How AI Is Reviving Vertical Content. Plus: Atlanta’s Future After Marvel

0:00All right. Welcome back to Denoised. uh we've got a couple breakdowns today let's do it let's do it yeah let's cover uh quibby's back quibby's back yes you can kill the man but you can't kill the dream jeffrey's been always ahead of his time yeah and i'll break down a little bit of a cool some cool uh ai vfx demos that we've been seeing and uh some covering again uh where it's just stuff shifting again in uh studio production in physical production world yeah yeah in in the u.s

0:29all right so let's talk about the rebirth of quibi it's not we're saying quibi it's not actually quibi it is the idea of quibi yeah i mean we have a few vertical platforms that are already taken off and doing really well a month or two ago right so now it seems like there is like a hollywood level executive jumping into the game yeah yeah a team of executives uh head headed by lloyd braun with a new company that they're calling micro co and sort of the headline with this is they're they're basically doing the same exact model as uh real shorts or those other chinese companies that have been doing these micro drama soap opera vertical soap operas where they just shoot vertical they're not shooting to like repurpose the content right and uh you find them on tiktok or instagram with like the little teaser that gets you sucked into the story and then you pay up to finish the rest of the story hey up and they're usually the craziest soap opera-y titles imaginable.

1:24I would say targeted towards women. That seems to be the majority of the audience for these platforms. Yeah. I mean, I guess they're just starting out. How much is it typically for real shorts? I want to say, I think when we did that episode, it was around$40 to watch a whole - Unlimited? No, I think it was like$40 to watch a whole whatever you call it, movie of complete series. That's pricey. It is pricey. Yeah. I mean, there weren't cheap but they get you sucked into it but maybe i'm missing the price you know maybe it was like 40 a month for unlimited or it was i think it was like a token system yeah where you buy the credits and you use them to watch to unlock the other episodes but each you know quote series or you know movie it's they're like i think a movie length by the end of it just chopped up into like oh i see so like uh like a 90 minute feature would be 90 episodes or whatever i think they're longer i think they're like 10 minutes like it would be like nine episodes or 10 episodes of seven to nine minutes in length.

2:19Okay. Anyways, MicroCo, US born, going after this model, similar to the Quibi model. But the sort of headline with this is they're using AI to cut production costs down to make this profitable. That's interesting. And so the quote from the New York Times piece, by its own admission, Quibi failed in part because it spent too much on content, about$100 ,000 to$125 ,000 per minute with episodes as long as 10 minutes. So MicroCo, they are aiming, they're using another company they acquired call it intelligent animation and they developed an ai-assisted process and they're dropping the cost down to as little as 1500 per minute wow so that's the big jump i'm trying to see if this is just i think i guess animation's a separate part it's also super speculative that that's their cost because nothing's been produced yet yeah i mean i'm assuming they have yeah test runs it's like when elon said the cyber truck was going to be$40 ,000 or whatever.

3:12And it ended up being$90 ,000. Yeah. So I got actually, so yeah, I'm thinking of this, I mean, so they are expanding to other genres, including animation. So I mean, you can't really compare apples to apples with that. If you're saying you're going from 100 ,000 live action production to$1 ,500. Yeah, animation minute animation is definitely the more prime candidate to cut costs. Yeah, for AI, I think animation is the gateway, right? That was the first one where you could speed up things uh there yeah by comparison the chinese companies are spending as little as fifteen thousand dollars for an entire season that's still cheaper than these guys's price yeah yeah fifteen thousand dollars for an entire season episodes are a minute to three in length season stretch from 30 to 150 episodes i went to one of those buildings i went to one of those buildings where they do that in china yeah yeah it's like a full factory like there's thousands of people in a campus i bet i mean you're just cranking stuff out yeah But I feel like it's going full circle to the Hollywood system 100 years ago, where you're just like, it's a studio, and you just show up for the day, and you're just cranking out whatever content is for the day.

