October 23, 2025 • 29 mins
Join Chris Hill and Adhrucia as they sit down with Ted Schilowitz, a 40-year entertainment veteran who’s shaped the evolution of digital cinema, immersive experiences, and AI-driven storytelling. From his early days producing children’s TV in Florida to pioneering desktop video with Apple, co-founding Red Digital Cinema, and advising major studios on the future of entertainment, Ted shares his insights on technology, creativity, and the democratization of filmmaking.
Show Highlights:
(00:00) Introduction and Guest Welcome
(00:40) Ted's Early Career in Entertainment
(01:48) Transition to Technology and Startups
(02:23) Involvement with Apple and Desktop Video Revolution
(03:39) Founding G-Tech and Red Digital Cinema
(04:56) Role as a Futurist at 20th Century Fox
(05:57) Impact of Technology on Entertainment
(12:16) Democratization of Filmmaking
(15:27) AI's Impact on Filmmaking
(16:21) The Shift from Traditional to Synthetic
(17:40) Advice for Brands in the AI Era
(18:42) The Evolution of AI in Visual Effects
(22:26) The Role of Brands in Content Creation
(25:21) The Future of Filmmaking and AI
(25:43) Closing Thoughts and Brand Inspirations
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
(00:18):
Welcome to, we Built This Brand.
I'm your host, as always, Chris Hill and
with me is my fabulous co-host of Drisha.
I am the host of Conversations with Curiosity,
and I'm so excited to be here at Powerful.
Forward and we have an amazing guest with us today, Ted.
Yes.
I dunno about.
Amazing.
But I'm here so you guys can decide, I guess, after you talk to me.
Well, we're happy to have you here.
(00:39):
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
Ted.
Will you tell our audience a little bit about your work?
Uh, sure.
Um, so I've worked in the entertainment industry for about 40
years, such the gray hair, uh, and somehow survived it all.
Uh, I've had sort of three kind of, I guess call it career arcs.
Okay.
Which is kind of interesting for I guess anybody from a career standpoint.
(01:00):
First I was, uh, a. Production person, um, mostly doing
children's television in, uh, this odd place called Central
Florida, which I refer to as the funnel of Crazy Florida's.
This little thing that sort of looks like a little vestige of the
United States, and if it gets crazy enough, it's gotta go to Florida.
Oh, I love that.
So that's where I grew up as a kid, uh, and, uh, worked there
(01:20):
for, for the first 20 years of my career doing production for.
Mostly Disney and Universal and PBS mostly
children's stuff as you do, uh, in a place like that.
Um, and then a good close friend of mine said, you gotta come out to the show.
You gotta come out to the West coast.
And so, um, when I was, you know, guess late thirties, I guess,
we moved to, uh, California and did some production here.
(01:43):
But kind of after 20 plus years of it, I was
kind of like, oh, maybe I'll do something else.
Was starting to do some startup stuff then.
So my entrepreneurial muscles started to get exercised.
Uh, right around that time while I was still in Florida.
I was very intrigued.
We were shooting a lot of film at the time and I was very intrigued
in this new Bengal technology called high definition video.
(02:03):
Mm-hmm.
And I started to build, um, some technology
around, uh, some enabling tools around that.
We raised some startup funds and one of the, uh, companies that
was actually building some of the hardware under the hood, um.
Was a company out of Northern California that was doing,
um, sort of video engineering at a very, very high level.
Okay.
And, um, I was very involved in Apple culture and Apple
(02:27):
products, uh, in the, in the eighties and nineties.
Um, using these things called avids, which still exist today, but they were
very expensive back then and they only lived on a Mac platform back then.
Okay.
So I was very connected to the Apple sort of ecosystem and, uh,
one of my mentors, his name is John, said, you know, after that,
that startup didn't quite get enough money to do exit velocity.
He's like, you know a lot about Apple and Apple culture.
(02:51):
Apple has approached us to, um, see if we would be interested
in being their partner on a hardware project around
professional video applications for the Apple platform.
When Steve Jobs was still running the roost and everything was, um,
and it was interesting and I said, okay, well that's interesting.
And my friends were like, you're leaving production.
I'm like, I don't know if I'm leaving, but I'm taking a little departure.
Um.
So I got involved in that and I was sort of this embedded
(03:13):
employee in Apple, even though I worked for this engineering firm.
We were partnered with Apple to build this thing
that became what we now call desktop video.
Uh, and it.
Became a huge sort of phenomenon all around the world where you
used to use these very expensive, dedicated tools to do video.
And then we started to democratize that and people could do videos on
computers, which is essentially what these three cameras are right now.
(03:34):
Um, so the world changed and I was involved with like seven engineers.
It was kind of a wonderful time.
Wow.
Then after that I did a little startup with a buddy of mine.
It's a long kind of interesting story.
Um, we were both connected to Apple and we started a
little company called gtech, which are these little silver
hard drives that look like little mini apple computers.
Some of your crew probably knows them, and they sit on everybody's.
(03:55):
Uh, desktop multimedia machine.
Mm-hmm.
Uh, that company, uh, got acquired by, um, uh,
Hitachi and then eventually Western Digital.
And then I helped, I was part of the founding member, uh, one
of the founding members in the first employee of a company
called Red Digital Cinema, which is a movie camera company.
Yes.
It came sort of the beginnings of this digital cinema revolution.
It wasn't digital video, it was digital cinema.
(04:17):
Um, so I was involved in the.
Early stages of that and then did that for X amount of years and then
eventually sort of tried to do it early, early retirement from that.
Uh, and then, um, some friends of mine at the movie studios, I was very
connected to the, the movie culture 'cause they all were using this new
fangled camera and the workflow, which was tied to Apple, interestingly enough.
Uh, so everything Apple doesn't leave far from the, from the tree.
(04:41):
In my world.
It's always there.
That
happens when you're the infrastructure of half the world.
So did
the Yes.
So, um.
So some friends of mine at, uh, 20th Century Fox, one of my
other mentors, his first name is also Ted, um, said, if you're
really gonna retire from the camera company, we have an idea.
We want you to come help us figure out like the future of entertainment.
You'll be our futurist.
Like, we'll give you a fun title.
(05:02):
And I was like, I didn't even understand what he was talking.
I was like, what do you, that's not a real job.
Like, what do you want me to do?
He's like, I don't know, you'll just have to figure it out.
He's like, who do you want me to do it with?
He's like, I don't know.
You'll have to figure that out too, me and other people.
Um, so that kind of became my.
Next career, the third part of my career.
Wow.
Um, and it was fascinating, and I got to
explore all these new forms of entertainment.
(05:23):
Got very heavily into the idea of next generation immersive
entertainment for theme parks and virtual reality and mixed reality.
Did that for 20th Century Fox for about six, seven years, and
then some of the key people moved from Fox over to Paramount.
I moved over to Paramount with them, did that for about seven
years, and then a couple years ago, retired from Paramount.
Now.
These days advising startups and helping people that are a generation or two
(05:44):
younger than me, sort of go on the same trajectory that I did start companies.
And hopefully some of them work out.
And that's kinda why I'm here at this conference.
So what
a journey.
That's,
that's, uh, that's 40 years and three minutes, so you'll have to
tell us more.
