MAKING THE PILOT

...a hilarious satire on greenwashing and big banking on Wall Street.Toby Fountaine wrote and directed this cutting-edge TV pilot for James Dowdall’s 10-part television series which has been written and developed over the last 2 years. It was produced by Screenography, a production company founded by Toby and James, filmFOUNTAINE and Mo-Sys.

James Dowdall’s creation began to come to life when he and Toby Fountaine sat down to put pen to paper. After some hours of writing (and many more hours of laughing), they had four episodes and synopses for a 10-part series. And a plan for Season 2.

Then came the problem of how to finance a pilot for a big streaming-quality pilot – and how to get inside a trading floor which is a highly prized and sensitive space; they are also few and far between. Then there was the location… New York City.

Then Toby met Michael Geissler, CEO of engineering and tech company Mo-Sys. Michael said his company could virtually reproduce any film set by building it virtually in Unreal Engine, a gaming engine. He said he wanted content he could use (previously the streamers and studios owned the content) to demonstrate what his company could achieve. So Toby slid the script of The Contractor across his desk.

Of course, he loved it. And the magic began!

And so the Screenography – Mo-Sys partnership was born. It is, as far as we know, the first co-production between a production company and an engineering company. It allows both to work right at each other’s respective sweet spots with no barriers in between. To concentrate just on the picture.

Mo-Sys is an award-winning, world-renowned manufacturer of virtual production solutions & camera robotics for Film, HETV & Broadcast. Mo-Sys brought you Dance Monsters, the most technologically advanced Netflix production in its history, the movie Gravity for Netflix, Squid Games for Netflix and high-end BBC drama. Mo-Sys serve many major studios.

Mo-Sys  Virtual Production (VP) technology is used in most third-party VP providers not attached to studios.

We employed a plethora of Mo-Sys Tech in THE CONTRACTOR. And we built the sets in Unreal Engine.

Editor Tom Sands, renowned VFX supervisor Gianluca and leading post-house iGene came together to make magic with the picture in post-production… to take the in-camera footage and merge it seamlessly with our computer-generated backgrounds. They appear real.Technical details of tech and post-production can be read here.

Filmmaker Eric James Gravolin also made a 25-minute broadcast-quality documentary, Making The Contractor, to document the pioneering tech and workflows used in the production.

It also features behind the scenes footage and interviews from the key creative and executive team members.

On request, we can share this with industry contacts interested in the series.

Toby Fountaine (from Screenography), Michael Geissler and Florian Gallier (from Mo-Sys) have been invited to give talks at industry shows and festivals such as the International Broadcasting Convention in Amsterdam, MIPCOM in Cannes and others going into 2024.

So that’s what we’ve done. The considerable investment Mo-Sys has made into VP tech, VP expertise and VP filming have all come together in THE CONTRACTOR. And it is important for Mo-Sys to stay creatively involved with projects such as The Contractor to be aware of the needs of industry and to evolve the tech to its needs.

In a world of constrained production budgets, VP is getting more attention as a cost-effective technique of creating high quality content.

Screenography have produced a cutting edge, high-end pilot employing all the new tech and workflows described here.

What we have achieved is innovative, disruptive, and for the budget, mind-blowing.

We look forward to sharing the pilot with you.

We look forward to making the full series.


If you’re a producer or production company, please get in touch