AKQA’s Laura Minton on Why Producers Must Commit Fully to New Tech

Nashville-based production company Gear Seven pushes the limits of creativity, technology and possibility - and innovates like it’s nobody's business. Alongside a non-exclusive roster of directors and production capabilities, Gear Seven offers hardware, LED volume studios and virtual production via its sister companies Shift Dynamics and Arc Studios

Gear Seven has teamed up with LBB to speak with agency production leaders about innovations in production technology and how it’s revolutionising commercial production. This series investigates the importance of education in this area for agencies and brands and offers a fun opportunity to nerd out on all things technical, while sharing memories of their most awe-inspiring and unforgettable moments on set.

The latest interview is with Laura Minton, senior producer at AKQA. Laura is an award-winning integrated producer, with 20 years of experience in both the creative and entertainment industries. Well-versed in producing live-action, animation, stills, events and more, the versatile and tenacious producer is driven by achieving industry firsts - more recently pioneering with new creative technologies like virtual production and the metaverse. 

Speaking to LBB’s Ben Conway, Laura discusses why hand-crafted projects and simpler tech like spreadsheets are still vital to her work, as well as some of the more advanced productions she’s been involved in, including her baptism of fire with virtual production and her experience ‘hacking’ Unreal Engine.

LBB> Throughout your career – what has been the most exciting or ground-breaking piece of ‘new’ kit or technology that was introduced to you and why?

Laura> I have a mug on my desk that says ‘I LOVE SPREADSHEETS’. My boss bought it for me in jest because I always have five open at any one time. I should get a new one that says ‘I LOVE GOOGLE DRIVE’. Tools that help me stay on top of the master plan and enable communication, collaboration and file sharing are the foundations of my production process. Where would we be without good old Google Drive, and Sheets in particular, for managing feedback rounds? 

I was surprised last year when an editor told me I was the first producer they’d worked with who proactively laid out timecodes and feedback for them in Sheets and that it revolutionised their workflow. Really? But I’ll take that. It gives me a headache just thinking about the email back and forth of yesteryear. 

I would be remiss not to mention frame.io; nothing will replace being in the edit suite when time and money allow, but frame.io is arguably more collaborative and brilliant for gathering multi-stakeholder feedback quickly.

LBB> And what are the technologies that you have your eye on now that either are having a big impact on how production is done - or have the potential to change things in a big way?

Laura> I didn’t want to say AI… but AI. What Adobe is doing with Photoshop Generative AI and Premiere AI editing will save a lot of time and money that we can redirect to making even more great work. It’s easy for me to say as a producer, perhaps, but we have to adapt, and I choose to see it as an opportunity.

LBB> What piece of kit (big or small and mighty) still makes you feel in awe when on set?

Laura> TechnoCrane – no question. I had another career before I became a producer and took a very scenic route into production, so I’m living my best life just being on set.

LBB> Can you talk us through one or two of the most exciting recent productions that you’ve been involved in that you think had a really interesting innovation or technological aspect to them?

Laura> Is it OK to flip this question on its head? Too late! The most exciting projects I’ve worked on recently are the opposite of technical innovation – they were crafted by hand. AKQA’s ‘Little Wings’ is an allegorical animated short made by displaced Ukrainian artist Mariia Shub using traditional painting and drawing methods and brought to life layer by layer in After Effects by her animation director brother, Rodion Shub. A cut-out animation and the most iterative creative process I have ever been involved in, where tweaks and changes needed to be literally taken back to the drawing board. 

I’ve just wrapped on 2023’s Future Lions, working alongside Oscar-nominated animation director Thierry Marchand and EP Michael Stanish at Ground Control to create ‘For All Life’ with Volvo Cars. Thierry’s passion for visual storytelling transformed this year’s theme into a delightful, whimsical, hand-drawn 2D world featuring Future Lions cubs on a mission to make life safer. Our Teams calls with Thierry are now a thing of legend on my team. Me and my art director, deciding in real-time, with Thierry drawing on-screen, whether a character (in this case, a deer) should be blasé or annoyed, based on the complete change of mood brought about by a few flicks of Thierry’s pen. He’s a comedy genius; we laughed a lot. I love producing animation and often have to pinch myself - I get paid to have this much fun.