So what, what was it like taking on a. Futurist role
at a massive legacy brand like 20th Century Fox.
(06:07):
Was it hard to disrupt within that environment?
And what was kind of, I know you had to create the
role, but what was the focus and what was the pushback?
And tell us, tell us about the experience.
Oddly
enough, I wouldn't say it was hard.
To build into that role because I had great support and great mentorship
and great people that understood the value of learning something new.
(06:29):
Um, and I tend to be sort of diplomatic around, um, disruption.
Mm-hmm.
I'm kind of called, people call me a technology diplomat because
there's a, there's an interesting phrase that a diplomat can
tell you how to go to hell in a way that you will enjoy the trip.
That you'll enjoy it.
Yeah.
(06:49):
Did is like I would take things that people were very
concerned about, like, this is gonna change a lot.
Like today, a lot of my discussions around AI is this giant
disruptive factor, which as you know, we were on this panel together.
Yep.
Of course.
So we just talked about it and I have these interesting perspectives
on it, just from a lot of learning and other disruptive phases.
Sure.
Of a 40 year entertainment career that was always
(07:10):
focused on these little disruptive nuggets that in some
cases became huge, um, trajectories for our industry.
Right.
So.
I had really good support at the very top level,
sort of CEO President levels of the company around.
We know we have to do things new and different while still
maintaining our heritage and the importance of what we do for
(07:30):
a living, but we can't just stick our head in the sand and say,
nothing's gonna change because we know things are gonna change.
So as long as you.
Got that kind of mentality that things will change, but you have to kind
of understand where the ethical boundaries are that are always changing
and the desire points and what's really gonna change under the hood.
And that creativity doesn't really change.
(07:52):
And storytelling doesn't really change.
You know, we tell the same stories over and over and over
again as humans, but we deployed different technologies.
To achieve those objectives.
And really at the end of the day, all of what we do
is some kind of illusion, some kind of magic trick.
This is all, you know, video is an illusion of technology.
Right.
And it goes all the way back to the beginnings of cinema.
(08:14):
In fact, many early practitioners of cinema we're actually magicians.
Uhhuh,
yeah.
And I have a lot of friends that are magicians and, and
so that, that sort of stock and trade has always lived.
Inside me.
So when you look at new things through a lens of, it's just another
version of magic and what people do to be entertained and allow
(08:34):
themselves to be entertained with these, like how is that even possible?
Yeah.
Like when you look at, you know, movies like.
Planet of the Apes, for example.
And you look at these creatures and you're like, well, clearly they figured
out a way to teach these apes to talk because there's no way you could
create something that looks that photorealistic with computer technology.
Yeah, well, of course we can.
And now in the age of ai, we can do almost anything.
(08:55):
And we're just in its infancy of learning how to build this into an industry.
Mm-hmm.
And it's like I was saying on the panel.
I've never been involved in an industry, and I've been in
this business for a long time where there's literally a
wholesale change of technology every two to three months.
Something new emerges, not just some
technology I was gonna add in there.
(09:15):
Not just some technology, a wholesale change of, I feel like
all kinds of things, but technology being one, the main,
not the, the technology sort of births all of these new concepts
and new ideas of how to tell stories and entertain people
and, and immerse people in, in various forms of entertainment.
Um, so.
The answer is kind of Yeah, it was.
It wasn't, yeah, it wasn't as a much of an uphill climb.
(09:37):
I could tell you where, and it's still an issue today, where
the Uphill climb was, was how do you find an ROI for new, right?
Mm. When we know the ROI, even though it might
be shrinking and starting to become a little.
Dis disabled.
Yeah.
Um, we know where we can make money with traditional
entertainment, it's harder to know where you can make money
with entertainment that doesn't have a basis yet what is new.
(10:00):
Yeah.
Right.
So like, could anybody have realized.
25 years ago that social media and vertical media on this thing
that we now call a smartphone would be such an economic force.
I don't think the answer is no.
I don't think they could.
Is no.
And I wanna throw, throw it to Chris, but I, I, I think that's
something that's very interesting that you hit upon both on the
panel and now is that it's interesting that a lot of times artists.
(10:24):
Storytellers look at technology as the, as an enemy.
We're hearing it right now.
Oh, it's gonna take our jobs because truly
art is always a bi fabrication of humanities.
Past.
We take art and we, Quintin Tarantino talks about
this, you know, he, he spends a lot of time.
Studying other art and then creating ideas from that.
Art and technology has always actually been the vehicle to then transform that
(10:48):
art into a new medium, and that's how we got filmmaking in the first place.
So it's crazy that to me, sometimes the artists see it
as this kind of demon that we're going up against when
it has been the enabler of our art this entire time.
Look,
every piece of technology has, well, let's call it demonic traits, right?
That.
Things will alter.
Things will change.
(11:08):
So if you want to just stay where you are,
you may still be able to hold a career, but.
The infrastructure around that will crumble.
Mm-hmm.
Like, you know, in, even in, in my era as someone is,
early, early sixties, there was a, a, a business of cutting
film and doing what we call negative cutting for films.
Yeah.
And making prints of films.
Yeah.
And a whole infrastructure of people that would drive in little pickup
(11:31):
trucks and vans and drop physical, uh, cans of film off to a network
and infrastructure all around the world for people to watch those films.
Right.
That largely changed to a digital infrastructure.
Those jobs changed in some cases, expanded in some cases shrink.
And there's still a tiny little fraction of the world that
uses film for acquisition, uhhuh and for distribution uhhuh.
(11:53):
Um, but you're talking about like almost no human, you know, like that you're
talking about like a handful of humans that do this kind of stuff now, where.
The digital disruption has now birthed a huge amount of new people that would've
never had a chance to be in the entertainment world, because they can shoot on
cameras like this that are low cost digital cameras, but still professional.
(12:16):
Or they can shoot on their iPhone or their Android phone.
Absolutely.
And they have an entire movie studio in that smartphone.
They can shoot.
They can edit it and they can distribute it to the world directly from
that device, largely because of what we, you know, call the internet.
Right?
The power of the internet is an enabling factor that has enabled.
Millions and millions of careers.
(12:37):
Mm-hmm.
That didn't exist.
It didn't exist at all.
It didn't exist at all in the days of movie
violas and film prints and, and negative cutting
technology is truly a gift when you look at it that way.
And
it's, and it's wild to me because it's not just, um, I mean, it's,
it's becoming even more democratized because you see, like, you know,
we, we talked about you being at Red, like red got acquired by Nikon.
Yes.
Now, Red's technology exists within new Nikon cameras.
(13:00):
Right.
You know, all of that technology is.
Becoming more democratized, becoming a lower cost
for the end creator that wants to create with it.
And then with ai, you have a similar thing happening where, you know, you,
you can look online and just scroll, I'm, I'm sure in your social media feed,
you'll come up with, you know, the AI sa well maybe, maybe this is my feed.
(13:20):
Um, but the AI Sasquatch or yes, you know, these
I've Sasquatch, AI generated, you know, these.
AI generated characters that come up from time to
time, and they're, they're looking more and more real.
They're becoming more and more direct.
And, and for some people that is like the result of their,
their planning and their strategy and their creativity.
It's not just throwing it into an AI machine and coming up with crap.
(13:42):
Yeah.
And, and.
