“We created a communication workspace,” he says. “I know it sounds like hardly the most innovative thing to people who are in technology spaces. In filmmaking, it's still sort of shockingly new.”
“A lot of hard-boiled New York crew came up and said that’s the most information I’ve ever had through a tech scout. A lot of people felt like we did what you normally do for rehearsal at the top of every day. Everyone was able to be standing there together, pre-visualizing what we were going to be doing in a convenient way. That’s been really great. I actually think if we had more time, we could’ve taken this to even another level.”
Dropbox recently introduced Dropbox Spaces as the first step in building the smart workspace of the future. So we were curious—how would Norton envision a smart workspace for filmmakers?
“It'd be amazing to have it be a curatorial space where you can organize all the cake layers of something, and have multiple people responsible for making sure their part of the cake layer is populated,” he says. “It would be cool if you could do things with it almost like tabs, where you [label them] directors, notes, wardrobe, storyboards, so that if someone was going into the document for the scene, they could tab into the specific buckets of the departmental information and it would bloom up. Or you could elect to go “collage mode” where it’s all there, sort of stacked, and you could scroll through all of it… a synthesized total view of where we are in progress.”
Technology has changed radically in the 20 years since Norton began working on Motherless Brooklyn. As AI, VR, and other emerging technologies expand the capabilities of filmmakers even further, imagine what pioneers like Norton will be able to create in the next 20 years.
Edward Norton’s new film Motherless Brooklyn is in theaters now. To learn how your team can use Dropbox as the smart workspace for your next project, check out dropbox.com/smart-workspace.