet I would say that it's incredibly emotionally impactful and…

16:52Jawad MirRight

16:52David Smith... And that it has that authenticity you're seeking because the story is so compelling. So the artifice, I don't think, is, i… is moving away from authenticity. Hopefully, when it's working right, it's helping to reveal the authentic…

17:09Jawad MirRight

17:09David Smith... Story below. And some… sometimes that's just on the other side of it. If you have, you know... We've all sat at home and watched boring home movies, you know, with our VHS tapes from the '80s, where there's no story.

17:22Jawad MirSure.

17:22David SmithThey're incredibly authentic. It was as authentic…

17:25Jawad MirYeah

17:25David Smith... As it gets, but it might not be compelling. So I think…

17:29Jawad MirYeah

17:29David Smith... Really the key is the technology being brought to bear in service of story? And if it is, now we're working on something. That's approaching art. If it isn't, well, then maybe that's just commerce. And there's room for that, too.

17:45Jawad MirRight. I'm glad you talked about the home video and the story. So in home videos, I mean, a person coming from outside may not connect to it. But for…

17:55David SmithRight

17:55Jawad Mir... People watching who know the characters…

17:58David SmithYeah

17:58Jawad Mir... They know the story, they know the context. But this whole thing about storytelling, thank you so much, because… I have a production company, and, even literally our whole, demo reel that we send out to clients, the narration is literally about storytelling. And there's actually a sentence that you mentioned that's in there that we'll be sitting around campfire and telling stories for the rest of our lives.

18:22David SmithYeah.

18:23Jawad MirRight? That is so important in business, like for even Silicon Valley companies, for politicians.

18:29David SmithSure.

18:30Jawad MirAnd somehow we don't look at it. We take it for granted…

18:34David SmithYeah

18:34Jawad Mir... Even in our personal life, because every... Even now, you and I are telling stories.

18:38David SmithOf course.

18:39Jawad MirRight?

18:40David SmithYeah.

18:40Jawad MirBut it's such a pivotal pa… part of our lives and obviously of filmmaking and games and everything, and political strategies.

18:48David SmithFor sure. Yeah.

18:50Jawad MirTell me how this all started. What's your background, David? Like, were you in film production, or how this… ... The genesis of all this?

18:58David SmithYeah. So I've, I've been working in some form of filmed entertainment, e… as early as high school. So I was lucky enough to, go to an arts high school that, we had a small television station as part of, as part of the high school…

19:13David Smith... On the campus. And so I was actually, at the ripe age of 14, had the opportunity to take classes. And at the time, I was, a little too young to be enrolled in the classes, and they didn't realize my age. And so once they realized my age, they needed to kick me out of the classes. But at that point, I had already, produced a video as a present for my father, on Vietnam, a music video for Viet… for his, for his birthday. And, it ended up winning some awards. And so they're like, "Okay, well, we can't get rid of this kid." so they gave me a job. So my first job in high school was working for the TV s… for the TV station, and I kinda never looked back. So I've owned a number of production companies over the years, doing everything from commercials to corporate video. Then, went to school at Cal State Long Beach for cinematography, and kind of pursued, started pursuing my cinematography career. I've shot about a dozen features, too many hours of television to, especially in reality television, to mention.

20:17David SmithAnd then in about 2006, I, was approached from some friends, to help filming some, the view outside of the window for... So it... There was a reboot of the Knight Rider TV series at that time.

20:33Jawad MirYeah. Yeah.

20:33David SmithSo there's the KITT, the robotic car. My friends were hired to f… to create the animation of the heads-up display on the inside of the windshield. And they had done all their animation and all of the beautiful work that they did, but they didn't have the view outside the windshield. That piece of footage, they were having a hard time getting a hold of. And so they knew I had insurance. They knew I had a production company. They knew I knew how to shoot. And they said, "Well, can you just go film that view outside the windshield so we can finish our work on the graphics?" And I didn't realize it at the time, but that was filming my first plate. And so I started down the rabbit hole of trying to understand more about what that piece of footage meant in a broader context. I had already been shooting some 360 degree, stills at the time, really as a hobby. And, over time, we started recognizing that there was an opportunity to bring 360 shooting techniques to the world of plate shooting.