Certainly in our business, you'd make the point
about red being recently acquired by Nikon, right?
There's an and, and a lot of prof, what we call professional camera companies
these days are actually really struggling economically simply because
the delta between a consumer camera that everybody has in their pocket
now shooting 4K video at various frame rates with high dynamic range and
(14:03):
photographic filters and so forth and so on, and certain filmmakers that are
gonna choose to use those cameras to actually make professional production.
Um, but the bulk of these people are using it.
To just upload their stuff on YouTube and it looks
really good and it totally serves that purpose.
So you start to narrow down the need for what we call professional tool
sets, because these consumer tool sets basically bring that delta in to the
(14:27):
point where in some cases imperceptible, and in many cases you can certainly
get a much better refined image if you use professional production, but.
Is it really going to be worth the cost and complexity?
Yeah.
When you're doing something to upload to
TikTok or or YouTube reels or whatever it is.
And the answer is largely no.
Absolutely.
So just, you know, I mean, just this microphone, I'm sure it costs almost
(14:49):
nothing compared to what a wireless microphone would cost at years ago.
Yeah.
And hopefully it sounds fine.
Right?
It sounds great.
Otherwise I wouldn't
be using it.
But no, it's.
You're, you're exactly right.
I mean, the, the cost of this stuff is, um, you
know, it's, it's the, the risk versus reward.
It's like I could go and get a six K camera or a 12 K camera and shoot all of
(15:09):
this interview, but is anybody even gonna be able to stream that on YouTube?
No.
And if you're looking at it on your phone, you're not gonna
be able to see maybe 4K resolution if you've got a good eye.
But even those,
even these cameras are relatively cost effecti you're talking about, you know?
Yeah.
Low thousands, or in many cases, sub a thousand dollars
easily.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So many.
You know, professionals can afford to enter into this
(15:30):
market where just a few years ago, there was no chance.
You're talking about cameras that were, you know, six figures.
Yeah.
To enter this market.
So a lot's changed and AI is going to be yet another
massive agent of change on that network effect, on that
cost lowering, like we talked about in the panel, the idea.
Hiring big time human powered helicopters to shoot.
(15:51):
Aerials number one went through its first
disruptive revolution with drones, right?
When you got drones that were big enough to hold things
like a red camera or an icon camera or whatever it is.
And now with ai, you're kinda like, for a lot of filmmaking,
you're like, well, I guess I could shoot it with a drone.
I'm definitely not gonna shoot it with a real helicopter, but why
don't I just type in, I need a woodsy, Oregon smokey, you know, like
(16:15):
aerial
helicopter shot.
Aerial helicopter shot with a blue pickup truck.
And these kind of things, and it'll make it for you.
Yeah.
There's an interesting argument to be made of
inorganic versus organic, which I touched on.
Mm-hmm.
So we're entering in an age where synthetic will start to take
over everything and you're gonna lose something in that equation.
Going back to a Quentin Tarantino who still likes to shoot on film
(16:37):
sometimes and distribute, like he'll do a 70 millimeter print Yeah.
For that tiny little fraction of an audience.
Yep.
That isn't a place that they can see it and afford to see it.
Yep.
And I feel like we always lose something in
the equation when technology moves forward.
Um, so you always have to be aware that you're gonna give something up.
But,
(16:57):
but you're gonna get something on the, also gonna get something that's
gonna be much more accessible to a lot more people.
Yeah.
And I think that's where there's still the
originality of an art form comes to play.
Like you could still, yes, technology has moved past.
You decide where you utilize it and where you go back and you use the
original hand sketch, the hand drawing, the, the film like Tarantino
(17:18):
does for Chris's audience, which is widely, um, interested in.
Brand building and how brands are built.
Uh, a lot of them are now facing this great, this great, uh, question of where
to put their attention as these tech technologies continue to boom and just.
You know, avalanche towards us in all industries.
(17:40):
For someone who has been a technologist and has, has done that for big legacy
brands and has been an advisor now for many, many brands, if you were to
give one piece of advice to a brand, uh, someone who's building a brand,
who's listening to s today as to where to pay attention, um, into, in terms
of the AI boom, where would you say that they should direct their attention?
(18:02):
Um, I think that's an extraordinarily complicated question today.
I think we've built so many layers now, historically, let's call it
the last 70 years of technology layers that enable creativity, right?
Um, that,
and this may sound, this is probably overused and may
sound a little trite, but ultimately if you build a
(18:24):
compelling story and approach it from an organic first.
Mentality, whether you're using organic tool sets to achieve it or not,
you're gonna achieve something that feels authentic to that audience.
Mm-hmm.
It like, there was a, there was a, a, a. Period of
time in this every three months everything changes.
Where a lot of AI visual tools, especially when they were applying
(18:45):
it to Motion, had this weird kind of glossy, sort of plasticy look.
Like everybody had this kind of strange, like, like they got dipped in oil
or they got dipped in gelatin, like they got pulled out of jello and, but
you could sort of see that there was something really intriguing about the.
Building of like synthetic humans and synthetic backgrounds
(19:06):
and synthetic stuff, but it just felt a little odd.
Like you, you tasted it and you're like, kind of tastes
like something I know, but it doesn't taste good yet.
In a fairly short period of time, a lot of technologists
started to work on that problem, that problem area.
Why does everything look kind of gelatinous?
And then they were able to solve it.
(19:27):
Now things don't look gelatinous unless you want it to look that way.
Yeah, right.
And then we started to figure out how to apply a. Audio tracks and do
things with synthesized audio and lip synthesis and things that were just
expensive and sort of archaic in terms of dubbing in multiple languages.
You are replacing some of a, of a, of an industry that way of, of
voice actors from many countries with a synthetic, synthetic version.
(19:49):
And it's not gonna be exactly the same, but given the choice between a
dub job where the blips are not matching the actor's voice and you're
kinda like, I would actually just watch the subtitles to a, I wanna
watch Great Korean content, or Indian content, or whatever it is, and.
I can watch this language in my language and the lips will match,
and you hope that they use the same actor's voice with the same
(20:11):
intonation, and you hope that the actor has given permission
to do that and hopefully makes money on multiple versions.
Right?
So there's lots of pieces to this puzzle
where as long as it starts to feel like we're.
Keeping the idea of organic, authentic to the style.
Mm-hmm.
And some of that style may be very high tech,
(20:32):
like a Tron type movie or a matrix type movie.
It doesn't have to be low tech to be organic.
Organic can be high tech too, or futuristic as well.
I think where things go wrong is when it's all focused
just on spectacle and creationism and less on narrative
and organic and authentic to the, to the audience.
Makes a lot of sense.
That's my 2
cents
(20:52):
on it.
Yeah.
'cause you can do some, you can do some ads and you can do some
content with AI that looks so artificial and so fake that people
are just gonna, you know, balk at it and it's gonna ruin, you know,
potentially your brand reputation depending on how you approach it.
Sure,
yeah,
yeah, yeah.
So it makes a big difference.
There were some
early ads.
And you, you kind of gotta give advertisers
credit for at least leaning into the future.
(21:14):
But you looked at it and like, this would've
been way better to just shoot this organically.
Yeah.
But now a year or two later that, again, that delta, right, like that delta.
When I started my journey working in digital cinema was massive.
Right?
