The Digital Revolution

The Digital
Revolution
THE NEXT AGE OF HOLLYWOOD
2
“It’s equivalent to the beginning of cinema or the
point when sound was discovered or colour.
Digital technology is a new colour for an artist in
cinema to expand their imagination.”
George Lucas1
1
From a press conference at the Caserta Royal Palace in Italy, July 26 1998, during the filming of The
Phantom Menace, a full transcript of which can be found at http://www.starwars.com/episodei/news/1998/07/news19980726b.html.
3
Contents
Introduction
Teaser
Aims
4
6
Digital History
Before
SFX
8
9
Digital Industry
Editing
Archiving
Filming
Distribution
15
16
17
20
Digital Amateur
The Tools
CSB Digital
Keena Films
25
26
27
Digital Evolution
A Future
Conclusion
30
31
Bibliography
Illustrations
34
37
4
Introduction
Teaser
The moving picture has existed only since technology has allowed it. The written
word and the still image have existed in varying forms since the moment a primitive
human being scratched markings into a cave wall, hundreds of thousands of years
ago. Cinema is barely a century old. Perhaps more than any other art, filmmaking is
endlessly reliant on technology. The history of film is a history of inventions, each
new creation heralding a new era of cinema and encouraging a gradual evolutionary
shift in filmmaking techniques and aesthetics. It is the latest phase of this change that
I will focus upon in this dissertation, as cinema enters its digital age.
Movement had always been something of a Holy Grail
for the visual arts. From the earliest drawings in the
Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc cave to the roof of the Sistine
Chapel and the 19th century Impressionism of Van
Gogh and Cézanne and the camera obscura, artists
have tried varying techniques to simulate the
movement of real life. Some inventions came close,
but it was the development of the film camera that revolutionised the art and
entertainment worlds.
The combination of a projector and a camera that could take
many photographs a second created an entirely new medium,
opening up new areas to be explored. The technology was still in
its early stages, and audiences were easily satisfied by the new
phenomenon. There is an often-repeated anecdote of people
running from theatres in fear when watching the Lumière
brothers’ L’Arrivée d’un train a la Ciotat,2 thinking that the projected oncoming train
was going to plough through the screen into the auditorium. No matter the truth in this
story, it illustrates that there was little idea of how far film would develop – nobody
2
This screening was on 28th December 1895, making it one of the earliest public exhibitions of a
motion picture, if not the very first.
5
suspected it would grow into a huge industry at the very cutting-edge of so many
technologies.
Cinema is rooted in technology. Without
sophisticated equipment, it cannot exist.
There is always a search for more
advanced systems, something that can
push the audience experience to the next
level. Just as silent cinema had comfortably established itself, companies started to
develop sound technology. The end of the 1920s brought ‘talkies’ to the cinema,
shifting the direction of film growth onto a more realistic and detailed path.
Combining sound with the images resulted in an unprecedented level of involvement;
film writers were now able to tell stories just as detailed as a stage writer might
conceive. The next big switch was the introduction of colour film, again introducing a
whole new aesthetic that could be used and manipulated.
Changes have been less prominent and drastic since then, often driven as much by
competition from the fledgling television industry as by anything else. Once people
were able to be entertained by moving images and sound in the comfort of their own
homes, luring them into cinemas became more difficult. Again, technology came to
the rescue, delivering breakthroughs that television could not hope to match or beat.
Some gimmicks, such as 3D films, did not fare well, quickly disappearing to exist
only as a novelty in theme parks. Widescreen techniques were far more successful,
very literally changing the shape of film, presenting a grander picture that dwarfed
any other entertainment medium, particularly the primitive and small television sets.
The ‘epic’ became popular in the 1950s, as it enabled Hollywood to show off all its
toys in one movie. Whilst the history of film as an art is an international story, the
history of film technology is very much centred upon the Hollywood system, for no
better reason than the American studios are the only companies with sufficient
resources to experiment and develop new equipment.
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Aims
The second half of the 20th century brought yet more advances in the technical arena,
as Hollywood reconfigured itself during the transition from the studio era to the postclassical system we are familiar with today. This dissertation will focus upon this
latter period, examining the technological developments since the 1960s that have led
to what I call the ‘digital age’ of Hollywood.
When referring to the ‘digital age’, or anything ‘digital’, I include all and any aspects
that relate to the use of a computer or similar device; that is, anything that utilises the
microchip. As I will demonstrate later, this can involve anything from DVD players to
cameras to projectors to the internet.
The first section, Digital History, will deal with the emergence of digital tools in
filmmaking, focusing in particular upon the development of computer-assisted special
effects, perhaps the clearest evidence of this new digital age. The time period covered
will be from the 1960s to the 1990s, with a particular emphasis on the last two
decades of that period, when the digital age began to fully establish itself.
Digital Industry will examine the less obvious aspects of digitisation, exploring how
gradually all stages of production have abandoned traditional, analogue methods of
filmmaking in favour of new digital wizardry. This process is still occurring, of
course, and I will examine what the future may hold. I will also investigate how
digital technologies are opening up new areas for low-budget and amateur
filmmakers.
