Sony Pictures Entertainment has named Randy Lake president, studio operations and Imageworks. Lake oversees all operations, strategy and planning for Sony Pictures Imageworks, post-production services, production services, global mastering and servicing, and asset management.
Manhattan Production Music, New York City, has established its first-ever Los Angeles office. Concurrently, the company has named Andrew Robbins as its new senior director of film/TV music.
Kodak and Sundance Institute are collaborating to support the Institute’s preservation efforts while also supporting independent filmmakers who are using motion picture film. As part of the new alliance, Kodak is providing film to the Sundance Institute’s Archives, which hosts a wealth of images, tapes and artifacts preserved over its rich 35-year history. Kodak is also creating 35mm exhibition prints for filmmakers who originated their projects on film and those with features in the U.S. Competition categories at the 2016 Sundance Film Festival who want to screen a film print. Additionally, Kodak is offering Sundance Lab participants a 50 percent discount on film purchased for origination of their project.
One of the highlights at this year’s Sundance Film Festival’s New Frontier Program could be the five-minute virtual reality film experience Giant. Drawing on director and co-creator Milica Zec’s personal experiences as a child in war-torn Serbia, the VR narrative takes the viewer into the experience of a family struggling to survive in a war zone. The film shows how cinematic VR lets us observe our instincts and ourselves and become more conscious of the way we make choices.
A survey conducted for Vicon suggests that virtual reality will need to overcome key challenges including the production of affordable consumer devices, in order for it to become a success. The results, based on a survey conducted by Vicon, gauged the opinion of 390 industry professionals. It highlighted that alongside cost, other factors such as content and realism stand in the way of virtual reality becoming an overnight success. In fact Vicon estimates that virtual reality will take off in the next two – three years.
Sundance Institute and the Dolby Institute, along with the Ray and Dagmar Dolby Family Fund have announced that Swiss Army Man, written and directed by Daniel Kwan and Daniel Scheinert, and Hunt for the Wilderpeople, written and directed by Taika Waititi, have both been selected as the 2016 recipients of the Dolby Family Sound Fellowship.
Nugen Audio today announced that Jeff Mullen, an Emmy Award-winning sound designer and mixer based in Washington, D.C., has adopted Nugen Audio's new Halo Upmix tool for automated upmixing of stereo audio to 5.1/7.1 Surround. As founder and owner of Sonichead, a full-service audio post-production facility specializing in television productions, Mullen uses Halo Upmix to produce both a high-quality 5.1 upmix as well as a stereo mix for a wide range of projects.
iZotope has added John Bigay to the executive team as chief marketing officer. Bigay will lead the strategic development and execution of global marketing, e-commerce, and education initiatives to accelerate the company’s rapid growth.
The German post-production facility Rotor Film has installed a 69-loudspeaker Meyer Sound cinema system in its recently opened mixing stage—the largest in Europe that offers both Dolby Atmos and Auro-3D immersive surround sound technologies.
Wildlife cinematographer Danny Schmidt plunged into Colombia’s remote Magdalena River Valley earlier this year to document the plight of the critically endangered brown spider monkey in a project for National Geographic. Schmidt and camera operator Federico Pardo had just eight days to locate the rare albino spider monkeys (their albinism is a genetic abnormality cause by habitat degradation), record their story and capture the fragile environment in which they live.
