Delivering the Final Cut with Jijo Reed

0:20  

Welcome to On Production, the podcast dedicated to the art, craft and business of Film and Television. I'm your host, Cameron Woodward, and today I'm speaking with someone who, after doing some research, I think, is an awesome visionary and has reshaped a lot of what it means to bring stories to life after the camera stops rolling in post. So you know, my guest today is Jijo Reed. He's an Emmy Award winning producer and the founder of Sugar Studios, which is an all in one post production powerhouse my old neighborhood's historic Wiltran Theater in Los Angeles. Jijo's fingerprints are on more than 60 feature films and also in something that I think is pretty astonishing, and I can't wait to ask you about Jijo is one of the few filmmakers who's personally visited the Titanic wreck site, and I cannot wait to learn more about that. So let's get started. So Jijo, when I was doing my research, I found out that your grandfather was actually the voice of Fred Flintstone, and you grew up in a family that worked in Hollywood. Did you feel an obligation to follow a certain path in filmmaking, or was your career always sort of a journey of your own invention?

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1:31  

I think the answer would be kind of no to both of those. I don't know, a journey of my own invention. That sounds awesome, but I don't know that is the case, I'll tell you. Yeah, definitely. My grandfather was the voice of Fred Flintstone, and it was great growing up with that and, and, of course, even way before I was born, he he did all kinds of movies and and he was a big radio personality in the in the 40s and 50s, and then he did a lot of TV guests, guest appearances. He was in Breakfast at Tiffany's. He was Sally tomato in the guy in Sing, sing, prison and breakfast at Tiffany so. But as far as my connection in in the industry now, I mean, he died in 1977 I was, you know, 10 years old when he died. Yeah, we did grow up in and around Hollywood in the San Fernando Valley, but I my family, I wouldn't call us a an entertainment family, while, yes, my grandfather and my uncle were definitely in the industry there, the peak of their careers were, you know, before I was even born. And and I Yeah, so I don't really see it as, like, I wish I could have benefited somehow. It would have probably helped me in my struggles in the early years. If, if there was, you know, a bunch of connections that were offered to me through my through my grandfather or my uncles. But you know, I was a waiter in the valley as a teenager, as a waiter at Jerry's Deli. I washed cars, I detailed cars, washed cars. I even shined shoes at a barber shop when I was, like, 15 years old or 14 years old. No, I think it's completely separate. It's just by chance that I was able to find a home in this industry. It and, and also, but, but just being born and raised in the city and being pretty active in social circles and and just knowing a lot of people, and plus, I had five brothers and sisters. I do. I have five brothers and sisters, including a twin sister. And primarily we were, I would classify us more as like a music family. My brother worked. My brother Chuck worked at Interscope Records for 30 years, side by side with Jimmy Ivine, since the since day one, supporting Jimmy and all of his is producing and everything. And my other brother, Jimmy was a musician and a bunch of La bands. And my twin sister, she's a chef. My other brother, Mike is he installs tile in bathrooms and kitchens and all over the valley. So my mom's an artist, and my dad is in advertising. So I got into this business just by needing a steady gig back in the late 80s, became a driver, a messenger for a trailer company, a company in Beverly Hills that did produce movie trailers, and I was just a messenger. And I'm so glad that just by chance, I got into that part of the industry, because, and mind you, when I got into this company, I didn't have any production experience or anything. It was strictly a I was a messenger. But every day, I was surrounded by these talented artists and technicians at a trailer house, which had every aspect of film post production in one place, because that's what that's the difference between how the trailer how they like film marketing and trailers and TV spots to create all those. So there's these agency houses, there's companies that specialize in doing trailers. It's not just done on the studio back lot, where I think that there's a general misconception, maybe less now, but there's a general misconception that movie trailers are just created by the studio, by the filmmakers of that film or happen on the studio a lot? Oh, they're just going to condense the movie and make a two minute trailer. No, there's a whole industry of houses that create theatrical, advertising, media and and the reason I bring that up is because what's so unique about the model of movie trailers, as opposed to the model of post production in feature films is with trailers. It's all done in one house. Now. These are, these are three, you know, two to three minute pieces of content. They're not full length features. It's easier to house all the post services for short form content in one location than it is for long form, for a number of reasons I won't get into, but

