How Tech is Transforming Production Workflows with Herman Phillips

Welcome to On Production brought to you by Wrapbook. Today we're joined by Herman Phillips, an innovative film producer and the driving force behind Cinapse, which is a really exciting and pioneering production management software. Herman's worked on major sets like Mandalorian, and his technology has been revolutionizing production workflows with technology. His journey represents the fusion of practical industry experience with really great, groundbreaking tech. So I want to dive into his insights and the impact of his work on the film production industry and landscape. Hern, thanks for being on and welcome to On Production. Yeah, thanks

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0:57  

so much for having me. Cameron, great to be here.

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0:59  

So I want to know Herman, what inspired you to transition from hands-on production roles. Tell us a little bit about your background. Who are you, and then how that sort of transitioned into developing Cinapse.

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1:12  

So, you know, I had always been interested in technology and its relationship to filmmaking, like ever since I was a kid, I watched the Ken Burns documentary, Empire of dreams about the Making Star Wars original trilogy, and really saw how technology impacted that entire saga, the Star Wars saga. And so I was always tinkering with little green screen or doing stop motion animation as a kid. And fast forward, when I was a teenager, I started my first production company, you know, used that to pay my way through college, and then every year, was doing internships with Netflix, HBO. And what really struck me when I was working on these, like, really large scale productions here in LA was that we're still using technology that is completely outdated, you know, from the 90s, from the early 2000s and that the interfaces and its capabilities never really looked anything like what we have on our phones, right or on our tablets. And so that's when I really was struck by it, so much so that I ended up writing my undergraduate thesis in college about production management technology at Hollywood. And then I came to LA I worked full time on set for a number of years, getting my days to join the DGA as an AD I would have been joining in 2020 and then, of course, a little something happened in early 2020. Blew things off course, but led me to start Cinapse

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2:47  

Herman. That's really awesome. I mean, with all of those different things that you've done, it's like we could double click and get into it, but basically, you've seen set from being a PA to moving up. What are some of the things that you take away from those experiences that then inspired you to build Cinapse.

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3:06  

I think what was really striking to me, especially being on the ground in production, was just how manual everything is, whether it's on paper to distribute information, to distribute the new drops of a script to sign in and out background vouchers for background actors. And of course, the schedule was really striking in the way that the AVS would manage that, and they would literally email the schedule file back and forth to update it, which is a really, really cumbersome thing to do when you're working on a really large episodic series. Now, of course, the way that we create and shoot episodic series today is very different than the way that we did 20 years ago, or even 10 years ago. We're shooting generally now multiple episodes concurrently, if not the entire season all concurrently. So you're shooting scenes from eight episodes in one day, or from four episodes across two days. And so organizing that becomes a really huge challenge when you don't have the technology that's going to enable you to collaborate on something like the schedule, which is really the source of truth for hundreds of people involved in the production, they have to know what we're shooting, when, where, and what's involved in every scene that we're doing. So streamlining that whole process became really apparent that that was a huge problem and opportunity for us to step in and help address

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4:40  

Herman. That's really, really cool. Can you tell me and our listeners, what is the status quo of production scheduling? What does that look like? And maybe from there, I'll have a few more questions about how you've been sort of applying your technologies to really reimagining. We're making that experience better than it currently is. And we're talking about an industry that is 100 years old. A lot of these things have been done the way they've always been done. I don't want to change them. And yet, there seems to be room, and has been room, for Cinapse to make some improvements that the industry is is eager to have happen.

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5:20  

Absolutely. Yeah. I mean, if you really look at it, the way that we schedule movies, hasn't changed in 100 years since the industry started. And it used to be that the assistant directors would literally cut out strips of paper and write down the scene information and have a cork board, and that's how they would schedule. And that became known as the strip board. And then it got a little bit more advanced in the 80s with the advent of movie magic scheduling, and that since the 80s, has really been the dominant player in all of scheduling across independent films and major motion pictures and television.

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5:57  

So from there, because that's the status quo. What are some of the day to day challenges that production teams are facing? I mean, you describe the fact that you have productions that are moving much faster, scenes that are being condensed, shot in a day. You're not necessarily shot linearly or within a chronological order. There's just complexity, depending upon the circumstances that producers need to address, but based off of the status quo and the new reality that we're in, what are the day to day challenges with the status quo?