First smartphones and first flip phones went crappy.
Little cameras, you know, way under one megapixel
and professional cameras were the real deal.
But
(21:34):
now look at it.
20 years later, it took 20 years, right?
Yeah.
The Delta is very minor with ai that Delta is shrinking so very rapidly
fast.
Yeah.
That it's hard to keep that authentic use case.
And on top of it as if we don't already have enough content of
just video content that's been created all around the world now
(21:55):
we've got every possible form of content that used to require a
deep VFX layer or a deep heavy production layer, and it's like.
Independent filmmakers or student filmmakers couldn't go out and
shoot a gigantic crowd scene or a gigantic war scene or a gigantic,
I want to explode 40 trucks and you know, and now they can.
So that's an amazing enabler for creativity.
(22:18):
But it also adds to this crazy content clut that we already
have that like, how do you even find the good stuff?
How do
you find anything?
Mm-hmm.
And that's why you build a brand, Chris.
That is exactly why you build a brand.
Gotta gotta make sure people know and trust and
have that authenticity to, to the content itself.
Um, and within that you can expand and you can experiment.
(22:38):
I think that's one of the fun things about.
This new technology and about AI is, it does
open the door for newer creative possibilities.
I know it was set on stage, but talking about using it to
pitch, using it to get ideas out faster, I think marketing
agencies really benefit from, um, being able to do that.
I know I've benefited from pitching a client
on, Hey, here's a silly video we're gonna do.
(23:00):
Here's my idea and here's all the.
Frames.
And they had, even though it was inconsistent at the time,
I was able to show like the, the storyboard just using that.
Because prior to that, this is how fancy I am, I was using stick figures.
So, so you know, it's far and away better than that.
And, um, you know, for folks like me who may not be the best illustrators
and have a small team, like it's a huge difference in how you.
(23:24):
Pitch, how you communicate, how you share with people.
Yeah.
Being able to use these technology tools to up your game.
Right.
Um, is really interesting.
And we talk about, you know.
Pre, pre pixel, like things that are only gonna
be shown within pitch meetings and and ideas.
And then getting close to final pixel.
Yeah, pixel.
So maybe temp effects and things that you may actually show to a test audience.
(23:45):
And then final pixel or commercial pixel, like you're delivering this
as paid media or media that's gonna go out to the world to an audience.
Mm-hmm.
And not just a test group or studio executives or people
you know internally that are stakeholders are gonna.
Give you a, a, a green light or a red light on something.
That's an interesting kind of where do you
draw the ethical lines of how it can be used.
(24:07):
The other thing is, what's also kind of fascinating to me is that a lot
of really important distinguished filmmakers of all form, whether they're.
Creating new, new fangled stuff on YouTube or TikTok or traditional
cinema artists, creators, or traditional streaming media are
actually using a lot of these tools and not talking about it a
(24:27):
lot.
Oh, they're all not talking about it.
They're
just like, just like the effects.
It's like, yeah, like the times where we actually have to really like
flip and wreck a car now, because within a game engine, you can make
a photo realistic car and you can actually do that, but you don't hear
a lot of people talking about, yeah, we didn't use any real cars here.
Yeah,
you want the illusion.
To work of.
You want the magic trick of for the audience not to know how it was done.
(24:50):
Of course,
you want them to just enjoy it, enjoy the experience and and
a full experience and go, wow, how the hell did they do that?
Absolutely.
You know, when
you like talking about when you create visual, that's kind, kind been the
fun of movie making from the beginning, the Moon magic, the very
earliest stages, the movie making from the beginning, from all
the back to George Malaises and the Man in the Moon.
Absolutely.
You know, a
hundred plus years ago, 120 years ago.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Using
(25:10):
the trickery that he had of his time.
To sort of fool people.
And yes, you could kind of now see, well, that's not a
great illusion today, but back then it was kind of amazing,
fascinating time.
We have the democratization on one side of, of all, all people being
able to use, utilize these tools to create, which is so beautiful.
And you have the overs saturation of the markets on the other side.
(25:33):
It'll be interesting to see how, uh, the leading horse takes the race.
Yeah.
Here we
go.
Right?
Yeah.
Awesome.
Well, Ted, thank you so much.
My pleasure on today to do it.
This has been really great.
One thing I always like to ask before the end of every interview
is, um, you know, what brand do you admire the most right now?
Or maybe what brand has influenced you as you,
um, you know, as you go about your advising.
(25:57):
Well, big brands, I think you may know the answer
'cause I sort of led you down this garden path.
Right.
I think you
already know
the, the fruit company outta Cupertino has always been a brand that, uh,
through its evolution, although it, you know, it stumbles every now and
again, but never really falls in my eyes and many other people's eyes.
Mm-hmm.
Um, is, you know, apple has always been kind of a, a, a,
(26:17):
a stake in the ground of an important technology leader.
Um.
In terms of tiny little like, or maybe not so tiny, but um.
I'd have to, I'd have to put more thought on it, but certainly, uh, what's going
on with bespoke AI models, like what Moon Valley is doing for the entertainment
(26:38):
industry, kind of licensing content and then building that is intriguing to me.
Um, and
they're doing it an ethical way they've licensed.
So that's all obviously.
Yeah.
Put them kind of ahead.
I think I'm involved mindset.
I'm involved in an
array of startups that are all doing what I think really interesting things.
I mentioned riff.
There's a company called IR Code that I'm involved in.
(26:59):
There's a company called gon, which is volumetric Capture that I'm involved
in, and a whole litany of other things, uh, that I get to play in these
early, early stage sandboxes and see where they go and where they head.
It's kind of, it's a really fun and intriguing
part of a, a career arc to be able to do that.
So
very cool.
We'll have to make sure everybody takes a look at those brands.
Can you tell everybody where they can find you if they like to find your word?
(27:22):
Um, yeah, sure.
I mean, like, you know, I do a lot of speeches and presentations
around the world, so of course I have a, a website that's just my name.
So it's ted schitz.com.
Uh, you just.
Google my name, you'll probably find it.
And lots of other stuff I did for Red and gtech
and all these other things over the years.
Um, so that's an easy way to find me.
Um, and then I do a podcast with two close friends, Charlie Fink and Rony Aboit.
(27:44):
We do a, a weekly podcast called the AI XR podcast that we talk
about AI and extended reality immersion tools and visual stuff,
and all the VR and xr, uh, stuff that we've been involved in.
That's called the AI Ai XR podcast.
Quite popular.
It's cracked the top 100 in the Apple.
Congratulations.
Congratulations.
That's a lot of people.
Listen to it.
Congratulations.
Got a
million plus used listeners.
(28:06):
It's kind of great.
Um.
And lots of other pieces and parts, but you, you just, just search for my name.
You'll find all kinds of crazy stuff that I've been doing over the
years in the, in the media sphere, even though I don't, I don't, I don't
use the traditional sort of social channels that a lot of people use.
I tend to find it a little, uh, toxic for me, but I use kind of old school media
(28:27):
tied to a new school interface, which is, you know, YouTube and all the other.
All the other forms of you can find me out there.
I'm all over it.
It easy to find.
Definitely send
people to check you out just
like this.
I'm sure you know, I'll
absolutely link to this
podcast and find it that way.
Thank you so much for, for being here.
