The award-winning team at 48 Hours: NCIS, a new six-part series on CBS, has teamed with Oblong Industries, Inc. to utilize the Mezzanine collaboration platform for visually enhancing production of the show.
48 Hours: NCIS Senior Executive Producer Susan Zirinsky worked with Mezzanine to help bring to life the real-world crime cases of the Naval Command Investigative Service at the heart of the new series. The series takes viewers inside some of the biggest cases handled by the NCIS.
“Mezzanine’s technology helped us develop a unique visual way to enhance our storytelling and to bring these compelling stories to our viewers,” says Zirinsky.
The “48 Hours” team worked with Oblong to incorporate a specially designed Mezzanine immersive visual control center into the production.
Mezzanine’s three-dimensional computing environment provides a stimulating means of presenting crime scene footage and revealing photographs to capture viewers’ imagination as the story unfolds.
“We’re using Mezzanine for the new show in a very immersive way,” says CBS News Director Rob Klug. “We’re actually putting the viewer inside of the control center for NCIS.”
There’s a reason Mezzanine was chosen to help the crew collaborate to the highest degree. Gartner recently released a Research Note that includes high praise of the Mezzanine platform:
These solutions aren’t so much about touchscreens or simple presentations, although they typically integrate that functionality. Rather, they are targeted at teams collaborating on a task that requires multiple data streams and active participation from multiple users. The goal is on visualization with information spatially distributed around the room.
The advantages of this approach are like what we see on enterprise desktops. Enterprise workers today frequently multitask, engaging with information from multiple sources, and to enable this we have outfitted their desktops with multiple monitors. This reduces the inevitable context switching that occurs as they move between tasks on a single screen. It also enables them to place information spatially to assist with collating and navigating across multiple applications and files.
Multiscreen, room-based devices do the same thing for a team. They place multiple streams of information across a broad, persistent work surface to enable multiple participants to quickly assimilate the information, focus on parts of the whole, and easily engage concurrently in the activity.
To see the award-winning team’s approach to elevating the stories of the real NCIS with Mezzanine, tune in to CBS Tuesdays at 10pm ET/PT.
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