It’s Iron Man vs. Thanos, the final battle scene of Avengers: Endgame. 93 million ticket holders sit on the edge of their seats. Thousands of warriors span the screen as the two armies collide—explosions and carnage on all sides. With a snap of his fingers, Thanos declares: “I am inevitable”. But there’s one more plot twist that renders Thanos powerless and brings us to Tony Stark’s famous last words: “I am Iron Man.” The crowd cheers (at least internally) and rises from their seats, anxious to beat the traffic. Exiting the theater, the confetti of popcorn usually captures more attention than the credits. And yet, hiding behind that seemingly endless stream of names are the real superheroes of the movie. From the director to the set designer, these are the folks who turn a mere concept into the highest grossing film of all time. So how does this tie in with RF field tests?
Turns out, the only thing that’s inevitable when it comes to making movies is all the time, money, teamwork, expertise, and logistics that goes into creating each scene of a film. In the movie business, it could take weeks of preparation to capture a fleeting moment. If you were to ask an engineer what it takes to prepare for RF field tests, you’d find the very same ingredients. All for the sake of capturing those pivotal moments that will determine the fate of the product’s release.
In the eleventh hour of an impossible project, what engineer hasn’t compared their challenge to those faced by Tony Stark? If engineers could design their own superpowers, what would they be? The ability to capture fleeting moments? Accumulating large quantities of data with ease? Sharing data across a large team of creative contributors? All of the above?
In future blog posts, we’re going to cover ways to harness these superpowers and take a few lessons from—yes, you guessed it—the heroes listed in the credits. If there’s one industry that knows how to harness a large team of people using complex equipment to capture, protect, and distribute large quantities of data, it’s the movie industry.