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6:05  

I have some questions for you about how you sort of did see this and then read them into the studio model. I'm sorry to interrupt you really quick, though, because you mentioned also that you came from a musical family, and I believe you were, you're a drummer yourself, right? So, like, I'm curious in what specific ways, sort of your your drumming background influenced your own personal editing style before you then actually went on and started building an integrated post sort of workflow in your own businesses. It's

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6:40  

a good question, and I haven't been asked that before, but it's, it's, it's an extremely valid question. You know, five of my employees that are artists here at Sugar are drummers, and as a drummer, it's about rhythm. Editing is about rhythm. It's about flow in a cut and having a musical sensibility. You know, my favorite editors, and our best editors are ones with with musicality in their in their souls. You know, people who can look at footage and just and visualize and feel how that how this take would work with that take in the scene with that scene, it's definitely, it just has to do with, I think, an internal, creative rhythm that musicians have, and especially drummers, because drummers are, I mean, by definition, you know, they're, they are keeping time and keeping rhythm. But, yeah, I think that when I was really editing, editing trailers. You know, you'd watch the cut, and you know, when you watch through watching, listening to a song, or you're watching a cut, you're, you're, basically see, I'm nodding my head. I'm just thinking about it. You're, you're feeling these different pick the pacing of the cut. And trailers are all about pacing, whether it's a stop and start or it's higher in the beginning, whatever the tempo changes throughout trailers. But they all have to be pretty rhythmic, you know, otherwise, something doesn't feel right. In fact, I just had a conversation yesterday. We were talking in one of our edit bays, and we were saying, how if the viewer notices the editing when they're watching something, it's probably not good. And the same is like when you're listening to a mix when you're watching a movie, if you're if there's something that's just sort of rubbing you or bumping you the wrong way, like editing, I think everything that we do with in post production is to and in editing, is to create a rhythmic flow that everyone can watch, watch these pieces of content, and just kind of be immersed and go along for the ride with it. It's like if you jump into a car, if the car is stopping and starting or, you know, chugging along, you're going to be kind of in the car, wondering what's going on in the car, and still be looking out the window, but it's much more enjoyable if you're just looking out the window and you're not worrying about how the car is running. And I think that could be a real crazy analogy, but it seems to make sense. You know, it's just, it's all about just going for a ride, you know, you tell me, am I crazy?

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9:24  

I know. I think it makes a lot of sense. There's a certain melody to it, you know. So you before I interrupted, you about your background as a drummer, and sort of how that infused into your observations and being an entrepreneur and building these businesses, you know, I think you were sort of describing, or starting to describe, sort of how you at Sugar studios have not necessarily challenged, but innovated in the trailer post production norms by really integrating full stack. Can you? Can you share a specific moment when you really saw where your unified approach you. Improved or even saved a project 100% and

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10:03  

just for clarification, what we did at Sugar suit is, is we applied the trailer model of all post services, the majority of post production services, under one roof. We just moved that over to specializing in independent, long form feature film. So just starting there. What that means is that we have in house at Sugar studios, we have editorial we have color correction, we have visual effects, and we have full sound, sound design and mix services and also deliverables, which is, once the film is completely done and ready to go to networks or distributors, we're able to to create all the assets that are needed for that. So, I mean, I could think of a number of occasions where perhaps we're in a color session, uh, a color correcting of a film, and this is at a stage in the process where you're working with the final files of a film, you're working with the camera masters that have been and we're color correcting and grading these files, and we're also working with all the visual effects that have, that have been created for this movie at that stage, hopefully, usually, there's been times where we've been in color correction, And for the first time, we're seeing this footage at a very high resolution. Because when you're editing a movie, you're not editing in high, high resolution typically, typically, you're working at a resolution that you may not be able to see every little pixel or thing that's going on. So if you have something like, let's say, visual effect shot, where a simple visual effect shot somebody like, let's say we were being filmed right now. If this was a scene in a movie, somebody having a podcast interview, what is happening on my laptop screen, this would just be blank when we're filming, right so that, and then we would composite the image and footage of what's happening on the screen later, so that we could edit back and forth and it remains consistent. So this is a, what's called a, we just call it like a monitor comp, monitor composite. We've noticed in color, we've gone in and now that we're seeing it in high resolution, we've noticed issues with this visual effects that we may have created, where maybe the edges of the screen, right here they are. Maybe the edges of the screen aren't lining up properly as the cameras moving, but we didn't maybe see that in a visual effects review before approving it. So now that we're seeing it at high resolution, we're noticing a flaw, a mistake or something that needs to be redone. Typically, that scenario would would cost be very costly, because let's take into account, for example, the color session that we're sitting in while looking at that high resolution. That's probably anywhere between 307 $100 per hour for that process, if we have something that stops where we have to go and reach out to a separate visual effects company, find the artist or the producer who handled that specific shot out of hundreds right in this movie, have him re, redo that shot, and then re, and send it back to us that could take a day, and so the client may have to pay for a whole day of color, when, when, while waiting for that shot, if that was towards the end of the session. So there's been numerous times where we were, oh, we see a little flaw. We just basically tell our visual effects team, hey, let's fix this comp. Boom. We can have it in 15 minutes, rerun in 15 minutes, and it's in the session. Happens in mix. While we're mixing a feature, we may notice something. Maybe there's a sound effect that isn't sounding right. You know, we can go to our sound department or sound designer who's in house, and boom, he can show some options, and we can drop him into the mix. So basically, when different aspects of post production are geographically in different places, right? If color is here and audio is in Burbank and visual effects are in Canada, right? It's not very easy, as in a quick scenario, to be able to call upon those various resources in times of need. That's

