Zack Arnold

Let's create things that matter. Together.

Will Your Job Be Replaced By Artificial Intelligence?

Do Your Best Creative Work Navigate Your Career

About Episode

Just weeks ago 20th Century Fox released a trailer for the upcoming horror film “Morgan,” and frankly it’s not the best trailer. So then why is it worth talking about? The reason it has made such an impact on our industry is that the trailer was edited partially with the assistance of artificial intelligence, namely the IBM system ‘Watson.’

What does this mean for our future in this industry? And more importantly, what does this mean for your job specifically?

In this episode I have an in-depth conversation with Philip Hodgets and Terence Curren. Philip is the president of both Intelligent Assistance, Inc and Lumberjack System, Inc. He is an expert in pre-post, metadata-assisted editing and metadata-based post production workflows, and he’s also the author of the HD Survival Handbook. Terence is the founder of Alpha Dogs post in Burbank, California a post facility that is founded based on the talent, not the tools.

Listen in to learn what you should be focusing on in your career development if you intend to still have a job in the next 5-10 years that won’t be replaced by artificial intelligence. And if you’re thinking ‘Skynet’ right about now…you’re not far off.

Transcript

Zack Arnold: I’m here today with Philip Hodges and Terry Curran, who in my mind are a couple of the most influential people in the post industry and are absolutely invaluable with sharing information in the forums and just sharing their ideas, and I’m very, very excited to have both of you here today. So, thank you so much for being on the show. My

Terence Curren: Pleasure,

Zack Arnold: And you guys also are the hosts of the Terrence and Phillips show, and for anybody that’s a South Park fan, the content is very, very different on your show than you might expect,

Philip Hodgets: A little. Yes,

Zack Arnold: So you guys have a have your own great post-production podcast as well, and you’ll be discussing this topic that we’re going to discuss today on your show, but the reason that I wanted to get you guys on here, and that I basically rushed as soon as I saw this one article and said, “Oh my god, if there’s anybody that I can talk about with this topic, it would be the two of you. It’s this idea of the very first AI trailer being cut, and it was recently cut and released for a 20th Century Fox film called Morgan, and I want to talk about this idea of AI, because I know that, especially you, Terry, you have been very vocal on both panels, as well as over Facebook and social media, about how the job of editor is going to change drastically over the next decade, so let’s just jump right into this topic, and let’s just talk a little bit about first, how this trailer was created, because there’s some miscommunication about how this was actually made, and Philip, you were the one that brought that to my attention, where the articles that are out there are a little bit misleading, so maybe you guys can walk me through how this was actually created. Then let’s talk about the process, then let’s talk about what this means for us in the future,

Philip Hodgets: The trailer was not edited by the AI. What they used IBM Watson for was to pull the selects based on action and emotion. Now that sounds like it’s deprecating the achievement, but in actual fact, I think being able to pull those selects based on those two parameters is probably as exciting as the ability to build a story together from those components. I point out that back in 2008 ish, we released a piece of software called First Cuts that can build a story based on the right metadata. Well, at that point in time, we didn’t have the ability to automatically generate that metadata, and what I see is the metadata that we would need for that story algorithm is rapidly being able to be generated directly from the source material via AI, so I see the achievement of pulling out these selects as being fairly important, even though the trailer itself was edited by a trailer editor, which is why it looks and feels like every other trailer on the planet.

Zack Arnold: So, that having been said, what, and I don’t want to go too deep into the technology of this, but I want to understand a little bit more. What is the computer actually doing in layman’s terms to be able to create, quote unquote, a select reel?

Philip Hodgets: It’s analyzing the content of each image, each frame, each series of frames each scene, into whether it contains high action or low action, based on a combination of movement of the image and I think intensity of the audio, it can also examine the emotion in the scene, doing a speech to text conversion, then doing a sentiment and an emotion analysis on that, that, and also on the facial features of somebody expressing a particular emotion. These technologies are part of IBM Watson, which is a set of open APIs, one of many that people can draw on to build additional applications upon. It’s literally doing speech to text, it’s literally looking at images, telling you what’s in the image. This is now quite pervasive. Even Facebook, if you ever get a slow loading Facebook page, you’ll see the metadata for each image shows you what’s in the image before the image loads, so it might say three people and some text in as a metadata that’s being automatically generated in Facebook. So these technologies have come out of nowhere very, very rapidly in the last two or three years,

Terence Curren: And this is huge. This is the part that I’m trying to get people to understand how big this is, because as far as just cutting together selects automatically from existing metadata, Philip had that, I don’t know what, five years ago at least do that, but the problem, of course, is with the software that he had, is you had to be meticulous about entering all the metadata in, so that the program would know what, what it was working with. The thing that’s happening now is that metadata can be generated automatically, which makes it extremely useful, because the computer can, I mean, think about what an AE, you might have an AE do, or a story editor, for example, who really goes through and finds, you know, the key parts and pulls them out and just strings them out. Then the editor has that to work with, that is the first part that’s going to be automated here, and it’s going to be relatively easy to automate. That’s what’s essentially happened with this trailer.

