See Steven Spielberg. He is a director. He drives a Ford Explorer. He has houses in Bel Air and East Hampton. He hobnobs with Bill and Hillary. He is famous. He is boring.
Now see Todd Unreel. He is a computer graphics creature modeler. He drives a Ferrari. He lives in an apartment in Studio City. He hangs out with digital matte-painting supervisors and visual-effects wranglers. He is a geek. He is so hot. He is the agent of Armageddon. He is having Deep Impact. He is saving Private Ryan's ass.
From dramas (Saving Private Ryan) to kids' flicks (Small Soldiers) to gentle parables (Pleasantville, in which nearly all 1,700-plus shots were manipulated), Hollywood's balance of power continues to shift from carbon to silicon. With five full digipics – Pacific Data Image's Shrek, Universal and Industrial Light & Magic's Frankenstein, Rainbow Studio's Blue Planet, and two byte-sized adventures from Pixar – in the pipeline, up from two a year ago, it's clear that flesh and blood are giving way to 1s and 0s.
The impact is rattling Tinseltown. Effects shops are restyling themselves as next-generation film studios and getting a piece of the gross. The geeks are taking meetings. The nerds are on speed-dial. The techies are doing lunch.
Special effects have always translated into time and money. But Moore's Law is as relevant to filmmaking as it is to computers. Smaller, better, faster, cheaper is putting magic into the hands of the many: With US$20,000 and some techspertise, a crew member can today accomplish what once required a loaded $200,000 box. This democratization is threatening the f/x oligopoly held by Digital Domain, ILM, and a half-dozen others. Big jobs are falling into the hands of newcomers like Banned from the Ranch and Hammerhead Productions. Some directors are even setting up their own render farms.
Of course, suits, financiers, and creatives still have a place in filmdom. Someone still needs to write the scripts, pay the bills, and plot the future. But in Hollywood 3.0, they also answer to the 14th element: silicon.
Pixar chair Steve Jobs may be the cover boy, and director John Lasseter may get the creative glory, but animator Ed Catmull is the quiet techie whose algorithms put the zing into films like Toy Story and November's A Bug's Life.
Among the cognoscenti, Catmull is known as the godfather of CGI. From auspicious beginnings in the University of Utah's pioneering computer graphics department, he went on to form the movie world's first CG unit at Lucasfilm in 1979 and has been breaking ground ever since.
His invisible hand is apparent throughout A Bug's Life. Sure, it might look like just another cool cartoon, but underneath that hunkering grasshopper are thousands of complex calculations. Catmull found that while the traditional polygonal CG approach works for angular objects "like dinosaurs and so forth," it's quite inadequate for replicating the fluidity required for creatures like squishy caterpillars.
Enter subdivision surface technology, which uses a control mesh with as many sides as you damn well please. "It's faster and simpler and much easier to make complicated shapes," Catmull says. "So you can have a smaller crew, and the project becomes a more personal venture."
We've come a long way from the clumsy chomping machine in Jaws. And a big reason why is Walt Conti, whose fascination with the mechanics of movement is putting increasingly lifelike animatronic beasts on the big screen. Following the 5,500-pound star of Anaconda, Conti's latest endeavor is a 25-foot man-eating shark that will terrorize beachgoers in next summer's Warner Bros. thriller Deep Blue Sea.
"We're putting something in the water that doesn't want to be there," Conti says of his new masterpiece – a rubber-enshrouded mass of hydraulic motors and microcircuitry that swims at 25 feet per second. "It's all about capturing the energy," he adds. But motion isn't the only challenge for the joystick-controlled, 4-ton fish. "The tough stuff is not the sensational acrobatic shot," insists writer-director Alan Shapiro, who tapped Conti to help create Flipper. "It's getting the animal to stay in one spot. And that's why God made Walt Conti."
How realistic are Conti's creatures? Real enough to provoke phone calls to the Portland, Oregon, office of the Humane Society from concerned citizens who saw Free Willy's US$1 million-plus stunt double strapped on the back of a trailer.
Next up, Conti is in talks with Disney and Universal to replicate the most complicated creatures of all: humans. At this rate, who needs cloning?
While most studios timidly toe the waters of high tech moviemaking, Ken Williams has plunged Sony Pictures Entertainment in headfirst. Under his watch, SPE has become the first studio to begin establishing a digital end-to-end infrastructure.
