MPC CTO Damien Fagnou: Talent and Technology from Technicolor and MPC Streamline and Secure the Making of The Jungle Book
Damien Fagnou, Chief Technology Officer at Technicolor subsidiary MPC Film, spent three years supervising the provision of technology that underpinned the creation of The Jungle Book. In a podcast interview for journalists, Fagnou points out that hundreds of people on three continents were involved in developing and managing the enabling technologies for the production of this film.
"The Jungle Book was shot in Los Angeles on a sound stage where only the actor who played Mowgli was present," Fagnou explains. "A lot of the work on building the environments was done in our facilities in India, in Bangalore. A lot of the animation, building the characters, was done by a team in London that had – at its peak – 700 people for the 12-14 months of the main production period."
Podcast Interview with Damien Fagnou
To keep the project creatively on track, Fagnou and his team designed and deployed a technology architecture on the Technicolor Production Network to ensure all the different versions of content under development were synchronized in real-time across the various sites.
"MPC and Technicolor have a long history of building really large-scale productions across many networks. We have 10-15 years of experience in asset management. Everything is version controlled ... to ensure that the important versions are moving into the right place at the right time. We needed many terabytes of storage ... so it was a tremendous technology challenge all around. But we were always trying to put that technology at the service of the storyteller because ... in the end ... what people want is the experience. They do not want to deal with technical difficulties," he says.
Fagnou and his team spent a lot of time on the user interface for directors and the creative team, and developed an automated process for the communication and collaboration functions so that – once artists had done their work – it could go to the next stage and with minimal effort.
"We wanted to involve the artist as little as possible [in managing collaborative technologies] because they needed to start working on the next shot," says Fagnou.
Throughout the process, Fagnou says security was paramount. The Jungle Book was a high profile project that generated a great deal of interest and anticipation from the very beginning of the project.
"We worked very closely with Technicolor and all our studio vendors to build very stringent security – while minimizing its intrusiveness for the artists. We leveraged the richness and the speed of the Technicolor Production Network that connects all our facilities in a secure way."
To listen in on the entire interview and read the rest of the Q&A, visit:
http://thefuturetrust.technicolor.com/article/the-future-of-storytelling/mpc-cto-damien-fagnou-talent-and-technology-from-technicolor-and-mpc-streamline-and-secure-the-making-of-the-jungle-book/
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