Trends and techniques in online video from Getty Images

Okay, good morning everybody. Welcome to Copenhagen and welcome to this presentation on video for Getty Images, being live streamed by the excellent TwentyThree. My name is Aoi Gosford, I'm Senior Video Art Director at Getty Images and with me today is Corky Bauk, who's our Senior Rights and Clearance Specialist. What we're going to talk to you today is about video, what's the value of video, where does it come from, you might not have thought about the different sources that we have to provide for video, what does it look like. We'll look through some rights and clearance studies, show you some things that we can clear that maybe you think we can't clear. Perhaps help broaden your creative perspective on what you can do for a project. We'll look at some resources, obviously the Getty Images website is available. The Getty Images website is all about licensing and searching. We have other sites attached to that that are more creative and inspirational and we'll show you quickly around those. We'll do a quick summary and then we've got time for some questions. So what's its value? It's not just about saving money, getting something cheaply, it's about allowing you to keep that budget that you've been given by the client, but to maybe put money elsewhere. What you can get through licensing, you can put into colour correction or some special effects. So we're not just in case of like, oh I've got no budget, I'm going to have to use the library. It's much more, you should look at it as much more creative or positive decision. We can also add production value. We have access to shots that you can't normally get. We have, you know, gyro-stabilised aerials, we have special effects shots, we have film from some of the movie companies. We have amazing stuff that is very difficult and very expensive to shoot. We can save you time. You've got a project where you need to get six cities in three days. Well we've got six cities and you can get them in 24 hours. So we have a tight deadline for a project. Yes, I'm sure you'd love to shoot six cities, but when you don't have that time, we've got it. We have access to one-off events through our news and BBC Motion Gallery affiliates. We can get you access to things that happened only once. We're the only people to have the coverage for that. And it's also a guaranteed product because what you see on the website and what you download is what you're going to get. It's not like sending a crew out to shoot and hope for good weather. If it's good weather on the shot, it's good weather on the clip when you buy it. And probably the most important thing is down at the bottom there, the earlier you talk to us, the better. We can help you with your idea, we can help develop the idea with you by research. We can help you with pricing, so right from the beginning you know what you're getting into when you're looking to license things. There's no surprises. And as I said, it can help you move your budget around. Where does it come from? Well, this is my area. My job is to work with the filmmakers that we have. I'm part of a team that's based in Europe and in the US and also in Asia. We split our contributors really into three areas, if you like. So there's group one. And these are sort of the household names, if you like. We've got B-unit material from Universal, Warner Brothers, also Disney. And then we have new sport and entertainment from people like Sky, Tribune and Bloomberg. We have specialist collections like Red Bull Media House who do adventure sports. And we're continually bringing on new image partners, new contributors all the time. Probably the best known out of all our image partners is BBC Media. We have amazing access to their archive. If you need something quickly from the BBC, we have a lot of content online. That's online and clean to use. Download and purchase it through the normal paths. If you want something that you've seen on YouTube, if you want something from a program you remember from ten years ago, it might take us a little bit longer. So do give us some time. But the stuff that's on the site is good and clean to use. It's amazing. We are bringing in new material all the time. We would like to have everything in their archive online, but obviously we can't do that overnight. It's a process of a number of years to get all the best content up onto the Getty website and for it to be straightforward to use. So in the meantime, if you see something that you're not sure about, talk to the sales team because they'll be able to help you clear rights. But do give us a little bit of time. I wanted to kick off just by showing you some of the usages which, if you're not really familiar with what's available through the BBC archive, it will give you an idea as to what's there. Let's have a quick look. Oh, sorry. Can you hear me now? No, you can't because it's probably not turned on. Okay. I'm sorry. Let's hear it again. Okay. