HITS

CULVER CITY, Calif. — Amazon Studios and its Media Engineering and Innovation (MEI) team take an artist-first approach to designing and supporting creative and technical postproduction spaces and systems. Or, as Jonathon Lee, head of media engineering and innovation for Amazon Studios, puts it: “Service to the story. That drives everything we do.”

Speaking May 23 during the opening keynote presentation at the Hollywood Innovation and Transformation Summit (HITS) at The Culver Theater, Lee shared insights around the benefits his studio enjoys.

The combination of technology and storytelling that Amazon delivers is unrivaled, he said. In a time where the pace at which technology innovations are impacting the creation of content is both rapid and accelerating, Amazon Studios is delivering revolutionary innovations impacting every corner of the content workflow ecosystem.

“We probably have the most advanced production pipeline of any studio right now,” Lee said. Lee was given the reigns when Amazon built its own film and TV production studio from the ground up, something he compared to raising a child. “When you build something from scratch, do you copy what everyone else is doing, or do you do something bold and different,” Lee said. “We look for ways to more efficiently expand storytelling’s power.”

Thanks to its history as a technology company, and with the power of Amazon Web Services (AWS) behind it, Amazon Studios can produce TV and films using a pure cloud production ecosystem, Lee said. “It gives time back to storytellers, lets them work wherever they want, work whenever they want, and dissolves geography as a barrier,” he said.

And it has actual, measurable cost savings, which Amazon Studios discovered when the production of one TV series was the first to use nothing but the cloud to manage its dailies workflow, and delivered a savings metric that was eye-opening for Amazon, and should be for other studios as well.

It was apt that Lee was delivering his keynote at The Culver Theater: It was mid-December of 2022 that Amazon took over the 12-screen, shuttered ArcLight Cinemas multiplex in Culver City, transforming half the screens into a post-production space. With two 8K, high-dynamic range (HDR) screens — one for the public and one for content creators — “this building itself is an example of innovation and transformation,” Lee said.

“We’re excited to bring these [capabilities] to our visual storytellers.”

The Hollywood Innovation and Transformation Summit event was produced by MESA in association with the Hollywood IT Society (HITS) and presented by Amazon Studios Technology, with sponsorship by Fortinet, Genpact, Prime Focus Technologies, Signiant, Softtek, Convergent, Gracenote, Altman Solon, AppTek, Ascendion, Coresite, EPAM, MicroStrategy, Veritone, CDSA, EIDR and PDG Consulting.