Cinema has certainly played a role in our expectations for technology. Rosie, the robot housekeeper on The Jetsons, was Roomba and Alexa rolled up into one. Doc’s VR glasses on Back to the Future are pretty close to the VR headsets we see today, and bionic hands like Luke Skywalker’s are not too far from becoming reality. But behind the scenes, many production sets use many more analog solutions than necessary. Here are five reasons why every film set should consider intelligent IoT wearables and platforms to streamline production:
Film equipment is expensive. Unfortunately, a lot of it gets misplaced or lost. BLE asset tracking allows set managers to ensure that all film assets and equipment stays on film set, is stored in the right place, and never gets carried out without an authorization. Wearables also make it easy to track crew and actors touchpoints, giving much more granular and targeted exposure notifications than manual tracking could ever provide. Isolating one or two people, rather than an entire “pod,” could make hundreds of thousands of dollars of difference.
Let actors and extras know when it’s their turn to go on set with a discreet vibration on their wrist. Intelligent IoT wearables can be programmed to notify people at predetermined intervals, specific locations, or with triggered alerts.
Call it the “Media of Things.” Research out of Newcastle University and the BBC has demonstrated how embedded ubiquitous IoT sensing technologies can produce context rich, time sequenced metadata on film sets and production studios.
Instead of card readers and complex codes, production sets can grant or deny access to restricted areas remotely and from one central dashboard. With a simple flick of the wrist, people can open any doors they need. Supercharged by BLE, access control becomes seamless and efficient, as there is no need to hold a physical key card to program its access privileges.
Using spreadsheets or clunky HR software systems to manage overtime budgets, manually track attendance and juggle sick leave is now a thing of the past. With intelligent IoT wearables, production managers can track cast and crew time and attendance from one simple dashboard.
Despite the challenges that COVID-19 wrought, technological innovation has been spurred to new heights. On set, technology has already been playing a massive role in reducing budgets and revolutionizing what we thought was possible. Now, IoT is set to revolutionize film production even more.