The financial incentives that Greece began to offer in 2018 for the production of audiovisual projects and which are managed by EKOME, as well as the improvements in the laws during the period 2019-22, have borne fruit: major companies are choosing our country for filming (Universal, Disney, Amazon, Paramount, Warner, Netflix, Apple TV, Millennium Media). In addition to the inflow of foreign capital, which has a huge positive impact on the domestic industry and on other sectors of the Greek economy, European cinema, and European co-productions have also benefited. At the same time, Greek film and television production has exploded in recent years. 273 projects (films, series, animation, videogames, post-production) have already been included in the financial incentives of EKOME, of which 158 are Greek and 115 are foreign productions. The total investment in Greece is estimated at 500 million euros, while according to the data of the production companies, approximately 70,000 jobs have been created by filming in more than 200 locations throughout the country.
The Greek State sponsored the program for the production of audiovisual works in Greece
with €75 million in the years 2018-2022, while for the next 5 years it has committed €200 million.
The purpose of the LoockMe project is the development, evaluation, and operation of a competitive platform through a variety of channels and specialized services that will outline in detail the possibilities of audiovisual production in Greece at a technical and financial level. The platform will be technologically capable of supporting semantic content, organized with international standards that ensure interoperability with international repositories and advanced personalized navigation and search techniques. It shall support content access and retrieval services by end users or operators, including content search, intelligent search, personalized response, commenting on the material, search based on the comments, a preview of the retrieved parts, and a multichannel distribution of the related metadata streams.
An innovative proposal, where there will be a mapping of the wealth of Greece, the recording of its human resources and its logistical infrastructure and the reduction of bureaucracy. All the above will be an important step and a powerful tool, which can make Greece more competitive and attractive in the area of specific investments.
The film industry over the last 20 years has undergone a digital transformation – from an analogue to an almost entirely digital workflow, introducing innovation and technology – but it has also brought along an increasing degree of complexity and volume of content that has been so far handled in a linear way, using a mix of traditional techniques.
LoockMe addresses this complexity by contrasting the following technologies:
- Natural Language Processing, which allows users to use their natural way of communicating with computing systems and services.
- Image and Video Processing with Convolutional Neural Networks – CNN, which combines the functionality to automatically add labels to each image that are associated with the objects represented
- Cloud computing environment so that all data is available at any time and from anywhere.
LoockMe‘s platform will enable public and non-public entities to communicate the conditions for using their locations and when this is possible, it will direct users to the sites indicated by these entities, so they can apply for license.