Connecting Storytellers in the Digital Age with Lead Research and Development Engineer at Sohonet, Daniel Beattie - E4

Rewriting the rulebook on how every major Hollywood distribution studio works behind the scenes is no small feat, and draws on decades of Daniel Beattie’s experiences.

From early work with the likes of Channel 4 to the dizzying world of film titans like Netflix, Warner Bros and Pinewood, he takes us through the evolution of the software that’s become integral to these creative industries.

This episode covers:

• Limitations of digital tools early in Daniel’s career

• The shifting nature of branded work

• Problems soon to see novel solutions in the industry

• Sohonet’s innovative work revolutionising global content collaboration

Episode highlights

“No one was really sure what the medium was or what it could do. But we felt like it was a bit like TV and film, but just interactive. I guess that’s how people were approaching it at the time. Then, of course, e-commerce took off, and social media didn’t happen till about 2007.” - 3:20 - Daniel Beattie

“The people I tend to work with, or tend to want to work with, are the people who are very much focused on thinking around a problem and taking different, creative approaches to solving problems.” - 17:10 - Daniel Beattie

“If you’ve got no constraint on time or money, then you have to constrain scope, otherwise the project will never end.” - 22:15 - Daniel Beattie

“If somebody’s selling bill interpretation as a service to other companies, then it’s a problem that someone’s going to solve soon and pull the rug.” - 31:50 - Daniel Beattie

“If you’re Disney, needing to move parts of a film to a VFX house in Vancouver quickly, we’re trying to solve some of those problems via browsers.” - 34:00 - Daniel Beattie

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[00:00:00]

Rich: Welcome to another episode of Great Software People. Today, we’re going to be talking about empowering innovation through project rescues, and I am incredibly excited to welcome our guest today, Daniel Beattie, who is someone that I’ve known for a while. As you’re finding out with a lot of guests that we’ve got on this, he’s worked in the agency world and he’s worked outside the agency world. He’s got a wealth of experience. So, welcome Daniel.

Daniel Beattie: Thank you. Thank you very much for having me on the podcast.

Rich: It’s great to have you here. Perhaps you can just kick off by giving us a bit of background about you. What we’re really interested in is—how did you get into all of this? What started it off?

[00:00:39]

Daniel Beattie: I did a degree in music and then ended up working in recording studios. And in the downtime, I was fiddling around with the Macs they had in studios. I got quite interested in playing with them—more so than doing the audio engineering, which tended to revolve around listening to the same track every night for a week, which got a bit repetitive, actually.

And then, yeah, I did a course and managed to land a job at one of the biggest pre-dot-com crash agencies called Deepend, where I got to work on some really great projects with some great brands and do some fun stuff for Cartoon Network—developing online games and the start of the advertising boom.

That would then completely collapse on 9/11, which ended up with the destruction of that company, but allowed me to form another company with some of my colleagues from Deepend and some of the same clients. And then we started to grow it.

[00:01:34]

Rich: And was that a lot of campaign work?

Daniel Beattie: It was a lot of campaign work, yes. In the company I formed, we did a lot of other kinds of stuff, but the first company, Deepend, was particularly focused on digital advertising—and that was the heyday of the microsite.

So we did all sorts of sites for people, and then they’d advertise them. Sometimes, you’d be getting the bus down from work and you’d see a massive billboard for your site that was going to come out at the end of the month. And you’d be like, “Oh my God, I better finish that site before the release date.”

I remember one in French we did for French Connection, which has a name that is probably not safe to say on the radio or in the podcast, but it was a pretty notorious campaign at the time. It was on a billboard, and I used to see it every time.

[00:02:22]

But yeah, probably the most creative stuff because no one really knew what the rules were then. So everyone would just be like, “We don’t really get what the internet is, but let’s just do this thing. It feels cool.” And then we’d go and do it.

I built a game once where you were a poodle whipping other poodles with noodles for Super Noodle. I built a bunch of crazy stuff for Panasonic with lots of music sounds and sound design—back when people still did sound design on websites, which they don’t do anymore.

No one was really sure what the medium was or what it could do, but we felt like it was a bit like TV and film, just interactive. I guess that’s how people were approaching it at the time. Then, of course, e-commerce took off, and that’s where we are now.

[00:03:00]

Rich: And social media—that didn’t really happen until about 2007.

Daniel Beattie: Yeah.

Rich: Back in those days, what was the tooling like?

Daniel Beattie: It was extremely poor. Having version control was a dream and generally didn’t work quite well. Version control was, “Save stuff in a new folder.” A lot of the time, there were automated systems, but they didn’t work very well.

