Fox Studios Australia wants to make Aussie film production synonymous with something more than lovable yet gruff outback characters with big knives.
New media manager Will Berryman says productions are traveling down under because Fox Studios Australia is bloody cutting edge, mate.
"This is a brand new site, the first film studio for Fox outside of North America," said Berryman. "It's been designed infrastructurely [sic] from the ground up over the past four years. We're able to take advantage of the latest technology."
Since opening in May of 1998, the studio has hosted the filming of the sci-fi shoot 'em up The Matrix and the farm animal sequel Babe: Pig in the City. Currently, Mission Impossible II is being filmed on the lot, and, recently, George Lucas announced the last two chapters in the Star Wars saga will start shooting at the Sydney-based studios in 2000.
The studio is a joint venture between Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation and Australian real estate and financial giant Lend Lease Corporation. The 24.3 hectare (.09 square miles) site, located smack dab in the middle of Sydney, features the Professional Studio, which is closed to the public, and the Backlot, which will be extremely open to the public when it officially launches with a live webcast 7 November. Backlot activities being hyped include "James Cameron's Titanic -- The Experience" and the cabaret show "Lights! Camera! Chaos!" produced by Baz Luhrmann, director of William Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet.
The entire site is connected by FoxNet, a massive intranet with miles of fiber-optic cable that link the 30 buildings in the complex, allowing communication between the six climate-controlled sound stages and 30-odd media industry service providers leasing space, as well as the Backlot staff.
This technology promises that filmmakers who need a lot of control, such as Lucas, can know what's going on everywhere, all the time.
"The grooviest thing about FoxNet from a nerd's point of view is that it's not that groovy at all," Berryman said. "It's simple to use and simple to operate." FoxNet allows Backlot staff to know what's happening on at the soundstages. And the FoxShop cash registers are linked into FoxNet so that sales representatives can look up customer inquiries on call sheets and see who is filming what on the lot. Usually.
"Of course, George Lucas isn't going to sit there and publish the call sheets of his picture onto our intranet," Berryman said, "but it's nice to know that Star Wars is being produced out here somewhere."
The intranet-enabled cash registers also control audio and visual content in the shop. Instead of running video tapes, CDs, or DVDs, Fox elected to run all instore trailers, commercials, and music as high-quality MPEGs -- digital video files that are compressed and saved on the network. This means employees can easily call up any clip -- so there's no excuse when a 7-year-old customer wants to see that Simpsons promo ... again.
During the filming of The Matrix the studio sent daily footage to Los Angeles via a point-to-point ISDN 2MB line. The system didn't prove to be cost effective, so Fox is hoping to exploit its MPEG technology to do the same job.
"That was the first test of sending rushes over to the US," said Gavin Dietz, the studio's information systems manager. "It proved to be very expensive so we've been researching better, cheaper ways to do it."