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14:24  

super helpful. You know, Jijo, you've embraced, in addition to the sort of full stack of your of your studio, some awesome advances in Dolby Atmos i You've mentioned AI driven tools, but you, even in our conversation, are like emphasizing the importance of human intuition, the musicality of it? Are there areas in your workflow where you are deliberately maintaining people and conversely, what emerging technologies excite you the most for their potential to you? Enhance creativity in these workflows.

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15:02  

You know, AI is exciting. And, you know, a lot of people are afraid of it in our industry, for both creative and financial reasons, because they think maybe certain jobs are, are, are at risk. And, and, you know, it's funny, because I, I'm asked about AI quite a bit, and, and as fast as AI technology is changing, it seems to be my opinion of AI kind of, I would say, changes. I still really feel that AI can be a very helpful is a helpful tool that helps make a lot of processes more efficient for both schedule and budget. It's been very helpful. It saved times. It has surprised us in in certain ways that it's been able to generate certain assets for us. You know, I feel personally that there's never a there can never be a real replacement for a human being, and it's one thing we're very conscious of here is that our filmmakers tell us all the time they really, they've, they like the, quote, unquote, the vibe. There's really no vibe with AI. There's no soul in AI. And I think filmmakers will always want to interact with people, with artists have that human kind of collaboration. But, you know, I'm not going to sugar coat it. AI will make certain revenue streams for people. You know, in ballot, it will help the technical process in a lot of ways, and it does a lot in our sound in our sound department, and a lot in our visual effects department, but these are processes that a lot of lot of things we would outsource anyway. There are certain processes, like in visual effects, there's rotoscoping that if you need a rotoscope, you know, let's say there's soccer players on a field and you need to composite something behind them, and they're all running around the field that's a big, big, big rotoscope shop. So a lot of times we'll go overseas for the type of tasks that are quote, unquote, more utilitarian than perhaps creative for where there's we just don't have the bandwidth here to rotoscope 80 shots with 10 people running in front of a building that they need to get rid of. So there are certain but AI has improved a lot and has huge advances in that part of visual effects work as well. You know, there are, we see a lot of AI now where there's generated images. But these are, it's not that easy. It's by the time you see an AI image or a visual effect shot that we can use. There's been so many back and forth with, you know, the prompts and being able to get AI to understand what we need and and and sometimes you can get lucky and it'll give you exactly what you need, or it can listen to your prompts and actually adhere to those revisions properly and then spit back out what you need. But the problem is, let's say, because in everything with our industry, with post production and working with clients, we'll present something and then that client will have a note and one single note on an AI generated visual effects shot. It might even be impossible to do, even if that note is, can this, this this piece of fire? Can this flame happen, you know, two seconds later, or something like something simple, it's because they're now we're dealing with the machine who's just understanding prompts. And it's AI. It's not like telling an artist, hey, this flame needs to start two seconds later, and the top wispy part of that part of the flame needs to curl that way away from the body. It's, I'm just giving you an example of some specific notes that are that are small, but could be extremely hard, complex and time consuming to create that type of revision with AI, you know. So AI can help in a lot of the baseline, hard, time consuming processes that are more algorithm and based and they can, you know, do some motion tracking, but, but when it gets to the point where you got to do those fine touches and those fine you know, where you bring your soul into it, where you bring, like, we're talking about a drum being a drummer, where you got to get that rhythm going with something, it doesn't, it doesn't calculate. You can't. I don't think you can teach AI to have soul, no, I hope not. If you can. It's scary, you know, if they could.