21:37David SmithSo we started recognizing... I realized that, okay, these plates are a thing that exists, and there's not a lot of people out there in the world creating them, and there was a lot of confusion about the best way to make them. So we just started kind of going down that rabbit hole. Developed the technology, got a patent on it, formed a company around it, and, you know, the rest is history. So we basically then,.. It was interesting 'cause I had always measured, as a cinematographer, the reach of my images was usually measured in thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of viewers. And so once I got into the plate work, that was my... When I was able to move the decimal point. So that's when I became... Now millions of viewers had seen at least a portion of my, of my images. And so, it's interesting 'cause it is such a... It's a, it's a very specific, unique little niche. There's not a lot of people that do what we do. And it's, it's... We're helping to set the environment.

22:37David SmithWe're trying... I approach it, as I mentioned, as from a storytelling perspective. For this specific use case, we're providing the environment. We're providing the location. And for some stories, that location is almost another character in the film. We wanna help with the world building of placing that character within their story environment. And so even though it's a very niche, specific little piece of the puzzle, we take a lot of pride in it, and we, and we wanna make sure that we're coming to it as filmmakers and storytellers, not just guys, you know, slapping cameras on a car and driving around. So we try and approach it really with that storytelling mindset.

23:20Jawad MirSuper. That's, that's so cool. Thanks for sharing that, man. If you can talk about some of the films that you... I mentioned the Joker two, The Penguin…

23:29David SmithSure

23:30Jawad Mir... Presumed Innocent, the new series, and many other titles. If you can just talk… ... Name me some titles and then maybe pick one or two of your favorite that you guys…

23:39David SmithSure

23:39Jawad Mir... Have worked on and how you sort of helped, the studio, the producers, the directors, cinematographers… ... In reaching their, vision.

23:48David SmithYeah. Certainly the ones that you mentioned are some of the more recent ones of note. So we had a large role to play in, the first Joker film. So we did the, subway sequence, which was…

24:01Jawad MirOh

24:01David Smith... A fairly significant technical undertaking. That was, an in… as far as we know, an industry first in terms of the way that we created that, as well as all of the driving sequences on the bus. That was us as well going across the Queensboro Bridge. And then we also came back to do all the driving work for the sequel as well. And so, and we had some technical firsts with the second film as well in terms of the way that we, acquired the plates. In terms of other recent notable, productions, actually going back to what we were just talking about as far as the story, or the location as a character, we did all the plates for a recent film called Daddio, with, Sean Penn, where…

24:50Jawad MirOh, right. Oh, yes

24:51David Smith... The entire film takes place in a taxi cab.

24:53Jawad MirOkay

24:53David Smith... So there's about three shots at the beginning of the movie at the airport in New York, and there's about two shots at the end of the movie at the, at the character's apartment, but the entire film is the journey inside this taxi cab, and it's the dialogue between the cab and the rider, or the cabbie and the rider. So all of those, all of that driving was done on an LED stage with our plates. So we actually filmed the real drive. The, there's an actual path that is, for New Yorkers, it's a very common drive from JFK into the city.

25:27David Smith... And so we were, tasked with getting that real drive in real time. We shot it over the course of two nights. And so we really consider New York is the third character in that film. There's the two actors in the car, and then there's New York. And so for us, from that storytelling perspective, we feel like we provided that third character, that the plate is crucial to the story being told and to the relationship between the characters. And so that's, you know, I think one of the, o… one of the more impactful uses of our technology. And it's one, the amount of trust that the filmmakers placed in us, it's the entire film. Like, it's not a shot or a scene…

26:16Jawad MirYeah

26:16David Smith... Or, you know, even a reel of the film. The whole film is in the car, and the whole film is our plates. And so the amount of collaboration and trust and testing and, the process that we had to go through to make that work, was really collaborative and really inspiring. And I think the end result, we're really happy with, proud of. And it's a good film. It's actually a really... It's a very…

26:43Jawad MirYeah

26:43David Smith... Interesting film.