This will lead to Digital Amateur, which demonstrates how these new technologies
have been harnessed by the independent and amateur markets in order to achieve
previously impossible results. This will include an examination of a new company
that is embracing the new technology to give more power to the amateur filmmaker,
in the process democratising filmmaking to some extent, ending the tradition of
Hollywood having all the best toys.
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Digital Evolution is the culmination of everything I have explored in the previous
sections, following the digital age’s natural developments into the future, and
extrapolating a potential new era of filmmaking, in which the very concept of
Hollywood will be entirely different, and in which the ‘digital age’ has truly arrived.
A note about resources: Due to the contemporary nature of this dissertation, the
resources will be a little unconventional. However, the extensive use of (carefully
chosen) websites and DVDs helps to enhance the central argument that digital
technologies are becoming evermore dominant. I have used traditional texts as well,
but much of the sources will be more specialised and unusual due to necessity.
A note about the CD-ROM: The CD that accompanies this dissertation contains
supplemental material that may assist or enhance the understanding of the topics
covered within the main text. For example, it contains Quicktime files of the short
films mentioned in the Digital Amateur section, as well as the Star Wars trailers
mentioned elsewhere. This dissertation is essentially about the moving picture, and
the CD offers the opportunity to include some pictures that do indeed move.
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Digital History
Before
Whether it be the robot from Forbidden Planet (1956, Fred M Wilcox) or HAL from
2001: A Space Odyssey (1968, Stanley Kubrick), computer technology has long been
present in movies, particularly in the realm of science fiction. However, computers
had little to do behind-the-scenes of a production; not least because they were still
primitive machines – the microchip was invented in only 1958,3 and it was not until
the early 1970s that the first pocket calculator was built, costing £70 a piece. Clearly
computers and associated digital technology were still the preserve of the future,
albeit an inevitable and fast-approaching one.
The end of the classical era set the stage for the next major development that would
lead towards increasing involvement of digital technologies in filmmaking – the
establishment of the ‘blockbuster’. Two directors in particular would spearhead this
new movement: Steven Spielberg and George Lucas. Their names would become
synonymously linked with digital technologies in years to come, yet at the start of the
1970s they were effectively unknowns, barely out of university. Then, in 1975,
Spielberg’s Jaws was released.
Released during the summer to
huge box-office success, the action
thriller started new trends of
production and marketing that
would be consolidated two years
later with Lucas’ Star Wars (1977). These two hugely successful films created a
formula for high-grossing summer films that continues to this day.
3
The designer of the first microchip was one Jack Kilby, an employee of Texas Instruments who had
been working at their laboratories for just four months when his research led him to arguably the most
important and far-reaching technical development of the 20th century.
9
The
blockbuster
technological
would
innovations.
drive
Generally
forwards
action
movies, and often in the science fiction or horror
genres, the blockbuster demands a high level of technical expertise and budgetary
flexibility. Each year studios want to increase the spectacle and grandeur of their
biggest productions, meaning that technical wizardry has become associated, for
better or for worse, with so-called ‘popcorn’ movies. The matter of the films’ qualities
aside, there is no doubt that the blockbuster is the perfect testing ground for state-ofthe-art technology, giving filmmakers the resources to experiment and develop new
equipment and techniques.
Two films in particular raised the bar regarding special effects – the aforementioned
Star Wars and 2001: A Space Odyssey. Effects had previously been very basic,
particularly with regard to monsters and outer space. 2001 introduced audiences to
convincingly realistic space scenes,4 although the technique was time-consuming and
difficult.5 Blockbusters would continue to drive forward the desire for ever-more
sophisticated visual effects, leading to the first major digital development in the
filmmaking world – computer-generated images, or ‘CGI’.
SFX
Traditional special effects focused upon models. Whether it be miniature sets or the
stop-motion creatures of Ray Harryhausen or the spaceships of Star Wars, it was
always physical models that were filmed in such a way as to make them seem large
and lifelike. Effects were entirely optical: they all involved using a film camera and
photographing them using traditional methods. TRON’s release in 1982 was a turning
point. The visuals were unlike anything seen before, involving as they did the use of
computers. The film is set ‘inside’ a computer, where the games people play turn out
4
Astonishingly, the film was made before any good quality pictures of the Earth had been taken from
space. Much of the film’s science is guesswork, being made as it was at the beginning of the space age.
It is remarkable that the effects have aged so gracefully, both technically and scientifically.
5
For 2001, effect elements had to be filmed several times, each time adding in new sections
(spaceship, then starfield, then crew moving about inside, etc), and each shot could take four and a half
hours to film. Combine this with Kubrick’s legendary perfectionism and you have a lengthy postproduction.
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to be terrifyingly real for the ‘inhabitants’ of the machine. The film mixes real actors
with objects and locations created using a mixture of digital and optical effects.