Zack Arnold: So then my next question is, somebody that knows nothing about the technology of AI, like I know what metadata is, that’s about it, like I’m totally the storyteller. Type editor that’s not very good with the technology, I know Avid well enough to be able to do my job at a high level, but that’s about it. So, the next question that I have is, if I’m a trailer editor, and this is something that’s going to start moving forwards at a rapid pace, or it’s even in the reality world, like you said, with story editors and story producers and people pulling all these lists, what’s the next step, short term, like what is it that I’m actually going to be given to use, and how would it make my day as an editor shorter and easier?

Philip Hodgets: You would end up, we would start with bins of material that was already transcribed, had keywords extracted, you know, some clipping done, it would have maybe basic string outs based on topic. If you’re in the reality world, it would string, it would be lined up to a script. If you’re in the scripted world, this would all be done for you by an AI. It would be theoretically possible, but I don’t think the next five to 10 years that the trailer could be built by an AI, because I’ve said that, of course, be done next week, just to prove me wrong,

Zack Arnold: Probably before we release this episode,

Terence Curren: Probably. Yeah, you’re absolutely correct. That level of AI, which is a totally different thing, is still a ways off, where you’re looking for a spark of creativity from AI. That we’ve got a ways to go. It’s coming, as we all know, but it’s not here yet. This is very rudimentary in the big picture, but it replaces that kind of repetitive task work that an assistant editor might be doing for you,

Zack Arnold: And that’s part of the reason. Actually, it’s the main reason I wanted to have this episode today. It’s really the crux of this conversation. It’s not so much about the technology, because this podcast is not really about technology or trying to find the latest tools for editing, unless those tools relate to your lifestyle or your health, and what I’m really interested in is the implications as far as somebody’s lifestyle, either in a very good way, because it’s providing a new convenience to shorten my day and get rid of some of the laborious work, but then there’s the polar opposite of that, which is that this could potentially eliminate a lot of jobs.

Terence Curren: Well, I mean, that is the reality of making somebody’s job easier, is that you’re eliminating some work that has to be done, and when you eliminate some work that has to be done, that’s less labor hours. When you have less labor hours, that’s less people employed. That’s just the reality of it. The bigger picture is that technology is replacing eventually all labor everywhere. It would be really nice if our leaders, our political leaders, were talking about how we’re going to restructure society to deal with this eventuality, but they’re not. So, in the meantime, we’re sitting here going, well, you know, am I still going to have a job in 10 years? The bigger question is, is anybody going to have a job in 20 years

Philip Hodgets: And short term, it’s not only going to be organizational, but there’s a lot of editing that is somewhat more procedural. It’s not necessarily in the entertainment area, but for example, we work with a company that does a lot of photography, and they build video out of their still images. They were employing video editors to put together those sequences, but they realized that they are so meticulously organized, and that all they needed to do was build a template in Final Cut and export the XML, and then all of the shots from alternates could be automatically cut into those videos, replacing at least two video editors’ positions.

Zack Arnold: Well, this having been said, one thing that I want to bring up, that’s kind of personal, based on my own workflow, and I don’t understand any of, like, the technological curve, and where we’re going, and all I’m hearing right now is that, you know, Skynet is gonna go active, like, that’s that’s where my mind is right now, is I just hear Skynet over and over and over, and I’m just waiting for Arno Schwarzenegger to come knock on my door. Anyway, that having been said, one of the things that I always think about is I’m always trying to be more efficient, I’m always trying to improve my workflows, but then at the same time I’m always thinking I’m not going to improve my workflow if it’s at the expense of my creativity or at the expense of the final product that I output it, which in my case is a television show, so for example I have several processes that are actually quite inefficient because they allow me to make better creative discoveries, and one, and I want to use this as an analogy to how the AI could possibly be used, but for me, I don’t use script sync, and I know that ScriptSync is one of those technologies that came about, I think, and you would both know better than I would, but what is it like the late 90s or early 2000s that that came out?

Philip Hodgets: Well, mid 2000 and it’s two technologies: one is the actual script sync pattern that Avid generated, which is now, I believe, out of its time, and there’s also the ability to automatically align the script with the media, and that was a, that was a license from the Exidia that hasn’t been reviewed, so there’s two different things. The script sync still exists, but you have to manually align it,

Zack Arnold: Right? So the idea for anybody listening that doesn’t know what scripts and gives or how it works, the very basic idea is that you can take your script, and I don’t know how it works in reality, but if you’re in scripted television or scripted features, it will take your paper script and you can turn it into a line script where you can click. Click on any specific line of dialog, and you can cycle through every single take of that dialog instantly. So, you click on the script, and then it will instantly bring up the daily that’s associated with that. So, say, for example, you’re editing a comedy scene, and you want to see all 10 readings of one specific line of dialog, you just click, click, click, click, click through all the dots, and you can see them instantly. That’s incredibly efficient, and I know a lot of editors that like to use that process. I personally don’t, because I like to be inefficient with my dailies and with my footage, because I want to force myself to scan through to find things, because every time I scan through to find a specific line, it makes me go through material that I may not have seen, and I’m like, “Oh, wait, I wasn’t looking for this, but that is a really, really good moment. There’s this look in their eye, and I want to use that, but I never would have found it with script sync, and there’s a part of me that’s saying, if I were going to have somebody or something have an AI that goes through and creates all of my selects and my metadata, that’s eliminating the human component of me trying to find these specific moments, and yes, it’s more efficient, but do we think that’s going to lead to a better product overall?

