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At the HPA Tech Retreat, a half-a-dozen short films reveal the behind-the-scenes of the event’s Supersession, a focus on the cloud-based remote production of “The Found Lederhosen.” Those films, as well as some other content promoting the HPA Tech Retreat, are the creation of Origin Point, a creative production/post company specializing in high-resolution image capture and workflow. The collective began as the in-house production arm of RED Digital Cinema in 2015 and, in 2019, formed their own company, Origin Point, allowing them to tell stories for brands across all industries. RED is one of their premiere clients along with others in the film/TV including Zeiss, Netflix and National Geographic.

“RED was a great training ground,” says creative director Clyde Bessey, who founded Origin Point with creative director Jason Mitcheltree and executive producer Andrea Dondanville. “That experience gave us an eye for how to capture the highest-quality, cleanest looking images.” The team often shot behind-the-scenes stories of feature films shot with RED cameras and won a Webby Award for its work on the RED Collective Series. Bessey reports that creating these behind-the-scenes films required them to go where the filmmakers were, in locations around the world and in sometimes difficult conditions.

“It taught us how to travel light and get the highest quality content out of the smallest team,” he adds. In addition to Bessey, Mitcheltree and Dondanville, that team also includes producer Kelly Pratt, director/producer Tyler Heckerman, and editor Christian May. Their background in challenging behind-the-scenes shoots made Origin Point a good fit to craft the behind-the-scenes footage for the Supersession.

For the HPA Tech Retreat Supersession, Origin Point is producing a documentary series about innovative workflow pioneered for “The Found Lederhosen” that will be shown on Day 1 of the event. The second day, the Supersession will switch to an all-live workflow demonstration, with Bessey acting as editor. He says that Origin Point is in the midst of post production for the Day 1 documentary. “It’s an interesting process because there are six international teams producing different films, in Hollywood; Dubai; Mexico City; Brisbane, Australia; London; and Ulaanbaatar, Mongolia,” he says. “This is an expansive story and we’re dealing with a massive amount of data coming in from multiple productions around the world, with post production also spread around the globe.”

He adds that Origin Point adopted a cloud-based workflow in order to fit into the production and post workflow of the HPA Supersession production. “We used Adobe Premiere as our workhorse,” says Bessey. “And we rely on BeBop for our virtual workstations. We wanted to avoid heavy downloads and uploads and worrying about compatibility issues, things that have always slowed us down in the past. BeBop and the cloud workflow made it very streamlined.” He adds that they’ve had “huge support” from Amazon, Google, Microsoft and all of HPA’s partners. Since the production handles the output of six separate productions, Origin Point had to handle data from Amazon Web Services, Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure. “They provided the storage for several cloud providers including Frame.io and Teradici,” says Bessey. “We bring it all into BeBop.”

“We’ve been working closely with Joachim ‘JZ’ Zell and the HPA team to make sure we’re in alignment with the content we’re creating for the show,” says Bessey, who gives credit to the project’s Zell and Leon Silverman. “Leon and JZ had the idea of the cloud-based workflows and we’re unraveling that in post,” says Bessey, who reports he’s done over 30 interviews. “It’s been great getting a front row seat to all the latest technologies. In talking to all these technology providers and creators, they’re not just talking to us but the whole community through us.”

Executive producer Dondanville agrees. “To help filmmakers around the world tell their stories is a beautiful thing and it’s why I was so excited to be part of this project,” she says. “If we can play a small part in showing them the way of the future, we’re proud to do it. These cloud-based workflows can really enable filmmaking to happen anywhere, anytime.”

Day 2 of the Supersession will be totally live. Bessey reports that the Origin Point team, with Zell, co-producer Mark Chiolis and Silverman, will be demonstrating a new vision for workflow for all to see, certain to be a great learning experience for participants and attendees.

What has Bessey and his team learned from the experience? “It’s fascinating to see how streamlined it has become to work in the cloud now,” he says. “It’s allowing creatives the freedom to work anywhere, anytime, which means we’re seeing content from voices that aren’t usually heard from. Cloud workflows are now for everyone and we hope it will empower productions to continue working with talented artists from anywhere in the world.”