LBB> A similar question but it doesn’t have to be recent - what is the time in your career that you’ve been on set / observing a production and been particularly in awe of what the production team was pulling off?

Laura> I hustled my way into movies after becoming utterly obsessed with the opening scene of Spectre. How did they do it? I had to know! Serendipitously, whilst buying a new car a few months later, I met the unit production manager on Bond, Hannah Godwin. I totally fangirled her and she gave me some pointers on how to get my CV through the doors of production offices (read: send a lot of emails). Shortly afterwards, I landed the role of production secretary on Studiocanal’s ‘The Guernsey Literary & Potato Peel Pie Society’. 

The whole ‘Guernsey’ experience was the most intense and extreme professional situation I’ve ever experienced. One needs the skin thickness of a rhinoceros and the willingness to give up every semblance of a personal life when you’re crewed. But wow! Seeing it all come together from pre-production all the way through to wrap was masterful – the creation and dismantling of an entire organisation that moves as one and runs like actual clockwork - all hands on deck, no excuses – within the space of four short months. The experience underpinned my work ethic as a producer, and I have the utmost respect for film crews; they are some of the hardest working and resilient people around.

LBB> Virtual production is growing in popularity in film and TV, what are your thoughts about its potential in the advertising space?

Laura> Virtual production has exponential use in the advertising space when the industry is better educated on the pipeline, the workflow is simplified and the price point comes down. As an agency producer, you need to upskill in VP if you’re going to use it; there is no getting around it. Some creative ideas will work better than others, and some won’t work at all.

Ideally, the agency producer would have a good sense of this at the concept stage. I was the first producer at AKQA to utilise virtual production for an in-house project (Future Lions x LEGO, 2021) and at that time, I couldn’t find a production company that had shot on a VP stage. I hired the brilliant Blood Films based on their extensive experience with green screen (and because they’re ace), but that didn’t count for much in the end because this was a new frontier. We went into it together, knowing full well we didn’t know what we didn’t know, with enough earned confidence to know we'd make it a success. As the agency producer who was also managing the pre-vis, I liken my experience to being a translator of a foreign language that I didn’t speak – with the production company speaking one language, the VFX team speaking another, and me in the middle, translating from a book, for everyone involved. 

So just let’s say, a mere two years ago, it was like the Wild West, but now, thankfully, volumes have stepped up to educate existing film professionals by offering comprehensive training on the virtual production pipeline. The film schools are doing a great job too, so the future is bright. It’s still a steep learning curve for existing film professionals, but we’ll figure it out together.

LBB> With so many platforms to produce for, what’s your preference - to maximise assets across platforms or to produce content that’s more tailored to each platform? Or some sort of balance? What do those conversations look like?

Laura> For in-house productions with modest budgets, it’s essential to maximise assets across platforms, so I always have multiple use cases in mind from the outset. Still, you can’t do that for everything, or you’ll compromise the creative idea too much. I mostly have the luxury of putting the work first, so if we can’t do it justice on a particular platform, we won’t post it there.

LBB> Quite often, production involves trying to solve a problem that’s never been attempted before - and that can mean hacking existing technology or trying to find new technologies. When you get a project that has such technological challenges, how do you and your team like to approach them?

Laura> With an intrepid and tenacious attitude. Get connected to the right people, ask the right questions, do your due diligence and be brave. You’ll find the right solution. You’ll also likely make friends for life, if that interests you. We shot a load of pre-recorded pieces to camera and hacked Unreal Engine to make it look like a live video feed. Sounds simple? In reality, it was painful and tested everyone’s patience on set, but there was no workaround. Plan B was to cut to full screen in post, but that would have been so disappointing and irritated me forever. You have to commit fully.