And Chris, thank you so much for having me on.
We built this brand today.
I think Ted's our last guest, so
(28:48):
I think so.
Appreciate
being here.
So this
is like too tandem.
Podcast.
You're looking together.
You're, you're you're doing It's Coco.
It's a crossover.
It's a crossover.
It's
a crossover episode.
It's a crossover episode.
Episode.
Episode.
So now it's a tri.
We got three of us.
In
my early days of television.
We used to call this a very special episode.
This is, it's a very special episode.
Episode.
(29:08):
It's what we're gonna
Oh, thank you so much.
Yes,
thank you, Ted.
Welcome to, we Built This Brand.
I'm your host, as always, Chris Hill and
with me is my fabulous co-host of Drisha.
I am the host of Conversations with Curiosity,
and I'm so excited to be here at Powerful.
Forward and we have an amazing guest with us today, Ted.
Yes.
I dunno about.
Amazing.
But I'm here so you guys can decide, I guess, after you talk to me.
Well, we're happy to have you here.
(00:39):
Thank you.
Thanks for having me.
Ted.
Will you tell our audience a little bit about your work?
Uh, sure.
Um, so I've worked in the entertainment industry for about 40
years, such the gray hair, uh, and somehow survived it all.
Uh, I've had sort of three kind of, I guess call it career arcs.
Okay.
Which is kind of interesting for I guess anybody from a career standpoint.
(01:00):
First I was, uh, a. Production person, um, mostly doing
children's television in, uh, this odd place called Central
Florida, which I refer to as the funnel of Crazy Florida's.
This little thing that sort of looks like a little vestige of the
United States, and if it gets crazy enough, it's gotta go to Florida.
Oh, I love that.
So that's where I grew up as a kid, uh, and, uh, worked there
(01:20):
for, for the first 20 years of my career doing production for.
Mostly Disney and Universal and PBS mostly
children's stuff as you do, uh, in a place like that.
Um, and then a good close friend of mine said, you gotta come out to the show.
You gotta come out to the West coast.
And so, um, when I was, you know, guess late thirties, I guess,
we moved to, uh, California and did some production here.
(01:43):
But kind of after 20 plus years of it, I was
kind of like, oh, maybe I'll do something else.
Was starting to do some startup stuff then.
So my entrepreneurial muscles started to get exercised.
Uh, right around that time while I was still in Florida.
I was very intrigued.
We were shooting a lot of film at the time and I was very intrigued
in this new Bengal technology called high definition video.
(02:03):
Mm-hmm.
And I started to build, um, some technology
around, uh, some enabling tools around that.
We raised some startup funds and one of the, uh, companies that
was actually building some of the hardware under the hood, um.
Was a company out of Northern California that was doing,
um, sort of video engineering at a very, very high level.
Okay.
And, um, I was very involved in Apple culture and Apple
(02:27):
products, uh, in the, in the eighties and nineties.
Um, using these things called avids, which still exist today, but they were
very expensive back then and they only lived on a Mac platform back then.
Okay.
So I was very connected to the Apple sort of ecosystem and, uh,
one of my mentors, his name is John, said, you know, after that,
that startup didn't quite get enough money to do exit velocity.
He's like, you know a lot about Apple and Apple culture.
(02:51):
Apple has approached us to, um, see if we would be interested
in being their partner on a hardware project around
professional video applications for the Apple platform.
When Steve Jobs was still running the roost and everything was, um,
and it was interesting and I said, okay, well that's interesting.
And my friends were like, you're leaving production.
I'm like, I don't know if I'm leaving, but I'm taking a little departure.
Um.
So I got involved in that and I was sort of this embedded
(03:13):
employee in Apple, even though I worked for this engineering firm.
We were partnered with Apple to build this thing
that became what we now call desktop video.
Uh, and it.
Became a huge sort of phenomenon all around the world where you
used to use these very expensive, dedicated tools to do video.
And then we started to democratize that and people could do videos on
computers, which is essentially what these three cameras are right now.
(03:34):
Um, so the world changed and I was involved with like seven engineers.
It was kind of a wonderful time.
Wow.
Then after that I did a little startup with a buddy of mine.
It's a long kind of interesting story.
Um, we were both connected to Apple and we started a
little company called gtech, which are these little silver
hard drives that look like little mini apple computers.
Some of your crew probably knows them, and they sit on everybody's.
(03:55):
Uh, desktop multimedia machine.
Mm-hmm.
Uh, that company, uh, got acquired by, um, uh,
Hitachi and then eventually Western Digital.
And then I helped, I was part of the founding member, uh, one
of the founding members in the first employee of a company
called Red Digital Cinema, which is a movie camera company.
Yes.
It came sort of the beginnings of this digital cinema revolution.
It wasn't digital video, it was digital cinema.
(04:17):
Um, so I was involved in the.
Early stages of that and then did that for X amount of years and then
eventually sort of tried to do it early, early retirement from that.
Uh, and then, um, some friends of mine at the movie studios, I was very
connected to the, the movie culture 'cause they all were using this new
fangled camera and the workflow, which was tied to Apple, interestingly enough.
Uh, so everything Apple doesn't leave far from the, from the tree.
(04:41):
In my world.
It's always there.
That
happens when you're the infrastructure of half the world.
So did
the Yes.
So, um.
So some friends of mine at, uh, 20th Century Fox, one of my
other mentors, his first name is also Ted, um, said, if you're
really gonna retire from the camera company, we have an idea.
We want you to come help us figure out like the future of entertainment.
You'll be our futurist.
Like, we'll give you a fun title.
(05:02):
And I was like, I didn't even understand what he was talking.
I was like, what do you, that's not a real job.
Like, what do you want me to do?
He's like, I don't know, you'll just have to figure it out.
He's like, who do you want me to do it with?
He's like, I don't know.
You'll have to figure that out too, me and other people.
Um, so that kind of became my.
Next career, the third part of my career.
Wow.
Um, and it was fascinating, and I got to
explore all these new forms of entertainment.
(05:23):
Got very heavily into the idea of next generation immersive
entertainment for theme parks and virtual reality and mixed reality.
Did that for 20th Century Fox for about six, seven years, and
then some of the key people moved from Fox over to Paramount.
I moved over to Paramount with them, did that for about seven
years, and then a couple years ago, retired from Paramount.
Now.
These days advising startups and helping people that are a generation or two
(05:44):
younger than me, sort of go on the same trajectory that I did start companies.
And hopefully some of them work out.
And that's kinda why I'm here at this conference.
So what
a journey.
That's,
that's, uh, that's 40 years and three minutes, so you'll have to
tell us more.
So what, what was it like taking on a. Futurist role
at a massive legacy brand like 20th Century Fox.
(06:07):
Was it hard to disrupt within that environment?
And what was kind of, I know you had to create the
role, but what was the focus and what was the pushback?
And tell us, tell us about the experience.
Oddly
enough, I wouldn't say it was hard.
To build into that role because I had great support and great mentorship
and great people that understood the value of learning something new.
(06:29):
Um, and I tend to be sort of diplomatic around, um, disruption.
Mm-hmm.
I'm kind of called, people call me a technology diplomat because
there's a, there's an interesting phrase that a diplomat can
tell you how to go to hell in a way that you will enjoy the trip.