Terence Curren: Okay, let me answer that in two parts. So, the first part is, you know, what is the script sync universe? What you’re talking about is correct in the script-based editing, and script-based editing, which Avid bought when they bought Ediflex, they got the script-based editing, because that’s where it came from, and that was back in, I don’t know, the 90s, sometime in the 90s. The thing that made it script sync was that prior to script sync, you an AE would have to go in and manually attach all of those takes to the script in the proper place. Script sync went through and automatically did that, so it removed a lot of AE work, basically. So that’s what ScriptSync is. And the third part is Phrase Find, which is an incredibly powerful tool, especially in reality and documentary, because it allows you to search for words spoken. So if you’re sitting here, let’s say you have a sound bite and they don’t really end it, they’re kind of lead into the next sentence, so you want to find that last word somewhere else where they actually do end the sentence and steal it. It’s really easy to do with phrase find. It’s a pain in the ass if you’re going to go, well, I’ve got to go through all the transcripts and see if I can find them doing that. So those are those tools and how they can help you out as far as what you’re talking about, about looking at all of your dailies, that is a very important part. That’s one of the things we lost going away from tape-based editing and film-based editing, because you had to go through the material physically to get to the shot you’re looking for. Constantly with a tape, you’re rolling back and forth to get to certain shots, so you’re seeing all the stuff run by with film. If you were sitting there on a flat bed, you were zipping back and forth to go get the shot you’re looking for, so you were constantly seeing all these other shots. It forced you to take time out to look at them, and I know Walter Murch talks about that in one of his books too. It forced you to do that, and you, like you said, all of a sudden you come up with other ideas, or you see other options, et cetera. That went away with NLES, because people no longer have to look through everything, they can just go instantly to what they want. So, we’ve kind of lost that. It’s great that you’re doing it, but it’s not the common approach that people take. And nowadays, with file-based recording, when they turn the camera on in the morning and turn it off at night, it’s physically impossible for most people to go through all the footage. It’s just not possible anymore, time wise.

Philip Hodgets: Yeah, when you’re generating 60 hours of material per 24 hour period, it’s just physically not possible for an editor that looks through all 60 hours of that footage to decide what, where the story beats are, which is why the story beats tend to come from the production assistants who put together basic string outs of where the store around that story beat? Well, I think, see, that’s where the AI will eventually go, putting together those story beats, ready for the craft skilled editor to polish and finish.

Zack Arnold: So, if we’re going to start getting our selects reels, and not just selects reels, but in this goes further than I expected, I thought maybe you’re going to get some type of read out or document or something that said here’s all the best material, you’re saying that the bins, the metadata, the keywords, everything is already there. So, if you’re, if I’m a trailer editor and I walk into my bay the first morning I’m doing a new movie, you’re telling me that everything is already laid out in bins, character names, moments, everything is already done for me, correct, correct. So then the next step is, how do I, how do I know where to start if somebody has done all of this for me? Because for me, as I was a trailer editor for years before getting into scripted, and I had a very meticulous process where I went through the film three separate times, so I could really get to know it and understand it, and do the scene breakdowns, and do the moment breakdowns, and you know, have a bin of head turns, and have a bin of, you know, things falling towards the camera, whatever it is, depends on the kind of movie that you have. That, to me, is a very important process to make the connections in my brain.

Terence Curren: I totally agree with you, Zack, making this on a trailer, using this as a demonstration in a trailer, is probably the worst place to use. It, because as a trailer editor, you have to watch the movie, you have to get the feel of the movie, you’ve got to go through it, like you said multiple times, to really know the movie, know what’s there, and then you’re going to start picking out what you like, the shots you’re going to use, etc. etc. So this is probably the worst case scenario to demonstrate what they want, but it was probably the easiest for them to do it, because it’s a two hour maximum amount of material to go through, where it will be really handy is something like documentary, reality television, etc. where it can scan through those 1000s of hours of footage and pull out the selects for you, so that you can start working with, say, 30 hours of footage to do your hour show, instead of 2000 hours of footage to do your hour show, you know what I’m saying. So, in the, in that sense, it’ll be really helpful. I