4:11Yeah. We don't have quite the manufacturing efficiency that China has, and that goes across the board. So this new venture, MicroCo, is headed by Lloyd Braun, Jane Winograde, Chris McGurk, and Susan Rovner. Now, these are very elite-level Hollywood execs. If you go through sort of their resume, they go anywhere from NBC to WME to Yahoo Media Group, which I was part of for a brief moment, as well as ABC Entertainment. So in a normal world without the shrinkage that the film industry suffered over the last couple of years, this team would be building an independent film studio, right? Like there would be no need to shift gears and try something new.

4:54But in today's climate with AI, with a different type of content economy going on, they're going all in on vertical shorts. Yeah. It's interesting. Yeah. I mean, yeah, that's what has been working with these other Chinese companies. Yep. Yeah. So, I mean, I, you know, I feel like I got suckered into some of the headlines around this too, because it was comparing apples to apples or it was comparing, made it sound like apples to apples of like, oh, Quibi was paying$150 ,000 per content minute and they're doing it for 1500 but digging into this article that's not the case quibia did live action for 150 000 they can do animation for 1500 a minute yeah compared to 15 000 to 60 000 per traditional animation minute yeah huge cut of cost i'm also curious i mean that how are they going to bring ai into the live action stuff and cut costs there yeah that's a great question so i don't know if it'll be like you know fully generated i don't think so i don't think i don't think i don't think scene extensions wide shots yeah this feels like tell me if I'm right this feels prime for if they invested in something like a their own virtual production setup in a studio so like not renting a studio but you're doing virtual production you're doing 2d 2.5d you're not building elaborate environments yeah and then you could just crank through the hospital scene yeah the outdoor scene uh you know if you have your whole grid rigged up with image based lighting Yeah, when I was in China, I went to a studio that does exactly this.

6:18I was there for the virtual production piece, but then I got a tour, and every floor had like a sound space. It was like the hospital. It was like the courtroom. Like a permanently built-out set. Yeah, so it's kind of similar to what LA Center Studios has here in LA. So if you go in there, you'll be like, oh, yeah, that's from RoboCop. That's from Law & Order. Oh, they have permanent standing sets? Yeah. I don't know if I knew it was a sound stage. Every floor is different. it's like a 15 story building or probably what um who's the youtuber i recovered his studio that he's building uh darman darman yeah probably what he's building out in la too where he's building out a big studio system with i think semi-permanent sets yeah vp makes perfect sense but i'm guessing at this price point they're looking past any sort of high-tech stuff except for ai yeah i mean i don't know but if they built out it built it out themselves would it make more sense to have it for to have their own stage or they could just keep everything on location like at their studio versus is oh hey we need to go on share grid and or on pure space and rent out a house or rent out this to do a yeah like location because i've seen a lot of um behind the scenes posts of people here doing vertical traumas and they usually like go to an established location because obviously it's a lot cheaper than doing a set build but you're still like well we got to go to location we got to like have the crew there if you could just build a empty warehouse space with a couple led walls and semi-permanent studios and everyone's there all the stuff's there how much more efficient would you be they need to hire joey for this this is your you're like and then you can just generate the background you know scene extensions yeah yeah i'm curious how they're gonna generate all the plates with ai right yeah i mean also like if you're going vertical too you don't have to worry about having oh you know what they need shots you just need to have tall shots they need a view one system yes they need that they need that is perfect for they need the view studio yeah that's coming out with some new features yes which have a new video dropping about that this week all right there you go i mean it's just i'm not plugging view i do love you but i'm not plugging but it's this this makes total sense video is coming out this week but it is coming out this week okay awesome awesome yeah no but that's also what's been in my mind because yeah it's like they built this whole system now with integrated lighting uh and it's just like oh if you just have a tablet yeah and you have your background you have your whole lighting grid rigged up awesome oh and the other thing i was gonna say this is not an apples to apples comparison with Quibi.

