Find the limits before you recommend the tech

People often assume the glamorous end of my work and the industrial end are different jobs. They aren’t. Whether I’m working on a music video, tracking an autonomous vehicle or helping set up a drone lab, the questions are the same. Which technology is the best fit? What are its pros and cons? Does it give a practical, quantifiable benefit, or is it tech for tech’s sake?

You only find out by trying things and breaking them.

For Halina Rice’s ENDLESS, I designed a 3D camera from OptiTrack components so we could shoot part of the piece as almost traditional side-by-side 3D, for a stereoscopic projection show. For Liam Payne’s AR performance on The Round app, which previewed just before the 2021 BAFTAs over EE’s 5G, Target3D managed the performance capture. The challenges ran from network issues to compressing the data into formats phones could play with the lowest latency we could manage. In AR, at that time, that was novel.

A lot of this is democratised and demystified now. I like to think projects like those helped work out where each technology fits. Understanding the boundaries is where the value is, whether I’m wearing my consultant, assistant director, technical director or producer hat.

It’s the same thinking whether I’m tracking autonomous vehicles, planning a drone lab or building an XR project: pick the technology that fits, be honest about its pros and cons, and make sure the project has a practical, quantifiable benefit. There are a lot of engines, tools and file formats out there, and the terminology overlaps whether you’re doing biomechanics or 3D printing. Getting through that is often an adventure in itself.