SMPTE Storytellers: The First Film?

DAVID NICHOLAS WILKINSON was the director, producer, co-writer and presenter of THE FIRST FILM, POSTCARDS FROM THE 48%, GETTING AWAY WITH MURDER(S) and an executive producer of HOW TO CHANGE THE WORLD. He has also produced many other documentaries and drama productions. Wilkinson has also distributed 120 films in the UK & Ireland in the cinema, on video/DVD, on television and online. Since 1998 apart from two films, these were all purposely only British & Irish films. He started his career as an actor in 1970, and for the next ten years, he acted in over 40 theatre, television and film productions. In 1982 he became, by accident, the first true independent producer to work with the BBC with a film of Virginia Woolf's TO THE LIGHTHOUSE, which starred Sir Kenneth Branagh. He also produced Sir Anthony Hopkins’s directorial debut DYLAN THOMAS: RETURN JOURNEY. He has also written books, newspaper and magazine articles and, in the last 40 years, has hosted almost 500, Q&As and film panel events in the UK, USA, Canada, France, Belgium, Turkey and Ireland. For 20 years, he chaired and sponsored an event called Meet The Experts, first and the Edinburgh International Film Festival, then at the London Film Festival and finally at the London Screenwriters Festival. He was, until it closed, a Patron of the Bradford International Film Festival, where he met Bill Lawrence. He was responsible for giving Lifetime Achievement Awards to Sir Ronald Harwood, Sir Tom Courtney, Brian Cox and Terry Gilliam.

Multiple-Emmy-award-winning SMPTE Fellow Mark Schubin has been working in television since 1967, writing about it since 1972, and chairing the HPA Tech Retreat program since 1998. He has shot for the Rolling Stones, lit Luciano Pavarotti, mixed Stevie Wonder, hooked up the TV in Eric Clapton’s bedroom, and performed forensic analysis for the Woody Allen/Mia Farrow child-custody battle. He worked on Japan’s first regularly scheduled HDTV broadcast, Kazakhstan’s first news network, and Hong Kong’s first cable-TV system. He has also worked on standards ranging from the VU meter to digitally compressed video transmission to the national TV system of Barbados. His clients range from the Metropolitan Opera to Sesame Street, MTV, The News Hour, the AFL-CIO, the U.S. Congress, and the World Book Encyclopedia. His writing has been translated into French, Japanese, Russian, and Spanish. His blog, http://www.schubincafe.com, is archived by the Library of Congress. Schubin has also sung at most of the great opera houses of the world, appeared inside the penguin enclosure of the Central Park Zoo, and piloted a blimp from Coney Island to the Statue of Liberty. He once lent Meg Ryan a dinosaur and another time was sandwiched between Helen Hunt and Kyra Sedgwick. He is a contributor to The Coward’s Almanack and is Minister of Information of the Provisional Government-in-Exile of Redonda. The Flying Karamazov Brothers failed to teach him to juggle. He has been named the official opera archivist of American Way magazine, somehow made it into one of the obituaries for Steve Jobs, and shared a news story with Aretha Franklin. Marvin Kitman, writing for The Los Angeles Times syndicate, called him “a leading thinker.” In the acknowledgements to his book Fast Forward: Hollywood, the Japanese, and the VCR Wars, James Lardner of The New Yorker wrote of Schubin that “he has the spectacularly rare ability to make technical matters clear to a nontechnical person.” Graham Binns of London’s Rediffusion Group said in the European publication Intermedia, “He has a complete mastery of the technical background to video. He rattles off data and ideas with fluency and with wit.” Director Robert Altman said of him, “We have our quiet fun together.” In 2014, for their 75th anniversary, the National Baseball Hall of Fame co-presented his lecture on “Baseball and Opera.” He won SMPTE’s 2017 Presidential Proclamation and won the 2019 Lifetime Achievement Award of Who’s Who in America. He sometimes wears pants and shoes.