"Studios historically have had an aversion to new technologies," says Williams, the chief of Sony's Digital Studios. "That's opened up opportunities for others to take advantage of the content we create." By streamlining operations, he hopes to build an agile entertainment powerhouse and direct distributor.
Williams has integrated digital ops, including the studio's six-year-old visual-effects unit – which worked on Starship Troopers, Contact, and the forthcoming Stuart Little – as well as an HDTV center, a DVD unit, an R&D lab for postproduction audio tools, and two groups that are tinkering with direct satellite distribution of movies to theaters worldwide.
"At Sony," says Williams, "we see digital as the universal platform that everything will plug into."
Beta testers don't usually get much attention on Oscar night. But Chris Landreth – who was nominated for an Academy Award for his 1996 all-digital short The End – is not your usual guy. A senior animator at Alias|Wavefront, Landreth says his job is "to be a tyrant." Long before his company's Maya program hit top f/x houses, Landreth put it to the test, searching for bugs and demanding new features.
For this untrained artist and onetime mechanical engineer, working at Alias is a "Faustian deal." He pushes, prods, and tests products, and in exchange he gets company time to create his own animations. His latest tour de force, Bingo, is a disturbing short based on a play by Chicago's Neo-Futurists. The eerily lifelike effects – from the swing of a pigtail to the twitch of an eyebrow – exploit features Landreth wrested from coders during a year and a half of testing.
In the increasingly specialized CG industry, Landreth relishes his dual role: "I am able to be technical – to help design the software – and at the same time be an artist who tells a story with those tools."
If you know Nickelodeon, then you know Geraldine Laybourne – the exec who took the sticky-sweet out of children's television. After building Nickelodeon and serving a brief stint as president of Disney/ABC Cable Networks, she is headed for the uncharted, undefined media frontier: TV-Internet convergence. Oxygen Media, based in New York and San Francisco and set to videocast via cable and the Web, will serve as both a home base for her slate of national programs and an incubator for new talent, which often first finds its voice online.
"This is like the early days of cable," says Laybourne. "It wasn't the tried-and-true media companies that invented the cable business. It was the entrepreneurial upstarts." Now she's an upstart once more. "We don't have a vested interest in old media," she says, though old media apparently has a vested interest in her – ABC is backing her venture from the get-go.
He was a partner in Digital Effects, one of the companies that altered the course of the industry, creating the first CG effects for the film industry in the 1982 movie Tron. She was a computer science major and a sculptor working as a medical illustrator at Harvard Medical School. They met at Siggraph '85, married, and formed Kleiser-Walczak Construction Co.
A sort of little-engine-that-could animation firm based in Massachusetts' Berkshires, Kleiser-Walczak has not only survived – a feat in itself, given that most indie firms crumble or cozy up to cash-rich backers – but thrived. In an industry blinded by eye candy, Jeff Kleiser and Diana Walczak value personality over pixels. A lip-synching fish the team created as a test for the upcoming remake of The Incredible Mr. Limpet is already drawing appreciative reviews, but Kleiser isn't satisfied. "Our goal," he says, "is to create a CG character that rises above the technology, that's so enthralling you forget it's computer generated."
The company also produced effects for the new animated Amazing Adventures of Spider-Man 3-D attraction at Universal Studios Florida and occasionally tosses off a PBS special or a live-art project such as stereoscopic backdrops for the Philip Glass opera Monsters of Grace. If there is a common theme in the company's work, it is that these projects all tap the Kleiser-Walczak whimsy.
As Kleiser says, "If we find something that's cool, we just do it. There's no board of directors to tell us we can't."
Who would have thought that a company founded in 1982 as a small, family-owned developer of 3-D digitizing technology for archaeological and medical visualizations would end up as a digitizer to the stars? Cyberware, based in Monterey, California, is now the first stop for studios scanning actors and objects to create synthespians and other high-end f/x.
The Tinseltown connection was made when Industrial Light & Magic visited Cyberware to scan crew members for Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home. Since then, Cyberware-enabled effects have dazzled audiences in scores of films, and in 1995 the company took away an Academy Award for technical achievement.
These days, studios are buying US$300,000 whole-body Cyberware scanners outright and doing the work themselves. "We heard they scanned all these actors for Titanic using our systems," says cofounder and president David Addleman.
Which means visits from the likes of Arnold Schwarzenegger have become less common. "It's a little duller around here," says Addleman, "but we get more work done."
