Renowned Cinematographer Mandy Walker, ASC, ACS Will Keynote 2021 HPA Tech Retreat

Noted cinematographer Mandy Walker, ASC, ACS will be a featured keynote speaker at the HPA Tech Retreat (March 15-24, 2021). Walker, whose recent work includes Mulan (2020) and Hidden Figures (2016), is a respected artist who has been working throughout the pandemic and will share her experiences and insights. The event features live and recorded content, live Q&A's, interactive roundtables, and networking opportunities, all presented in HPA's new Engage portal.

Walker was born and raised in Melbourne, Australia. In high school, she developed an abiding love of photography and after graduation she went on to study film criticism and cinema studies with John Flaus, the prominent film theorist and critic. Walker apprenticed as a camera assistant on documentaries, feature films, and music videos, and shot her first feature film, Return Home, at the age of twenty-five. She has 30 screen credits as director of photography and has filmed over a hundred high end international commercials, most notably the commercial films for Chanel No. 5: The Films directed by Baz Luhrmann and featuring Nicole Kidman, and more recently with Gisele. Walker is a sitting Governor of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, and the American Society of Cinematographers. She was inducted into the Hall of Fame of the Australian Cinematographers Society, of which she has been a member since 1999. She was the Kodak Artist in Residence at UCLA film school for the 2014-15 academic year, and in 2015 she received the Kodak Cinematography Mentor of the Year Award. Her notable feature film credits also include Australia, The Mountain Between Us, Red Riding Hood, and Shattered Glass.

Long considered one of the most influential conferences in media and technology, the 2021 HPA Tech Retreat is designed to be more than an online conference or series of zoom calls masquerading as an event. This year's presentations cover a diverse array of topics across significant areas of interest that include production; workflow and the cloud; industry developments; and the impact of covid.

There are dozens of sessions, and a complete list is here. Recently announced program additions include:

Artificial Intelligence/Machine Learning in Production

Tom Sahara, Tom Sahara LLC

A look at the current state of AI/ML. While AI/ML holds great potential, the reality is it will take years to mature and many hours of human effort to build, train, and manage these systems.

Industry Impact: COVID and the Media Business

Andrew Wallenstein, Variety Intelligence Platform

Wallenstein will present an overview of the many different ways that the pandemic has impacted content consumption habits across a wide range of media and devices encompassing video, audio and more.

A Cloud Based VFX Workflow for Pulls and Receives

Randi Altman, postPerspective

David Rosen, Sony Electronics, Inc.

Stephen Shapiro, Sony Pictures Entertainment

Sony Innovation Studios and Sony Media Cloud Services have developed a workflow that enables automated cloud based VFX pulls and delivery directly to VFX vendors.

Computer: The Ultimate Communication Device

Aayush Bansal, Carnegie Mellon University/Facebook Reality Labs

Humans can easily observe, explore, and analyze a four-dimensional (4D) audio-visual world, yet struggle to share observation, exploration, and analysis with others. The goal in this presentation is to learn a computational representation of the 4D audio-visual world that can be: (1) estimated from sparse real-world observations; and (2) explored to create new experiences. We introduce Computational Studio for observing, exploring, and creating the 4D audio-visual world, thereby allowing humans to communicate with other humans and machines effectively without any loss of information. Computational Studio serves as an environment for non-experts to construct and creatively edit the 4D audio-visual world from sparse real-world samples.

Is Creative Intent Wrecking the Intent of the Creative?

Poppy Crum, Dolby

Nigel Edwards, Streamland Media

Andy Quested

Craig Todd, Dolby

While audiences may complain about content, it's often stories of incomprehensible dialogue or too-dark images that hit the headlines. Because of social media, we know before the end of a presentation if the audience has a problem with the way it looks or sounds. The panel will explore some of the background to the issues and look at the filter of creative intent. Is it making content better or worse?

Post Disruption: How Production Pipelines Are Going Global

Annie Chang, Universal Pictures

Darin Grant, Animal Logic

Jody Madden, Foundry

Sebastian Sylwan, Technicolor

Last year we saw the disruption of the content supply chain accelerated by the rapid expansion of premium video platforms, coupled with a near-instantaneous pivot to a distributed workforce brought on by COVID-19. How is distributed global production affecting all stages of the content pipeline, and what key factors need to be considered in order to take advantage of the opportunities this new reality brings to our industry.

Fundamentals of Virtual Production and Safetyvis

Zach Alexander, Lux Machina

Ramy Katrib, DigitalFilm Tree

Sam Nicholson, Stargate Studio

Erik Weaver, ETC@USC

Simplified presents the fundamentals of Virtual Production as explained by key community pioneers Zach Alexander (CO-CEO Lux Machina) and Sam Nicholson (CEO Stargate Studios). The blue ribbon panel will discuss important concepts including pixel pitch, parallax and moir .

Following the presentation, there will be an introduction of Safetyvis and how Unreal and lidar scans are taking safety to the next level on set. A look at the Ripple Effect and how Safetyvis was leveraged on set.

Mark Schubin, longtime curator of the Tech Retreat main program, remarked, While there has yet to be a Tech Retreat that

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