26:46Jawad MirI haven't seen it yet, but I know exactly the movie. You're talking about Sean Penn, Dakota…

26:50David SmithYeah

26:50Jawad Mir... Johnson.

26:52David SmithYeah

26:52Jawad Mir... S… I remember when I watched the trailer, I was... I mean, you could tell because the trailer literally takes place in the car that this movie…

26:58David SmithYeah

26:58Jawad Mir... Is gonna be special because it's just very focused on two characters and two actors that are carrying these characters, and it had to be something really powerful for the movie to be able to carry through from beginning…

27:09David SmithYeah

27:09Jawad Mir... To end without feeling bored. But I'm so glad you said what you said about, especially about Jok… I haven't seen the second Joker. I was going to, but then obviously w… what hap… what happened with the film…

27:21David SmithYeah

27:21Jawad Mir... I decided to wait on it.

27:22David SmithYeah, sure.

27:23Jawad MirBut the first Joker, that sequence when he's in the bus, right?

27:27David SmithYeah.

27:27Jawad MirThat's the moment that stands out to me the most…

27:30David SmithSure

27:30Jawad Mir... Like an iconic moment. Never could I have guessed in a million of years that was not Queensbridge.

27:37David SmithYeah. Yeah.

27:38Jawad MirI mean, that's, that's amazing.

27:39David SmithSo in terms of the authenticity that you're talking about, when it goes well, and when everybody is making the same movie at the same time, and all the elements come together, our hope is that our work disappears, that you would never imagine…

27:54Jawad MirYeah

27:54David Smith... That wasn't, an actual bus going across the bridge or an actual train in the subway station. Like, that's, that's... When people don't know we were there, that's when I'm the happiest.

28:07Jawad MirWell, it's the invisible editing, art of invisible editing or art of invisible lighting and, you know, and when you're im… immersed into characters and storytelling and then everything else doesn't matter.

28:18David SmithYeah, indeed. For the, for the subway sequence in the first Joker, that we actually did, in terms of a bit of a first. We knew that there was going to be, the stunt action, the gunfight and the fight that leads up to it. And we knew that the style of acting that Joaquin was interested in pursuing for the character was gonna be very, improvisational and very immersive. So we did everything that we could to make the environment dynamic. We actually built it. Instead of... We were actually originally approached to go film plates from a subway, which we've done for other movies, and is a fairly common technique. We do our array photography on a subway train with the windows out, and we film those environments. But because they never left the tunnel or the stations, we, pitched the idea, rather than shooting plates, that we would actually create an ani… a set of animated stills.

29:19David SmithSo we, with the VFX team on the film, captured a bunch of still images of the interior of the tunnel, and the interior stations. It's funny, the tunnel was actually the underside of an overpass that was on my... On, I literally shot it with my cell phone on my way from my hotel to the stage. I would walk under this overpass, and the wall texture was really interesting, and that became the texture for the tunnel. So we stitched together these very large panoramic images and then created transparency layers for depth and slid those stills in front of each other with a parallax effect. Very simple piece of math and a media server to make it look like they had, dimensionality when in fact they don't. But because it was animated stills, we could tie all of that to a MIDI audio fader that turned into the throttle for the train, so we could give the director a physical slider that he could speed the train up and slow the train down, pull into the station, and come to a stop.

30:25David SmithPull back out of the station and keep going. Cue the trains that passed on either side, 'cause the train on the other track, the story conceit was that when a train went by it would cause the lights in our train to flicker. So all of that was cued live on the set to be able to match the action of the stunt.

30:44Jawad MirWow.

30:44David Smith'Cause the goal was to try and have the gunshot happen in a moment when that train had passed, our lights flickered, and then the gunshot went off in the moment the lights were off. But we didn't wanna have to try and have the actors sync their performance to the timing of the plate, which if we had photographed a normal plate, we would've hit play and that train would've passed 10 seconds later, and the actors would've had to count down to figure that out. Instead, we could have the environment be performed by the gaffer, the cinematographer, and the director so that they could cue things to happen in the environment based on the timing of the performance, rather than asking the performers to time off of the plate. And so we're, we're... A… as far as I know, that was the first time a dynamic environment of that scale had been used in a feature film. Now it's fairly common. Now that's... Virtual production…

31:38Jawad MirRight

31:39David Smith... Has advanced to a place where real time rendering allows those kinds of dynamic environments to be much more, much more common. But that was, those were early days and, really exciting.