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6:31  

With the status quo the biggest challenge, or there are many, but one of the biggest ones that we've seen from our customers, who are predominantly first ad is upms, live producers and independent filmmakers, is that there is no real time collaboration on the schedule file, and that's a huge problem, because there have to be multiple people looking at and building upon the schedule. You know, the first ad may be moving the order of the day while they need the second ad to go in and add information to the breakdown sheets, to the actual detail of the scene that we're going to be filming. So that can mean, when you're in prep that the second ad is waiting around for six or seven hours to get the schedule file from the first ad. And of course, they're doing other things during that time, but we can save all of that that entire window for both of them to be collaborating at the same time. So that's one of the biggest challenges, no real time collaboration, and also the fact that you cannot, you cannot have episodes that are actually built into breakdown sheets, and with how much premium television has grown in the last decade, software for scheduling really has to be built around episodic series to accommodate the way that we film them today. So that's one of the other things that the status quo doesn't really take into account, which has a whole host of problems when you're looking at cast availability, for instance, and when cast is supposed to be filming on certain days, and they really have to work around the software that they're using now in order to really jury rig it to make it look the way that they need it to look. But it's still not quite exactly accurate, because the way that they're having to work around the software,

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8:24  

that's really fascinating. So we have a sort of a broad narrative that you've painted. We have a status quo situation. There's a lot of problems that are faced. And you actually even just brought up a particular problem in this process, which is on like cast availability. I want to know, starting broadly, Herman, in what ways do you see Cinapse specifically addressing some of these day to day challenges? You mentioned collaboration, that's a huge one. That makes sense. Are there any others?

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8:50  

Yeah, so the episodic one is the second biggest one, I would say, because what we have done is taken every breakdown sheet in the system and added an episode field to it, which sounds really simple, but there's all these back end calculations that we do automatically for the assistant directors, so that they can see when actors are working on what episode and what their work status is For each episode, which follows sag AFTRA standard rules around hold days, drop, pickup days, intervening days between drop and pickup and all of the and that's according to every episode and their appearance in every episode. Traditionally, the assistant director has had to manually do that or manually reconcile that. So again, a huge time saver there on the episodic front, and coming soon, actually, in about a month, we are releasing what we're calling unit day breaks. So on large cross border episodic series, you are often going to have at least two units filming concurrently, at least for a handful of. Days, if not much of the entire production, and they're currently in the legacy software. There's no way of really delineating and automatically calculating the number of pages that are being filmed on a given unit, and then also understanding if an actor is double banked, which means are they working on both units simultaneously? And what does that mean for the logistics of moving them from one unit to another unit? When you're thinking about a really big show like Game of Thrones or house the dragon that's shooting in multiple countries concurrently, but they also have to share the same schedule. That's something that we can we will be able to help with with the unit day breaks, and delineate the pages that they're shooting, the hours that they're shooting, and being able to see the actors and if they're booked on two units at once, which you would never run into if you're shooting in two countries, but certainly when you're shooting on the same back lot, or if you're shooting at a sound stage and a back lot in the same location, we can really help with that process. So that's our unit Daybreak functionality that's coming out in about a month.

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11:04  

That's so awesome. Herman, you know, it's interesting. I think about a lot of the work that we're doing here at rapbooks about the reconciliation of financial resources, which drives the utilization of physical resources, of people, of props. And it seems like a lot of the work you're doing is figuring out how to use technology to use technology to reconcile those costs, to efficiently, really run your production, which is super cool to see, sort of software innovation in our industry, both in physical production and also in sort of the financial services and background to make it all function. That's really, really neat. I think you just touched on some, like, really big, exciting problems that you guys are taking on in the product today. Is there a particular problem that you feel the Cinapse has solved successfully, that you just want to, like, take a victory lap on, like, the peg I didn't, I know, for me, at Wrapbook, there are so many, like, little features and things that people have been like, dreaming of for years. Like, it sounds ridiculous, but like an infinite scroll on a ledger, you know, or auto savings, you don't lose your data. Like, these, are these? These? They seem small, but they're actually really big at scale. I'm curious for you at Cinapse and your journey of building software. Like,

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12:30  

is there one thing you're really proud of? Yeah, I think there. There are two, and that's that we have offline mode and online mode so you can work completely offline in synapse, which you know, if you can't work offline, it's really a non starter. So that was one thing that we built in the very beginning, was the fact that you can work offline. So if you're in a tech Scout, in a van, if you're out in the middle of nowhere where you don't have Wi Fi, you know, it doesn't matter. You can still edit and create your schedule completely offline, and then when you come back online, and let's say the other ad was working on the schedule while you were off on the tech Scout, those changes will merge and be reconciled when you both are online. And so you're always working off the most up to date version as soon as those changes sync to the cloud. And then the other thing, it's a I'm really proud of, is our report filtering, which, again, like sounds like super basic and simple, but ad's upms producers, they've never had the ability to filter their schedule down to the level of detail that they really need to be able to show with. For instance, if I need to share a one liner or shooting schedule with my DP and gaffer so they can see what exterior night work that we have at a specific location that would have taken hours of manual labor for the the first ad to create that specific schedule to show the DP and gaffer what is going on. But with Cinapse, you can simply filter it down to show me, okay, on between shoot days five and 10, what exterior night work at these locations do we have? And you can generate that report in seconds. So I'd say that's a huge time saver for the ad is but also their ability to then share out really focused information to their department heads to be able to make decisions which they've either never been able to do before or have only been able to do if they've taken significant time to build those specific types of schedules for those department heads.