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19:48  

It's very interesting to hear it from your perspective, because like in software engineering, there's a sort of meme going around called vibe coding, where it's like installing your creativity into the. Types of systems, and the in the problem with the code generation, the application generation, is very similar to the the scenario that you gave, which is, like, the context windows aren't large enough to actually be able to make, like, a slight modification to an existing workflow that you're you're quite happy with, right? So it's super interesting when you, I don't know if you've talked about vibe before maybe this interview. But you know, looking 5-10 years, I mean, there's a couple of interesting things, right? 5-10 years ago, it was much more difficult to use an outsourced rotoscoping shop. Now today, there's like algorithmic rotoscoping that's probably only gonna get better. You're in an interesting position as a guy that does a lot of post in that you've always been on this crazy train of innovation. Like, it hasn't stopped since digital cinema started, and it doesn't seem like it's going to stop now. So asking you these questions is sort of like asking you the question 10 years ago, like, yes, it's all going to change, but the fundamentals are going to stay the same when you imagine 5-10, years ahead. We talked about vibe. But like, when you think about it, considering everything you know, being in this business a long time, can you like, and you know, we talked about the artistic nature of a drummer, but like, where do you think there's vibe coding? What's vibe post production? What is, what is vibe editing

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21:28  

in 10 years? Or is that what you're asking me maybe? What is

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21:31  

it now, and what is it in five to 10 years? What was the same five to 10 years ago? That's the same now, and it'll be the same 510 years from now. I don't know even fully where my question is going. I'm just really curious how it hits you. Yeah,

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21:44  

I mean, I can tell you what's been true since day one of me in this me being in this industry for the last 30 years, is directors. And directors put it this way, like directors will have their guy or their girl for editing, for example, oftentimes you'll see directors who stay with the same editor no matter what studio they're working for, no matter what film they're working on. Clint Eastwood has a guy, I believe his name is Joel Cox, and we know Scorsese has has his editor, Spielberg has their editor, like these, these directors, when they lock in creatively, spiritually, personally, with another creative soul that gets them and understands what their intention is, even if they themselves aren't aware of what their intention is, yet, you know, they they lock into these people. There's a bond, a creative and technical bond, primarily creative with these people. They get along with each other. They can they can fit in the same room together for months on end, shoulder to shoulder, you know, you can't do that with a lot of people, you know. And it's this, it's then, I think it's instinct, you know. So I think that's the same we get DPS all the time. So I have my colors. We don't need a colorist from sugar. We have our guy. It's non negotiable, like, Okay, let's do it, you know, we'll work with whoever. But, but, but that happens a lot, where people get locked in together. And that is something that, you know. How do you explain that? How do you is, it's not just because they've made successful movies together, you know, and they're just happy because they made money together. I don't think it's that at all. I think it happens because they feel creatively comfortable in collaborating with this person. They know that this person gets them, and they get that person, that they can have a shorthand that may not exist, that definitely doesn't exist with other editors if they don't know them or work with them. And you know, I think that why it works here at sugar in the world of post production, why? Why it's working? Number one is because we're we have this cool model that that works well with the independent film workflow, but also, because we're staff here, my team is staff. I don't I don't hire out freelancers on every project and bring in new people for like filmmakers, our our businesses, repeat business and referrals, primarily, I guarantee probably 99% of the people listening to this podcast don't know about sugar studios, but they, you know, they've heard of, you know, deluxe and Technicolor and other you know, they've heard of the other big houses, don't you don't hear of us. We're not a big advertiser. Our client base is people who come back to us. And we have a staff of people that we have a shorthand within our team of of the independent feature film workflow. And clients come back, they feel comfortable. We welcome back with open arms, and they know they just have this sense of comfort. They have a sense of ease and and confidence that everything and trust. You know, trust is huge. They know that we care like care from our heart. For these projects my team, they don't. They're not aware of one film is has a super high post budget, or another film has a super low budget. They're not working out. They're not they're not getting paid based on what the individual budgets are of a movie, because they're on salary and staff. So they approach every movie, whether it's a small, tiny independent doc for a, you know, without any distribution, or a, you know, $20 million Netflix or whatever, a big project, a bigger project, everything, we approach everything the same here, with the same amount of passion, with the same amount of understanding that the filmmakers are entrusting us with their babies, you know, and we need to protect that. And they feel that they and, you know, even even have visual effects artists I had dinner with last night. He said, You know, I work with a lot of post houses, but when I go to visit those post houses, he said they don't even know he's there. They don't know who he is, because to them, he's just this email address that's forwarding them shots or posting shots online. And when he came here, everyone was like, oh, AJ is here. Let's, let's, you know, make sure we get to say hi and AJ, because he's one of our artists who are who works remote out of Texas, and we rarely get to meet, see him in person. And He came in and he said that was a real difference between what we do and and what other post houses that he's had experiences with it, that there's a family vibe, there's a familiarity vibe. There's a you know, there's a camaraderie, as you know, you know, there's a camaraderie is something that happens on film sets in the actual live action production of films, especially if you're on location on a movie with a crew for 30 to 40 days, you feel a bond with these people, you know, and and then when the when you rap, everything says, usually dissipates, and the only time people kind of get together again is at some premiere, or perhaps in an 80 hour session later on. But after that, the director is kind of on his own with a couple of producers, with a whole new group of people over here at a post house, and we try to bring that collaboration that is on set and just extend it into the post process. So it's not like we're just this void, this repository, this this post apocalyptic void of worker bees that happen. After all, the sexy Lights, Camera Action is has happened, you know, we just continue the fun, you know, and continue the passion and continue the artistry on these films after a route