And then you had really clunky things, like you could check a file out, and then someone else couldn’t check that file out while you were working on it. And that, of course—you know—doesn’t really work very well.

[00:03:32]

Rich: Yeah.

Daniel Beattie: And of course, the hardest thing was the computers at the time, which would crash almost constantly. And not just the browser would crash—the whole thing would crash.

You’d be working on something, and the whole thing would just freeze, and you’d have to restart. We don’t have to deal with that anymore, thankfully, since Mac OS X brought in the kind of memory protection that we have these days.

And obviously, browsers are a lot better. We didn’t have tabs in browsers—that was a big problem in that era.

[00:03:59]

Rich: Yeah, I remember.

Daniel Beattie: It’s hard to remember quite how bad things were. But it was great fun because, like I said, there weren’t any rules.

We could do a lot of stuff. We had things like Flash and Shockwave, so we could do a lot of interesting interaction stuff with that, which still stands up today in terms of the creative outcome.

[00:04:14]

Rich: Memory management on Flash might not stand up today.

Daniel Beattie: No, the memory management on Flash was always a bit of a problem.

[00:04:22]

Daniel Beattie: I did another project once for Wallpaper Magazine—you’ve probably heard of them.

Rich: They’re a pretty well-known design company.

Daniel Beattie: Yeah. We were doing a project where every individual subscriber could design their own magazine cover, and then we would digitally print it.

I wrote all the software to allow people to put all the different bits of assets together and save that out as a file. Then, we had to run the same software backwards to create the magazine images, which were, of course, 300 DPI images—pretty substantial.

We had to do about 30,000 of them, which was a problem because the machines kept crashing.

We had to work out where Flash was leaking memory and try to deal with that, record where we’d got to, and try and restart from that point. It wasn’t easy—especially as Wallpaper Magazine wouldn’t let us have their database.

They said we had to do it in their office for security reasons. So, we had to take about eight MacBooks to their office and run this program I’d written to generate the files (basically the PDFs or PNGs, whatever they were) over and over again and wait until it would crash.

Rich: And then try and carry on from where it left off.

Daniel Beattie: Yeah, exactly. I think I figured out a few things about Flash’s memory management from doing that project that I’ll never need to know again.

[00:05:45]

Rich: That’s always the downside—you spend so much time learning about this esoteric thing, and then it goes away, and that knowledge never gets used.

Daniel Beattie: Yeah. Steve Jobs decides he doesn’t like Flash, and it won’t run on an iPad. And then that was that, really.

[00:06:04]

Rich: Maybe it’s good news if you decide to write a compiler one day, I don’t know.

Daniel Beattie: Yeah, I guess so. At the moment, I feel like I’m trying to reimplement TCP in JavaScript, which is difficult.

Rich: We’ll come on to that. We’ll come on to that a little bit. Okay, so that kind of took you up to about 2004, and then I guess you carried on as a contractor and tech director in the agency world?

[00:06:21]

Daniel Beattie: I started working for Channel 4 for about three years on an educational project they were doing. Back then, Channel 4 had a remit to provide educational content legally—otherwise, they didn’t get funding from the government.

It was a big application that dealt with a large video library, so you could make playlists of videos. From my point of view, it was a fun project because I had complete flexibility to work wherever I wanted, as long as I turned up every three months and delivered a new iteration of it. Everyone was happy with that.

After that, I went back into advertising with a small agency.

[00:07:00]

Rich: You couldn’t help yourself.

Daniel Beattie: No, I couldn’t. That project—Channel 4’s project—got bought by another company. They took it and did what they wanted with it, which is fair enough.

After that, I worked with one of the most creative agencies I think ever existed in the early dot-com days—Less Rain. They did some of the most interesting work, including the famous Fish website that everyone used to talk about a lot.

They had great clients like Red Bull, who were willing to push the boat out and do some really advanced stuff with 3D.

[00:07:28]

Rich: What was the Fish website? Just remind us all.

Daniel Beattie: So, this was around 1999. I think it was the first website where they used Shockwave to create an interactive experience. They got a halibut (or some other kind of fish), photographed it, and users could interact with the website by touching different parts of the fish. It was animated, and nobody else had done anything like that at the time.

Rich: Those crazy German guys.

Daniel Beattie: Yeah, they were German. But it turns out there were also Greeks, Spaniards, and other nationalities. It was a very international company. I was the only British person in the London office, which made translations interesting—like when a Spanish person argued with an Italian about what a German person said.

