Trilith Studios has been home to some of the largest blockbusters in entertainment, ranging from ... [+]
Trilith Studios has been home to some of the largest blockbusters in entertainment, ranging from “Avengers: Endgame” to “WandaVision.” With a recent rebrand of the business, Trilith has started on a new expansion of the business given changes they see in technology and content. I sat down with Frank Patterson, President and CEO of Trilith Studios, to talk more about the company rebrand, his vision for Trilith, and how the studio got back to work in the height of the pandemic.
Dave Knox: Can you tell us a little bit about who Trilith is and the background of the company?
Frank Patterson: Trilith Studios was formerly known as Pinewood Atlanta Studios. We are one of the largest purpose-built film and television studio facilities in the world with 24 stages and 1.2 million square feet. We provide operational expertise and these production facilities to some of the biggest filmmakers in the world. We originally began here in Atlanta as Pinewood Atlanta Studios seven years ago. Pinewood is an 85 year old brand that supported filmmakers from Alfred Hitchcock all the way to George Lucas. And we have carried on that tradition here at Trilith. We were home to the production of “Avengers: Infinity War,” and “Avengers: Endgame,” and a lot of superhero projects. Our stages and facilities are designed to support these very big, very fast moving expensive productions. That's what we're known for and that is what we are good at.
Knox: Given the legacy of Pinewood, what led you to the decision to rebrand the studio?
Patterson: It really was just an expansion of the scope of our business. We really wanted to focus on building two other pillars of business in addition to the facilities business. One is we wanted to start making some strategic investments into content. We knew there would be an incredible demand for content given everything that's going on in the industry. And two, we wanted to begin making investments in technologies, technologies that help content scale.
We wanted to make those investments and our partners at Pinewood wanted to stay in the facilities business. So we shook hands on how to separate and part of that was we knew we were going to have to rebrand. Branding is being able to authentically tell the world what you are actually doing. We had two goals with that. One was we wanted to carry forward our U.K. heritage that we began with Pinewood as an 85 year old brand. We were hoping to do something that would allow us to carry forward our British heritage, but we also needed to sort of tell the world that we were now a three pillar business and what those pillars were. During the whole rebranding process I found myself focusing on Stonehenge, which is right down the road from Pinewood in London. It happened to match our three pillars of business perfectly. It was a very purpose-built place. It's rich with stories and it was the most advanced technology of its time. We thought, “That's interesting. Those are our three pillars as well — purpose-built, focused on stories and storytelling, and providing industry-leading technology.” And then I learned that the three stone structure in Stonehenge is called a trilith. And triliths are seen all around the world often as gateways to very interesting places, often gateways to inspiration. We thought that was a perfect match for what we are building. And so with that, we committed to the name Trilith and our three pillar business.
Knox: What is the vision for this master development that you are creating with Trilith?
Patterson: With Trilith, we are building a place where all the resources any creative would need in the film and television industries are here in one place, a place where they feel like anything's possible. So we have built a town with beautifully designed homes and parks, and 51% of the space is actually green space. It's the largest geothermal installation of its kind in the United States. And the architecture is absolutely gorgeous because we know our creative tribe in the film industry is very interested in design and loves to live among beauty. We have a town center with restaurants created by proprietors, by the creatives themselves. We are looking for makers and artists and people who want to live here. We have all kinds of people living in the town now adjacent to this incredible movie studio. The goal here is that Trilith is a place where storytellers can feel like anything's possible, tell their stories, and if they want, they can live and raise their families here or just come visit and make and move on. But it's kind of a dream place for us. Selfishly, it's the place I wish I could have found when I was 25 years old.
Knox: With the content industry changing so dramatically in recent years, how is Trilith managing that demand?
Patterson: On the one hand on our facilities business, we have relationships with the very best content makers in the world. Marvel has made a lot of movies here with the “WandaVision” series being the most recent. We feel very fortunate to have that kind of relationship with content makers. The content world is changing fast. It reminds me of the old Jack Welch quote, "When the rate of change outside your organization is faster than the rate of change inside your organization you're in some serious danger." All the changes that we are seeing in our industry are creating disruption. It's a very exciting time, as long as you're willing to make bets and investments and really look forward.
