Welcome to the Colour Time podcast.
I am your host, Vincent Taylor.
This is the podcast where
we speak with professionals
who work with colour.
Today we are speaking to Mr. Alex Williams.
Alex is the founder, CEO,
and all around nice fella from Louper.
Louper's a remote, I don't know what you call it,
viewing system, we'll ask
him, we'll ask him what it is,
but it's used for remote workflows
and things like that for grading.
So I'm really looking
forward to having a chat with him.
So let's go.
Take your seats because the
hourglass is about to turn.
We are entering the world of the micro podcast.
Explore the craft, creativity, and science
of professionals who use colour to tell stories.
Welcome to the Colour Timer with Vincent Taylor.
- Alex, thank you for joining me.
- Thanks for having me,
it's nice to be here, Vincent.
- Yeah, man, I appreciate you taking time out.
I so often forget to start my little sand timer,
so let's do that first so the game show can begin.
So boom, oh, I'm being so well behaved
for remembering these things.
And all the construction sounds
seem to have stopped all around me,
so that's good as well.
- What countdown thing going on there?
Is that intentional behind your screen?
- That's just, it should
just be the recording, I hope.
- Yeah, cool.
- Oh yeah, there's the
hourglass thing, cool, nice.
- We'll see if it works.
It's all kind of stuck together with Band-aids.
Let's jump straight in.
This is a big, broad question
and it can go in a zillion different directions,
but you have a company called Louper.
Tell me about Louper.
What do you do and what service does that offer?
- Yeah, so it's a little startup.
It's a cloud-based live collaboration platform
for filmmakers, so
predominantly used in post-production,
so across editorial,
colorists, VFX artists, sound designers.
Also used a little bit in production.
And it really is in four words,
it's Zoom for video professionals.
So it's a kind of a meeting
live collaboration platform
you can do live over the shoulder.
It's an edit or sound for color sessions remotely,
and the idea is that it's very focused
towards artists and creatives
working with their colleagues and clients.
So really trying to recreate the experience
of sitting in an edit suite or
cutting room or grading suite,
but trying to do that online remotely
with stakeholders from all over town
or all over the world.
So yeah, we're a small company.
We started sort of 2022.
We're growing, we raised a
bit of venture capital funding,
and we're having a lot of fun.
- So how long has it been going then?
How long has Louper been going?
- It's officially two years in April
since we've kind of launched publicly.
But I started as a side project.
I really wanted a way to achieve remote working
with directors.
I was an editor for a long time.
That's the world I came from.
I don't come from a technical background at all.
I was an editor for close to
15 years across commercials
and music videos and feature films,
and really built Louper because I needed
a really easy, simple to use platform
that would allow me to work with directors
and ad agencies from anywhere,
and to do it in a way that kind of recreated
as much as possible the
experience of working in person
with these people.
I came up through the ranks working in edit suites
and cutting rooms and building and maintaining
relationships with clients
and directors and producers,
and found that it was really
difficult to do that online
with just an asynchronous
sending links back and forth
kind of platform like your
frame.io's and media silos.
Really was gonna try and do it in a way that
preserved that in-person
collaboration feeling and benefits.
So yeah, that's my long answer to how long
we've been going for.
I started at a totally as a side project,
I didn't intend for it to
become a fully fledged company,
but yeah, here we are.
- What's the reaction been
from clients and people to Louper?
- Yeah, it's been interesting.
It's largely positive, which is good.
Like from the, in terms of the user base,
maybe that will help contextualize it.
We started going after freelancers and independence
and really small boutique
post facilities and post houses,
and actually really freelancers initially.
That was the world I came from,
and that sort of from a product perspective
wanted to build a product
that would suit their needs,
both from a product perspective
and also from a budget perspective,
and really use that as our
testing ground, if you will,
to sort of get product market fit,
to figure out what customers wanted,
who they were, how they were using it.
So the reaction on that front was really good,
and what happened was that
companies started using it,
and post facilities started using it,
and pretty big companies
started getting interested in it.
So we kind of built out the platform
to suit their needs as well.
And now we're at the point
where we've got sort of this 50-50 customer base
where half our customers and users are freelance,
individual freelancers,
and half are larger post
facilities and studios and so on.
- And is it predominantly US or is it worldwide?
- It is, it's worldwide,
but it is predominantly US,
not by design or by intention,
just that's how it's happened.
We put the product out there.
We don't really do much
outbound sales and marketing.
Really it's all mostly
product-led growth and inbound stuff,
so people discover us and get referred
by their friends or
colleagues, and they come to find us.
So there hasn't been this design campaign
to attract US customers,
that's just kind of what's happened.
I'd say it's about 80% US and 20%,
the remaining 20% is UK, Europe, and Australia.
- Yeah, I mean, that was
definitely the case with me.
Louper was recommended to me
when I kind of started freelancing
and I was looking at different options
and there was a big loud, "you just use Louper"
just like from most of the
colleagues I was working with,
everyone seems really, really
happy with it, which is great.
You said it kind of kicked
off a couple of years ago.