Audiences did not embrace the new technology, and the film did not perform well at
the box-office. Hollywood itself also turned its back on the groundbreaking film,
refusing to grant it a Best Visual Effects nomination, allegedly because the Academy
felt that it had ‘cheated’ by using computers. However, the film’s influence would be
huge, sending ripples through the effects industry. John Lasseter, director of Toy Story
(1995), has said that “Without TRON, there would be no Toy Story.”6 TRON director
Steven Lisberger describes the importance of his film as “It was a little like we were
taming or dominating the medium – civilising it…In the case of TRON it was really
about riding bareback and holding on for dear life.”7
Although the film features just fifteen minutes of CGI, in the early 1980s this was a
major achievement – this was in the days before IBM PCs or Apple Mac computers
even existed. There were few companies who specialised in computer visuals, and
there was no such thing as the ‘computer artist’ at the time: those who worked on the
film’s special effects were technicians. Disney did not capitalise on their
accumulation of this new talent, instead choosing to let them all go when the film
under-performed. John Van Vliet, an animator on TRON, laments that “[Disney] had a
10-year advantage. They could have been the studio that did Terminator 2. They
could have been the first guys there with dinosaurs…They only saw that the show
didn’t make money and they dumped it. At the end of the production, they flushed
everyone away. We, en masse, were amazed. In terms of the moviemaking business, it
was one of the dumbest decisions ever made.”8
Disney’s short-sighted, profit-induced decision-making would see the digital reins
eventually handed to another company, Industrial Light & Magic. ‘ILM’ had been
established by George Lucas to create the new effects techniques required for his Star
Wars movies, although their digital prowess was still limited. Their first major foray
6
As quoted on Disney’s official page for the 20th Anniversary DVD re-release of the movie at
http://www.disney.go.com/disneyvideos/liveaction/tron/tron01.html.
7
As quoted in ‘Revisiting TRON’, a retrospective by Stephanie Argy at VFXPro at
http://www.vfxpro.com/article/mainv/0,7220,21407,00.html (registration required to view the
webpage), p. 1.
8
Ibid., p. 3.
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into the CGI arena was also in 1982 with Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan (Nicholas
Meyer), with their depiction of the ‘Genesis’ technology in a brief sequence. Whilst
the film was an important milestone for the company, it was another, less-successful
film that more ambitiously showed the future of visual effects a couple of years later –
The Last Starfighter (1984, Nick Castle).
A film truly ahead of its time, The Last Starfighter was the first to feature visual
effects that were entirely created using a computer. Space sequences and even some
sets were created ‘virtually’, then integrated into the live action footage. The company
responsible was Digital Productions, and they improved the polygon-based computer
techniques used in some sequences of TRON,9 enabling far more detailed visuals. The
Last Starfighter’s director, Nick Castle, reflecting on the film’s visuals in 2000, said
that “computer graphics allowed us to conceive our wider exterior space scenes in
three dimensions, which opened up the possibility of different kinds of shots. I think
everyone realised this was the future.”10
The Last Starfighter failed to truly capture audiences, and so CGI development was
slowed once again. Other largely unnoticed advances would slip by, such as the
stained-glass window knight in Young Sherlock Holmes (1985, Barry Levinson), a
fully-articulated humanoid creature that interacted with the real set and actors.
At the 1987 Academy Awards, a short film called ‘Luxo Jr.’
was nominated in the Best Animated Short Film category.
Though it did not enter public consciousness to any great
level at the time, it was another hint of what was to come.
Directed by John Lasseter at Pixar, it was one of the earliest
computer animations to be acknowledged by the Academy. It would be a further eight
years before Pixar got everyone’s attention with Toy Story, the first feature-length
9
Digital Productions was set up by Gary Demos and John Whitney Jr., both of whom has once worked
for Triple-I, one of the companies that worked on TRON. When Demos and Whitney realised that
TRON was to use only fifteen minutes of computer effects, and the majority of the film’s ‘look’ would
be achieved via more traditional animation and optical effects, they left to form their own company in
1981.
10
As quoted in ‘Revisiting The Last Starfighter’, a retrospective by Stephanie Argy at VFXPro at
http://www.vfxpro.com/article/mainv/0,7220,22938|1,00.html (registration required to view the
webpage), p. 1.
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computer animation. In the meantime, the digital focus would be firmly upon special
effects.
The breakthrough came with James Cameron’s The Abyss (1989). ILM fully
embraced the new computer technology, using it to create the ‘pseudopod’, the watercreature that stalks the underwater base and mimics the facial expressions of actors Ed
Harris and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. The creature resembled nothing ever seen
before on film; it was a true harnessing of the computer’s unique animation features.
The Last Starfighter used CGI to mimic model effects in order to keep its budget low;
The Abyss used CGI to show something that no other technique could achieve. ILM
effects supervisor Denis Muren recalls the time prior to working on The Abyss:
“Everything seemed like more of the same…Then Jim Cameron came to us looking
for someone to do the pseudopod for The Abyss. I thought ‘Here’s a sequence you
don’t want to use the old technology on.’”11
Rather than letting the technology wane as with
previous CGI efforts, Cameron instead consolidated
the advances made in The Abyss in his next movie –
the hugely successful Terminator 2: Judgment Day
(1992). The liquid metal T-1000 robot is a natural
progression from the pseudopod, advancing every
CGI technique. The digital age was no longer struggling to establish itself – at last it
had officially arrived, and everybody knew it.