Philip Hodgets: Just like to check that, you know, we’re already going part of the way with lumberjack already. In that, you know, if you enter metadata in the field, then you can have a string out based on those keywords that you enter in the field, because automatically put into timelines already for you to scan across all the references to that particular topic across all of your interviews, across all of your acquired material. That’s where we are now, and with material that already has a transcript, we’ve been pulling out magic keywords using one of these with these APIs. Magic keywords are simply computed extracted keywords. They are not as good as I would generate right for myself, because they don’t see similarity. That’s a place where I, we ought to, in the future, be able to put in a neural network on the up into that chain that says, well, these two, these things are very similar, so I’ll concatenate them into one keyword range, or one keyword, instead of having multi engine drag, multi engine car, multi-engine with a hyphen, and multi-engine cars. You know, that’s three separate keywords the way of where we are at the moment with the AI. If we make it smarter, then that becomes one keyword range around that topic, and you have a string out of all of the, all of the selects that were related to that topic for no effort from the end user. So that’s where we are now. If we can automatically get that transcript from one of these APIs, and that’s out there at the moment, then we can start to do this without the human intervention.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I think that one of the, to kind of just step half a step back to talk about this idea of the AI breaking down hundreds or even 1000s of hours of footage, that’s where I do see tremendous benefit, because I, too, was kind of scratching my head, like, why would I need this on a trailer? This is going to save me maybe a day and a half or two days worth of work, like the amount of work that I would do as a trailer editor, from watching the movie until delivering locked picture, and I’ll, I’ll take the 38 studio versions out of there, because that could be seven months of work, but let’s just assume it’s version one. That’s usually like a two week process. So, if I’m thinking, well, if somebody is going to save me a day of work, it’s really not going to help me, because it’s going to take me an extra day to learn the material anyway. But when it comes to documentary or reality, like let’s say that I’m working on Big Brother, which has 12 cameras, not even turning off at the end of the day, and starting at the beginning of the day, that’s 24/7 I can’t imagine the amount of man hours and the amount of overtime and stress and just absolute miserable lifestyle that went into working on a show like Big Brother. So, that being the case, there’s a tremendous use case for this type of technology. Where I want to go now is talking about this idea of well, do we really need the trailer editor to sit in front of the selects anymore, because that, I think, is the conversation more people are interested in down the road. And Terry, you had put up a post about this technology curve and the idea of somebody time traveling from the Middle ages to a certain time, and well, I’ll let you kind of go on from here, because I, when I read that article, it blew my mind, and I know this is kind of your specialty. So, go into this idea of this technology curve.

Terence Curren: Well, the problem is that we, as human beings, think linearly, you know, we’re born at zero, we grow up through childhood, and then we go through middle life, and then we get older, and then we die, and it’s to us, it’s a linear progression, and so we think of everything as linear, trees, plants, everything around us grows in a linear style. Technology is exponential, it’s not linear, and if you map it out on a curve, you’ll see how rapidly things change. If you look at trains, which we got basically 160 170 years ago, we got trains prior to that. Your method of transportation was foot, horse, or a carriage pulled by a horse, that was it for the rest of the history of mankind, which you recorded history stretches back 5000 years, so we know at least that far back, right. And then all of a sudden in that last 170 years we’ve gone from the train to being able to land on the moon, etc. etc. and of course the internet and all these crazy technologies, and it’s just happening so fast. That’s how it works with just computers alone, of course. You know, it’s the old axiom, they double in speed and half and. Price every 18 months, you know, Moore’s Law, that happens across technology, just in your lifetime alone. Look at how much things have changed in my lifetime. It’s insane, because you know, I was before faxes, I was with old rotary phones when you know you had to dial, etc. That’s how far back I go. This is just amazing. I, we had three channels on the TV, and you had to stand up and walk over and change between those three channels. That’s how far back I go. So things now are so rapidly evolving that people don’t think about it. We’re developing AI. The current sort of overall general agreed upon air range is that by 2040 will hit AI, true AI, which is a self-aware computer, and what people don’t think about is one minute after a computer is as intelligent as a human being, it is smarter than a human being, a day later it’s a god, a week later we’re cockroaches to it, because of the exponential development cycle, so that is why there are a lot of higher-end, very intelligent people who are kind of going, maybe we shouldn’t be doing AI, maybe we should slow down, maybe we should be careful about this, but I don’t know what, we’ll see what happens, that that doesn’t tend to be mankind’s strong forte to calm down when they should or hold back when they should.

Zack Arnold: So then me thinking Skynet, I’m really not too far off, then

Terence Curren: No, you’re not

Zack Arnold: Well, fantastic. This has just gone in an incredibly positive direction. I love

Philip Hodgets: It. It’s actually, you know, I get it very.. I’m very excited about what the technology can do, but at the same time I recognize that Terry makes the sort of extremely valid point that the ultimate outcome from this is there are no jobs for nobody, no more other than service positions,

Zack Arnold: And that was the area that I wanted to go to next. Is there there’s a distinction between being the buggy whip owner, like somebody that creates buggy whips for a living in the early 1900s saying, well, this is ridiculous, like this Henry Ford guy, like he doesn’t know what he’s doing, like you’re terrified that you’re going to lose your livelihood, but clearly mankind progressed forwards because of the invention of the Model T in the car. So, the question is, are we all just sitting here saying, “Oh, well, these new technologies and these kids and their AI, like, is it that, and everybody needs to get off my lawn? Or is this something we genuinely need to be terrified about as human beings?