Is that a coincidence with the pandemic,
with the way things happen,
or was that part of the motivation?
- It was part of the motivation.
I actually started playing
around with this kind of workflow
and the source of product in 2019, so pre-pandemic.
And I actually had come through it
through another platform that
required proprietary hardware,
it was pretty tricky to use,
but the end result was great.
It was, I was working in an
edit suite in Soho in London
with a director who lived in LA.
We worked in person for a while,
he had to go back to LA and we still wanted to do
like a week's worth of changes.
And so we ran the session and it worked great,
but the whole setup was incredibly convoluted,
required a big proprietary hardware box
and I thought there are kids streaming on Twitch,
there's gotta be an easy way to do this.
It's not that easy.
But yeah, that was where it initially started
and then I didn't really do anything about it
until I was bored and sitting at home
during lockdown in 2020.
- So it was either gonna be make lots of bread
or build Louper.
- Yeah, and actually I started with the bread
and then switched over to Louper.
- I do like, one of the things
that kind of instantly sold me
with Louper was from a client perspective,
how bloody easy it is.
You just click on it, open it up and away you go.
I was finding that with some of the other options,
they had to go through too
many hoops to make that work
and people just, they can't be bothered,
they don't wanna deal with that.
They just wanna get the picture
and get on with doing the job.
- Yeah, I mean, I experienced that having come from
mostly working in
advertising and ad land and agencies
and people just, it just has to be one click join.
They're not very technically savvy,
they don't want to be,
they just want it to be as simple as possible.
So we really, yeah, I took a lot of that experience
from having worked in
editorial advertising for a long time
and infused it into the product
and to try to make something as simple as possible.
But at the same time, the
product does keep expanding
and we keep adding features
and listening to user feedback.
So we're kind of--
- Well, that's a perfect segue actually Alex,
because I was gonna ask you,
because in the short time that I've been using it,
relatively short time I've been using it,
I've seen it evolving.
So I'm wondering, and you
might not be able to talk about
this, but what's coming up or
is this gonna be an NAB reveal
that we can't talk about or?
- Yeah, so there's no particular NAB reveal,
there are multiple things going on.
There's a lot we're working on.
We try to be pretty open with customers,
we're pretty communicative on new updates
and stuff coming out.
We're always improving the platform.
And one thing we're trying to do,
which I think probably
separates us a little bit from
some of the other solutions
out there is we are trying
as hard as we can to really make it
a complete collaboration solution.
So for example, we added a year ago
and people are using it more and more now
and some people are only using that feature
with the ability to upload video files,
have collaborative watch
passes of those video files,
in addition to doing a
typical live streaming session.
And so a lot of the focus
this year is on building out
that side of the product, doing timestamp comments,
all that kind of stuff.
That really should be ultimately a platform
that serves both the needs of live streaming,
real time sessions, but also the ability
to do timestamp comments and review links.
And really building out.
Yeah, so as opposed to having to have two or three
different solutions to cater your needs,
we really want to try and build it out into
kind of a platform that answers all your needs
from a collaboration and working with clients
and colleagues point of view
in terms of reviewing content.
- Yeah, I mean, straight away, I'm going,
"Oh my God, that would be fantastic."
Is nothing better than doing a live session
in person remotely, it's always gonna be better
because you're getting that feedback straight away
and you're getting emotional reactions
to when people watch it.
But it's really handy if people can just also
scribble down some notes.
So when you go back and you go,
"Oh shit, I missed that thing about the close up
of about the guy's face."
And yeah, that's great.
- Yeah, for me, it's like the ultimate thing
should be probably
something that is synchronous live.
First with a graceful fall back to async
or allow people to do both.
That's where I think we're headed.
I won't go down a rabbit hole
because it would take much longer than 15 minutes
about generative AI and all that kind of stuff.
I think what we're trying to do is to be
sort of a meetings collaboration platform
where you can collaborate
synchronously and asynchronously
in one cohesive way.
What's interesting as well is that some customers
are using Looper for production as well.
So they're doing sort of like remote
or virtual video village.
And then running that same show through post.
So they'd be using Louper
for video village initially
and then for grade and sound mix
and color sessions during post.
- And just so I understand that.
So it would be a situation where
certain people couldn't be on set obviously.
And so they can just send
what's happening real time.
- Exactly.
- As if people are sitting in that video village.
- Exactly, yeah.
So you'd send out the production camera feed.
Some people do both where they send a -
like stream out a witness camera,
like a GoPro, whatever, a wide angle witness camera
and the production camera feed.
So you can kind of get both.
You can get the witness camera for context,
the production camera feed as the video monitor.
And it's exactly useful that it's used
in cases where producers or
stakeholders cannot be on set.
Which is an interesting use case.
It was one that we didn't really push very hard
but people are just starting to use.
- Yeah, that's really, really interesting.
This next question is a
little bit of crystal ball gazing.
But I mean, do you think that working remotely
is here to stay?
- Yeah, yeah, absolutely.
I saw it coming kind of a
while before the pandemic,
I think, you know, stuff was,
and I certainly, just as a freelance editor,
was starting to do,
I was starting to do more and more stuff remotely
around 2018, I would say.