A succession of films that utilised sub-standard CGI,
coupled with a nostalgia for traditional skills, led to the
technique earning itself a bad reputation. Its overuse and
misuse led to the irrational conclusion that the computer
methods were at fault, when the flaws were in fact with the
individual filmmakers. Some films nevertheless managed
to show the true potential of ‘going digital’, such as Jurassic Park (1993, Steven
Spielberg) and Starship Troopers (1997, Paul Verhoeven), both of which showed
11
Ian Freer, ‘Deep Blue CGI’ in Empire magazine (#146 August 2001), p107
13
clearly the superiority of CGI over stop-motion, go-motion and other techniques that
had previously been used to depict dinosaurs and associated monsters.
History came full circle in 1999 when George Lucas released The Phantom Menace,
the latest instalment in his Star Wars franchise. Embracing CGI more than any
previous film, Lucas demonstrated that filmmakers are no longer limited by the real
world; the only limitation now is the imagination. Released the same year, the
Wachowski brothers’ dynamic visual style in The Matrix perfectly illustrated the
potential of the computer to free the camera from its physical nature and transfer it to
a partly digital area, delivering visuals that had been impossible before the
introduction of computers to filmmaking.
On a subtler level, computer-enhanced visuals now enable films to be ‘fixed’ if need
be, altering the image in post-production – sometimes referred to as ‘digital
janitoring’. This can be in order to gain a particular rating,12 or to correct an
unfortunate mistake.13 This kind of alteration is impossible to spot, yet is vital to the
current mode of filmmaking. Directors no longer need to worry quite so fervently
about small, insignificant details; they can simply be tweaked and corrected in the
computer.14
CG
animation
has
also
opened
up
new
opportunities in television, allowing shows to be
made on much smaller budgets. In 1993, Babylon
5 was the first television series to extensively use
CGI, enabling it to depict vast and elaborate
space sequences at a fraction of the cost of the
traditional model work employed on the Star Trek
series at the time. Now almost all science fiction
12
In the US, Stanley Kubrick’s Eyes Wide Shut had additional humans digitally added to the
masquerade sequence, in order to obscure some of the more explicit sexual acts. This was Kubrick’s
decision, in order to avoid having to physically cut out any footage.
13
During filming of The Perfect Storm, director Wolfgang Petersen realised that the docked ship was
falling lower in every take, as the tide changed. ILM told him not to worry and, in post-production,
they artificially raised the ship back up to ensure continuity between shots.
14
Of course, this does somewhat beg the question as to why a small white delivery van can be seen
driving past in the background at one moment during The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the
Ring.
14
television shows use primarily computer effects, as they have been proven to deliver
cheaper and better results. Even documentaries have started to take advantage of the
technology, most notably the BBC series Walking With Dinosaurs, which took the
advanced visuals of Jurassic Park and applied them to what would otherwise be a
traditional wildlife documentary, seamlessly combining CG dinosaurs with real,
filmed locations.
Gary Demos, who had worked on The Last Starfighter, said in 2000 that, unlike the
huge modern effects companies like ILM, he “had a vision that you could have a
smaller team – 10-20 staff members, not 50-100…That model remains to this day an
untapped frontier. I predict that if anyone can do it, that will be the next revolution.”15
Framestore, the company that provided the effects for Walking With Dinosaurs,
crossed that frontier, with director of animation Mike Kilne explaining:
The BBC wanted three hours of animation and had a limited budget. The
producer had been to ILM…and they quoted him something like ten
thousand dollars per second of animation! So it was a question of ‘who can
think of a way to do it?’ – and we could…We started with a skeleton crew
of four and worked like that for a few months. Then, eighteen months
before the deadline, the whole crew came on. We had between thirteen and
fifteen people, which is very small compared to Hollywood.16
Any story can now be told, in any way the filmmakers desire. Budget-permitting, for
the first time in the history of cinema, there are no boundaries. When used
appropriately, the computer is a tool that allows writers to be as outrageous and
expansive as they wish, and enables directors to visualise scripts without having to
compromise for practicality.
15
16
‘Revisiting The Last Starfighter’, p. 2.
Interview with Mike Milne at http://www.bbc.co.uk/dinosaurs/tv_series/graphics.shtml.
15
Digital Industry
Editing
Everybody is aware of computer special effects, but what is less evident from the
finished films is how digital technologies have contributed to the less spectacular
areas of filmmaking. One of the earliest developments was editing on a computer –
also called ‘non-linear editing’. Traditional methods of physically splicing together
reels of films is referred to as ‘linear’ because the frames are pieced together in
chronological order using actual film. With non-linear editing, NLE, the film is
scanned into a computer, where it exists as digital files. These files can then be
manipulated and edited together in a ‘virtual’ environment,
without ordinary physical limitations.