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28:15  

that's awesome. Can you share a maybe, maybe you can, maybe can't. But can you share a specific project or moment when a particularly challenging scenario forced you or the team to do something innovative under pressure, and how did that experience change your approach to problem solving?

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28:35  

I could say this. I'm not sure I could mention the name of the film only because obviously these questions weren't sent to me. Sorry. I would have probably had a better story, but I could tell you, there's a film that we worked on, and we worked on for months and months and months, and it's a comedy, and it premiered at Tribeca, and it was an amazing premiere. And what we realized at the premiere was that it was the first time we saw the film in front of a great audience at the Apollo right. And what we realized while watching the film with a live audience that was very reactive to the film, is when they laughed at a joke that was meant to be laughed at, and then in the edit, we had another joke following that first joke about three to four seconds later in the edit, super funny in the Edit bag, one joke beat second joke. What we found out during this screening was that the laughter from the first joke completely wiped away the second joke. Nobody heard the second joke, so we had to go back. This was in between a a, you know, premiere screening and delivery to a distributor. We had to go back and open up that that beat. Uh, you know, in between the first joke and the second joke in that one area. Because if you're watching the movie and you laugh at that first joke, you'll totally miss the second joke. So the space in between was extended a second, I think, two seconds and what? And that required a lot of work, a lot of hardcore technical work to even open that if you change a movie one frame after it's delivered. It's a ripple effect that can be that extends into about 10 to 12 different departments that need to adhere to that. But we were able to do that in two days, and that included, we brought in, we extended the shots, and now we had to color correct that extra second. We had to carry over the background ambient sound to cover that gap that we inserted into the movie, the score had to be edited because there was music and under underlying current score going underneath that moment. So there was audio that had to be smoothed out and EQ, there was footage that needed to be color corrected, even though it was a second. It means opening up a session, going finding those seconds in the camera masters, opening up the set. I mean, this is after the film was delivered. And we did it in two days, because we had all everything, all the assets were here. And maybe kind of hard to kind of realize what, you know, how difficult that is to somebody who doesn't really understand post production, but you seem to understand that, you know, if you open up a film for two seconds after it's finished, those two seconds, you might as well be re redoing five minutes it doesn't, you know. And so we had it caught, and it cost, and to do that cost over $50,000 in just costs in all kinds of red delivery, because we had to redeliver DCPS and and assets and deliverables that it was, it was something that, and I have no idea if that even came close to answering your question, but that's my answer.