And so for us, we really focused our investments on content companies that are in a position of making multimedia franchise content, kind of 360 content that's really in keeping with where we think it's going right now. For instance, we are seeing a rise in how short-form content is causing a longer-term engagement with consumers. And that change is a result of creators beginning to build their own brands instead of simply producing content. They are doing this by using short form content on free, low barrier technologies like YouTube and TikTok to gain direct access and to build audiences. They then leverage their audience to build their brand around an entire ecosystem of longer form content like licensed merchandise, consumer products, and publishing games. Until recently, this was limited to the biggest IP in the world, primarily because of the siloed business model of business structures and the enormous cost for producers to access distribution channels.
But that has been changing recently. Take for example “CoComelon,” which is owned by Moonbug Entertainment. It's a children's brand built on 3D animation shorts on a YouTube channel. It was the third most popular show on Netflix in 2020 after becoming the second most subscribed YouTube channel in the world. And the most subscribed YouTube channel in the U.S. I underscore that Netflix licensed “CoComelon” for their subscription business after it was available to the entire world for free on YouTube, a move that, just a couple of years ago would have destroyed media executive careers. The reason of course is that Netflix is buying audiences and proven digital IP that will keep their viewers and importantly, their viewers' parents, and grandparents inside the app. So Moonbug then of course introduced toys based on “CoComelon” characters and are looking at multiple revenue streams beyond that. It is all outside the traditional system. They have built measurable brand affinity among consumers. And now they are leveraging it to engage their audience in a variety of ways that all began with free short form content on YouTube.
So that is where we want to be. We want to back talent. We want to look at media as building brands that engage viewers in content that we love, that we can support, that we get behind. We're makers, we're creators, and we think that's the future. And we're just excited to be part of it.
Knox: With technology being one of the three pillars of Trilith, how does that fit with these trends and your vision?
Patterson: One immediate problem that we can solve for our filmmakers on the lot today is to give them direct access to virtual production tools that make their ability to shoot content, manufacture content, faster, better, safer with better creative outcomes. And so we brought on Barry Williams from Industrial Light & Magic to lead this technology sector with a first focus on how virtual production can sort of liberate our filmmakers on the lot right now. Virtual Production is sort of a buzzword in the industry these days, but it is basically about using game engines and different kinds of immersive technologies like LED screens to give filmmakers the opportunity to place a camera in a 360 environment. They can take the camera into locations and to imaginary worlds while being on a soundstage and have actors, virtual characters, physical and digital assets, all on the set at the same time and interact with them with a camera in real time so they are limited only by their own imaginations. One of the most popular and recent examples is “The Mandalorian” and how they built all those worlds. Think about how that kind of technology can provide all kinds of opportunities for filmmakers here on the lot. You can have a driving scene at night in New York one moment and then later have a country road in Georgia. And you can bring whatever car you want with whatever actors you want into whatever environment you want, anytime you want in a 360 degree environment. That is liberating to a filmmaker. Our vision is to focus on those kinds of technologies that help content scale.
Knox: The entertainment industry, like many, was seriously impacted by Covid. How has Trilith made production possible during this past year?
Patterson: Like everybody else, come the second week of March, we just put pencils down. We circled our team and instead of asking ourselves, “How can we be the best place in the world for top creatives to make content?,” the question became, “How can we become the safest studio in the world?” And that's a very different charge because we did not know what safe meant. We spent 12 weeks trying to answer that question by focusing on three areas.
The first was a new set of practices of how we would operate. We had to work with all the other stakeholders in the industry that represent the people of the industry in a collaboration on how we're all going to get back to work. The second was what kinds of technologies could we install that would enable us to be safer. We just had a hunch that there were opportunities there. For instance, we discovered a very cool technology that we were able to get installed very quickly that kills Covid on contact. Finally, we knew security was going to be critically important.
We went down this process like any startup does. How are we going to bring value to the marketplace? And in this case, how would we become the safest studio in the world? This was our goal. At that moment, it was critically important to us. We started working with our production partners and we were able to get our first feature film back to work the first week of June. It was the first studio feature film in the United States to get back to work and the first project in the state of Georgia to get back to work. But that was a test. We had a plan, but now we have got to deliver. Our technology partner was giving us real-time feedback daily three times a day on the testing. We were getting feedback from all the team members and really learning how they felt. As you might imagine, the goal was no one with Covid going on our lot. The last thing we needed was a spike. We are very fortunate that the plan worked. Today I had well over 3,500 people on the lot and we have a lot of productions up and running. “WandaVision” just wrapped out of here. We love the show and we feel very proud that we were able to help that team get back to work and tell great stories.