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. So I hope that gives you an idea as to the range of material that we can get through the BBC Motion Gallery. Very, very wide range. A wide range of subjects, contemporary, archival, news, sport, entertainment. So on to the second tier, and these are production companies. We work with a large range of production companies, advertising production companies, corporate production companies, documentary makers. These are really valuable to us because they give us really high-quality material. So they cover a wide range of subjects, as you can see, and we have them all over Europe and the US. We have a very, very broad reach. We get amazing material from them. The third tier are the individual contributors. You might think that this is actually the least important group for us, but actually it's the most important group because they're the people who actually shoot specifically to our needs. We have a really large creative research team, and what they're doing is analysing the site, finding what people are buying regularly that we need to refresh, finding what people are searching for but not finding, and then also looking at future trends. And we mix all of these in, and we produce custom shoot briefs for our contributors. These people are often specialists in their field, time-lapse specialists, wildlife specialists, underwater people, and we get amazing, amazing work from these guys. 4K is very much of the moment. We have over 51,000 clips available to download in 4K resolution. It's our aim to basically replicate the content, We see it as a format that people are increasingly using for feature films, commercials, and live events, due to the change in the really large screens like this. And it's an ideal format. We're being very picky about what 4K we take. Some 4K is better than others. We're being very strict about the technical quality of the 4K because we believe when a customer comes to buy something in 4K, they want to use it big. They want that kind of technical excellence. So we're archiving everything off at the highest quality we can. In terms of a library, I've been working in this business for 15 years, and really, if you don't have these three areas buttoned down, you don't really have a collection. And I think that these are areas that we excel in. So we just have a quick look at aerials. Pretty much all our aerials are gyro. And people go, yeah, gyro-stabilized. You know, does it make a difference? Is it worth the extra money? And we think yes. And often a lot of what you see is gyro-stabilized. And people go, yeah, but what's the difference? So I've managed to find some un-gyro-stabilized for you to compare with some gyro-stabilized. It's still the most expensive piece of library shooting that we get in. It's about 15,000 to 20,000. Well, in Euros, it's about 15,000. But that's what gets you super smooth. The aerial contributors that we work with, we push them to be more than just illustrative. We try and get them to actually, rather than just record what they see, we try to get them to compose, to tell story, to be visually interesting. Because when an aerial camera operator and the pilot are working together, it's like a dance. It's like a ballet. The two work in concert together. And you get the most amazing camera moves that are visually exciting rather than just being straight illustrative. Something, a city from just high up. And we think that the areas are much more than that. So this is the kind of thing that we try and push our contributors to do to kind of raise a standard. And you've got to really shout to reach the back of the room. If you've got a really smooth, Last time I showed this, someone put their hand up and went, what about drones? I went, aha, drones, or UAVs, Unmanned Aerial Vehicles, as the pilots like to call them. We don't really see them as being a replacement for classic aerial filming, the height of which a helicopter works is much higher than a drone. The camera stabilisation is much better on a helicopter than a drone. But where we think it compares is with a Steadicam or a Jibarm or a cable cam type shot. We think that UAVs work best in proximity. So we've been really encouraging our UAV contributors to really focus on that area rather than trying to copy what a helicopter does. The other thing to note about this is it's very new technology. There are a lot of issues with drones and privacy and safety. And so we insist that all our drone pilots are licensed, are properly licensed, so there's no comeback. There's a lot of stuff out on YouTube, and you go, that looks great. But often when you look at it, you can tell just by the way that it's being flown, it's an unlicensed pilot. And there have been some cases of really large fines being levied by aviation authorities to people who've been using drone material that wasn't from a properly licensed pilot. Usually you can see the safety issues straight there in the shots. So we ask all our pilots adhere to safety rules, be licensed. We ask them to upload licences when they submit the material so we can check that they're licensed. I'm very excited to show you this, because it really shows you kind of what's possible with a drone. And I think that kind of proximity just gets some really exciting material. I have all my drones in my Silvia. If they don't happen, Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay, so that's UAV material. We've got lots of it, so if that kind of movement interests you, have a look. There's some really good stuff there. The next category is time lapse. I'm embarrassed to say that when I started working in footage for Getty, we shot time lapses on film cameras, one frame at a time. It was very slow, very laborious, very difficult. With the advent of DSLR cameras, time lapse exploded. I probably get about 150 people contacting me every year saying, I've got time lapse, can I join you? I probably take about five to ten a year. We've got some of the best guys in the world, and we're really, really picky about the technical quality of what's been shot, the creative quality of what's been shot. There's a lot of very mediocre, poor technical quality time lapse out there. We've decided to try and take the technical high road and be really, really picky about it. You'll see in this reel, there's some shots where the time lapse is actually moving. Try and pick those out, because I'll talk about those in a minute. I hope you saw those moving time lapses. They're called hyperlapses. There are only a handful of people in the world who can actually do those and put them together. We're lucky enough to have one of them, a guy called