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31:57  

I mean, it's pretty powerful, even still, like it's pretty interesting. I mean, it's amazing. It is funny. You know, I have so many different guests on the show and, like, it is fun to take a beat and think about the post production process, even now, because it is such an amazing constellation of complexity, it's it's awesome. I'm curious. Jijo with sugar studios. Your vision? Do you envision expanding your sort of integrated studio model geographically or into different types of media, like gaming? Or do you? Do you plan to just continue to deepen your capabilities further in Los Angeles? What's the future for you in the studio?

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32:37  

My future is staying exactly in the lane that I'm in, and I'll tell you why. Is because to get to this point of just saying we do independent feature films, remember, I've been doing this for 30 years. I started in trailers, I did commercials. I ended up doing music videos and documentaries and short form and blah, blah, blah, epks and sizzle everything. So throughout my career, and you know, I've always been pulled in these various forays into other types of technology, gaming, yeah, I went down the gaming road and created a lot of content, gaming trailers and so forth. VR, we did a lot of VR stuff when, you know, created VR content and got involved in the production of VR, you know, played a little bit in the virtual production space, a little bit in the in the LED virtual production space and and AR. I mean, it wasn't until, you know, six years ago where I just said, you know, I'm going to try to bite the bullet and not. The reason why I think people foray into other areas that is there that strays from their main to direct trajectory is for for money or for expanding the company to be a diverse media company. Now, that's not our thing. That's not our thing anymore. We made a decision just like, You know what, let's let's not even do trailers anymore. I don't want to do trailers anymore. We do sometimes for the films that we're doing post on, but I don't push for them. I spent years trying to hustle, getting trailers from from people. It's a very competitive, competitive marketplace, and it's extremely exhausting. And creatively, it's creatively, it takes a lot out of you to do a theatrical campaign for a film. And and I was all about it in my 30s, and but right now, we made the decision to just stay in independent feature films. I love that. I love to see documentaries, I love to watch really cool independent films, and I want to work on the films that I like to watch. You know that I want that I'm happy and excited and. Proud to be a part of like content that I can really relate to. And I think since we made that decision, that we're not going to go off like, you know, in the future, like we're not going to foray into emerging AI technologies, or VR gaming or or these other areas. I mean, there's enough work out there for everybody, if they just look for it, I'm really happy of just being all about independent features. I love it, and I'm not gonna stray from it. And you know, and everybody here is too everyone loves movies. We're all fans here at Sugar. We're all fans of movies, and

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35:39  

that's awesome. Well, Jijo, thank you for sharing with me a little bit of your insights, your background, your experiences in building sugar studios. It's super awesome. Before I let you go like you have to tell me about the Titanic. I mean,

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35:58  

yeah, that was here. There's a, there's a this says Titanic. This is the mere one. This is my dive date. This is the sub.

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36:10  

Okay, so if you're just listening to this, you have a literal tattoo commemorating the experience, going to the Titanic. So for sure, clearly the experience meant something to you very Oh yeah, very much. To the point where you you think about it when you look in the mirror, you know what? All the time, all the time, why? What? Explain.

