Mediapro invests in a multi-million-dollar Miami studio that can put you anywhere
By Yousra Benkirane
If you watched the original 1989 Batman movie today, you couldn’t help but notice how fake Gotham City looks. The 1989 Batman film had a distinctive, Tim Burton-esque visual style, influenced by the limitations of green screen technology at the time. By contrast, if you watch Matt Reeves’ 2022 iteration of the Batman movie, the evolution of visual effects is dramatic.
Reeves’ Batman displays a grittier, more realistic aesthetic, due to the seamless integration of LED visual screens – a visual background made up of hundreds of LED panels to create a single, cohesive, high-resolution world where the talent is completely immersed in their environment. On the other hand, when you are shooting against a green screen, that is literally all you have: a blank screen set up behind the actors. “In the old Batman and Robin films, you’ll see them walking around and it looks super fake. They projected it on a screen and filmed in front of it. But there was no way to move a camera or change the parallax,” explains Kalhil Adames, a virtual production producer. “They were stuck with just one video.”
The composite LED screen that changes all this is not a new technology – IMAX was an early adoptee in theaters – but only recently has the concept been developed for use by the film-making industry. Now, it’s the cutting-edge technology, which is why a year ago the Spanish-based multimedia conglomerate Grup Mediapro decided to provide that service to their clients.
“We did our research, and we found that there was a company in Broward [County] that was doing it. It was like a very symbiotic thing where we had the same dream,” says Irantzu Diez-Gamboa, CEO of Mediapro North America. “So, we thought ‘Why don’t we work together?’” In June, Grup Mediapro and BrandStar, one of South Florida’s largest production companies, signed a multi-year agreement to construct and offer virtual production capabilities at Grup Mediapro’s U.S. subsidiary in Miami.
The partnership – BrandStar Studios at Grup Mediapro – called for BrandStar to design, build, and install the largest LED screen in South Florida. Brandstar had already built its first LED production screen in its Deerfield Beach HQ three years earlier. The new LED screen in Mediapro’s studios in Medley, an industrial suburb just north-west of Miami International Airport, is three times the size of the one in Deerfield. The finished screen, which cost $2 million to build, is made up of 800 LED panels that measure around 22-feet tall by 80 feet.
Brandstar also provided the necessary management and support services to fully operate the virtual production system and 2,000-square-feet of office space that houses their staff (renting the studio can cost up to $20,000 per day). “It was an opportunity for BrandStar to come to Miami-Dade, where great things are happening. And it was a great opportunity for us to skip all those steps to do virtual production because they knew how to. They have the expertise,” explained Mediapro’s Diez-Gamboa.
For its part, Grup Mediapro is a leading European media production and distribution group, based in Barcelona with operations in 31 countries and annual revenues of $1.3 billion in 2022. The group runs 53 offices with 7,113 employees ranging from technicians to scriptwriters. The multinational has had a presence in the U.S. for more than 25 years, with 200 broadcast professionals now working in studios in New York and Miami. “After Spain and Portugal, the U.S. is the most important [market],” says Diez-Gamboa. After first setting up operations in New York, Mediapro picked Miami as their U.S. headquarters because “the market we wanted to address was here,” says Diez-Gamboa – namely the U.S. Hispanic and Latin American communities.
Initially, when the company expanded to Miami, it focused solely on services leveraging sports media rights. It acquired broadcasting rights from sports governing bodies and sold them to streamers like Telemundo and Prime Video. Evolving over two and a half decades, their Miami studios now offer three additional services: content production, broadcast and media services, and NEXT, their division that provides innovative technologies. The aim is to be a single-source media solution for clients.
Content production involves developing and producing an idea for a client, either as television, film, or music video– content which Mediapro then sells to major networks and new media platforms. Broadcast and media services provide infrastructure and personnel support for clients’ visions, such as studio space and technicians, including their Mobile Production Vehicles (MPVs), which travel throughout North America capturing live sporting events. NEXT is where they innovate, creating new content and technologies like investing in esports and the LED screen. The virtual production screen in Miami is the first of such LED screens Mediapro intends to install in Barcelona, New York, and Madrid.
The conglomerate currently offers production services out of their studios in Miami for media groups like ESPN, CNN, beIN Sports, HolaTV, Hemisphere Media Group, and CONCACAF. “Mediapro’s depth and breadth have been instrumental to our success in that they are literally a one-stop-shop for us. Truly curated services,” says Carlos Mesber, an Emmy-nominated Venezuelan producer for We Love Entertainment. “Whatever level of production support we need is available. We can scale up and down literally at will.”
As CEO of Mediapro’s North American market, Diez-Gamboa is not only taking the company further in the U.S. but also strengthening its footholds in Canada and Mexico. Mediapro’s expansion into Mexico is led by its active involvement in esports, the growing world of competitive video gaming. The company now owns an esports league, investing in an industry that has seen exponential growth in recent years. “Mexico is an amazing market, and booming for content production, not just for Mexico, but for the U.S. Hispanic market as well,” says the CEO. Mediapro now organizes tournaments, which they stream and broadcast throughout North America, profiting from brand deals and sponsorships.
Here in South Florida, economic development agencies hope that Mediapro’s presence augurs a resurgence of Miami’s somnolent film-making sector. The addition of the LED screen, plus some well-placed subsidies, could help take Miami back to a time when the city was known for blockbuster films like “The Bird Cage,” “Bad Boys I and II,” “Marley and Me,” and “Scarface.”