8:35If you remember in the late 2019, when Jeffrey was on stage with like literally every A-level talent, they all sort of supported the launch of Quibi. A big portion of the Quibi expense was the A-level talent. Like the fact that Brad Pitt and like, you know, all these, Sandra Bullock and all these people were on the shorts demanded that price tag. Yeah. Because they brought the names too. Yeah. I mean, I feel like they were trying to adapt the early kind of netflix playbook to get into original content yeah but for a short form vertical and i was just a different a different beast a different thing you know uh it's funny you say so katzenberg jeffrey katzenberg who did quibi also founded dream works and comes from disney he did the lion king aladdin all those disney hits from the 90s he more or less invented putting celebrities in animated films oh like to have that voice just that headline right like uh when robin williams was aladdin like that was that was his creation right and even though you don't really see the likeness of robin williams his voice and the fact that he's in the movie made that a much bigger movie and that was sort of the same dna that quibi had you know that's like the big name and the big sticker will carry that content into another realm that was the idea then the pandemic it was was what really i mean i know that yeah I don't know.

9:59I mean, I think the costs are just too high for trying to make something that when you look at TikTok and it's like, okay, you could pay zero for your content costs and they do way better. It's just a different medium. Okay. You know, I have a soft spot for Jeffrey. Yeah. I'm glad they were able to do something crazy, but yeah, I just don't think it was the right medium. It's nice to see it re-imagined in today's world. The other thing I've been thinking of with these vertical shorts is, I mean, look, we've called them soap operas and they usually either like the craziest titles like you know i fell in love with like my werewolf box or you'll be titles these are from the chinese app real short selling my virginity to the mafia king and pregnant by my ex my ex's professor dad uh are just two of the titles from the chinese those are very much ai generated titles hey chat gpt give me the wildest good crap for ai slop but it's like you can find slop anywhere you look or whatever you want to call it how can this expand to other genres like why does it always have to be the soap opera genre besides they're pretty cheap and easy produce and they you know suck you in telenovelas are the same telenovelas yeah can this work with so cineverse is one of the companies involved in this project too and they produced terrifier 3 which oh that was great dude that is classic so they have a whole slate of other movies like actual movies and stuff and ip that they've produced so it's like yeah could this work with horror could this work with action like robert robert rodriguez is trying to kind of crowdfund a company to produce low budget action films yeah yeah i'm wondering like can you get other genres that work on this format too like why does it have to be soap operas i think uh one of the genres that easily plugs in so they're looking at stuff that's ultra low cost right they want low cost and they want to know that like what this ultra low cost with a high high roi like a guaranteed return on investment one of the things one of the reasons what we've seen a lot of horror movies is because of exactly that it's like relatively cheap like uh you know if you look at hereditary and all the saw the saw movies the saw to produce make a lot of money under 10 million it's going to make 100 million plus at the box so i think horror could be another genre that easily fits into this now provided how do you how do you deliver that horror hit at a micro level at an episodic level i think that's that's the challenging bit yeah you need a good jump scare you need some scares and you need you know a cliffhanger ending to keep people being like i gotta fight watch the next one because horror movies as you know like the way they're designed there's a long investment there's a payoff investment payoff like it's quite the arc and i don't know how you would re-engineer it essentially for micro formatting yeah yeah yeah i'm just curious it's like can this work with other genres yeah i would say like get some uh like the left the darmans of the world and the you know elite level youtube creators in there because they understand short form content better than anybody else and get them to consult on other genres.

12:48Yeah. Okay. Next one. Yeah. So I, as, as you're on X all the time, I'm on LinkedIn, just scrolling, doom scrolling, looking at AI stuff. And yeah, I'll say like 90 % of it is AI slop. You know this, I know this, but every once in a while I'm like, Oh, this looks amazing. Who is this guy? And then so I connected with it looks like a digital effects supervisor at Digital Domain, Greg T. Garden. Shout out to Greg. And he's posting stuff that not a lot of people are looking at, like this post with the Will Smith one at the Oscars. That would only got like nine. Yeah. Yeah. And this one is he used Pavarotti's performance.

