HITS

In 2012 Bluescape launched as a joint venture between contract furnishings specialist Haworth and Obscura Digital, a creative studio specializing in immersive digital design.

And when the technological value of the visual collaboration platform became clear — providing unreal time, efficiency and cost savings for Haworth — the company took full control of Bluescape, spinning it off as a separate company, and expanding its availability to other industries, including media and entertainment.

Amin Tavana, VP of enterprise sales for Bluescape, took time with MESA to share how the M&E industry has latched on to the software-as-a-service, Bluescape’s crucial discussion to offer mobile availability during the pandemic, and why integration of existing, industry-specific applications and proprietary tools is a must.

MESA: In short, what is Bluescape, and what does it offer for the M&E industry?

Tavana: Bluescape is an infinite, collaborative workspace designed to accelerate decision-making by enabling anyone to create, communicate, visualize, organize, and strategize virtually anything, anywhere, anytime. The Bluescape Workspace is a common area on which everyone can share content, view other content, and make edits that all can see. Through this new technology platform, decision-makers and product development teams are able to improve global communication and problem-solving with teams and executives around the world.

MESA: The pandemic has resulted in more distributed production teams than the industry ever considered possible. What has the last year meant for Bluescape’s business, and how has the company adapted its solutions to the changing needs of M&E companies?

Tavana: The ongoing pandemic has forced many businesses to shift to remote working. Creating a reliable replacement communication system is crucial to maintaining workflow in a remote environment. Bluescape allows people to stay informed about their co-workers’ activity without requiring manual check-in. All work product is stored and updated in a virtual location, for easy access and up-to-date review.

At first, Bluescape was primarily used as a large touchscreen display, often stretched over an entire wall. This is still extremely useful for film studios using Bluescape as a storyboard. The “Aha!” for Bluescape was realizing “What if we could take this experience on the go?” That really sparked Bluescape’s evolution into the solution it is today, where users can access a central, visual workspace from anywhere and on any device.

The film industry has long relied on in-person production at entertainment hubs like Hollywood and New York, but now more than 40 leading movie studios, including Lionsgate, are virtually editing and producing movies/shows from beginning to end on Bluescape, meaning production can happen anywhere and at any time.

MESA: One of the first concerns around remote collaboration tools revolves around security and locking down assets. How does Bluescape go about ensuring the protection of intellectual property used via your services?

Tavana: Federal agencies, Fortune 100 companies, and leaders in media and entertainment trust Bluescape with their most critical and sensitive content and projects. Customers can choose from multiple deployment options including public cloud, a virtual private instance, and on-premises, to meet their security and architecture needs.

Bluescape works in both public and private cloud environments to bring everyone on the project together in one secure workspace and control their access to content based on their roles.

The Bluescape virtual work platform meets all federal authority to operate (ATO) security controls and General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) requirements. Bluescape is cloud-agnostic to let customers decide how they want IT operations to be conducted on their networks. Bluescape authenticates using a SAML-based SSO and offers secure integrations with external applications. Through multiple proven accreditations and deployments by the federal government, Bluescape offers robust security, increased agility, and cost savings with flexible deployment options.

Integrating existing industry-specific applications and proprietary tools is a must for many M&E firms.

MESA: What does Bluescape offer to guarantee clients that their workflow needs are met without any hitches?

Tavana: With a completely open ecosystem, it’s easy to integrate the tools that work best to meet individual needs. Bluescape features integrations https://www.bluescape.com/why-bluescape/integrations/#integrations-library with products from Adobe, Amazon Chime, Cisco, Google, Microsoft, Zoom, and others.

Bluescape takes an open approach across the entire company starting with a platform that fully integrates with other tools and applications. This delivers added value to different working groups, opening up lines of communications and eliminating barriers that siloed applications create among teams. Bluescape also encourages open collaboration across and outside of the enterprise.

MESA: What are some of Bluescape’s favorite use case stories in the media and entertainment space, and why?

Tavana: Around concept and art development, with Bluescape teams of creatives at work in any medium can see the story, script, characters, costumes, and worlds develop side-by-side for more efficient collaboration and continuous consistency across deliverables. It’s easy to integrate your workflow applications like Adobe CC directly into the workspace.

Jon Bokenkamp, creator and executive producer of “The Blacklist” said: “Bluescape is the next best thing to being there in person. It puts me in the room in a way that lets me see and understand the tone of what’s happening and how ideas are received and lets me interact in real-time as the story takes shape.”

For producers, now everyone in the project has real-time visibility into schedules, budgets, tasks, and ancillary data as it emerges. You stay fluid and flexible, and keep things moving forward without becoming the bottleneck of administrative communications. Import live data and visualizations from project management tools like Shotgun.

On the marketing side, Bluescape users can see the entire story of the project as it develops from concept to release, then build on the momentum as you execute your strategy for publicity and advertising. With Bluescape you can securely share assets and review concepts with vendors, agencies, and partners as you build out your broadcast, digital, social, and OOH campaigns. Keep everyone on the project in the know through integrated video conferencing and communications tools.

Aaron Michaelson, president of entertainment marketing agency Concept Arts, said about Bluescape: “Technology for us is not just something that’s fancy or cool, it has to impact the way we work in positive ways. The ability to use Bluescape to show the necessity of every part of the process and how we work is going to be incredible.”

MESA: What’s next for Bluescape, what advances and offerings can we expect from you next?

Tavana: With Bluescape you have persistent connectivity and productivity to allow for better, faster, and smarter decision making from concept development to production, and on through marketing and distribution.

Bluescape enables you to bring images, videos, documents, and applications all together in one infinite container to view them side-by-side. Imagine your storyboards next to location photos, next to production stripboards, next to budgets, next to dailies, next to the weather forecast all on one screen at the same time.

We’ll continue to partner with other organizations where technologies and offerings can enhance one another. Bluescape has partnered with Adobe to create a Bluescape plugin for Adobe Creative Cloud that enables teams to work collectively in applications like Adobe Illustrator, Photoshop, InDesign, and XD. And with Adobe Sensei, these collaborative sessions are made even more intelligent.

We unleash new ways for people to work, meet and interact with content and industry-leading applications, using Dell’s interactive multi-touch screen monitors and touch-enabled devices.

And Bluescape and Amazon Web Services (AWS) are collaborating to deliver secure and virtual workspaces for teams to generate ideas, make decisions, and solve problems.