The editing process is made vastly quicker when a computer
is involved. Simple cuts are effortless, requiring only a
couple of mouse-clicks. Complex sequences can be achieved
more easily, with frame-accurate precision. Complex filters and image correction can
be applied to visuals, and sound can be carefully controlled and perfectly
synchronous. Most important of all, everything is easily reversible – nothing is
permanent. If a mistake is made when editing with the traditional, analogue method,
you may find yourself with several feet of ruined film. As the original digital files are
never altered, and all the editing and alterations take place virtually, it is always easy
to change your mind; consequently it is less of a risk to experiment in the editing
room, in theory leading to the possibility of more original and interesting finished
movies. Working with digital files also means that there is no physical interaction
with the actual film itself, ensuring that the film quality remains at its best throughout
the process.
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With regard to special effects, digital editing also enables digital compositing.
Whereas composites used to be achieved via optical filters, a computer can now be
used to achieve far more advanced final images, in which the defining line between
separate elements is no longer visible. In the pictures above, taken from the
forthcoming second Star Wars prequel, Natalie Portman is seen on the left acting
against a blue screen with a minimal set. The completed shot, on the right, has
hundreds of added elements, from the more detailed walkway to the machinery and
dust. Using traditional optical compositing, this shot would have been impossible to
achieve. Digital compositing not only makes it possible, but blends the line between
reality and non-reality to such an extent that it is no longer possible to tell which parts
of the set are real, and which are not. In this instance, it also allows Natalie Portman
to perform her own stunts in a safe environment, adding to the overall experience of
the sequence.
Archiving
A natural progression from digital editing is digital archiving. The fully edited movie
can be exported as a single digital file, which can then be carefully stored in its digital
form on a material that will not quickly degrade. Copies of this digital file can also be
made without any loss in quality; it is exactly the same concept as copying a text
document or an email.
Traditional methods of film archiving are deeply flawed. Information is stored on film
via a photochemical process, a natural side-effect of which is that the film degrades as
the chemicals age. This degradation is made even worse if the reels are not stored and
maintained carefully. Hundreds of films have been lost due to this; indeed it is
inevitable. Each subsequent copy of the film to a fresh storage medium will cause
degradation, as some information will be lost with each copy generation. Digital
technology offers, for the first time, the chance to safely store versions of films in
such a way that they will be preserved indefinitely.
17
The transfer of information from the film reels to the computer is not always a simple
one, however. Even once the film is found and scanned, the quality may already have
become unwatchable. When George Lucas began work on the special editions of the
original three Star Wars movies, he discovered that the original negatives had already
badly degraded – and this is from a relatively recent film made at the end of the
1970s. The footage was cracked and covered in all kinds of debris, and the colours
had faded badly. Once again digital technologies came to the rescue, and the film was
painstakingly remastered, using computers to remove the dirt and damage frame-byframe, and correct the colour. Curiously, the result was that the prints of the special
editions that went to cinemas in 1997 were of better quality than the originals that
were released in 1977.17 The BBC are also attempting to convert their archives,
beginning a £20 million project in 2001 to recover lost material and preserve it
digitally.18
With responsible maintenance, there is no longer any reason for films to be lost or
damaged. Even low-budget filmmakers, lacking the resources of Lucasfilm and the
BBC, can archive to a digital format quickly, easily and cheaply. Modern technology
is helping to retain the history of film and television; no longer need the work of many
films and television programmes be lost due to bad storage or the inevitability of time.
Film history and film studies will eventually owe much to digital technologies,
without which all materials would eventually disappear.
Filming
Digital developments have occurred in something of a reverse order. First came the
special effects, then the archiving and editing – all parts of post-production. Digital
cameras have been a long time coming. The delay is all to do with compression.
Standard film stores images optically – each frame is imprinted upon the lightsensitive film negative, which can then be processed to deliver the final moving
17
Further information available in the ‘Making Of’ documentary on the VHS editions of the Star Wars
trilogy.
18
Further information available at http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/treasurehunt.
18
images. Therefore one physical frame of film stock is all you need to store one image
– the same concept as taking several photographs and then stringing them together for
projection. Digital files do not work this way; instead, the information is stored as
millions of ones and zeros. Digital files are not a pre-determined size – whilst a 35mm
film frame will always be the same size, a digital file alters its size from frame to
frame, depending on many factors such as the range of colour and movement in a
shot. Compression is a technique whereby the size of the file is offset against the
quality of the image, in an attempt to maximise quality whilst minimising storage
requirements. Cameras were required that could photograph scenes and store them
simultaneously, in a practical format that would not require endless media reserves.
Unusually, developments in digital photography began mostly with the home user,
with digital camcorders becoming available around 1997 – albeit at a high price and
with questionable image quality. Television was the next to embrace the new format,
discovering quickly that digital cameras were robust enough to survive the harsh
conditions experienced by news and documentary crews, and able to store information
more safely and with better visual quality than video cameras. Working in a digital
realm also enables footage to be sent by satellite quickly and easily, without having to
convert first from the analogue source. During the recent war in Afghanistan, new
cameras were seen for the first time which enabled journalists to send live video
images using an ordinary phone and internet connection, allowing them to remain
mobile and unobtrusive. Digital cameras are frequently used in dramas now, as the
quality far surpasses other television formats. However, it took a little longer to
develop cameras that were capable of photographing at a high enough definition to
compete with professional, studio-quality film cameras.