13:32Yeah. Singing opera to drive an image of Will Smith. yeah and the way he's doing it is uh he's using a local instance of comfy ui and we covered this on the comfy episode like it's so powerful what you could do with one 2.1 and comfy and he's using a couple of lauras and a couple of control net things stuff like fantasy portrait and multi-talk uh the will smith episode is only 873 frames so it's not like super crazy to do that actually is impressive though because you know if you do anything else with trying to drive a character performance on AI with like the public tools a lot of them are going to have a well except for that new Pika update that came out that said it could be on any duration but for the most part you know it's going to be 10, 15 second limit this that he's running locally on his computer and doing 30 second continuous shot is impressive in itself yeah absolutely and this is for me this is a big inspiration and it's what I talked about a couple episodes ago if you're an established vfx artists you've done vf i mean in this guy's instance decades of vfx you have the eye like you know what looks good and you know how to fix it you know how to address those things you're just applying that eye into a new skill set into ai tool sets and that's exactly what greg is doing and the results are fantastic like from all the quote-unquote filmmaker stuff i've seen versus his stuff his stuff is much closer to what feature film is although it's not quite there yet but it's it's almost like one guy running this on his computer on his computer with minimal resources you know really good what was the uh the alien demo yeah so for those of you who've seen uh alien romulus shout out to freddy alvarez uh i attended that panel with freddy at uh at dgb dga last year directors guild and uh we saw behind the scenes of like oh we built a practical alien he was seven foot tall and they went back to the basics like like they're like we're not gonna vfx everything although they did end up vfxing a lot of it and i think ilm did a lot of that and um for the scene i don't want to ruin the movie for you guys but there is i still haven't seen it yeah so this is this happens uh right after alien one so ian holmes's cyborg character is in there and there is a shot where he's basically dismantled by alien so his torso is just leaning up against the computer and he's talking he's warning the team about the dangers ahead So, for that scene, they used a prosthetic Ian Holmes.

16:01And the way they built Ian Holmes is they took his, because he was in Lord of the Rings and he passed away, with permission from his family, they took his digital mold from Lord of the Rings and they cast it in silicon. So, Lord of the Rings had done a digital scan of him? Right. Okay. Right. And so, you would think that that looks, because it's practical, it looks pretty good, but it was so into the Uncanny Valley. It was like the worst shot of the film. And Fetty knew it. So when the director's cut came out, he replaced that practical shot with a VFX version of it. And so what Greg Teigen did is he took that and put it through AI.

16:37And I think out of the three versions, his version looks the best. And he took the original shot from the movie or the VFX fixed shot and then tweaked that one? So I'm guessing here what exactly he did. So I'm guessing he took one shot from the film. He plussed it with AI as a single image. Yeah. So now you have Ian Holmes' reference image. And then he took the motion from the film to animate Ian Holmes. But Juan did the image to video. Yeah, because I'm looking here. It says he took a single reference frame and video driver. Yeah. So it definitely lost a lot of the uncanny valley characteristics.