Terence Curren: It is something we genuinely need to be terrified about. I don’t know if terrified is the right word at this point. It would be concerned, and if we address it properly as a society, it could be great, but if we don’t address it, then yes, you should be terrified, because the other way that things happen is revolutions, etc. At a certain point, when the majority of people aren’t employed, you know, there’s uprisings. It’s not a good thing. Why is this different than the past? Because up till now, you know, you would.. I’m not a Luddite. I do like Philip. I really love the new technologies, but I’m looking at the reality of it. In the past, when you go, “Okay, we’re going to replace coaches, buggies, with automobiles. Well, they still had tires, somebody had to put those tires on. They still had, you know, suspensions. Somebody had to build the suspensions, etc. etc. The difference now is, if you come up with a new car, it’s put together by robots, and you could say, “Oh yeah, but then they’ll people need to repair robots. Well, now you got robots that can repair robots. See, so this is the difference. We’re now creating more and more technologies that completely replace human beings. You, you want to raise the minimum wage to $15 an hour. McDonald says, “Is fine, we’re gonna put iPads, you know, in front to order, so we don’t need people up there, we don’t have to pay them to be there. It’s easy to do. Where do those people now go work? What are the replacement jobs by putting an iPad up there that are created, there aren’t any, so this is the problem that people are not really talking about in general in society right now, and I’m, you know, personally concerned, because if we don’t really start talking about and think about it, and we just put our heads in the sand, it’s like I said, at some point there’s a tipping point when too many people are unemployed, and then it goes south, that’s just what happens historically.

Zack Arnold: Well, the good news is that we have a sound foundation of political leadership in this country, and whatever, whatever direction we go in this election, we’re going to be in really good shape. So, I don’t – I’m not worried about any of this at all, because we’re so forward thinking in our, in our society, we’re not even thinking about the present right now, much less the future, like we can’t even get our together, like just with basic stuff, much less like Q mad. Just imagine the topic of AI coming up in a political debate, like that’d be amazing. It would be absolutely amazing.

Philip Hodgets: And in the sense that we’d be amazed, but it would ever happen, because it’s never going to happen as a discussion. To you know, we have leadership that are technical Luddites, largely who do not engage with the technology in the way that younger generations do. So, there is no real chance that at that level this discussion is going to happen.

Zack Arnold: Well, then clearly you’ve never seen Trump’s ability to use Twitter, because there’s a guy that knows how to use technology. But I’m going way off on a tangent. This could be a very different part. Podcast, I’m not gonna let that happen, but I, you know, just had to do that in there. No political viewpoints on either side, just making a statement. All right, so

Terence Curren: It’s a really important thing, because if you know, I mean, one of the possible ways that this could be resolved with resolved going forward is to develop a base income. Everybody has a base income. I mean, I grew up watching The Jetsons, you know, The Jetsons were, it was really cool, you know, futuristic show where, you know, they had robots in the, in the cool flying cars, and the whole nine years, so everything theoretically is taken care of, but George still had a job, he went to work, and he just pushed a button, one button during the day, a couple times, I mean, that’s all I ever saw him doing so, what are we going to develop if a we handle the how everybody has enough to be fed and to have a place to live, etc. Once we’ve handled that, then you move to the next step. If you’re just sitting there being fed and you don’t have any purpose in life, then morale goes out the door, and then you have a bad situation in society, too. So, if we’ve taken care of basic needs, then we have to figure out what. How do we give everybody a sense of purpose? What do we have them doing, so they feel like they belong, and there’s a reason in life, etc. etc. These are.. I know they’re, they sound like heavy things, but they’re what we should be talking about as a society right now, because we don’t, like I said, it goes the other direction.

Zack Arnold: Well, to bring this back a little bit more to the present time, because now I’m just getting downright terrified. A lot of the audience that’s listening, they’re people that are younger, trying to break into the industry, or have kind of broken in, but they’re trying to make a transition, so not worrying about the implications of our society completely imploding and being slaves to computers and becoming batteries. If I’m somebody that wants to get into the post production industry, and I want to.. I don’t think future proof is the best word to use, but it’s the best thing that I can think of off the top of my head. If I want to put myself in a position where I’m creating a job that I’m going to be useful for a longer period of time, notwithstanding, you know, the massive changes to society at large, like for example, if 10 years ago I’d come out of college and said I am just infatuated with DivX technology, and I want to learn everything I can about DivX, and I want to be a DivX transcoder, clearly you would have wasted your time. Yeah, but there are there, you know, oh, same thing with Blu-ray, like I really, I want to put all of my time, energy, and investment into learning how Blu-ray technology works and making Blu-ray. They’re still out there, but it’s not going to be around for much longer. Whereas if you say I want to be a storyteller and I want to learn how to put stories together, and you don’t tie yourself to a piece of technology, you’re going to be more useful in more context. So, what can we look at in the short term, now that these changes are starting to happen.