George Lucas, again riding the crest of the digital wave, pushed forward advances in
digital photography, hoping to shoot his new Star Wars trilogy entirely digitally. The
new Sony cameras were not ready for The Phantom Menace, although a few shots
were achieved using prototype cameras. However, episode two, Attack of the Clones,
has been shot entirely digitally, using a format elaborately called ‘digital 24 frame
progressive high definition’. Producer Rick McCallum explains some of the
advantages of shooting digitally:
19
For the kind of films that George makes…we are ostensibly in the digital
arena from the first day that we actually start working…Every single frame,
every single shot has a digital effect…So for us to shoot in film, and then
scan it into a computer is a ridiculous process. Right now we can shoot on
high-def and fifteen minutes after we shoot a fifteen-minute cassette, it’s
inside the computer.19
Jason Ballantine, second assistant editor on Attack of the Clones, elaborates upon the
practical and speed benefits: “There’s no more laboratory. It’s now on tape. Sound
and picture are on the same recording device, synced automatically for us to put it on
the computer. It’s all on this one thing.”20 Of course, not all productions feature visual
effects on quite such an intensive level as the Star Wars films. Whilst the cost of
digital filming is still prohibitive for smaller-budgeted productions, it will inevitably
become cheaper as the technology is miniaturised and streamlined. At that point,
digital cameras will offer a cheaper, safer and quicker way of filming. The digital
media is more robust than film, it is easier to manipulate in an editing room, and there
is no loss of quality between capturing the image and outputting the finished movie.
One of the main advantages is that material shot digitally can be instantly replayed on
a monitor, unlike film which needs to be developed to some extent to create the
‘dailies’ or ‘rushes’, which will usually only be available the following day. Lucas
explains the benefits: “Everybody gets to see if anything is wrong, and they get to fix
it by the next take, whereas normally you wait until the next day and then you have to
go back and re-shoot it.”21
There is still controversy about the image quality attained by digital cameras. Victor
Kemper, president of the American Society of Cinematographers, maintains that “the
quality of an image that’s captured on a digital camera does not stand up against the
same image that will be captured on a piece of motion picture film.”22 George Lucas
believes that Attack of the Clones will tip the balance:
There is a lot of controversy about the fact that we’re shooting this digitally.
As far as I’m concerned, we should have been shooting digital cinema twenty
years ago. People say why am I doing it? The real question is why not?
19
Interview in ‘Here We Go Again’, a web-documentary at http://www.starwars.com/episodeii/video/making/making1.html, 00:02:11.
20
Ibid., 00:02:54.
21
Ibid., 00:04:40.
22
Ibid., 00:00:21.
20
Distribution
The one area that has yet to fully benefit from digital technology is distribution. It is
the one weak link in the digital chain – whilst a film can be shot and edited entirely
digitally, with no loss of quality, the final, crucial stage of projection remains an
analogue system, at which point the movie needs to be converted back onto film.
Film projection has always been a destructive process – every time the film reels are
run through the projector, they degrade a little from the exposure and the mechanical
process involved. Whilst digital projection retains the core technology of the
projecting device itself, the method of delivering the required images is entirely
different. The projector is connected to a computer that contains the movie as a digital
file. This file will never degrade – it will be the same quality on its fiftieth screening
as it was on its first; no longer will prints be covered in hairs and cracks by its third
week of showing. The Phantom Menace was the first film to be projected digitally,
albeit only in two cinemas and for a limited time. Russell Wintner, co-founder of
CineComm Digital Cinema, one of the pioneers of digital projection, said “[we are]
quite certain that historians will one day write about the June 18th opening of the
digital release of The Phantom Menace with no less excitement than was given the
opening of The Jazz Singer, motion picture’s first talking movie,” describing the event
as the “first glimpse of Hollywood in the new millennium.”23 Of course The Phantom
Menace was not filmed digitally – it falls to the second episode of Star Wars to be the
first movie to be filmed, edited and projected entirely digitally, without a single piece
of film involved during the process.
Eventually films will not have to be delivered physically; they will be sent
electronically, simultaneously arriving at the required cinemas by a satellite link,
ready for the computers. This will cut distribution costs hugely, as the production of
hundreds and sometimes thousands of film reels followed by their delivery to cinemas
has always been a costly aspect of movie distribution.
23
‘Episode One Digital Screening’, June 03 1999, http://www.starwars.com/episodei/news/1999/06/news19990603.html.
21
Digital projection has not yet been embraced by cinemas as widely as McCallum and
Lucas had hoped. However, they remain positive, with McCallum stating: “The shift
to digital projection is going to happen…It’s already in every editing room, every
sound department, every visual effects company, and now it’s here competing with
film, to capture images. The last step is exhibition.”24
Distribution goes beyond the cinema, however. The Digital Versatile Disc (DVD) was
introduced in the mid-1990s with the first DVD player being sold in Japan in
November 1996. It is the fastest-growing type of consumer electronics in history.25
DVD offers the highest quality for video and audio currently available. When
encoded properly, films viewed from a DVD will often seem clearer and crisper than
the same film viewed in a theatre without digital projection. On top of this, the digital
technology has allowed studios and directors to include ‘extras’ with their films –
documentaries and deleted scenes, outtakes and interviews, and commentaries from
the cast and crew that can be heard whilst the film plays. It has been hotly debated
whether these extras contribute anything to sales, or whether they are to most people
just novelties that are barely watched even once.
