SAN FRANCISCO — LucidLink (lucidlink.com) is helping to power remote collaboration for studios, brands and creative professionals via its Filespaces cloud collaboration SaaS product. Filespaces has been used on a number of recent projects, including The Boy, the Mole, the Fox and the Horse, which won the Academy Award and for Short Film (Animated) and Best British Short Animation at this year’s BAFTA Awards. The tool has also been used on the action movie
Devotion, the hit FX show
The Bear, and the theatrical feature Missing.
By using LucidLink’s cloud collaboration SaaS product, creatives can work together remotely and simultaneously on the same media files. Users working with creative applications, such as Adobe Premiere Pro, Avid, Media Composer, Apple Final Cut Pro and Blackmagic Design’s DaVinci Resolve, can collaborate in realtime as if they were in the same location, cutting production and post production time, as well as the need for location travel and costs.
“LucidLink’s business literally took off at the onset of COVID, enabling remote creatives to access and use their data files, in the cloud, from any location,” explains Dave Leopold, LucidLink's director of strategic development, M&E. “LucidLink Filespaces provides the fastest access to media assets stored in the cloud. Distributed TV and film production teams across the globe easily collaborate simultaneously on projects, like working off a local drive. Creatives can use any of their favorite applications, like Premiere Pro, Pro Tools, Resolve, etc., access data immediately, and collaborate in realtime on production and post production workflows, seamlessly. If an application can read a file from a local drive, it can read a file from a LucidLink Filespace.”
In the case of The Boy, the Mole, the Fox, and the Horse, which is currently streaming on Apple+, the film was created by British Illustrator Charlie Mackesy with a team of animators spread around the world. New to the world of feature animation, Mackesy relied on the expertise of animators based in as many as 20 different countries, including the US, UK, Australia, Spain, France, Germany, Italy, South Africa, Canada and Brazil. Artists were using a variety of editing platforms, including Adobe Premiere Pro and After Effects, Avid Media Composer and Blackmagic Design’s Resolve. LucidLink Filespaces enabled creatives across the globe to quickly access all their media assets from the cloud for the same production.
“Artists were able to join the working team quickly, as it was easy for them to install LucidLink and be up and running rather than wait for machines to be delivered to start work,” explains Ben Wood, senior support specialist at Nonemore. “We would have run out of money if we had to ship high-powered machines or co-locate artists together. Without LucidLink, we would have had to rely on separate drives, Dropbox and Synology, and keeping track of where the data was stored would have been very hard. Using LucidLink, everyone had access to the same file at the same time, and the collaboration process was seamless, while I had peace of mind that the files were secure and in one place.”
The Bear is a new and popular show on FX about young chef Carmy Berzatto, played by Jeremy Allen White. Berzatto returns from the fine dining world to Chicago after the death of his brother in order to run his family's sandwich shop with his brother’s best friend. This show was entirely edited by remote teams using LucidLink and Adobe Productions in Premiere Pro. The editors and assistant editors all worked remotely using LucidLink. At the recent ACE Eddie Awards, Joanna Naugle won an Eddie for the Best Edited Single Camera Comedy Series for her work on the “Systems” episode.
Missing, the theatrical thriller from Sony Pictures, is presented through computer and phone screens. Produced during the pandemic, the production team used Adobe Creative Cloud and Frame.io, working in tandem by using Adobe Productions, hosted on LucidLink.