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14:36  

That's super, super cool. I'm really curious. Herman, I mean, can you tell us about your clients and what kind of feedback have you received from production teams using Cinapse?

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14:47  

Yeah. I mean, I can't go into super specifics, but I can say that we are used across most of the major studios right now, Netflix, Apple, Amazon productions, are all using us to schedule. Production. So including, we also have some with sky, and we just recently, now have a partnership with the Italian Assistant Directors Guild, so we're expanding into Europe as well. But I'd say the the number one thing, and we've been talking about throughout this this podcast, and that our customers keep telling us this is amazing, is the episodic logic that is built into the software so that they don't have to do all this manual calculation themselves, but also the real time collaboration, and it's really those two things that are saving them dozens and dozens of hours of not having to wait around for the schedule and to always be working off of the master version of the schedule, because historically, they've had to email the schedule file back and forth, and they call it the football and so you're footballing the schedule back and forth, and you're always versioning that one and saying, This is The most recent version. And that can quickly devolve into a situation where two or even three first ad's are working off different versions of the schedule, and then all of that effort is then lost, and all those hours are lost, and then the work has to be redone again to put it back into what 80s calls the master schedule. So the fact that 80s don't have to do that, and just the mental load that is now removed from them, and knowing that they're always working off the most up to date version schedule is, you know, giving a ton of peace of mind and also giving hours of their life back, which first ad's. You know, it used to be 16 hours would be when they hit their extended day, and then oftentimes they would go home and keep working on the schedule when they get home, because they can't work on it on the floor when they're first ad. But, and now, you know, I think it's 15 days under the new DGA contract is when they hit their extended day. But now, because the ad s can all collaborate off the same schedule, we can avoid that now completely, you know, and they don't have to go home and work off a bit because they're all they all have access to it, and they can make updates in real time. Of course, we also have an iPad version too, which now makes it possible for the ad s who are on the floor when they are for saving between setups to simply pull out their iPad, make updates to the schedule and then not persist across everyone's devices as well. That's super

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17:31  

inspiring. It's it's really, really exciting to just imagine with you and build the tools to really just remove so much drudgery and hard, hard, complex work from these incredibly talented people in the industry. You know, lastly, Herman, I want to know, you know, looking forward for you all, what features or capabilities can we expect from synapse that you think will really further support film, TV production? I mean, you mentioned a few things that are coming out, but maybe, maybe look to the future a little bit further and tell us what, what we should expect and how, if you're a producer or a crew person, engaging in these types of workloads, how we can learn more about Cinapse and get engaged,

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18:12  

for sure. So like I said, we have the unit datebreak functionality that's coming out just a short while from probably the release of this podcast. But also we have a bunch of automated features that we will be rolling out soon as well, so things like automatic sunrise sunset times based off of the location where you are filming, which currently is also a completely manual process. And now you'll be able to just plug in the postal code or zip code of the location where you're filming, you'll also be able to view what actually changed between versions of the schedule, because this is one of the biggest the other biggest problem that department heads, in particular when a new schedule comes out. It's a similar problem to when you get new pages from the script, and knowing what changed in the stripped. So we're taking sort of that concept from the stripped and applying it to the schedule. So we're calling it the change log, and it's going to be a comparison of the shooting schedule, you know, the white shooting schedule, to the blue shooting schedule. And it will show you here's what scenes were moved and changed between the white and the blue, so that you don't need to really look at the entire schedule. You only need to look at the days that actually had changes that will also come out with an automatic summary that tells you these are the five days that we had changes on, and these are the other highlights of what actually changed in the schedule. So that's a huge time saver for department heads who, especially on really complex cross border episodic productions with multiple units, have to spend hours looking at the schedule to understand what changed, so that they can let their vendors know, or they can let their teams know and their day players know. Hey, we've got to move here. This changed here, we'll be able to give all of those hours back to department heads and just tell them, here are the days that you care about, and here's what changed. So that's probably the biggest new feature beyond unit day breaks that's coming out in the future that's going to really improve the lives of crew members and cast and everyone involved who gets the schedule that's

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20:21  

too cool. Herman, thanks for joining me and sharing a bit about your background, about your awesome company, Cinapse, and just sharing your passion with me and our listeners about what you're doing. Thanks so much.

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20:32  

Yeah, thanks for having me Cameron.