Terence Curren: Well, you’ve just said it, the last thing to be replaced by AI is going to be that spark of creativity. So that’s where you should focus all your attention, is being that creative person. And then, secondly, if you look at what we, as editors, if you look at all the successful editors, you know what’s one of the main things nobody usually talks about? One of the main things you do in an edit bay, besides creative putting together a story, is how do you deal with the clients, the people who are paying the check, right? Isn’t that a huge part of what we do? It’s that psychology, etc. and salesmanship, and all that, that goes into, you know, selling the cut that we have to the people behind us, and, and dealing with the squabbles between the people behind us, etc. etc. all of that stuff that goes into it. That’s one of the best skills to also develop, is that, I guess, I don’t know how to describe it, but that’s the best way I can put it.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I couldn’t agree with that more. Where I will tell people that ask me, well, I want to be an editor. What, what software do I need to learn? I say, don’t worry about software, like you can learn Avid, Final Cut, Premiere, Light Works. It doesn’t matter what it is, that’s the kind of stuff that you can learn the basics in a week or two, and then pick it up as you start to progress at a specific job, but you need to understand how to manage people, and you need to understand human psychology, and you also need to learn how to manage your own energy in your own presence, because that’s the kind of thing that’s going to get you hired back again. Is if somebody says, ‘Man, I just.. that was such a fun process, being in the edit bay, and I just felt relaxed, and I just felt like I was in good hands. Like learning how to manage that, that’s really what’s going to get you called back to do more jobs, rather than, wow, that guy really was fast in that avid timeline, and he knew, like, eight shortcuts, that was so cool, like, nobody cares.

Philip Hodgets: Storytellers have always been fairly highly valued. I mean, storytellers have been in our society as far back as it goes, you know. We have medicine men, we have the religious centers to the tribes. These are essentially storytelling positions, so storytellers, people who can take people out of themselves into another space, whether it be just simply by the magic of their own vocal mannerisms and abilities, or putting together a series of visual images that are pleasing to an audience, and all the various ways that we do things, that’s a highly valued. Situation, but anything that’s repetitious, like you know, largely all the work that an assistant editor does is expected to be automated. I mean, even Michael Cioni has been talking about a lot of that, you know, heavy iron post house work is going to move towards the camera end rather than be a separate expense line. These are trends that have been going for a long time, and combine that with a, with a trend within the industry that is always pushing to do more with less. You’re going to see producers who say, well, yes, this may be, you know, 20% less creative, because I’m not letting Zack have time to go through all the frames of the footage for himself to see those wonderful moments that are going to lift this from being acceptable to brilliant. I think that the trend has never, never really supported that sort of argument. It’s always, well, if it’s good enough, if we can get through the various gatekeepers that we have to get this through, then let’s save the money.

Zack Arnold: And see, that’s the trend that I thought about immediately when I watched this trailer, is I was thinking studio executives are already trying to do as much as possible to cut costs on the creative end and get rid of that one really pesky step where they have to work with editors and make stuff, so if, if they’re already in, I thought I’ve been making the joke for years that when people say, oh, what, when you worked in trailers, what software did you use to edit? I said Microsoft Excel, and they’re like, wait, what? I’m like, we cut trailers with Microsoft Excel because the studios would go into malls and they would ask people what they liked, and they would give me an Excel spreadsheet with quadrants and say this is what people liked. I’m like, oh, so I’m editing my trailer with Microsoft Excel. Great, so if they’re already, they’ve been going down that road for years and years and years, if they can now take a spreadsheet with analytical data, and they can input it into Watson, and you don’t need somebody to cut it. Then, why in the world will they care about that extra 10% If the studio executive now has complete creative control, where they don’t have to argue with the curmudgeony editors and creative directors,

Terence Curren: When they get the technology to that point, that’s exactly what will happen.

Zack Arnold: And that’s actually what I saw, this is not like hyperbole. This is me thinking this is coming. Studio executives taking a spreadsheet, emailing it, probably not even emailing it, just pressing a button on the back of their skull, and it goes to some AI system. And then all of a sudden, you know, four hours later, or whatever it is, oh, here’s our trailer. It tested well. All the quadrants look good. Let’s send it to this other AI that’s going to color it, that’s going to mix it, that’s going to finish it, and then we’re going to download it directly to the theaters 15 minutes later.

Philip Hodgets: Yeah, but it goes, we should keep in mind that, as important it is to people around us, the feature film and television world are relatively small markets compared with the corporate education journalistic applications of video production, they will probably be disrupted first, simply because you know Hollywood, the metaphoric Hollywood is a very conservative and slow-moving organization in general. It doesn’t, does not adopt new technologies rapidly, it doesn’t change on a dime to do something different, because there’s lots of money involved, and people don’t like to put their jobs on the line by doing something different. That said, there’s a lot of other places where this will already be proven before it gets to that level.