That you'll enjoy it.
Yeah.
(06:49):
Did is like I would take things that people were very
concerned about, like, this is gonna change a lot.
Like today, a lot of my discussions around AI is this giant
disruptive factor, which as you know, we were on this panel together.
Yep.
Of course.
So we just talked about it and I have these interesting perspectives
on it, just from a lot of learning and other disruptive phases.
Sure.
Of a 40 year entertainment career that was always
(07:10):
focused on these little disruptive nuggets that in some
cases became huge, um, trajectories for our industry.
Right.
So.
I had really good support at the very top level,
sort of CEO President levels of the company around.
We know we have to do things new and different while still
maintaining our heritage and the importance of what we do for
(07:30):
a living, but we can't just stick our head in the sand and say,
nothing's gonna change because we know things are gonna change.
So as long as you.
Got that kind of mentality that things will change, but you have to kind
of understand where the ethical boundaries are that are always changing
and the desire points and what's really gonna change under the hood.
And that creativity doesn't really change.
(07:52):
And storytelling doesn't really change.
You know, we tell the same stories over and over and over
again as humans, but we deployed different technologies.
To achieve those objectives.
And really at the end of the day, all of what we do
is some kind of illusion, some kind of magic trick.
This is all, you know, video is an illusion of technology.
Right.
And it goes all the way back to the beginnings of cinema.
(08:14):
In fact, many early practitioners of cinema we're actually magicians.
Uhhuh,
yeah.
And I have a lot of friends that are magicians and, and
so that, that sort of stock and trade has always lived.
Inside me.
So when you look at new things through a lens of, it's just another
version of magic and what people do to be entertained and allow
(08:34):
themselves to be entertained with these, like how is that even possible?
Yeah.
Like when you look at, you know, movies like.
Planet of the Apes, for example.
And you look at these creatures and you're like, well, clearly they figured
out a way to teach these apes to talk because there's no way you could
create something that looks that photorealistic with computer technology.
Yeah, well, of course we can.
And now in the age of ai, we can do almost anything.
(08:55):
And we're just in its infancy of learning how to build this into an industry.
Mm-hmm.
And it's like I was saying on the panel.
I've never been involved in an industry, and I've been in
this business for a long time where there's literally a
wholesale change of technology every two to three months.
Something new emerges, not just some
technology I was gonna add in there.
(09:15):
Not just some technology, a wholesale change of, I feel like
all kinds of things, but technology being one, the main,
not the, the technology sort of births all of these new concepts
and new ideas of how to tell stories and entertain people
and, and immerse people in, in various forms of entertainment.
Um, so.
The answer is kind of Yeah, it was.
It wasn't, yeah, it wasn't as a much of an uphill climb.
(09:37):
I could tell you where, and it's still an issue today, where
the Uphill climb was, was how do you find an ROI for new, right?
Mm. When we know the ROI, even though it might
be shrinking and starting to become a little.
Dis disabled.
Yeah.
Um, we know where we can make money with traditional
entertainment, it's harder to know where you can make money
with entertainment that doesn't have a basis yet what is new.
(10:00):
Yeah.
Right.
So like, could anybody have realized.
25 years ago that social media and vertical media on this thing
that we now call a smartphone would be such an economic force.
I don't think the answer is no.
I don't think they could.
Is no.
And I wanna throw, throw it to Chris, but I, I, I think that's
something that's very interesting that you hit upon both on the
panel and now is that it's interesting that a lot of times artists.
(10:24):
Storytellers look at technology as the, as an enemy.
We're hearing it right now.
Oh, it's gonna take our jobs because truly
art is always a bi fabrication of humanities.
Past.
We take art and we, Quintin Tarantino talks about
this, you know, he, he spends a lot of time.
Studying other art and then creating ideas from that.
Art and technology has always actually been the vehicle to then transform that
(10:48):
art into a new medium, and that's how we got filmmaking in the first place.
So it's crazy that to me, sometimes the artists see it
as this kind of demon that we're going up against when
it has been the enabler of our art this entire time.
Look,
every piece of technology has, well, let's call it demonic traits, right?
That.
Things will alter.
Things will change.
(11:08):
So if you want to just stay where you are,
you may still be able to hold a career, but.
The infrastructure around that will crumble.
Mm-hmm.
Like, you know, in, even in, in my era as someone is,
early, early sixties, there was a, a, a business of cutting
film and doing what we call negative cutting for films.
Yeah.
And making prints of films.
Yeah.
And a whole infrastructure of people that would drive in little pickup
(11:31):
trucks and vans and drop physical, uh, cans of film off to a network
and infrastructure all around the world for people to watch those films.
Right.
That largely changed to a digital infrastructure.
Those jobs changed in some cases, expanded in some cases shrink.
And there's still a tiny little fraction of the world that
uses film for acquisition, uhhuh and for distribution uhhuh.
(11:53):
Um, but you're talking about like almost no human, you know, like that you're
talking about like a handful of humans that do this kind of stuff now, where.
The digital disruption has now birthed a huge amount of new people that would've
never had a chance to be in the entertainment world, because they can shoot on
cameras like this that are low cost digital cameras, but still professional.
(12:16):
Or they can shoot on their iPhone or their Android phone.
Absolutely.
And they have an entire movie studio in that smartphone.
They can shoot.
They can edit it and they can distribute it to the world directly from
that device, largely because of what we, you know, call the internet.
Right?
The power of the internet is an enabling factor that has enabled.
Millions and millions of careers.
(12:37):
Mm-hmm.
That didn't exist.
It didn't exist at all.
It didn't exist at all in the days of movie
violas and film prints and, and negative cutting
technology is truly a gift when you look at it that way.
And
it's, and it's wild to me because it's not just, um, I mean, it's,
it's becoming even more democratized because you see, like, you know,
we, we talked about you being at Red, like red got acquired by Nikon.
Yes.
Now, Red's technology exists within new Nikon cameras.
(13:00):
Right.
You know, all of that technology is.
Becoming more democratized, becoming a lower cost
for the end creator that wants to create with it.
And then with ai, you have a similar thing happening where, you know, you,
you can look online and just scroll, I'm, I'm sure in your social media feed,
you'll come up with, you know, the AI sa well maybe, maybe this is my feed.
(13:20):
Um, but the AI Sasquatch or yes, you know, these
I've Sasquatch, AI generated, you know, these.
AI generated characters that come up from time to
time, and they're, they're looking more and more real.
They're becoming more and more direct.
And, and for some people that is like the result of their,
their planning and their strategy and their creativity.
It's not just throwing it into an AI machine and coming up with crap.
(13:42):
Yeah.
And, and.
Certainly in our business, you'd make the point
about red being recently acquired by Nikon, right?
There's an and, and a lot of prof, what we call professional camera companies
these days are actually really struggling economically simply because
the delta between a consumer camera that everybody has in their pocket
now shooting 4K video at various frame rates with high dynamic range and
(14:03):
photographic filters and so forth and so on, and certain filmmakers that are
gonna choose to use those cameras to actually make professional production.
Um, but the bulk of these people are using it.
To just upload their stuff on YouTube and it looks
really good and it totally serves that purpose.
So you start to narrow down the need for what we call professional tool
sets, because these consumer tool sets basically bring that delta in to the
(14:27):
point where in some cases imperceptible, and in many cases you can certainly
get a much better refined image if you use professional production, but.