The future might be made of silicon, but a little bit of Lycra is also bound to turn up in the mix. Sanja Milkovic Hays, the 40-year-old designer and former protégé of famed costume designer Joseph Porro, is this season's It girl in the world of sci-fi fashion design, a fact lost on the shy creator, who has just completed work on Star Trek: Insurrection, due out next year.
"I'm basically just a big sci-fi fan," says Hays, an ex-architect from Croatia who gives her characters a clean, futuristic look. "It's all about performance and finding fabrics that allow the actor to have movement." Crafted from neoprene, latex, polyurethane, pliable metals, and a whole lotta Lycra, Hays's fantastic creations often resemble shape-shifting superarmor. "They have to be completely moldable," she stresses. "I don't like anything to be too stiff."
Typical of the new breed of Hollywood costume designer, Hays's resources come from the most unlikely places. For research into Star Trek garb, she surfed seemingly every nerdy fan site on the Web but ultimately found inspiration in the space-creature drawings of her 7-year-old son Luka. "He knew his planets before his colors," she sighs. If you can't find it on the Net, just look on your refrigerator door.
Michel Gondry knows how to pack the visual wallop of a feature into a three-minute clip. His innovative body of work, ranging from videos to commercials to short films, offers equal servings of digital effects, in-camera trickery, and unusual CGI.
Witness the worlds he and pop star Björk have created – a surreal digital landscape that breathes, a videogame world with Björk as avatar, a self-reflexive story within a story within a story.
Schooled as a graphic artist in Paris, Gondry dabbled in music and animation before finding a 16-mm camera at a flea market and getting hooked on film. "I saw that music video could be a perfect matching between music and visuals, a way to create a universe in three to four minutes," he says.
Gondry has been scooped up to direct two high-buzz big-screen projects – the masked-crimefighter flick The Green Hornet and an as-yet-untitled romantic comedy.
How does a filmmaker blow US$1.1 million on less than one minute of big-screen entertainment? Digital Domain's budget for a 40-second shot on the deck of the Titanic translates to $27,500 per second, making it the most expensive cinematic moment to date. (The average CG f/x shot lasts only five seconds, at a cost of $25,000 per second.) The scene begins with actor Leonardo "King of the World!" DiCaprio whooping it up on the prow and pulls back into a slow reveal of the entire ship, with a nonexistent camera tracking freely in digital space. Hundreds of motion-captured virtual actors walk the decks, faux water splashes up against the ship's bow, simulated smoke billows from stacks, an artificial afternoon sun casts long shadows. Together, these elements conspire to make the shot an algorithmic achievement that, unlike the ship, may prove unsinkable.
Live Action Both a scale model of the ship and actors Leonardo DiCaprio and Danny Nucci are photographed against a greenscreen. As the camera swoops back from the pair into a pan of the ship, their images are swapped with digital re-creations. Broken out separately, the actors' fees would be the cheapest line items on the chart – about $4,000 for DiCaprio and $500 for Nucci. Cost: $150,000
Synthespians The decks are populated with 515 CG humans to infuse the shot with motion and life. Body doubles (mostly DD staffers) were recruited for motion-capture sessions. They were rigged with recording markers, and their actions – strolling, bending, chasing a ball – were picked up via infrared-based cameras. The data was then used to animate CG figures. Rendering shadows, which had to remain consistent with those of the ship, became an additional hurdle. Cost: $300,000
Scale Model A 44-foot, 1/20th-scale Titanic model, built of wood, plastic, steel, and brass, required 50 craftspeople to toil for four months and cost close to $1 million. Based on original blueprints from Titanic builder Harland & Wolff and built with 1,000 portholes and 100,000 rivets, the model never once touched water. Since this prop was used in scenes throughout the film, the figure below represents the cost of its use in this one shot. Cost: $50,000
Finishing Touches Digital birds, smoke, flags, Marconi wires, and wind-rippled canvas lifeboat covers were plugged in. Cost: $100,000
Ocean of Bits DD codesmiths enhanced an off-the-shelf water-simulation program so the ocean would respond to the ship and such environmental elements as light refraction, wave patterns, and wind speed. Collision-detection algorithms produced a loamy wake the length of the ship's hull. Real water was photographed for splashes on the bow and wake at the stern. Cost: $250,000
Compositing In the final step, compositors assembled the elements that make up the scene, including 400 to 500 layers of digital-effects imagery, which was then output to film. "We hit the limit with our software, which goes 300 layers deep," says compositing supervisor Carey Villegas. "So we had to write scripts to put it all together." Render time for water was tediously slow, averaging three hours per frame. The liquid landscape alone accounted for some 3,000 hours of CPU time. Cost: $250,000
Total cost: $1.1 million Total length of shot: 40 seconds, or 954 frames
Source: Estimates derived from data provided by Digital Domain and other f/x houses.