Jeff Tomkinson. I wanted to show you, just take you through one of his shots, just to give you some sense as to... the technical prowess and dedication that some of those individual contributors make, which is why they're such an important group to us. We were talking about a shot. He wanted to do a hyperlapse through Times Square in New York. Apart from the logistics of actually physically moving a camera through a very crowded space, if you look at this shot, because obviously it only works at dusk, you've got... it's very dark at the bottom, very bright in the middle, and changing darkness across the top. Technically, that's really a nightmare. So, what he did was, as he went through, he actually took four shots at every stop point, and then dropped them all together to make basically a four-part composite. So, it was such an amazing shot to see from the original version, so I asked him to do a little before and after. So, have a look through this. I'll play it twice, and just see how it changes from its original captured version to the final version. It's not just the steadiness of the shot and the smoothness, it's the balancing out of the different light levels. Let me see if I can play that again. Particularly with the screens in the sky. That was three days' work in a windowless room, staring at a couple of monitors. But that's what our guys are prepared to do. And that's the kind of... the stories behind the shots that you see on the web. It's not just a lot of stuff that we gather in. A lot of it is crafted, a lot of it is made with our input. So, these guys are really, really passionate. And women, as well. We have many women filmmakers. They're very, very passionate about what they do. The final section I'd like to talk about is people. People is really difficult, because there's so much more to get wrong. Styling, casting... Not everyone can act. You've been there, haven't you? But it's an area that we try and excel in, because it's really valuable to you guys. It's difficult to shoot, but that's what makes it important for you. So, we try really hard. And it's often the area where we work most closely with our creative research teams. These are the teams, as I said before, who analyse what's selling, but also look at future trends. So, this is a production still from a shoot we did running up to the London Olympics. We wanted to do something to show the changing role of women in sport. Before, I think, in advertising, women were shown as just doing very gentle sport. And now, a lot of companies, they're looking to show women more engaged in more extreme sports. So, we came up with the idea of filming a triathlon. Setting up our own triathlon and filming it. Because it's probably the most extreme event that we could find. It's also one where men and women compete together in the same event. So, it allowed us to put our hero woman, that's the lady in white there, along with other women and also men, as she kind of goes through her event. And we filmed different sections of it. I wanted to show you a little short film, really just to hear the voices of these people. They're amazingly dedicated. And also, you'll get a sense as to the kind of the production level that we go to. It's not, like we can sometimes be thought as being a bit cheap and cheerful. But actually, when it really counts, we put a lot of effort into it. And that's the reason for that being we want it to cut in well with what you're shooting. We know you care about what you shoot. We want you to know that we care about what we shoot as well. I've always done sport. Loved sport. I was at the gym. The guy said, hey, you should start triathlon. You're cute. Okay, I will start triathlon and absolutely fell in love with it. lost the guy in the process, and just grew and grew into it. The next thing I knew, I was doing Olympic distance. We train between 20 and 25 hours a week. Wake up quarter past four, hit the gym five o'clock, train as much as I possibly can, work eight till five, no lunch hour, to gym in about six, finish, get home, hop us eight, nine o'clock. One of the few sports where you are quite balanced, male and female, in the past, I think females were just kind of, they weren't as hardcore as their male counterparts. And now in the last few years, we've stepped up to the plate, and we've shown them we can go as hard and as far. The guys don't realize how competitive we are, so I think a lot of us that train with the guys are, we continue to be racing against them, and they hate it. They hate being beaten by a girl after a race with friends again, but we don't enjoy each other during a race. It's not only me. It's me. It's quite mental and spiritual as well, and you need, at that point where you feel you can't go anymore, you need to be able to draw from somewhere other than your physical ability. It just takes you to a completely different level, not only of fitness, but mental space as well. Predominantly most of the race, 40% fitness, 60% is all in your head. It's like life. You've got to want it, and you've got to go out and get it, and if you don't, someone else is going to take it away from you. I never go to a race thinking, oh, what the hell am I doing? Yeah, I enjoy being competitive, and so that's why we're in the sport, I guess. Triathlon is your life. It's going to be life in your life. You don't have time for anything else, and that's what you do. We always love and joke, we say, today that we've trained so hard for you, do you want to be able to start quickly, or do you want to be in the moment forever? Amazing people. Thank you. What was interesting was three months later, Nike came out with their Endless Possibilities campaign, which was about the changing role of women in sport. So, we got a real kick out of being a little bit ahead of the curve on that one.