Creating 50 films in 5 weeks with LucidLink

About the project

A global government conference tasked a creative agency with producing 50 short documentary films in just 5 weeks to showcase groundbreaking projects worldwide.

Introduction

Imagine receiving this brief — create 50 short documentary films in 5 weeks with footage sourced from 5 solo filmmakers traveling the world. When faced with this monumental task, veteran independent Editor and Workflow Architect, Philip Owens turned to LucidLink to streamline his remote post-production team’s workflow and deliver the project on time.

A workflow run entirely on LucidLink’s cloud storage collaboration platform helped the team:

• Complete 50 films in 5 weeks across 21 locations

• Manage over 30 terabytes of media 

• Deliver more than 1,000 final files

• Collaborate with editors in various global locations

We caught up with Philip to hear about how he and Assistant Editor Ruben Proença took on this herculean assignment.

The challenge: 50 films, 5 weeks, 5 globe-trotting filmmakers

The scale of the project was staggering. "We had 21 locations from Honduras to Guatemala to Finland to Germany to Brazil to Ethiopia, the Bahamas, Bhutan, Canada, Laos, Germany, Dubai," summarizes Philip.

Five filmmaking teams, each equipped with Canon C70s, Red Komodo cameras and DJI Mavic drones, traversed the globe capturing stories. The editing team faced a mountain of work, including:

• 50 main films

• Social media versions for multiple platforms

• English and Arabic subtitles for every version 

• A massive video wall display using the Notch codec

• Over 1,000 final rendered deliverables

A fully remote post-production team

To tackle the challenge, Philip put together a post-production team working from Brazil, New York, LA and London. “We had four editors in Brazil with two assistant editors. We had three editors here in LA with the assistant editor and myself.” 

“I supervised the whole show and Ruben supervised everything technically. We had a colorist/motion graphics artist who started in London, traveled to New York, then came to LA, and was completely remote. Not a single person ever met in person during the whole project.”

"It was my first time using LucidLink," he says. “I had heard of it and people that I trusted recommended it. So I was really keen to try it, but I just kind of couldn't quite believe that it would really do what I really wanted it to do.”

“It could, as it turned out.”

The solution: collaborating across continents with LucidLink

The team implemented a robust workflow centered around LucidLink and Adobe Premiere Pro's Productions feature. 

"LucidLink is really cool. It just mounts as a drive on your desktop. To the user, it's extraordinarily simple," says Philip.

"We ended up with 30 plus terabytes of media for the whole job, including dailies, proxies and all the deliverables. Everything was always on LucidLink and only ever edited off LucidLink.”

Here's how it worked:

1. Filmmakers generated proxies of all their camera footage and uploaded them to LucidLink via Starlink satellite internet.

2. Editors accessed the proxies through LucidLink, which appeared as a local drive on their computers.

3. The team used Google Docs to track production progress and coordinate efforts.

4. Adobe Premiere Pro's Productions feature allowed for seamless collaboration across the global editing team.

5. The workflow finished with Frame.io for reviews and approvals.

Results: deadline-crushingly quick collaborative workflows

Against all odds, the team delivered all 50 films plus over 1,000 final files, including social media re-versions and language versions.

The project pushed the boundaries of remote collaboration, with the team navigating niche dialects, time zone differences and varying internet speeds. But throughout the project, LucidLink underpinned the team’s workflow.

Combining the power of LucidLink and Premiere Pro’s Productions, the team worked efficiently across continents, saving hours of precious time.

“The moment the proxies were up, we could begin editing. There was no waiting around for transcodes to be available or shared across the network. It was so fast. Every editor said, ‘I'm amazed how fast this performs’.”

Handling heavy duty data flows

Not only did the team deliver all of the films, they also had to create a giant 360-degree projection for a wrap-around video screen at the conference itself.

“It was a giant 30-foot high screen at 13,000 pixels wide by 1800 pixels tall. That was created in an After Effects project combined with an edit using elements from all of our films. So characters that appeared in the films appeared on the walls with sound from them as well. That was all designed and laid out in 3D.”  

“That added a whole layer of additional complexity because it took 50 to 100 layers of 4K video. And so that got really heavy duty. That pushed the system really hard. But again, everything was handled through Lucidlink.”

Final thoughts: astonishing productivity

"Everybody was thrilled. The agency was astonished that they could produce that much content that quickly. I was astonished."

As well as boosting productivity, LucidLink proved to be cost-effective too. Philip notes, "The most expensive thing was actually the three 64 TB raid backup drives.... LucidLink is cheap. It's actually really, really good value."

Philip's final verdict? "I don't think this would have been possible without LucidLink. I really don't. They've built an amazing system."