Is it really going to be worth the cost and complexity?
Yeah.
When you're doing something to upload to
TikTok or or YouTube reels or whatever it is.
And the answer is largely no.
Absolutely.
So just, you know, I mean, just this microphone, I'm sure it costs almost
(14:49):
nothing compared to what a wireless microphone would cost at years ago.
Yeah.
And hopefully it sounds fine.
Right?
It sounds great.
Otherwise I wouldn't
be using it.
But no, it's.
You're, you're exactly right.
I mean, the, the cost of this stuff is, um, you
know, it's, it's the, the risk versus reward.
It's like I could go and get a six K camera or a 12 K camera and shoot all of
(15:09):
this interview, but is anybody even gonna be able to stream that on YouTube?
No.
And if you're looking at it on your phone, you're not gonna
be able to see maybe 4K resolution if you've got a good eye.
But even those,
even these cameras are relatively cost effecti you're talking about, you know?
Yeah.
Low thousands, or in many cases, sub a thousand dollars
easily.
Yeah.
Yeah.
So many.
You know, professionals can afford to enter into this
(15:30):
market where just a few years ago, there was no chance.
You're talking about cameras that were, you know, six figures.
Yeah.
To enter this market.
So a lot's changed and AI is going to be yet another
massive agent of change on that network effect, on that
cost lowering, like we talked about in the panel, the idea.
Hiring big time human powered helicopters to shoot.
(15:51):
Aerials number one went through its first
disruptive revolution with drones, right?
When you got drones that were big enough to hold things
like a red camera or an icon camera or whatever it is.
And now with ai, you're kinda like, for a lot of filmmaking,
you're like, well, I guess I could shoot it with a drone.
I'm definitely not gonna shoot it with a real helicopter, but why
don't I just type in, I need a woodsy, Oregon smokey, you know, like
(16:15):
aerial
helicopter shot.
Aerial helicopter shot with a blue pickup truck.
And these kind of things, and it'll make it for you.
Yeah.
There's an interesting argument to be made of
inorganic versus organic, which I touched on.
Mm-hmm.
So we're entering in an age where synthetic will start to take
over everything and you're gonna lose something in that equation.
Going back to a Quentin Tarantino who still likes to shoot on film
(16:37):
sometimes and distribute, like he'll do a 70 millimeter print Yeah.
For that tiny little fraction of an audience.
Yep.
That isn't a place that they can see it and afford to see it.
Yep.
And I feel like we always lose something in
the equation when technology moves forward.
Um, so you always have to be aware that you're gonna give something up.
But,
(16:57):
but you're gonna get something on the, also gonna get something that's
gonna be much more accessible to a lot more people.
Yeah.
And I think that's where there's still the
originality of an art form comes to play.
Like you could still, yes, technology has moved past.
You decide where you utilize it and where you go back and you use the
original hand sketch, the hand drawing, the, the film like Tarantino
(17:18):
does for Chris's audience, which is widely, um, interested in.
Brand building and how brands are built.
Uh, a lot of them are now facing this great, this great, uh, question of where
to put their attention as these tech technologies continue to boom and just.
You know, avalanche towards us in all industries.
(17:40):
For someone who has been a technologist and has, has done that for big legacy
brands and has been an advisor now for many, many brands, if you were to
give one piece of advice to a brand, uh, someone who's building a brand,
who's listening to s today as to where to pay attention, um, into, in terms
of the AI boom, where would you say that they should direct their attention?
(18:02):
Um, I think that's an extraordinarily complicated question today.
I think we've built so many layers now, historically, let's call it
the last 70 years of technology layers that enable creativity, right?
Um, that,
and this may sound, this is probably overused and may
sound a little trite, but ultimately if you build a
(18:24):
compelling story and approach it from an organic first.
Mentality, whether you're using organic tool sets to achieve it or not,
you're gonna achieve something that feels authentic to that audience.
Mm-hmm.
It like, there was a, there was a, a, a. Period of
time in this every three months everything changes.
Where a lot of AI visual tools, especially when they were applying
(18:45):
it to Motion, had this weird kind of glossy, sort of plasticy look.
Like everybody had this kind of strange, like, like they got dipped in oil
or they got dipped in gelatin, like they got pulled out of jello and, but
you could sort of see that there was something really intriguing about the.
Building of like synthetic humans and synthetic backgrounds
(19:06):
and synthetic stuff, but it just felt a little odd.
Like you, you tasted it and you're like, kind of tastes
like something I know, but it doesn't taste good yet.
In a fairly short period of time, a lot of technologists
started to work on that problem, that problem area.
Why does everything look kind of gelatinous?
And then they were able to solve it.
(19:27):
Now things don't look gelatinous unless you want it to look that way.
Yeah, right.
And then we started to figure out how to apply a. Audio tracks and do
things with synthesized audio and lip synthesis and things that were just
expensive and sort of archaic in terms of dubbing in multiple languages.
You are replacing some of a, of a, of an industry that way of, of
voice actors from many countries with a synthetic, synthetic version.
(19:49):
And it's not gonna be exactly the same, but given the choice between a
dub job where the blips are not matching the actor's voice and you're
kinda like, I would actually just watch the subtitles to a, I wanna
watch Great Korean content, or Indian content, or whatever it is, and.
I can watch this language in my language and the lips will match,
and you hope that they use the same actor's voice with the same
(20:11):
intonation, and you hope that the actor has given permission
to do that and hopefully makes money on multiple versions.
Right?
So there's lots of pieces to this puzzle
where as long as it starts to feel like we're.
Keeping the idea of organic, authentic to the style.
Mm-hmm.
And some of that style may be very high tech,
(20:32):
like a Tron type movie or a matrix type movie.
It doesn't have to be low tech to be organic.
Organic can be high tech too, or futuristic as well.
I think where things go wrong is when it's all focused
just on spectacle and creationism and less on narrative
and organic and authentic to the, to the audience.
Makes a lot of sense.
That's my 2
cents
(20:52):
on it.
Yeah.
'cause you can do some, you can do some ads and you can do some
content with AI that looks so artificial and so fake that people
are just gonna, you know, balk at it and it's gonna ruin, you know,
potentially your brand reputation depending on how you approach it.
Sure,
yeah,
yeah, yeah.
So it makes a big difference.
There were some
early ads.
And you, you kind of gotta give advertisers
credit for at least leaning into the future.
(21:14):
But you looked at it and like, this would've
been way better to just shoot this organically.
Yeah.
But now a year or two later that, again, that delta, right, like that delta.
When I started my journey working in digital cinema was massive.
Right?
First smartphones and first flip phones went crappy.
Little cameras, you know, way under one megapixel
and professional cameras were the real deal.
But
(21:34):
now look at it.
20 years later, it took 20 years, right?
Yeah.
The Delta is very minor with ai that Delta is shrinking so very rapidly
fast.
Yeah.
That it's hard to keep that authentic use case.
And on top of it as if we don't already have enough content of
just video content that's been created all around the world now
(21:55):
we've got every possible form of content that used to require a
deep VFX layer or a deep heavy production layer, and it's like.