17:15It does look more lifelike. You lose the ability, as of right now, you have to have a static shot. So you lose the ability to move the camera. Move the camera. But yeah, I mean, looks really good. Looks really good. So yeah, I just wanted to point that out that there are some excellent trial and errors and experimentations going on in the VFX community as we're all going through this revolution. The other test I like to add up to was using WAN 2.2, which is a more recent model, which we talked about on the episode, to have more specific control over driving motion. So you see the Dolphin one. So it basically just has like three white dots on a black frame and he's using these dots to drive the motion of the image yeah with these dolphins chiming out of the water yeah having temporal control uh specifically with subjects is such a hard thing as you know and so i think there's definitely a control land in there that's receiving those dots and then influencing the generation but the fact that he's able to figure all this out on a local pc yeah but also bring it in control because i mean we've talked about that a bunch too it's like just having more of that control in ai is like the missing gap for traditionally the effects artists and you know him messing around and being able to figure it out yeah is a step in the right direction yeah somebody could look at this dolphin example and immediately dismiss it like oh that's not photoreal that look the water looks like gel and it's gonna get there we can as a matter of fact you can already fix it now you can then put this through another video generation model and apply a detail insertion model and all that stuff you can already fix it now but the fact that he's able to attach a control to it very specific temporal control that's i think that's money oh i did want to say something about uh when 2.2 because when we talked about it i was like i tried to run it on the computer and it took like 45 minutes to generate one video yeah there have been a lot of improvements people figuring out how to run it through some lauras and some other uh reconfigure the workflow to make it a lot more efficient and yeah so i did another test a little bit lower resolution but that was able to spit out some videos in like two minutes oh so uh with the 14 billion parameter model what was the secret there well if you do the updated workflow that they have the default workflow in uh on comfy it now runs through i don't remember the specific laura name and how that exactly works but it runs through some new laura workflows that speed up the process i need to figure out more of the science how did you get the workflow it's they have it they built out the one released it comfy ui if you go to their workflow template section and load up one so So two minutes for how long?

19:49For about five seconds. That's really good. At a lower resolution. I don't remember. I think I might have done full HD in my first test. But even I cranked up a little to 720p. And that was maybe five minutes. It's good enough for like prototyping. And then you're like, I want this shot at 1080p. Then you go in and let it. Yeah, or make it and then upscale it with like Topaz or something. Yeah. You know, maybe crank it up higher if you're doing a shot that has like, It's a wider shot and has a lot more details where you don't want to lose the details in the video. So maybe crank it up for that.

20:20But for a close-up of a face or something, you can keep the resolution kind of low, spit it out quicker, and then up-res it after the fact. For sure. We covered this a few episodes ago. There is enhancer.ai, which is a model that inserts skin detail and turns plastic skin into real skin. Was that just for still photos? Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, but maybe you can run that. So you generate a video and use that as motion reference. And then the enhancer image is now your new video generation. And then you do another video generation that has more detail. Does that make sense? Say that again. Okay. So let's say with this dolphin example, you have control over the dolphin.

21:02It comes out. But now you want a photoreal version of this. So you take it to enhancer. Enhancer does a photoreal detail insertion. and then you use that as reference to generate another video with the motion influence from the first oh i see what you're saying so you kind of know you have that the movement down that you want you just crank up to do a higher resolution yeah yeah so it's like a photo reel pass yeah with a higher resolution but you say you just wait longer but you know like this will be more like the final shot yeah the dolphin skin is going to be accurate the water will have more you know reflections and all that on it yeah yeah yeah could be work yeah okay be a good trial workflow yep all right and then the last collection of stories uh just come shifts or some new updates ish in the ever-evolving world of physical production i don't keep up anymore it's gotten so out of control with so many different cities and countries just you know vying for hollywood production yeah like it seems like every day that now there's like like malaysia and indonesia and like the all the far corners around that too yeah it's just like all over the world i mean here in the u.s and it's an absolute battle right like for every state and now obviously texas new jersey california and atlanta and georgia those are the big four but if you look under that there's like a second tier list there's nevada yeah but i believe the nevada one uh because there was like that weiner brother studio that was going to get built there that's sort of pushed by mark walberg but mark walberg but yeah I don't think the tax incentives for the state ended up passing okay which the studio is kind of banking on so I think that's on hold for now yeah but the one state that's been able to make a real dent is Texas really and yeah like with Matthew McConaughey remember he went to the Texas Senate and stuff so yeah other update from Texas Taylor Sheridan from Yellowstone big deal with Paramount Plus they are going to be building a new a massive new film studio in Texas Taylor Sheridan man what a prolific filmmaker I think he is one of the guys of our lifetime and especially in this current era you have you know like him Christopher Nolan Denis Villeneuve and like there's like a handful of filmmakers that are just killing it so I got turned out to him with Hell or High Water this was almost like 10 years ago it was with Chris Pine and Ben Foster and Jeff Bridges I mean, it's like, I love Westerns.