[00:08:16]

Rich: At that point, you’d gone completely global.

Daniel Beattie: Yeah, completely global. And I loved that. It was a lot of fun. We did some fun stuff with Less Rain until I decided I wanted to learn more. By that point, it was clear that Flash was dying, and I thought, “I’d better go find something else to do.”

[00:09:05]

Daniel Beattie: What did I do next? I worked with some startups and learned some new stuff. I was freelance for a while.

Rich: You went out of the agency world at that point a little bit?

Daniel Beattie: A little bit, yeah. I worked with startups that didn’t start anything, which was certainly painful. Then I joined another agency called Stink Digital.

Rich: I remember Stink.

Daniel Beattie: Yeah, they’re still around, and they’re still really good. They’re very much part of that advertising model. One of the founders also runs a big film and TV production company called Stink, so their approach to digital is very tied to how the film and TV world works—and it works well.

[00:10:00]

Daniel Beattie: One of my favourite projects at Stink was for an orchestra in Hilversum, Holland, sponsored by Philips. We recorded all the individual instruments and made a website where users could acoustically “zoom in” on any instrument in the context of the full orchestra.

Coming from a music and audio background, I found it fascinating. It was also technically challenging—we had 55 concurrent audio streams running in the browser and two videos so users could see what was happening in the orchestra at the same time.

[00:10:53]

Rich: A bunch of different questions come out of that. First, I imagine it cost a lot of money to create. Was that the Radio Philharmonic Orchestra?

Daniel Beattie: Yeah, it’s a famous orchestra based in Hilversum. They’re now called the Dutch National Orchestra, I think.

Rich: Is that campaign still live?

Daniel Beattie: No, that was around 2010. Campaign work tends to only be live for a few months. That one lasted a little longer, but eventually, they just junked it. It’s amazing how much money is spent on things that only last a few months.

Rich: You could spend a quarter of a million on something, and it just gets thrown away.

Daniel Beattie: Exactly.

[00:12:00]

Rich: Do you think those kinds of budgets are still around?

Daniel Beattie: I’m not sure. I’m not in the agency world anymore, but I feel like platforms like Google have sucked a lot of that money into AdWords. Brands seem to care more about driving direct sales rather than engaging people through microsites.

[00:13:01]

Rich: And where did you stop working in the agency world?

Daniel Beattie: I moved to a larger marketing company that combined advertising work with experiential design. It was a mix of theatre and technology. A lot of people in our world came from a theatre background because it was about presenting things in a stage-like environment. But when COVID came along, that market essentially disappeared. So, I went freelance and eventually joined my current company.

[00:13:38]

Rich: So how did you land where you are now?

Daniel Beattie: I just got a call one day, and they said, “Do you want to talk to these people?” So I did. I thought the CTO was a great guy—he didn’t ask me any stupid questions, unlike so many others I’d been speaking to at the time.

Rich: Just for the benefit of anyone listening, there might be a few CTOs tuning in—what are the stupid questions that CTOs ask?

[00:14:00]

Daniel Beattie: Imagine you’ve got 17 or 18 years of experience working for some of the best agencies, and then they ask you to interview with junior or mid-level developers who are asking specific questions about JavaScript features. Things like, “How do promises work?” Or, “What happens if you do this thing and then that thing?” If I need to know this, I’ll look it up. It’s not about memorising the entirety of the MDN website—that’s not what makes you a good developer.

[00:14:58]

Daniel Beattie: At a junior level, it’s fine to ask those questions—did they learn this in a bootcamp? Do they understand the basics? But if you’re interviewing someone senior, ask about problem-solving or approaches to technology.

Rich: I often say it’s about understanding how people think—breaking down their thought process.

Daniel Beattie: Exactly. How do you solve problems? Creative problem-solving is what we do as technologists. That’s the skill I want to see. I remember interviewing a guy for a creative technologist role, and I asked him, “If you were tasked with putting a camera in a football, how would you approach it?” The idea was to figure out how you’d make it balanced, durable, and functional without breaking toes or the camera.

[00:16:14]

Daniel Beattie: He said, “I don’t know—I only know HTML and JavaScript.” And I thought, Nobody knows how to put a camera in a football. That’s why I’m asking you. Let’s talk about the problem space, break it down, and brainstorm solutions. If you can creatively explore a problem and start imagining solutions, you can deal with anything. Everything else—how Python works or what a specific function does—you can look up.

[00:17:13]

Rich: That kind of creative thinking is what’s at the forefront of agency work. It’s like Formula 1 for innovation. I feel like startups sometimes miss that—they don’t think like that.