Independent filmmakers or student filmmakers couldn't go out and
shoot a gigantic crowd scene or a gigantic war scene or a gigantic,
I want to explode 40 trucks and you know, and now they can.
So that's an amazing enabler for creativity.
(22:18):
But it also adds to this crazy content clut that we already
have that like, how do you even find the good stuff?
How do
you find anything?
Mm-hmm.
And that's why you build a brand, Chris.
That is exactly why you build a brand.
Gotta gotta make sure people know and trust and
have that authenticity to, to the content itself.
Um, and within that you can expand and you can experiment.
(22:38):
I think that's one of the fun things about.
This new technology and about AI is, it does
open the door for newer creative possibilities.
I know it was set on stage, but talking about using it to
pitch, using it to get ideas out faster, I think marketing
agencies really benefit from, um, being able to do that.
I know I've benefited from pitching a client
on, Hey, here's a silly video we're gonna do.
(23:00):
Here's my idea and here's all the.
Frames.
And they had, even though it was inconsistent at the time,
I was able to show like the, the storyboard just using that.
Because prior to that, this is how fancy I am, I was using stick figures.
So, so you know, it's far and away better than that.
And, um, you know, for folks like me who may not be the best illustrators
and have a small team, like it's a huge difference in how you.
(23:24):
Pitch, how you communicate, how you share with people.
Yeah.
Being able to use these technology tools to up your game.
Right.
Um, is really interesting.
And we talk about, you know.
Pre, pre pixel, like things that are only gonna
be shown within pitch meetings and and ideas.
And then getting close to final pixel.
Yeah, pixel.
So maybe temp effects and things that you may actually show to a test audience.
(23:45):
And then final pixel or commercial pixel, like you're delivering this
as paid media or media that's gonna go out to the world to an audience.
Mm-hmm.
And not just a test group or studio executives or people
you know internally that are stakeholders are gonna.
Give you a, a, a green light or a red light on something.
That's an interesting kind of where do you
draw the ethical lines of how it can be used.
(24:07):
The other thing is, what's also kind of fascinating to me is that a lot
of really important distinguished filmmakers of all form, whether they're.
Creating new, new fangled stuff on YouTube or TikTok or traditional
cinema artists, creators, or traditional streaming media are
actually using a lot of these tools and not talking about it a
(24:27):
lot.
Oh, they're all not talking about it.
They're
just like, just like the effects.
It's like, yeah, like the times where we actually have to really like
flip and wreck a car now, because within a game engine, you can make
a photo realistic car and you can actually do that, but you don't hear
a lot of people talking about, yeah, we didn't use any real cars here.
Yeah,
you want the illusion.
To work of.
You want the magic trick of for the audience not to know how it was done.
(24:50):
Of course,
you want them to just enjoy it, enjoy the experience and and
a full experience and go, wow, how the hell did they do that?
Absolutely.
You know, when
you like talking about when you create visual, that's kind, kind been the
fun of movie making from the beginning, the Moon magic, the very
earliest stages, the movie making from the beginning, from all
the back to George Malaises and the Man in the Moon.
Absolutely.
You know, a
hundred plus years ago, 120 years ago.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
Using
(25:10):
the trickery that he had of his time.
To sort of fool people.
And yes, you could kind of now see, well, that's not a
great illusion today, but back then it was kind of amazing,
fascinating time.
We have the democratization on one side of, of all, all people being
able to use, utilize these tools to create, which is so beautiful.
And you have the overs saturation of the markets on the other side.
(25:33):
It'll be interesting to see how, uh, the leading horse takes the race.
Yeah.
Here we
go.
Right?
Yeah.
Awesome.
Well, Ted, thank you so much.
My pleasure on today to do it.
This has been really great.
One thing I always like to ask before the end of every interview
is, um, you know, what brand do you admire the most right now?
Or maybe what brand has influenced you as you,
um, you know, as you go about your advising.
(25:57):
Well, big brands, I think you may know the answer
'cause I sort of led you down this garden path.
Right.
I think you
already know
the, the fruit company outta Cupertino has always been a brand that, uh,
through its evolution, although it, you know, it stumbles every now and
again, but never really falls in my eyes and many other people's eyes.
Mm-hmm.
Um, is, you know, apple has always been kind of a, a, a,
(26:17):
a stake in the ground of an important technology leader.
Um.
In terms of tiny little like, or maybe not so tiny, but um.
I'd have to, I'd have to put more thought on it, but certainly, uh, what's going
on with bespoke AI models, like what Moon Valley is doing for the entertainment
(26:38):
industry, kind of licensing content and then building that is intriguing to me.
Um, and
they're doing it an ethical way they've licensed.
So that's all obviously.
Yeah.
Put them kind of ahead.
I think I'm involved mindset.
I'm involved in an
array of startups that are all doing what I think really interesting things.
I mentioned riff.
There's a company called IR Code that I'm involved in.
(26:59):
There's a company called gon, which is volumetric Capture that I'm involved
in, and a whole litany of other things, uh, that I get to play in these
early, early stage sandboxes and see where they go and where they head.
It's kind of, it's a really fun and intriguing
part of a, a career arc to be able to do that.
So
very cool.
We'll have to make sure everybody takes a look at those brands.
Can you tell everybody where they can find you if they like to find your word?
(27:22):
Um, yeah, sure.
I mean, like, you know, I do a lot of speeches and presentations
around the world, so of course I have a, a website that's just my name.
So it's ted schitz.com.
Uh, you just.
Google my name, you'll probably find it.
And lots of other stuff I did for Red and gtech
and all these other things over the years.
Um, so that's an easy way to find me.
Um, and then I do a podcast with two close friends, Charlie Fink and Rony Aboit.
(27:44):
We do a, a weekly podcast called the AI XR podcast that we talk
about AI and extended reality immersion tools and visual stuff,
and all the VR and xr, uh, stuff that we've been involved in.
That's called the AI Ai XR podcast.
Quite popular.
It's cracked the top 100 in the Apple.
Congratulations.
Congratulations.
That's a lot of people.
Listen to it.
Congratulations.
Got a
million plus used listeners.
(28:06):
It's kind of great.
Um.
And lots of other pieces and parts, but you, you just, just search for my name.
You'll find all kinds of crazy stuff that I've been doing over the
years in the, in the media sphere, even though I don't, I don't, I don't
use the traditional sort of social channels that a lot of people use.
I tend to find it a little, uh, toxic for me, but I use kind of old school media
(28:27):
tied to a new school interface, which is, you know, YouTube and all the other.
All the other forms of you can find me out there.
I'm all over it.
It easy to find.
Definitely send
people to check you out just
like this.
I'm sure you know, I'll
absolutely link to this
podcast and find it that way.
Thank you so much for, for being here.
And Chris, thank you so much for having me on.
We built this brand today.
I think Ted's our last guest, so
(28:48):
I think so.
Appreciate
being here.
So this
is like too tandem.
Podcast.
You're looking together.
You're, you're you're doing It's Coco.
It's a crossover.
It's a crossover.
It's
a crossover episode.
It's a crossover episode.
Episode.
Episode.
So now it's a tri.
We got three of us.
In
my early days of television.
We used to call this a very special episode.
This is, it's a very special episode.
Episode.
(29:08):
It's what we're gonna
Oh, thank you so much.
Yes,
thank you, Ted.
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