31:51Jawad MirRight. Just to kinda wrap things up, David, what... Has it ever happened, or do you think it can happen, or it just shouldn't happen like that, where you have obviously the pro… the pro… the processes that you go out and shoot all these plates, right? Like 360 degree shots based on the script, based on everything. Now you're sh… shooting the scene, let's take for example Daddio or, you know…

32:18Jawad Mir... Walking in Phoenix bus sequence or the subway sequence.

32:21David SmithSure.

32:22Jawad MirAnd things are not the way you guys had anticipated… ... And there is some sort of discrepancy. Now is the process that we go out again after the production is done and do those shots again and kinda merge them in? Or do we just take a break and go do it, and bring it back in and start again, if there is such a process?

32:44David SmithSure. Yeah, it's... So it's interesting. There's, there's no one answer to that question, 'cause I think it's really shot by shot, production by production, challenge by challenge. What is interesting is that the advent of virtual production as a on-set tool. In the green screen world, all of that work and those, that final image wasn't visible until months after the shoot was done.

33:13David SmithWhen the post process is, you know, everything's edited and now we're going through compositing, and w… and w… that's when you learn whether or not things worked. With virtual production, it's happening in real time on set. Everybody gets to see it on the monitor, and hopefully they're paying attention to all the things that need to be paid attention to acknowledge and recognize those problems in real time at the moment. And when it's working well, you can identify the problem and work to fix it before it's, you know, months later and you have to come back. So reshoots and pickups are common. Like after the…

33:52Jawad MirRight

33:52David Smith... Initial process you'll realize that there was a piece you didn't get…

33:55Jawad MirYeah

33:55David Smith... Or something didn't work the way you want it to. And what's nice is because we can basically bring the actors back into an LED stage, we can shoot pickups in a much more efficient way, where we're not having to go back to Morocco and we're not having... You know, we can bring those things to the stage and recreate that scene in a very believable way, at an, efficiently and cost-effectively, and in whatever location the actor happens to be. We can... An LED stage in Toronto is just as capable as an LED stage in New York or LA, so we can, we can bring the film to the actor if that's necessary. But the good news is hopefully because it's happening in real time, it's happening in front of the camera, the goal would be to not have to come back because everyone gets to buy in and see the r… the final result, on the day. But yeah, certainly there are instances when things, don't work out the way you expected, and so it is very common to come back later and reshoot.

34:57David SmithThat does happen. It's not a goal, but I think it's something that everybody…

35:01Jawad MirOf course

35:01David Smith... Recognizes is ne… a necessity.

35:04Jawad MirYeah. No, 100%. And any projects that you guys are working on that you're able to disclose, that's coming out the next six months or a year?

35:14David SmithYeah. The able to disclose part is the hard part.

35:18Jawad MirGot it

35:18David Smith... Usually until the trailers drop, it... We're, we're kind of beholden to, non-disclosure agreements about what has…

35:28Jawad MirI get it

35:28David Smith... Has worked. The next one that's gonna be hitting the theaters, is the new biopic for Bob Dylan. The name is escaping me at the moment. With, Timothee, Chalamet in the role of Bob Dylan. So we did a lot of work for that one. So that's one that has, the trailer has dropped and we're allowed to talk about.

35:50Jawad MirOh.

35:50David SmithWe

35:51Jawad MirComplete Unknown.

35:52David SmithYes, Complete Unknown. Thank you very much.

35:54Jawad MirYes.

35:54David SmithI apologize. I…

35:54Jawad MirYes. No, it's okay

35:55David Smith... Completely blank on the name of it.

35:57Jawad MirThat looks great by the way

35:57David Smith... Yeah, so we're, we're very excited about that. Penguin is still releasing now, so we did a lot of work with Penguin, that we're very proud of. It's also just a really, if anyone hasn't seen it's a really... The series I think is some of the best, the best comic book drama that I've seen in a long time. It's, it's really enjoyable. And so we're, we're very proud of the work we did on that as well.