Daniel Beattie: Yeah, startups need a business plan, but agency work is often throwaway. Its purpose is to grab attention, to be interesting. It’s not about widgets or sales; it’s about engagement. That said, some great startups have been built on curiosity rather than a business plan. For example, the founder of Twitter was fascinated by logistics and signaling systems. He thought, Wouldn’t it be great if ambulances could just say where they were instead of me having to call them? That curiosity led to something huge.

[00:19:00]

Rich: Let’s talk about delivering software in an agency context. You’ve had hard deadlines—David Beckham’s booked, and he’s going to show up. You can’t just tell him, “Sorry, we’re not ready yet.”

Daniel Beattie: Exactly. You’re agile in the way you work, but not in the product development sense. You’re not iterating on features long-term—you’re delivering a finished product by a fixed date. Classic agile assumes time and money are flexible, and scope is constrained. But in advertising, time and money are fixed, so scope has to be negotiated constantly.

[00:20:47]

Rich: That brings us smoothly to our main topic—empowering innovation through project rescues. When things go wrong and you’ve got fixed time and budget, how do you handle it?

Daniel Beattie: One of the most challenging projects I worked on was Diesel Island. We created a virtual social network on Facebook where users could join, vote on laws, and create their own societies around the Diesel brand. We also built a Google Street View-style experience where users could navigate in 360 degrees, see models on the island, and interact with them.

[00:21:35]

Rich: Surely it would’ve been easier to just create an animated island?

Daniel Beattie: You’d think so. But for Diesel, the digital section was the least important part of the project. The models, video shoots, and photography were their priority. We just had to make it all work digitally. We used a 360-degree camera rig with a high-end DSLR and a curved mirror to reflect 360 degrees of light onto the sensor. We took two rigs to Colombia—one as a backup—but we didn’t anticipate the sea spray.

[00:22:59]

Daniel Beattie: Salt in the sea spray corroded the mirrors, turning them black. We tried to shield them, but salt gets everywhere. We ended up doing extensive post-production in London, manually reconstructing over 50% of the images in Photoshop.

Rich: This was before AI tools like Content-Aware Fill.

Daniel Beattie: Exactly. We had to rely on Photoshop experts using patch tools to rebuild everything. It was a huge effort.

[00:23:57]

Rich: So what was the user experience like in the end?

Daniel Beattie: Users could navigate the island, interact with models, and click on their clothes to see prices and buy them. They could propose and vote on laws, change the radio station, and even access Diesel’s Twitter feed if they were elected President of the Island. It was a lot of fun, but it was also the Wild West of Facebook development.

[00:26:32]

Rich: Facebook Developer Garage days?

Daniel Beattie: Yeah. Back then, you could write apps that stored data directly on users’ profiles, which saved us hosting costs. It was a completely different era.

[00:28:00]

Rich: Fast forward to now—what’s different in the modern day?

Daniel Beattie: Tooling is much better. Modern JavaScript is fantastic. But the cloud has introduced new complexities. Scaling isn’t an issue anymore, but costs can spiral out of control, and interpreting your AWS bill is its own challenge. I worked with a company that hired another company to interpret their AWS bills. If someone’s selling “bill interpretation as a service,” you know there’s a problem.

[00:30:23]

Rich: Speaking of challenges, tell us about your current work. You mentioned you’re trying to rewrite TCP in JavaScript?

Daniel Beattie: That was an exaggeration, but yes, I’m working on tools for Hollywood studios to transfer massive files—terabytes and petabytes—between locations. Think Disney sending parts of a film to a VFX studio in Vancouver. Browsers weren’t designed for this, so we’re pushing their limits. For example, Chrome has a hardcoded limit of 512 files you can upload at once. We keep finding edge cases like that.

[00:33:45]

Rich: Looking back, what’s helped you overcome challenges in your career?

Daniel Beattie: Persistence. When you’re stuck on a bug or dealing with a disaster, you just keep trying. Take breaks, talk to others, and get fresh perspectives—but don’t give up.

[00:35:41]

Rich: That’s a great takeaway. Daniel, thank you for sharing your journey. Where can people find you?

Daniel Beattie: I’m on LinkedIn. I also have an old website, notclickable.net, with some spinning WebGL boxes I made years ago.

Rich: We’ll add the link in the description. Thanks for being on Great Software People!

[00:37:00]

Rich: Thanks for listening. If you like what you’ve heard, please subscribe and check out our other episodes. Until then, take care!