How Digital Backlots Transform Media & Entertainment Creativity

Digital assets in the media and entertainment industry are a source of competitive advantage, not just for current films, shows and projects but especially those assets making the digital backlot of previous productions. The concept of the digital backlot is a revolutionary approach that promises to redefine filmmaking and content creation because it means current animators, artists and creators can stand on the shoulders of all the talent, output and creative genius that came before. Imagine being able to find every single sword developed for every Star Wars film or every iteration of each Minion character.

Imagine a 3D asset management approach where creative teams don't ever have to unnecessarily recreate an asset again - that’s a digital backlot.

Understanding the Digital Backlot

Digital Backlot centralizes 3D models and any kind of digital assets, enhancing efficiency and saving costs by streamlining the organization, global access, and asset reuse across movies, TV shows, and other projects. Instead of having the institutional knowledge of each asset live in the collective memory of each creator, the digital backlot aims to preserve and make easily available each creative asset ever produced across the enterprise.

The Importance of Digital Backlots

Digital backlots are not merely a trend; they represent a fundamental shift in how media content is leveraged and developed. Each production has its domain within the system. Domains are secure spaces to add all on-show assets like characters, scripts, sequences, scenes, and much more, to work on them collaboratively. Users can be assigned to multiple domains with different roles, so you can ensure everyone has access only to what they need.

Digital backlots save creative artists countless hours in looking for what has come before in order to create better versions of what comes next. Digital backlots are all about referenceability, simple storage, sophisticated retrieval, and ultimately a single version of the truth for all assets.

Digital backlots enable teams to preserve and enhance institutional knowledge to create competitive advantage so that if one team experiences turnover that knowledge is retained and doesn’t “walk out the door” if someone leaves the organization.

And digital backlots are all about relationships. It’s not enough to just dump all production and creative assets in a storage location and “search”. Hierarchical file folder storage solutions won’t do anything to illuminate the relationships between assets, type, characters, movies or scenes. For that you need a graphical database structure.

The role of a semantic graph database in digital backlots

Traditional asset management systems are hampered by folder-based or relational databases and struggle to keep up with the demands of modern media and entertainment studios and creative teams. Semantic graph databases are a revolutionary approach that transform how businesses store, manage, and retrieve digital assets. By leveraging a semantic network, graph databases offer unprecedented speed, flexibility, and accuracy, ensuring that asset management systems are not just a repository, but a powerful tool for innovation and growth for five main reasons:

Automatic Relationship Management: Graph databases store relationships directly in their structure, presenting a big, interconnected web where every asset knows precisely how it's related to others.
Single Source of Truth: In graph databases each asset exists only once so each asset can then be related to multiple folders and projects.
Build Powerful Compound Assets: Graph databases excel at creating powerful compound assets by linking related assets to form a complete picture.
Flexible Data Structures: Graph databases offer a flexible schema that can adapt and grow with your needs.
Lightning-fast Search Results: Graph databases create a semantic network of connections allowing for significantly faster searches.

Digital backlots represent a significant leap forward in the media and entertainment industry. By offering cost savings, enhanced flexibility, and greater creative freedom, they empower filmmakers and media professionals to save time and spend more time being creative instead of looking for files to bring their stories to life in exciting new ways.

Learn more about censhare’s Digital Backlot solution.