And I think things were
heading in that direction anyway.
I think the pandemic only accelerated it.
I do, I'm not fooling anyone.
I still think that working in person,
if you can be in person with someone,
at some point in the project, that's great.
That, do it, right?
That's first prize.
You know, that's how I came up with ranks.
That's how I learned.
That's how I, you know, through osmosis,
being in cutting rooms with directors and editors.
And having that
camaraderie, I think doing stuff live,
... online remotely is great
and will always be here
and will probably become a predominant way
that people work.
But I don't think it should
completely eradicate in person,
if you can do it in person.
- It's interesting to use the word camaraderie
because it is that.
There is something nice
about that energy in a room.
But I mean, another version
of that is the hybrid thing
where, you know, you get a
couple of people in the room,
but there's a couple of people who can't be there.
And so you end up using, you
know, Louper for that situation
and which I've done a couple of times
and that's been great.
That's worked really well.
- For sure.
Yeah, yeah, exactly.
So yeah, I hear use cases like that all the time
and that's happening more and more,
especially with, you know, important people,
not, you know, moving out of cities,
but still having a say.
You can do hybrid sessions.
You know, we had a customer a few months ago say
that they were planning on renting space.
They were working on an indie film,
planning on renting an office space in LA
to work together with the director and editor,
ran a session on Louper as a test
and liked it so much they decided
against renting office space
and just decided to, you know, use Looper all day,
which was awesome.
- Which is fantastic, right?
Actually, is there a limit to the time
that you can have a Louper session going?
- There are, depends on the tier.
So free tier is pretty limited.
Plus is, I think, two hours straight.
Pro is eight hours straight, so all day
and then the studio tier is like 24 hours.
- Gotcha.
- And then there's no limit to how many times
you can have a session, so
you can restart and go again.
- And that's why I will
never get the top, top, top tier
because I don't wanna grade for 24 hours straight.
That would be awful.
(laughing)
- Yeah, yeah.
- It's really for ...
for customers who don't wanna think about it.
- No, that's it.
You've been doing more and more interviews
and I quite like, I've just
started doing this recently,
but I quite like it, where I ask you, you know,
is there something that you
wish somebody would ask you
about your product that people don't ask you?
And you can say no, you can say no.
Everyone asks me everything, but you know,
but I'm curious.
(laughing) Or something that you would like to kind of--
- I mean, it's the one thing I kind of already,
I think it's the one thing
I already kind of answered,
which was, or spoke about at least,
which was I think people
make the mistake of viewing us
and what we're trying to do
is just as a passing service
or something small and
what we're really trying to do
is build something big,
both in scope of the product
of what it does, both in
scope of who we're serving.
You know, I think that's the next,
the next five, six, seven, eight years
is gonna be heavily focused on live synchronous
collaboration tools in the cloud.
- Yeah.
- And we wanna try and be at the front of that.
- Yeah.
I have never done this before where we've actually
finished our series of questions exactly
when the color time has finished.
That's genius.
That means you're wonderfully succinct.
- I timed that pretty well.
I mean, I was watching it.
- You did!
(laughing)
- I was keeping an eye on it.
That thing on the screen
was particularly useful, yeah.
- Alex, it's been a delight and I'm really grateful
that you took time out and I mean,
I for one am gonna absolutely keep using Louper
and I was thinking about it this morning.
I went, I don't want it to
turn into a fanboy infomercial,
but at the same time, I wanted it to people
to get a bit more of an education about it.
If someone decides they wanna jump into the world
and use Louper, I mean, all the information's there
on the website of how to
set up and all the rest of it?
- Yeah, exactly.
So we have, yeah, we've
got super decent setup guides
and onboarding stuff.
We've got a wealth of
information when you sign up as well.
So yeah, Louper.io is the
website, LOUPER.IO
- Yeah, I'll put that in the
show notes for everyone as well.
- Yeah, and then we also have, you know,
we've got onboarding capabilities.
We're happy to jump on calls as people.
Yeah, we're pretty open and accessible.
- Awesome.
Well, Alex, thank you so much.
I really appreciate it.
- Thank you very much, Vincent.
Great to talk to you. - Cheers.
- Thanks.
- Alex, thank you so much for taking time out
to be on The Color Timer.
It was really, really good to speak with you.
There was a couple of things
we chatted about afterwards,
which I went, oh, we should have included that,
but we were good.
We were really well-behaved.
We kept it to 15 minutes, which was excellent.
Thank you to my executive
producer, MixingLight.com.
If you are watching this or listening to this
on the Mixing Light website,
you already know what they are or what they do.
If you don't, then check them out, MixingLIght.com.
They can help you with everything color-related
and more, actually, and
they're a really fantastic asset.
Thank you, the listener or watcher or both,
for taking time out to listen to the podcast.
Like and subscribe to all that kind of stuff.
I know I keep saying it,
but it really, really does make a difference.
It really does help and look after yourself.
I'll see you next time.
Cheers.
- The Color Timer, a micro-podcast experience.