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36:35  

I was offered this amazing opportunity to be a part of this, this project that was, it was a pilot episode for a documentary series that they that involved a father taking his son on a in a submersible to The Titanic. And this was way before that unfortunate, tragic accident that happened last year. This was 20, about a year ago, about 20 years ago, actually, that I went. So, you know, I was, this is one of my forays. I was doing trailers, and someone offered me this project where I could direct a show, and it involved with the Titanic. And I was like, I'm in no matter what I'm in, if this involves going to the Titanic, I'm in. And it turned out they didn't have all everything all lined up, as I thought, but we ended up making a deal with the Russian Academy of Science, who owned the submersibles that are on a ship called the television that actually would do these scientific research type of explorations to the Titanic. It's the exact same crew and subs that you see in the beginning of the movie Titanic with Jim Cameron, where you see, you know, you know, they film it in real time, those opening scenes in Titanic, with the orange and white submersibles and the crew, the Russian crew and the pilot, they're all there's all real, like those that was actual, actual the submersible, the same team pilots, everything. So we had six months to plan for this expedition. It was an expedition. We kind of said it was more of an educational expedition to be able to get permission to do this. There's some cash that switched hands, but, you know, some Russians. That was pretty funny. I'll probably get a call about that, but, you know, it was just in a nutshell. So I had the opportunity to go. We went out for five days, and I was able to do a dive on one of those days, it took us three hours. First, we flew to St John's Newfoundland, and then we took a ship out to the above the crash site, the location of the Titanic on this on this research special. And then we got to get into the submersibles. Me, my producing partner and the pilot of the submersible drop down. I think it takes two and a half hours to get down. It's almost 13,000 feet. It's about 12,800 feet down from surface, about two, two and a half miles deep, and it's 6000 pounds per square inch. It's amazingly dangerous. And, you know, for the whole time leading up to this, this expedition I'm directing, I'm shooting this thing, I'm thinking of all the technical planning that needs to happen in order to make this a success. And it's, it's, you know, it's no joke, trying to coordinate a film crew and film at 13,000 feet. So there's a lot of logistics that took months and months and months to figure out. So the whole time leading up to the expedition, it was all about, technically, how are we going to solve this? And when I. Landed at the bottom of the ocean, and it looked like the surface of the Moon down there, because there's no movement. It's smooth and wavy ground. And we're about 100 feet or so from the bow of the Titanic. It's it's Titanic is in two separate areas. It's split in half, as everyone knows, the stern is where we're here, and the bow is over there. We hit the bottom, and all the technical prep and everything, like just all that sort of went away when I saw a shoe, you know, the first I get down there after two and a half hours of darkness. And then I saw a shoe in the sand. Then as we kept going, we saw some broken dishes, and we saw there was a bookshelf over here. And then we started seeing luggage. We started seeing personal items. They treated the leather with something that allowed a lot of the leather to leather to still be preserved back then. Also anything that was brass, for some reason, did not decay. There's zero oxygen down there, zero sunlight. So there's certain things that just algae, just doesn't grow on everything. You know, there's the rustic holes on the ship, because you'll see those. But I saw dishes with a with a White Star Line insignia on it down there, you know, 100 years later, you know. So it made me realize that, Oh, wow. This is because every you have this idea of the Titanic that it's a, it must be kind of a, it's so famous, and it's, it must be kind of managed in some way, you know, it's like must be touristy or so you just get this feeling in your head that it's so freaking famous that it must be somehow managed, right? No, it's a freaking shipwreck where people died and it wasn't a cleanup mission. I mean, no one's going down two and a half miles to, you know, make it presentable for anything. It was a shipwreck that's still there and decaying and falling apart. But still, the bottom line is, you got get a real sense that, holy shit, this is a lot bigger than a freaking documentary pilot that I was doing. You know, it's bigger than how, you know, how am I going to mount the camera to that, that pressure sensitive jib arm, it all, everything. It was just like, wow. And then you feel the sadness. Feel a real sadness. It's dark, it's silent, and it's incredible. We rolled up, we started coming up onto the bow and and you just keep looking up and up and up, and you're like, Oh my god. Leonardo, DiCaprio was on the bow with Kate Winslet like a skeleton. No, but, but it was, it was pretty crazy. It was wild. And it was definitely, you know, I didn't even realize it till after I went that, you know, less than, I think it was, less than 100 people have done it ever. I mean, that's another thing. Do you realize that you think, oh, man, tons of people must have seen it. And there's only been, I think it documented, just over 100 people, including Jim Cameron and all his people that have been to the Titanic. Probably more now, but, but, yeah, it's, it's not, it's not a widely experienced thing, and I'm feel honored and privileged to have experienced that. Jijo,

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43:30  

thank you so much for sharing that story like really so interesting. And you gave me chills just thinking about it, the magnitude of that man, so crazy. Well, thank you so much, and

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43:45  

thanks, Joji. Yeah, you sure ended this on a bummer. No,

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43:50  

you know it's so much, it's so it's so tragic, even all these years later, it is so tragic for those people. Oh yeah, it's amazing how life reverberates. You know, their lives, even now, reverberate into the present. And I don't know there's something like, really, yeah, special about that. And I think that there's also something special about making movies and telling stories. There's something vibey about it. There's something important about the vibes that we have as humans, and so I really appreciate being able to talk with you today on on production.

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44:26  

Thank you. It's really a lot of fun. Thanks, Cameron, I appreciate it so cool. Man,

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44:32  

that's incredible. So insane. Awesome.