You've gotta hand it to George Lucas. Ever since production began on the original Star Wars film in 1975, he's been pushing the limits of cutting-edge technology to bring his visions to the silver screen. And, with the pending release of the first of his new Star Wars trilogy in May, Lucas is set to sound the starting bell on another new chapter in movie history.
No, I'm not talking about the biography of Darth Vader here. While the story of young Anakin Skywalker is what will keep audiences glued to The Phantom Menace, equally exciting for many filmmakers is Lucas' own quest to change the way that motion pictures are created. In a twist that will sound familiar to MP3 addicts around the 'Net, Lucas' latest vision is a digital one.
Digital special effects are nothing new to moviegoers at this point. Computer-generated images first captivated audiences for Disney's Tron back in 1982. But Lucas sees effects like these as only the beginning. If the plans he's announced come fully to fruition, we might expect to see an Episode Two of the Star Wars saga that's 100 percent digital — no film involved.
Here's how such a production might work. Start by shooting the scenes using state-of-the-art digital cameras, such as the ones Lucasfilm has teamed up with Sony to develop. Then transmit the day's worth of material back to the editing facility via high-speed digital satellite uplink, direct from the shooting location.
Once there, the scenes can be pieced together with digital editing equipment, like the Avid computer workstations that have already become a standard in film and television production. As this phase is completed, the same material can be uploaded to the effects house, where CGI elements can be added in. Digital audio can be mixed and edited throughout the process.
When the picture is finished, it can be transferred to 35mm film using Sony's Electron Beam Recorder technology. But why bother? The complete feature could be sent over satellite to theaters nationwide, stored on servers there, and projected digitally. Not a single frame of celluloid need be printed.
Sound farfetched? It isn't. While an all-digital Star Wars may yet be a tough goal to reach, Lucas has already employed many of these techniques in his films. Digital audio is commonplace in modern theaters, provided by several vendors including Sony, Dolby Labs, and Lucas' own THX group. Certain scenes of Star Wars, Episode One were filmed entirely with digital cameras.
The recent Special Edition versions of the first Star Wars trilogy were printed to film from all-digital sources. And in June, Lucasfilm has announced special screenings of Episode One in four theaters equipped with filmless digital projection devices, using competing technologies from Texas Instruments and Hughes-JVC.
Though Lucas is one of the few in the industry today who could command the kind of budgets needed to realize a plan this ambitious, he's not the only filmmaker looking to use computer technology to enhance his productions. In fact, for the new breed of independent filmmakers who embrace digital techniques, a large part of their motivation is to keep the budgets of their films as low as possible.
Craig McGillivray was one of the early pioneers of small-scale independent digital filmmaking. With partner Sara Archambault, he founded Claymore Studios in 1994 to explore how the new technology could make feasible what previously could only have been possible given the budgets of larger studios. The result was Sucker!, the world's first online episodic serial, edited and packaged on desktop computer workstations and delivered over the Internet.
"We chose the digital medium 'cause it was cheap and there were no rules," says McGillivray. "It gave us the freedom to experiment like crazy, with visuals, with sound, with narrative structure."
In the end, it wasn't McGillivray's vision that proved to be the limiting factor in the production of Sucker! Rather, it was that by 1994, technology just hadn't caught up to what he knew was possible.
"The bandwidth issue," the filmmaker laments. "There just were not that many people who could download the thing at that time. We had to keep the episodes short: 51 episodes, at around 15 seconds per episode. We figured we had to keep the size per QuickTime file around 1 MB, or nobody was gonna be able to download it. We were compressing so much story information into such little hunks, we had to figure out just how much we could leave out and still have an audience understand what was going on."
If there's one thing you can count on in the computer industry, though, it's progress. Today, McGillivray works on digital films of another kind — as a member of Steve Jobs' Pixar Animation Studios in Richmond, Ca.
Compared to Sucker!'s limit of 1 MB per 15 seconds, a single second of Pixar's recent feature film A Bug's Life occupies about 18 MB of computer storage. The full length of the computer animated feature film approaches a terabyte — or a thousand gigabytes — of digital information, in its final form. Almost two full terabytes of storage were needed during the production of the film.
Still, while all that digital storage and the network bandwidth to move the data from place to place are expensive, the total long-term costs are nothing compared to the cost of the use of traditional cameras, film, and materials. Film costs money. Developing and printing the film costs money.
But both these steps are eliminated in an all-digital production system. Distribution can be done over network wires instead of using trucks, further reducing costs. Even multimillionaire Jobs must have seen the value of these kinds of savings, when he first bought Pixar from Lucas back in 1986.
As more small independent filmmakers begin to realize these advantages, and as more low-cost tools for film production become available, the number of digitally created productions is sure to increase. If the growing roster of short films shown at digitally-oriented festivals such as D.Film is any indication, it's already happening.
And if Lucas is successful in delivering a Star Wars, Episode Two that's 100 percent digital from camera all the way to the theater, the sky may well prove to be the only limit.
Unless, of course, other self-imposed limits arise. The recording industry is still waging an ongoing battle against the MP3 audio format, which they perceive as a threat to both the intellectual property rights of artists and, more importantly, to their own profits. If the Hollywood movie industry begins to see digital filmmaking tools as a similar threat to their own market share, who knows what measures they might take to crush or control the digital film movement.
The old publishing and distribution systems that controlled how artists could create and market their works are beginning to crumble left and right — but they're not going to go without a fight.
Still, for digital filmmakers it's hard to imagine a better ally to have on their side than Lucas. And if Hollywood isn't yet sold on this new medium, it probably won't take much more than one look at the receipts for the new Star Wars trilogy to make them believers, too.