Dennis Muren. Rob Coleman. John Knoll. Scott Squires. These Industrial Light & Magic f/x wizards are the real stars behind the first Star Wars prequel, due out in May. Just as the original trilogy redefined moving pictures with knifing cuts and motion-control camera techniques – remember Return of the Jedi's jet-scooter chase? – the as-yet-untitled first episode promises to redefine the use of special effects, blurring – nearly erasing, that is – the line between real and virtual.
Most movies have effects sequences. But with its 2,000 computer-enhanced scenes, the premiere prequel "is practically a digital movie," says ILM president Jim Morris. The team is creating simulations so realistic, you can't tell that the imperial megalopolis of Coruscant and the neo-Gothic Jedi Temple are mere fictions. Mixed into its cast of 100-plus CG characters will be a number of integral personality-driven creatures like Jar Jar Binks, an aquatic member of the Jedi Rat Pack.
"It's epic," says Tom Williams, Alias|Wavefront's vice president and general manager. "It's Lawrence of Arabia huge." Given the quartet's combined résumé – which includes three Star Wars flicks, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, The Abyss, and 10 Oscars – we'd expect nothing less.
Imax is pulling the last trick you'd expect – getting smaller to get bigger. By reducing the height of new 3-D screens from 80 to 55 feet, the huge-screen company is squeezing its way into a multiplex near you with blowouts like Everest and T-Rex. CEOs Richard Gelfond, a financier, and Brad Wechsler, an alumnus of HBO, Columbia Pictures, and Penthouse, plan to add 36 new theaters from Sonoma, California, to Halifax, Nova Scotia.
With Hollywood f/x hot on its heels, Imax is dumping its Smithsonian-era stodginess to meet the industry head-on. The action-adventure T-Rex, directed by Brett Leonard (Virtuosity) and opening this October, is the first of 15 new pictures the company has in production or development.
Imax's next leap forward is animation. Still in beta, its patented Sandde software lets animators use a freestanding stylus to sketch in three dimensions. "To compete with Disney, you've got to do the animation better," says Gelfond. "But we can also do it different." Make that 55 3-D feet of different.
Six years ago, Warren Lieberfarb, president of Warner Home Video, realized coming digital pay-per-view and video-on-demand services threatened to doom his VHS-centric business. With Toshiba's Koji Hase, the 23-year Warner veteran launched a preemptive strike – DVD, a CD-based format introduced this year that delivers superior digital sound and picture. By putting the Warner name, movie titles, and advertising dollars behind the platform, Lieberfarb is pushing the industry out of the analog age.
"This is kind of a horse race," Lieberfarb says. "But history proves two distribution techniques for content can coexist if they offer consumers different benefits. Take a look at radio and recorded music, for example." Lieberfarb believes that for DVD to succeed, it needs to be in 10 million homes by 2002. With respectable first-year sales of 450,000 players, that leaves this evangelist with just 9.6 million more consumers to convert. He's game.
Since he built his first loudspeakers at age 13, Tomlinson Holman has been obsessed with sound. In the early '80s, his experiments at Lucasfilm begat a sonic revolution – THX, a high-fidelity audio environment currently heard in more than 1,500 theaters worldwide. Now, the USC professor and author of the definitive text Sound for Film and Television has launched his own studio, TMH Corporation, to redefine state-of-the-art audio.
Holman's upgrade: a desktop system with a custom-designed C41 processor and speakers, creating a calibrated monitoring environment that allows you to experience sound exactly as it will play in theaters.
Called the Micro-Theater Service, the system has proved an instant hit. It allowed Titanic director James Cameron to collaborate live with sound designers 400 miles away at Skywalker Ranch. "Cameron had more time to sit in his editing room and think because he didn't have to go to Lucasfilm's sound studio," Holman says. "Micro-Theater Service is like the world's best videoconferencing system – only it sounds like a movie."