Zack Arnold: Well, the one area, and I’m only half joking when I say this, but the one area of the industry that really has driven technology more than any other that most people don’t even know about is pornography, and you know, as you know, like, there are certain technologies that, once the pornography industry adopts it, all of a sudden it takes off, because it’s a huge, huge market that makes way more money than any feature film does. So, I could see a lot of people saying, “Man, I don’t have to go through selects anymore, this is awesome. So, sorry. yeah,

Terence Curren: That’s an interesting concept. Actually, I would say the one market that has driven our ability to edit, etc. The very reason we have NLE is the very reason we have extremely cheap NLES is actually the video game players, because of the video game players, the graphics cards kept getting better and better and better and better, because there’s a huge market to buy those, and then the side effect of that is that we can get a really powerful graphics card, instead of having to buy dedicated hardware, which is where Avid started out, and that makes that makes basic video editing available to everybody, it sort of democratized or commoditized the process, so I would, I would actually say that the video game industry is the biggest contributor to us.

Zack Arnold: Great, agree, I would agree with that as well. Where, when, when people look at the box office numbers for a huge movie, let’s just take Avatar, one of the biggest movies in history, or The Force Awakens, those numbers are so tiny in comparison to a single video game release like Call of Duty, I mean they’re in the billions of dollars, so it’s a vastly underrated sector of the industry, it’s like, oh yeah, well, it’s just a bunch of kids and nerds playing games, and no, they’re generating billions and billions and billions of dollars, way more than the film industry,

Philip Hodgets: And remember that the film industry is largely. Industry about first dates and kids having somewhere to go that is outside of their parents’ home and car. It’s not so much about seeing going to a particular place to see a particular story in a particular way. Some of those experiences can be better done in the small personal video game approach, and that’s not as personal as it used to be. Multiplayer games now that are very immersive, not that I play them, but I see other people playing, they’re very immersive. So maybe storytelling is going to evolve a way around from from what we’re seeing. It’s very hard to predict the future, except to write it up as history.

Zack Arnold: Well, I think that the other area to go to as well that we haven’t really talked about, which may be veering off on a tangent, but perhaps not, but I know that you guys know way more about this than I do, but it’s the idea of virtual reality, and that’s another area where, if we come back to this, the kind of foundation of this conversation, which is, well, where is it that I need to focus my attention if things are changing so rapidly? This is another form of storytelling that’s completely different than the form that we know and understand, but it’s still storytelling.

Terence Curren: Yeah, I wouldn’t.. I wouldn’t.. fuck, virtual reality is not going to replace what you and I do on a normal basis, or our universe. It’s deceptive when people call it virtual reality. When you’re shooting something and you’re calling it virtual reality, you’re not, you’re shooting theater in the round, which Disney had, you know, back in the ’80s, that’s all it really is, because you have to put the camera stationary somewhere in a room, let’s say, and okay, now the person puts on a headset and they can be that camera and they can look around the room, but what if I’m looking around the room and I see a door and I go, oh, I want to walk through that door, you can’t. You can in computer-generated virtual reality, and that’s true virtual reality, and that’s a different thing. But that’s not really storytelling per se, because you don’t control if I decide to walk through that door, and that reveals a different story. You’re not in control of the story you’re telling me anymore. So, there’s the virtual reality for the kind of gaming industry, which is I call true virtual reality, and then there’s the novelty gimmick of just like d of VR for storytelling, and yeah, it’s really cool novelty right now, and in five years we’ll remember five years ago when people were talking about VR, oh yeah, that was funny, ha ha, okay,

Zack Arnold: You mean like the like we do with d now,

Terence Curren: Exactly, yeah,

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and it’s funny because I was, I was definitely in that camp five, or I guess it was almost 10 years ago, and really the current iteration of it really started to take off, and I’m like, there’s there’s no way this is gonna last, because nine out of the 10 people that I talked to, they’re like, it makes me sick, and the screen is dark, and I just want to see it in d, and like, there’s no way, and my kids hate it, that’s really what tells the future, is like my son is six years old, and we’ll go to the latest Pixar movie, and he’s like, “Oh, we can’t go see in d, I hate d, and I’m like, “There’s no way that something like that can last if that’s how my child is reacting to it, because just multiply that by millions, and that’s how everybody feels. And it seems to me, at least in the film space, like you’re saying virtual reality makes no sense to me whatsoever. I get it in the gaming space, but when it comes to the film space, I can’t even imagine as an editor it is so impossible right now to try and keep people’s attention and understand where their eye is going and trace their eye movement in this whole idea of Walter Murch and in the blink of an eye, like that’s one of the fundamentals of being a good editor, is where is my audience’s eye right now? If they’re in virtual reality, Jesus Christ, that’s going to be miserable.

Philip Hodgets: Exactly, could not agree more. Could not agree more. I see a lot of application for virtual reality in exhibition items and in telepresence, various things like that, narrative storytelling. I don’t think so much unless it’s computer generated, and then it’s really a personal experience. It’s not this controlled viewing experience. And I made, I’ve made that exact same point, that part of what a director and an editor do is direct the focus of attention the entire time. You should be looking where I want you to be looking at this point in time, whereas with virtual reality, you can’t guarantee they’re even looking forward,

Zack Arnold: Yeah,

Philip Hodgets: Or in any particular place.

