“Technology is interchangeable—people are not”
In the age of AI, video-machinery focuses on authentic stories and genuine teamwork
Based at Studio 20B, video-machinery GmbH delivers high-end TV productions. The driving force behind the company is cameraman and managing director Ansgar Otto. While studying at the Berliner Hochschule für Technik, he was already working as a camera assistant in the media hub of Babelsberg, including on the long-running soap opera Gute Zeiten, schlechte Zeiten. He then spent many years working as a freelance cameraman. Together with Andreas Rauscher—managing director of audio-machinery, a company that has been based in Adlershof since 2014—he founded the video branch, video-machinery GmbH in 2021. Otto was also able to draw on his long-standing experience at the prime-time TV programme The Voice of Germany. While Studio Berlin GmbH handles the studio recordings for the casting show, video-machinery takes care of the off-site shoots. In terms of technology, much has changed. When castings were still held in major cities outside Berlin, everything was recorded in analogue—using a camera, two small boxes and stacks of CDs. It was a major logistical effort, Otto recalls. “I remember once in Stuttgart, there was a queue with 1,200 applicants.” Recordings lasted over 12 hours. For more than a decade now, the team has used a cloud-based system to store the songs. The company itself is small but highly specialised. Alongside the managing director, the team includes three permanent employees, three apprentices and a number of freelancers.
Otto values the company’s variety of projects: Conferences, live-streamed award ceremonies, TV series and productions across Germany all appear on the schedule. For the nine-part YouTube series “Digitale Kommunen, Digitale Region”, commissioned by the German Environment Agency, the team interviewed mayors and staff from various municipalities. To avoid the usual line-up of talking heads, video-machinery also wrote realistic scripted scenes. The greatest praise came from the people portrayed themselves, who felt their day-to-day work in local government had been accurately reflected. A further project on mobility in rural areas soon followed.
Technical requirements change from project to project, says Otto, who sees himself as a creative interface between technology and design. “What drives and excites me is developing concepts using strong video and audio technology—even when budgets are tight. Discovering on set that something is missing or not working quickly becomes very expensive.” Sometimes unconventional or technically innovative solutions are needed. As a media hub, Adlershof continuously creates synergy effects: “We practically run into the people we work with in the stairwell.”
Since last year, video-machinery has also been filming in Berlin for the UFA-produced legal series Lenßen hilft. Because the programme is scripted reality, there is no conventional script and a lot of the dialogue happens spontaneously. For the boom operators responsible for sound recording on set, Otto describes it as “a dance with the camera.” Workflows and equipment are constantly refined—at one point even the wheels on the sound trolley were replaced. Speed is crucial during filming. Trainees sometimes sprint away on cue carrying the boom pole, or leap behind a bush during heated on-screen arguments to disappear from the shot. Now and then someone still appears in a reflection or somewhere in the background— but only insiders tend to notice.
There are no tricks in video-machinery productions. No one seen on screen has been digitally inserted. “One aspect of fake news,” says Ansgar Otto, “is manipulation of images. We saw it happen earlier this year in Venezuela. There were videos circulated online claiming that people were celebrating in the streets because President Nicolás Maduro had been captured by the United States. Later, one outlet used an AI detector to show that some of the footage had been AI-generated or taken out of context from older material.”
Organisations such as the Coalition for Content Provenance and Authenticity (C2PA) are currently developing digital watermarks that document every step of the production process, he says, a development he also considers urgently needed. “In a world where we are constantly receiving images and videos we cannot independently verify, it becomes all the more important to distinguish genuine material from AI-generated content,” he says. “We need to be able to say clearly when and where a clip was recorded.” This transparency is also crucial for assessing which news sources can be trusted. For video-machinery, such watermarking would be a major advantage in proving the authenticity of its own productions. “However, AI could help us deliver even better work through more refined tools. I wouldn’t say it’s purely a threat. What continues to make us interesting—and good—are the people behind the technology. Technology is interchangeable—people are not. Not even artificial intelligence will change that.”
Susanne Gietl for Adlershof Journal