Alana Watts is a life-long movie fan and leads Deluxe’s Cinema team across Australia, New Zealand and Asia. As Studios Director, Alana plays a pivotal role between cinemas and distributors, helping to bring films to screen for movie lovers to enjoy. Prior to Deluxe, Alana worked in post-production, coordinating film rushes and grading.

Welcome Alana, please introduce yourself:

I’ve been with Deluxe for nine years, as Studios Director, very proud to be working in an industry I love. In this role, I work with teams locally and across the globe, who are equally passionate about bringing content securely to screen in many ways. Prior to Deluxe I worked in post-production.

What’s Deluxe’s role in the screen industry?

Deluxe Media is the world’s leading multi-disciplinary service provider for premium content creators and distributors. We provide end-to-end servicing across Cinema, Content Creation, Localisation and Content Distribution for theatrical, streaming, broadcast, and mobile endpoints.

My team specifically is the Cinema team, and we look after theatrical content mastering and distribution for ANZ and Asia Pacific. We work with indies, studios and all sorts of content creators.

Deluxe must have a big role to play within content protection? Can you talk a little about that?

At Deluxe, content protection is a top priority and it is our duty to our customers to implement protocols that keep content secure. This includes strict security protocols at all of our facilities and partner hubs worldwide, encrypted mastering and key management, our WebWatch services who play an integral part in monitoring and forensically identifying sources of piracy back to specific theatre locations, and so much more to ensure content is protected at all times.

How do you think Australia is measuring up in its response to piracy?

It’s incredibly frustrating that the appetite for pirated content is so high in Australia. We are fortunate with the number of ways that content is available to us legally, but our reported piracy activity continues to grow.

It’s encouraging that there has been more legal support recently in getting ISPs to take quicker action, but its upsetting that its so difficult to stop the pirates – either in the act or with arrest after the fact.

The flow-on impact of piracy on the content creators and talented teams who support these projects is really disappointing – especially when the cinema industry had already been through its own challenges with the Pandemic and the recent strikes.

What TV shows are you watching and recommending to friends at the moment?

I finally finished watching Succession (and really enjoyed it) and am just about to start watching The Bear Season 2 on Disney +. I keep going back to The Office and 30 Rock as well.

What’s the last great film you saw?

This year has been such a great year for cinema, I’ve seen so many movies I’ve really enjoyed. Mission Impossible 7 was awesome (I’m a fan of the series), but I loved taking my family to Barbie most recently. I’m excited for the movies still to come this year too.

My children are 11 and 6 years old, so I am also loving introducing them to older films – we have a lot of (legal) movie nights in our house. We recently watched Detective Pikachu and Singin’ in the Rain.

What excites you about the future of this industry?

Technology improvements, meaning faster delivery of content to cinema is exciting. While Australia and New Zealand are a few years in on an electronic transition, the wider Asia market is on the cusp, and that will be a game-changer.

I love the collaboration with our distributor partners on exploring new ways of doing things – there is a real feeling of continual change and improvement which keeps things fresh and exciting.

This article was first published on CONTENT CAFE