Zack Arnold: I just.. I can’t imagine having a dialog scene with two people sitting at a table, and the second that it gets a little slow, you just turn around, you’re like, oh, that’s a pretty painting on the wall, and oh, I wonder what’s through that door, like, oh my god, that would drive me crazy.

Philip Hodgets: And virtual reality.. virtual reality porn, I mean, who wants to look around and see what it says happening on the rest of the set? It’s not exactly going to be conducive to keeping in the mood, is it?

Zack Arnold: Well, but I think when it comes to porn and virtual reality, I don’t see a lot of people looking around the room and staring into space. I could be wrong, but is

Philip Hodgets: That you’re, you know, again, you need to be involved in list the illusion of being involved in the action in front of you rather than looking around, and I think Terry wasn’t one of the speakers at the editors lounge, but said that after people get used to the experience, they mostly look at about 20 degrees in front of them, they never really look around after the initial exposure.

Terence Curren: Exactly, that’s yeah, Lucas Wilson said, basically, you watch people, they put on, they look all around, and then they settle forward, and that’s where they, that’s where they are for. The rest of the time, so you kind of edit compensating for that, but again, it’s not a great storytelling format, and a lot of what we do is designed for more than one person to be watching it, you know, the more people in an audience, the group experience applies. I mean, can you imagine the difference between a comedy when you’re just sitting there watching it by yourself, and in a large theater with everybody laughing, which is why they added laugh tracks to TV originally, because you didn’t have the theater experience. So same concept, you carry it forward to this: if everybody’s sitting there wearing a helmet, even if you’re all sitting next to each other wearing helmets, you’re not together. You can’t look at your friend and go, “God, did you see that? or “Oh, that was funny. You can’t.. there’s none of that. There’s no social interaction involved anymore. It’s a bunch of people on an island, which also impacts the way that we tell stories.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, and I want to use that as a place to wrap it up. I want to be very respectful of both of both of your schedules. But the one thing that I would say to come back to the foundation of this conversation is, if you’re listening and you’re saying there’s so many things changing. I don’t know what I should be focusing on next. I have two things that I recommend, and then I want to see if you guys have additional thoughts. But what I always tell people when they say, what should I be learning if I want to be a great editor, I don’t tell them Avid, I don’t tell them Premiere, I don’t tell them any software, no plugins. I say number one, you have to learn how to direct your audience’s attention every single frame. You should know where their eyes are. You should know what they’re looking at. And number two, you need to know what emotion they’re experiencing and be able to control that emotion, so you know where they’re looking, you know what they’re feeling. If you can learn how to develop that skill, you’re going to be valuable in so many different industries, and you’re not going to be phased out just because you know how to break down footage, because that will be replaced by computers. So, do you guys have any last-minute thoughts about just in addition to, like, what’s the skill that I can learn that’s not going to make me obsolete in five years?

Terence Curren: Well, kind of along the same line of what you’re saying, when I was teaching editing classes back in the early 2000s and one of the ideas that I came up with as an exercise, which worked really well, was I bought some comic books, and I cut up all of the cut out every individual frame and just dropped them into an envelope, and I’d hand an envelope to each of the groups and let them go to a table and put the story together, and it was interesting, they all had the same comic book, but they’d end up with different stories, but it’s an interesting way that you can learn how to edit, because it’s the same concept. If you just have all the individual frames, how do I put this together in a story, and can I put it together as a different story, et cetera, et cetera. You start to see how putting shots together in different ways creates different outcomes, et cetera.

Zack Arnold: And then, Philip, any final thoughts on how I can future proof myself against the AI machines,

Philip Hodgets: Expose yourself beyond the narrow area of the knowledge of your industry, and there’s good reason to learn some psychology, learn some, a little bit of the theories of computer science, learn a little bit of how culture works, and how culture impacts people, and how culture evolves. These things will help us adapt, I think, as culture changes by knowing how it has evolved in the past. It’s not anything outside the realm of learning about filmmaking, is still very valuable to the application to making films.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, absolutely. And then the final thought, which will be complete shameless plug, is along the lines of learning about things outside your industry, learn a little bit more about human psychology, learn about nutrition, learn about productivity, learn how to find balance in your life. Doing all these things is going to help future-proof you and allow you to have the resilience to move around and learn different things in different industries as it evolves, because you think it’s moving fast now. This industry is going to skyrocket in speed as far as the learning curve over the next five to 10 years.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, I agree. Agree. Yes. So,

Zack Arnold: That having been said, I want to thank both of you for being on the show. I learned a ton, so I can only imagine that my audience feels the same way, because I’m both thoroughly invigorated and terrified after our conversation.

Philip Hodgets: I think that’s the appropriate response.

Zack Arnold: Yeah, absolutely. Thank you so much to both you.

Terence Curren: Thanks for having us.