23:28It's like, how do you take the Western formula and pop it into the 2010s? And he did that really successfully. Amazing film. Obviously, he went on to have success with Yellowstone and then the prequels, 1923 and I think 1886, other prequels. He also did Mayor of Kingstown with Jeremy Renner. That's on Paramount. I'm going to say Tulsa King with Stallone is also in. That was that part of him too, yeah. But I mean, it's definitely most known for Yellowstone and all the spinoffs. And like Yellowstone is the biggest thing Paramount has. Oh, yeah. That's like a billion dollar franchise. Yeah. So like that alone makes them very valuable to Paramount.

24:03I mean, I see Yellowstone toys in the toy section. Landman was the other show. Landman. Landman. That's great. In the Yellowstone universe. With Billy Bob. Yeah. Yeah. This guy's killing it with TV shows. Yeah. So they're building this new studio in Texas that is going to be part of the Alliance Texas campus, a 27 ,000 acre development owned by billionaire Ross Perot. You say 27 ,000 acres? I think that's the entire campus. I don't know what else is on this campus. That's like the land that Kevin Costner owns in Yellowstone. It's like that size. But it is owned by billionaire Ross Perot Jr. Oh, really?

24:38Yeah, I remember Ross Perot. Oh, yeah, dude. Yeah. Yeah. Those big Texas names like George Bush and Ross Perot, they still run that state in a weird way. Yeah. So this, I'm assuming is the sun the film campus is composed of two buildings with six sound stages that can support four large-scale production simultaneously right it is expected to be the home base for such sheridan produced shows as land band and lioness yeah oh lioness was the other i don't know what is behind lioness with uh zoe sildana yeah more of like an action film also in paramount yeah so he's basically the paramount king of paramount plus yeah content they needed to work and so yeah building a studio there in texas yeah where he's based makes sense and then the other article came about too was uh sort of about marvel we've talked about a bit about marvel yeah kind of leave their home base for all their stuff was atlanta yeah trillith studios for a while um but now they're switching to london they're saying because of i don't know if it's spinewood specifically or a custom-built studio in um oh why are they leaving georgia that that's a big blow for george uh labor costs really like that london or england has similar tax incentives but that the labor costs is less there than Atlanta.

25:49I find that hard to believe that the labor costs and that the entire, the cost of shooting overseas versus like keeping it here, that it's that, that is that drastically different. I mean, both places are heavily incentivized. I'm curious how this math works out. Yeah, exactly. The one thing I could think of, and this is typical with any London versus America productions is healthcare is free. They don't have to pay for healthcare. That's another one. That's like a big one. And I think some of the other sort of like social security whatever benefits you have to roll into the wages yeah so on top of the wages you spend the fringe benefits yeah i don't i don't know if they even exist in england or if it just uh i don't know england is met well but yeah in the u.s it's like on top of the rate you pay people you have to pay the fringe benefits yeah yeah the whatever retirement stuff and the health care stuff and all the other extra stuff on top of but even in the current salary u.s labor market uh uh, Atlanta is so much cheaper than LA, right?

26:45Like just cost of living and how much people expect to earn. So I would think that would be a more of a one-to-one with London. I, that's what you initially think of too. You know, I mean, my thought too was, I suspect there's something bigger at play here. I don't know. I mean, my thought too, what the frame of this article was like, cause it was a Wall Street Journal article, Disney's Marvel abandoned Georgia taking livelihoods with it. I mean, look in general too, like Marvel was cranking out stuff, you know, they painted a picture of just how like, you know, a trail of sound stages were packed and they couldn't fit stuff in because there's so many movies being produced marvel movies but uh marvel itself is just like toned down the amount of stuff they're making yeah in general too like i mean they're only they only had one or two films this year they're having like two films next year they're not doing the four four films and tv shows yeah they just sort of oversaturated with how much stuff they're making so you know it's like okay maybe some of it did move to london but they just weren't gonna be making that as much anyways yeah um But it also kind of reminds me, it makes me think of, you see Mad Men?