Carl Rosendahl made the Pillsbury Doughboy mambo. He morphed a blond beach boy into an Asian woman for Michael Jackson's "Black or White" video. And now he's transforming his 18-year-old Pacific Data Images into a movie studio, teaming up with DreamWorks SKG to produce Antz. PDI is one of the first f/x houses to make the leap to feature films, and Antz – a witty romantic comedy about one bug's battle against conformity – could not be a more fitting début.
Rosendahl made PDI a scalable company that would be able to ramp up from TV commercials to f/x work to feature films in no time flat. So when the order came in for Antz, he hit the ground running, nearly tripling the number of employees from 100 to 250, he reports, and "going from a handshake with DreamWorks to a feature in theaters in two and a half years."
DreamWorks is so confident of the all-CG film that it moved up the release date to compete directly with that other insect saga, A Bug's Life. Whoever wins the six-legged tug-of-war at the box office, Rosendahl has proved that f/x is not just a bug – it's a feature.
The mission: Restore participatory democracy by empowering the masses to create their own TV programs. The tool: a truckload of television-production equipment miniaturized into one box priced at less than US$5,000.
To that end, Play Inc. founders Mike Moore (foreground) and Paul Montgomery – of Video Toaster fame – created Trinity, their PC-based "TV studio in a box." Trinity, they insist, represents the future of the medium: real-time, high-end video effects and image manipulation combined with live production elements – all folded into a product almost any schmo can afford.
"It's the Swiss Army knife of live television production," says Moore, the mastermind behind the machine's chip designs. How simple has Play Inc. made high-end TV production? "We're selling Trinitys to grammar schools," says Montgomery. "Just wait until 9-year-olds start doing more dazzling live newscasts than the local network affiliates!"
Hollywood's destiny belongs to digital technologies, but that's where the certainty ends: Harried consumers have limited time, budgets, and patience for new movie-viewing formats. The eyeballs of the future will be glued to many of these systems, but some are fated for a hasty burial beside black-and-white TV and Betamax.
| Platform| 1997 Sales (US$ millions)| Household Penetration| Street Price (average)| Number of Titles| Key Players| Outlook| Fate
| Theater box office | $ 6,366 | (31,640 US screens) | $ 4.59 | 507 (1997 releases) | Regal Cinemas, Carmike Cinemas, Loews Theatres | Attendance is up, although only 23 percent of studio revenues now come from box office sales. | Rising
| Premium cable TV | $ 5,060 | 31.0% | $ 13.88/month | n/a | HBO, Showtime | On the rebound. Interactive services could be cable's killer app. | Rising
| Imax | $ 40 | (80 US screens) | $ 8.00 | 140+ | Imax | Coming to a multiplex near you. | Rising
| DVD | $ 58 * | 0.3% | $ 24.95 (sale) $ 3.00 (rent) | 1,370+ | Sony, Philips, JVC, Pioneer | Consumers have taken to DVD faster than expected. | Rising
| Pay-per-view | $ 646 | 36.2% | $ 3.49 | n/a | Viewer's Choice, DirecTV | Growing slowly. Consumers cling to the movie-rental experience. | Quiet
| Divx | n/a | n/a | $ 4.50 | 150+ | Circuit City, Zenith | DVD's challenger is a late starter. | Quiet
| Satellite TV | n/a | 8.2% | $ 36.46/month | n/a | DirecTV, Primestar | Still looms in cable's shadow. | Quiet
| Internet | n/a | 20.5% | $ 19.00/month (Net access) | n/a | Yahoo!, AOL, MSN | Until bandwidth booms, Net flicks are few. | Quiet
| VHS | $ 7,587 (sale) $ 8,974 (rent) | 81.8% | $ 11.95 (sale) $ 2.55 (rent) | 66,000+ | Blockbuster, Wal-Mart | Still popular, but the VCR's days may be numbered. | Falling
| Broadcast TV | $ 32,459 | 98.0% | free | n/a | NBC, CBS, ABC, Fox | The ratings slide continues as cable and the Net gain audiences. | Falling
| Laserdisc | $ 208 * | 2.0% | $ 35.00 (sale) $ 3.00 (rent) | 9,000+ | Image Entertainment | Circle the wagons … DVD is coming! | Falling
*Rental figures unavailable at press time. Sources: Adams Media Research, Baker and Taylor, Imax Corporation, International Data Corporation, Motion Picture Association of America, Optical Video Disc Association, Satellite Broadcasting Communications Association, Television Bureau of Advertising. Figures do not include hardcore pornography.
| HOLLYWOOD 3.0
| CGenius
| Platform Players