36:20Jawad MirAmazing. You know, I've been meaning to watch The Penguin, but I haven't seen the new Batman, film…

36:27David SmithYeah

36:27Jawad Mir... By Matt Reeves.

36:28David SmithSure.

36:28Jawad MirSo… Something I'm really looking forward to. And yeah, it's, it's incredible what you guys are doing. I will be very upfront with you. So I'm a director myself.

36:40David SmithOkay.

36:40Jawad MirAnd before the beginning of this conversation, up until you talked about Joker… ... You know, Joaquin Phoenix being in the bus and the Queensbridge being not the real…

36:51David SmithYeah

36:51Jawad Mir... Queensbridge, I was like, "I don't think if I ever wanna do this for any of my…... My projects." Just being honest.

36:58David SmithNo, absolutely.

37:00Jawad MirBut, after you told me that, we'll see. Maybe.

37:05David SmithSure. Sure. And there's, I think there is definitely an opportunity for all techniques, and we don't want to see one technique…

37:16Jawad MirYeah

37:16David Smith... Win over the others. It's, it really kind of boils down to what is the, what are the needs of the scene? What are the needs of the performers? You know, when you're, when you're, say, doing a process trailer and you have an actor sitting in a car that's being towed around the streets, that is a very uncomfortable environment for the actor. Usually the car is not running, so there's no air conditioning. There's, you know, you have a bunch of people hanging off of it, and if you need one specific piece of road, you have to... The reset back to one means that you're having to go, you, let's say it was 20 minutes down the road this way, well, guess what? It's gonna be 30 minutes back to get to one to get your second take. Like, it's a very tedious and arduous process.

38:00Jawad MirYeah.

38:01David SmithAnd so we actually have seen some actors now that have included in their contracts that they just won't do car process work anymore. They won't…

38:09Jawad MirReally?

38:09David Smith... They won't do a trailer because it is so, i… it's so taxing. And so, you know, the question then becomes, okay, is the verisimilitude of having the vehicle on the actual street and the romanticism of the, that technique is what we wanna use, does that outweigh the challenges you're presenting the actor and potentially the problems that it may create for their performance? And so if we can create an alternate version that gives them a higher degree of control, a higher degree of repeatability, a higher degree of comfort, where we're not worried about all these other external things, and safety being one of them. It's, it's not the safest thing in the world. Our hope is that by providing techniques that create an end result that is just as believable, but give you more control and give you, and hopefully to honestly do it less expensively. You know, we, i… i… it is still a business at the end of the day.

39:09Jawad MirOh, that's what it boils down to at the end mostly…

39:10David SmithYeah

39:10Jawad Mir... Than anything else, I think it's the budget.

39:12David SmithYeah. Fair. Fair. So our goal is to be able to create something that answers those needs but doesn't compromise the believability for the audience. If anything, we wanna, we wanna try and heighten it. So everything that we do every day, we're, we're constantly innovating, we're constantly trying to push the bar forward, and, move, push the te… technology forward and raise the bar. And it's always in service of how do we make it as believable as possible.

39:38Jawad MirAmazing. That's great. Thank you so much, David, for your time.

39:42David SmithOf course.

39:42Jawad MirI would love to chat with you in the near future, whether it's about Completely Unknown or some other project…

39:48David SmithSure

39:48Jawad Mir... That you're working on that you can't talk about.

39:50David SmithYeah.

39:50Jawad MirIt'd be lovely to se… hear the process and the behind the scene work of that.

39:53David SmithIndeed. Yeah, there's, there's one that's gonna be coming up. A, they just did a private screening of the trailer at Comic-Con. I'll, I'll, I think I can say that much. And we…

40:04Jawad MirI think I know which one are you talking about

40:05David Smith... We did some work on that we're very proud of. So one… once we're free to talk about that one a bit more, that I think would be, would be one you'd be excited to hear about.

40:15Jawad MirGreat. Thank you so much, David. Have a good one.