However, for film enthusiasts the DVD offers unprecedented access to film history
and behind-the-scenes information. A DVD collection has the potential to teach as
much about filmmaking as some educational courses. For example, the El Mariachi
(1992, Robert Rodriguez) DVD features an in-depth commentary by director Robert
Rodriguez in which he explains how to make a high quality film on a miniscule
budget. The Terminator 2: Judgment Day disc features the entire script, all the
storyboards, commentary by all the main crew and detailed examinations of the
filming and post-production processes. The same material was unavailable prior to the
advent of DVD – and if it had been available, in paper format for example, it would
have been highly expensive; the DVD is available for under £20. The commentaries
are perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the new format – to have the privilege of
having writers, directors and actors talk about their entire film from scene to scene
would have been rare, limited to only perhaps the top educational establishments and
24
From a speech given by Rick McCallum at ShoWest, the annual exhibitors’ conference, a transcript
of which is available at http://www.starwars.com/episode-ii/feature/20020306/index.html.
25
Further information available at BBC News Online, including
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/entertainment/new_media/newsid_1720000/1720808.stm.
22
professional conferences. Now anybody can listen to the creators from the comfort of
their own sofa. DVD also gives directors another chance to finalise their work,
tweaking their film for its DVD release, and ensuring that the DVD version is the
definitive one – DVD acting as something of a historical archive. Some releases, such
as the upcoming E.T. The Extra-Terrestrial (1982, Steven Spielberg) release, contain
both the original and special edition versions of the film.
DVD has the potential to introduce a new generation to film. Whereas those interested
in the medium have previously had to hunt for material, it is now easily available, and
more of it than ever before. This could result in a new film-literate generation unlike
any preceding. Just as the 1970s saw the arrival of the new breed of young directors
that had emerged from film school – Spielberg, Lucas, Scorsese, Coppola, De Palma
– so the next two decades could see the DVD-generation of young directors making
their mark: highly film-literate people who have had little if any formal film training
or education. Many aspects of traditional film courses may have to be rethought to
encompass the new available information. With new disc technologies such as blu-ray
and D-VHS, both of which offer even higher resolution and disc space than DVD, the
home viewing experience is becoming more and more interactive and informative.
George Lucas reflects this view:
I think especially for young people it’s important to let them know how all
these things go together because I’m hoping a lot of them will get into it and
do it themselves. So it becomes a kind of educational process. It’s not
something that was available when I grew up.26
One area of digital distribution that remains largely untapped due to technical
limitations is the internet. Whilst music is now regularly distributed online (albeit
mostly illegally), internet connections are still not fast enough to support online films.
New compression technologies that are able to reduce files to one hundredth of their
original size show a possible future, but it takes months for that level of compression
to be accomplished. However, with internet technologies ever-improving and
26
Discussing the DVD of The Phantom Menace with Rick McCallum on September 10th 2001, full
details at http://www.starwars.com/episode-i/news/2001/09/news20010910.html.
23
computers gaining speed every year,27 it is only a matter of time until the internet – or
its future incarnation – becomes a viable transportation and viewing system.
There is one thing at which the internet has proven
unexpectedly effective – marketing. The major studios had
largely ignored the potential until The Blair Witch Project
(1988, Daniel Myrick and Eduardo Sanchez) caused a stir with
a website that blended fact and fiction, creating very positive
word-of-mouth about the movie and supposedly considerably aiding its huge boxoffice takings. Ever since, films have been accompanied by websites of varying
complexity. Most simple serve as elaborate advertisements, featuring downloadable
pictures and trailers. Others, such as the recent
Blade 2 (2002, Guillermo Del Toro) site, go into
more detail, featuring storyboards and cast and crew
interviews. The Star Wars website is a huge online
encyclopaedia of everything related to George
Lucas’ twin-trilogy, factual and fictional, and the
website dedicated to The Matrix is trying to follow
its lead.
Perhaps the most innovative website of all was that accompanying the Steven
Spielberg/Stanley Kubrick collaboration (of sorts), A.I. Artificial Intelligence (2001).
Whilst the official website was the standard mixture of promotional materials and
behind-the-scenes snippets, regular internet users started noticing odd websites
appearing all over the web, all linked to a mysterious credit attached to the A.I. trailers
of
‘Sentient
Machine
Therapist
Jeanine
Salla’,
sandwiched neatly between ‘Costume Designer Bob
Ringwood’ and ‘Music by John Williams’. Internet
search on the previously unknown Miss Salla led
people to the Bangalore University website, where she
appeared to be a member of the teaching staff. Further
27
The recent advent of 1GHz was heralded as a huge step forward in speed, and yet IBM are already
working on 100GHz machines that should be available in a couple of years (business decisions aside).