27:42Remember like the Lucky Strike issue? Refresh my memory. Lucky Strike, like one of the season one or two, like one of the main story, like Lucky Strike, the cigarette company was like their main client, was like 80 % of their revenue. Yeah. And, you know, then eventually they're like, we're going to switch agencies. And it's like, that's going to kill them. Yeah. Because that is like their one and only client, like their main client that like funds everything. And so I always keep thinking of that with, you know, when you have your like one client funding a lot of your stuff, like you don't want to have the lucky strike problem.

28:11Right. So, you know, Marvel was Atlanta and Trillis lucky strike. Yeah. And whether they move, pull out and move to London or just, you know, they're also making less stuff. You still, you know, you want to think of other ways to do this. You want to diversify your opportunities, your revenue, all that stuff. Yeah. Yeah. And Trillis themselves, you know, Frank Patterson, the head of Trillis, like I say, and like this is cyclical and we'll have other productions and, you know, accommodate other stuff. And they have a good kind of incubator program too, where they're trying to like use it to like raise more local filmmakers and talent and stuff to develop shows and use the facilities.

28:41So I think they're smart and forward thinking with that way. Yeah. So many people from LA moved to Atlanta like 10, 15 years ago to have a career there. Right. So they definitely have the talent pool in Atlanta. And that's the other thing I was going to tell you about Texas is like, yeah, you can build 27 ,000 acre campus. You need the talent and the infrastructure. But how much flying in are you going to do? Like you can't fly a whole crew to LA for every production. Philip has a, a like mini city. Yeah. With like houses and schools and stuff for like, you know, the, the, the above the line talent that they bring in for them to like, you know, comfortably live and be there for a few months.

29:17Yeah. Yeah. I mean, look, Georgia has kept up with the, with the incentives and stuff, but it reminds me of just the last 20 years or so where, you know, I remember when Florida had incentives and a lot more stuff was shooting in Miami and the bulk of it was burn notice it took i think the bulk of the tax and that's a good show it was yeah and it shot locally in Miami and like it captured a lot of stuff in Miami yeah uh and then and then New Orleans had tax incentives for a while and a lot of shops packed up in Florida moved to New Orleans and set up shop there a lot of the post houses and uh development labs and stuff when that was still relevant yeah and then Atlanta picked up and then everyone moved to Atlanta so it's sort of like New Orleans winded down this is like they hop around yeah uh yeah new orleans i don't know that one show on showtime with brian cranston i don't know if you guys saw it it's called your honor right right yeah oh yeah dude such a slept on show that was shot all over new orleans that's right that's true yeah and um the true blood shoot in new orleans i mean it was kind of based in it does feel like it doesn't i mean it feels like it i don't know if they actually did shoot there yeah no there's so many things that were shot you're like wait why is everything in new orleans why There's a bayou everywhere.

30:23Yeah, exactly. But yeah, New Orleans has a lot of good character. But the state, yeah, they pushed the tax incentives, and then I think they stopped, and then it moved to Atlanta. That is the nature of the film business, isn't it? Like, what's after London? Is it – because I hear that now incentives went to Austria, and obviously Czech Republic has had it for a long time, and now Croatia is opening its doors. i mean i i would i'm not an economics expert too but i would also guess that london works now too because the dollar versus the pound yes is yeah not is weaker than dollar will be strong against the pound so it's almost one-to-one right like before right before it was like the pound was like so much more expensive the pound was like two dollars was a pound yeah so there was like to convert and pay there would be would cost you way more u.s dollars yes but now it's not such a big deal anymore.

