ENO doc

[Abraham Robinson]

This Documentary About Brian Eno Is Never the Same Twice Thanks to a software program, the length, structure and contents of the movie are reconfigured each time it’s shown.

https://www.nytimes.com/2024/07/12/m...cumentary.html

I personally don’t find the idea very compelling or original (Warhol did this with Chelsea Girls almost 60 years ago), but I am interested in the mechanics of it in the digital cinema era.

anyone showing this care to comment on how many versions of the DCP you were provided?

[Carsten Kurz]

Well, it does not necessarily have to be a DCP at all. As it is a self-produced documentary, they could use non-DCI playback solutions.

It would even be possible using DCI systems if they create different playlists automatically. But why go that route if they can use off-the-shelf players and interfaces.

[Jim Cassedy]

The ability to dynamically change the story or ending is certainly a lot easier to do with
digital presentations, but not necessarily a new idea. The 1985 movie "CLUE" had 3
different endings, depending on which theater you went to see it at.

[Bryce Warren]

I am hearing it's one DCP per screening, so two DCPs are available to us.
They also noted these versions won't be seen again outside of cinemas (of course).

From the NYT article

On the festival circuit, Hustwit and Dawes occasionally brought the Brain One machine onstage and tweaked “Eno” in real time, adjusting the audio for each theater’s acoustics. When the movie plays Film Forum in New York, they’ll create individual Digital Cinema Packages

The way the info we have available reads, is that all cinemas will show DCP1 on Oct 8, and DCP2 on Oct 10 (as opposed to 2 versions per cinema)

[Gordon McLeod]

In 1967 at Expo in Montreal the Czech pavilion that had push button a yes or no polling and as the protagonist had to make a decision of what to do the voting of the audience determined the next reel
The booth had 3 Machines and the projectionist had the running reel on one and the other two had the reels for depending on the vote he changed over to the correct one and the then laced up 2 more reels each reel was about 8 min but the now matter the voting pattern the last reel was the same to show that man's decisions always had the same outcome

[Abraham Robinson]

I am hearing it's one DCP per screening, so two DCPs are available to us.
They also noted these versions won't be seen again outside of cinemas (of course).

From the NYT article

The way the info we have available reads, is that all cinemas will show DCP1 on Oct 8, and DCP2 on Oct 10 (as opposed to 2 versions per cinema)

Thanks Bryce, this is exactly the kind of info I was looking for. To make sure I understand, you are doing two screenings total, one each day and are saying you anticipate receiving individual DCPs for each screening rather than VFs?

I’m mostly just curious how seriously they are committing to authoring “unique” copies for every show vs just Marketing talk

[Carsten Kurz]

There is not that much magic in it - they have a proprietary player solution that they use e.g. for festivals when the creators are present, and they create a number of static DCPs for general cinema showings as well.

https://thequietus.com/culture/film/...o-documentary/

There would actually be ways to do this with standard DCPs near realtime as well, and without loading 20+ full DCPs on a server, but I guess they didn't have the knowledge or access to implement that. At least hard cuts could be done based on a single OV as VFs, and hundreds of small VFs could be stored or created on the fly for any DCI server without eating up extra storage. They would still need to operate a dedicated machine to create all these CPLs (probably cloud based), download them to cinemas (very small files) and distribute them automatically. But they would need some sort of TMS like software interfacing, and that is probably a bit too much for a single project.

Instead, they probably thought that the average interested movie goer would watch the thing maybe twice for the fun of seeing 'a different' movie.

The idea may be new for cinemas, but 30 years ago, and still today, artists like Björk or Peter Gabriel created interactive CD-ROMs or DVDs with the same approach, and of course you could operate these on a cinema screen if you'd liked to.

[Bryce Warren]

To make sure I understand, you are doing two screenings total, one each day and are saying you anticipate receiving individual DCPs for each screening rather than VFs?

Yep! I am expecting two OV's and no VF's

[Harold Hallikainen]

Can't there just be a single DCP with a bunch of CPLs?

[Carsten Kurz]

Of course. Only hard cuts, or J/L cuts would be possible to create variations of the same footage. At least on the technical level. One could have prerendered transitions within the assets that may be used as variable elements as well, though, so it wouldn't appear that actual hard cuts were the only means of manipulating the content. You could consider the actual video and audio mxf merely as a library of elements to be shuffled around in the CPLs.

[Randy Stankey]

Or "Dip-to" transitions... Dip to black. Dip to still image. etc.

Brian Eno has been been experimenting with self-assembling music since I can remember. I used to be into his obscure, experimental stuff since high school. He's one of the first people to experiment with tape loops to make self-assembling music.

He set up two stereo, reel-to-reel tape recorders, placed some distance apart and threaded a reel of tape between them. The output of the playback head of the second tape recorder would be connected to the input of the right record head of the first tape recorder. Playing sound or music into the first deck would cause the sound to echo, back and forth between the left and right channels. Playing back the tape, after recording in this fashion, could give you all sorts of effects.

Brian Eno also used to gig with guys like Robert Fripp. It was Eno and Fripp who experimented with tape loops and other electronic devices to make music, back in the 1970's.... AKA: "Frippertronics."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frippertronics

It sounds like Brian Eno is back up to his old tricks, this time he's doing it with movies instead of just music and sound.

I'd like to see this movie but I'll probably never see it in a theater.

[Ryan Gallagher]

I was expecting more than 2 versions for 2 screenings when I read the "Never the Same Twice" headline. In fact it's exactly never the same only twice. lol
Seems a bit like a marketing gimmick, though i'm sure the intent was artistic. Unless they are promising that on subsequent archival bookings it will be yet another version?

Maybe they should do that with all movies to encourage the tiny cinema-going audience to keep coming back for subsequent "alternate versions" and save a few establishments.
;-)

[Marcel Birgelen]

There would actually be ways to do this with standard DCPs near realtime as well, and without loading 20+ full DCPs on a server, but I guess they didn't have the knowledge or access to implement that. At least hard cuts could be done based on a single OV as VFs, and hundreds of small VFs could be stored or created on the fly for any DCI server without eating up extra storage. They would still need to operate a dedicated machine to create all these CPLs (probably cloud based), download them to cinemas (very small files) and distribute them automatically. But they would need some sort of TMS like software interfacing, and that is probably a bit too much for a single project.

If you have built the thing that builds new CPLs, wraps them in DCPs, then the rest can be a manual process for the time being, where you send out the updated DCPs and KDMs every day and allow them to be ingested the normal way. It's still a little hassle, but fully automating this process would require a deep integration into cinema servers and/or TMSes, which, without a common interface, is an almost impossible task.

On the other hand, you could probably come up with a custom player, based on e.g. a Raspberry PI that could do the same for sub $200 dollars in hardware.

[Matt Jeanes]

I saw this in Austin with the director sitting by the screen with a laptop. It wasn't clear what if anything he was doing to influence what was on screen. It did feel like you could puzzle-piece a bunch of pre-edited clips together in a random order and achieve something more or less like what we saw, but I think there's a bit more going on all the way down to the sound mix and some of the interstitial graphics. Simply playing a set of CPLs in a different order each screening would achieve the "different show" effect but wouldn't really be all that faithful to the intent.

[Dennis Benjamin]

I always wanted to make a film in which the last twenty minutes of it take place in the theatre where the movie is being shown. So the last twenty minutes would technically be live. It would involve some work, but with the technology we have now, it could be done.