PGA president and Revelations Entertainment CEO Lori McCreary has called on Hollywood to form “an industry-wide task force to teach [Hollywood] about security and mandate what is needed to keep Hollywood safe.”
Speaking during a PGA Produced By conference session Saturday about “digital disruption,” McCreary and fellow panelists took aim at data security, a topic that’s been on the minds of many after several news outlets rushed to proclaim that Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Men Tell No Tales was stolen and was the center of a ransom demand. Disney chairman and CEO Bob Iger has said that the studio doesn’t believe it was hacked.
McCreary, who admitted that her company had experienced a hack, urged caution and attention to this area, and Transformers: The Last Knight producer Ian Bryce agreed. “We don’t have prints,” he said. “We are sending [digital] footage [around the world to different countries], temp footage to final shots, and people are going to be after it. When you invested $150 million in a production, that’s risky.”
“There’s a lot of risk there,” Bob Eicholz, CTO, Technicolor Production Services, agreed, adding though that he views the growing use of cloud services as a safer proposition. “The storage is in a bigger facility rather than in different places,” he said.
To that end, McCreary encouraged a dialogue with cloud service providers such as Google and Amazon in order to drive development of services that will meet Hollywood’s needs.
Eicholz added that updating industry standards in this area “needs to happen as fast as possible.”
Director of photography Daryn Okada and ARRI president and CEO Glenn Kennel also participated on the panel. (Disclosure: The session was moderated by The Hollywood Reporter’s Carolyn Giardina.)
