MovieLabs “Roadmap is Becoming The Road”

“The Roadmap is becoming the road,” said MovieLabs’ Industry Forum Chair Leon Silverman during a Friday panel at IBC, citing the “2030 Vision” that MovieLabs (a nonprofit tech joint venture formed by Hollywood studios) introduced at IBC 2019 with principals that guided OMC development. 

Nearly 60 companies have now joined its Industry Forum, and OMC has been supported by partners across categories including script writing, production management, workflow design and orchestration, editorial and postproduction. OMC v 3.0 will be available under creative commons licensing by the end of 2026. 

As part of the session, Matt Walters, VP, Production Technology, The Walt Disney Studios, and Chris Vienneau, Production Technology Specialist, MovieLabs discussed how OMC is being and could be applied to workflows. At IBC, MovieLabs is also demonstrating how OMC v3.0 was used in the IBC Accelerator project’s AI generated film One Small Crawl. 

“Our goal is to give our creatives the greatest amount of time possible so that they can be creative and work with our tools to help them find their story faster. So to do that, we need a pipeline, or more specific, we need to have no pipeline,” said Walters. “No pipeline does not mean zero pipeline. … It means we don't have a single monolithic pipeline forcing every production through the same fixed end-to-end process.” 

OMC provides the “integral framework,” he added. “This is about connecting your story and your plot and all that narrative context onward onto the other tools and marrying that with the OMC.” 

Vienneau suggested that studios want to build their own experiences “but then they want to leverage the fact that there's an ecosystem of tools that they can build off and have both, right? And that's kind of what to me what Movie Labs is all about.” 

“The good news is that we have filmmakers that are asking for the connective tissue and access to the tools in ways that they haven't before,” said Jonathan Tortoro, VP, Post, Workflows & Operations, Warner Bros. Discovery. “It's nice to know that the work we have done collaboratively as studios and within the MovieLabs framework is hopefully empowering not only what's next but also working behind the scenes in ways that maybe the shows don't even quite realise yet.” 

Steve Lapinski, CIO, Film and Television, NBCUniversal, asserted that while the “2030 Vision” that prompted the project was written several years ago, it’s “more relevant than ever” with foundational challenges” remaining. “In some cases, obviously we've got new and increasing security threats, bespoke architectures without a lot of interoperability,” he said. “I think while technology will change as we're experiencing now, I think that the need for that foundation doesn't change.”