31:15Right. For now. Yeah. So London is cheaper for now. If the markets and economy change with the dollar to pound conversion rates, then it might not be as appealing or as cost effective to hire UK labor. I agree. And, you know, somebody at Marvel that's, you know, calculating all this stuff, they probably have a very complex algorithm to decide yes or no. People are crunching these numbers and making multiple versions of budgets. They're not stupid people. No, like their entire job is to crunch numbers of budgets and like factor in the tax incentives and what you get for this and yeah i mean look the goal is annoying as it is the goal is to keep making stuff yeah at a budget which is like the goal with you know all of these crazy hop and skip tax incentives and things and also ai and all of that stuff it's just like with shrinking budgets how can we still make these things possible yeah and the reality is the box office has shrunk and we don't expect it to go back to 1990s levels so now we have to work at a reduced capacity it's just how do you have the same level of quality and the same number of movies with a reduced budget.

32:13Well, and maybe let's end on a shinier note. What did you see about LA tax applications? Oh, yes. So, you know, recently California upped it to$750 billion. And I think there was some stuff that was passed to reduce the red tape in the city of LA for film production. It went up by 400%. That's awesome. That's good. I mean, it's such good news for us Angelenos. Joey, you're now an Angeleno. Angeleno. at heart for a while. No, like we could feel it here that productions have sort of shifted away because growing up you drive down any big street like 3rd Street in LA or Ventura Boulevard here in the Valley and it's like, oh, there's a production there, there, there, there.

33:00You can see the trucks outside. You can see the crew. You can see the craft services line. I know, yeah. I mean, yeah, I remember visiting as a kid in a while and it's just like, oh, production here, production there. everywhere um i rarely see that rarely see that now what a few months ago i did see one of the craziest car driving process caravans okay that i've ever seen and i could not kind of piece together what was happening and it happened the past so quick i couldn't get a shot of it but it was like a very impressive like multi-car crop process rig of like follow vans and like the car on the platform with like a couple other stuff the old school way the old school way but like in a more elaborate fashion than i've ever seen built and i don't know what they're shooting or what where they're trying to do yeah maybe second to if you've seen any of the behind the scenes like the spider-man stuff that they're shooting techno crane cars and following no it wasn't that elaborate because they were on regular streets and so they had the police escort but they were still just driving down normal streets yeah but have you seen the spider-man the stuff they're shooting and um the rig was being driven by a car with the crane with the the tank yeah and then And the stuntman was, I hope that wasn't actually the talent.

34:05I don't know. But the behind-the-scenes photo coming out of that have looked like an actual Spider-Man. Yeah. Oh, also, on a happy LA note, did you see all the Once Upon a Time sequel stuff at Highland Park? Oh, that they're shooting there. Yeah. Yeah. I've seen some of those shots. Dude, that entire main street has been converted into the 1960s. That's awesome. Oh, there's like CRT TVs and stuff. Yeah. Actually, speaking back of actual... actual well wait first off though i didn't want to i think you said 750 billion dollars it's million the tax instead of us sadly but i just wanted to clarify yeah why would it be billion i'm sorry yeah we're not saudi arabia out here but uh you know speaking back to physical production i remember when they shot school school of rock house of rock what was the tom cruise it was the broadway play that they adapted into a musical with tom cruise it's not school of rock that's the jack rock rock of ages rock of ages i think so they shot it in miami and i remember they turned like a whole block area that was normally just like shuttered up and and and run down into like 1980s uh storefronts and stuff and i was like driving through and they hadn't like closed the streets off yet and i was like driving i was like what wait what is all this time travel it's literally time where am i and then i realized that they were shooting the movie there yeah that see that's the kind of stuff that i hope you don't do with ai but unfortunately i think they're gonna to do with the AI.

35:25Some stuff, but I think we'll still have some other practical stuff. Yeah. Always. All right. It's about to wrap it up. Yeah. Good episode. Thank you to those of you who have commented on the latest episode on Nano Banana. Yeah. Thanks to everyone that found Nano Banana on Google. Yes. If you're just new to the show. We come with early updates because no one else was talking about Nano Banana until after the fact. That's right. Yeah. And you heard about MicroCo here first. Yes. Yeah. Thanks for everything we talked about as usual at denoisepodcast.com. Yeah, thanks for watching. See you on the next one.