24
investigations led people into a bizarre story of murder and betrayal, all linked to
Jeanine Salla and the film’s plot. This online ‘game’ was immensely complex, and
spawned hundreds of websites dedicated to unravelling the plot. Other than this tactic,
the film was not promoted extensively in any other ways beyond the normal trailers
and TV spots.
A side of the internet that Hollywood would rather ignore is that of the fan
community, exemplified by the Ain’t It Cool News website, run by the inimitable
Harry Knowles. Originally a small website of movie information, Knowles gradually
expanded his network of ‘spies’, bringing his readers news stories and reviews about
films months before the studios wanted anybody to know anything. Knowles’
damning early review of Batman And Robin (1997, Joel Schumacher) is alleged to
have played a major part in that movie’s demise.28 Hollywood now reluctantly
recognises Knowles’ authority, and even tries to win his favour now, rather than
ignoring him. The Jeepers Creepers (2001, Victor Salva) poster even prominently
featured a quote from Knowles’ online review. With the power of computers ever
increasing, the internet will become more important in the very near future.
28
http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=1635
25
Digital Amateur
The Tools
Technology that was developed for Formula One racing eventually filtered down to
vehicles in the consumer market – initially just high-end, expensive models, but
gradually the features spread to most cars. This inevitable shift, the down-filtering of
previously specialist super-technology is also occurring in the filmmaking
environment.
Technology that was once cutting edge and
struggled to operate on the most sophisticated
machines ILM could use is now commonplace
in the consumer market. The huge advances in
technology allow this to be possible – the Cray
supercomputers used to render the graphics for
The Last Starfighter are prehistoric compared to
a top-specification modern home computer.
Digital editing, even in the professional arena, is performed on ordinary PCs or Apple
Macs (albeit top-of-the-range). Software packages such as Adobe Premiere and
Apple’s Final Cut Pro are now becoming sophisticated enough to give the
professional editing system of choice, Avid, some serious competition. Apparently
parts of Attack of the Clones were edited using Final Cut Pro. Whilst these packages
are still around the £600 price area, they are far cheaper than the systems that would
have cost thousands of pounds just ten years ago.
For the home enthusiast who is serious about
editing, professional level packages such as
Premiere and Final Cut Pro are well within reach;
if not, there are several more affordable and less
sophisticated NLE systems – the crucial thing is
that they all run on ordinary computers.
26
Perhaps more surprising is the capability of home
computers to achieve remarkably professional
special effects at very little cost. Complex 3D work
can be achieved using programs that can be freely
(and legally) downloaded from the internet, such as
Blender, or acquired from magazine cover-discs. Just recently Cinema4D was given
away free with several magazines, having previously sold for over £500. Whilst it
takes time and effort to learn how to use these programs, it nevertheless means that
amateur and low-budget productions have the tools available to them to create a
product comparable to a Hollywood blockbuster.
CSB-Digital
Despite many of the tools becoming ever-cheaper, they are still outside the price
bracket of those with only a casual interest in filmmaking or a very tight budget. One
company that is trying to change this is CSB-Digital. They plan to release a series of
computer programs that enable users to achieve professional results, quickly, easily
and at a vastly reduced price compared to the competition. Their first program,
AlamDV, enables impressive special effects to be applied to any footage, making
explosions, lightsabers, muzzle flashes and other visual tricks possible to those with a
limited budget.
Currently their software is aimed at amateurs, but they intend to gradually enhance
their products and close the gap between professional and amateur. Managing director
Joshua Davies explains that “AlamDV is priced so most people can buy it without
having to think about how they are going to afford it – it should be a tool all
filmmakers can afford…In the future we will aim to create even more professional
software but still sell it at a low price.” Regarding how technology will help both the
amateur and professional arenas, Davies believes that “If the talent is there, the
applications will be made to take advantage of it. AlamDV is just one example of
such a program…[Audio-visual] quality will be the first thing to improve. Although
there are tons of gimmicks that come along…it will be the quality of digital capture
27
that will play a huge role. Online distribution will play a major role, as long as people
can make money out of it and connections become faster. In the next five years a TVquality signal should become broadcastable from your own house.”
Companies such as CSB-Digital ensure that amateur filmmakers will be able to keep
just a few steps behind the professionals, perhaps even drawing closer and blurring
the boundary. Davies is sceptical of the low-budget amateur ever being able to
compete with the professionals, however, stating that “They will always be separate,
because as one improves so does the other.”
Keena Films
In an attempt to test whether impressive results could indeed be attained on a zerobudget, I embarked upon the making of several short films with Stephen Davis under
the Keena Films banner. Whilst hardly artistic masterpieces, the films nevertheless
quickly proved that budgetary constraints no longer need to result in creative
restraints.
The films so far have been a great success. Muffy and Jebediah: Episode One, the daft
adventures of two intrepid space pilots, featured scenes of a spaceship flying through
the cosmos, then entering a planet’s atmosphere before crashing
and exploding in a forest. It was shot on a Hi8 camcorder – the
only piece of equipment that was not digital – and edited on a
normal home PC using Adobe Premiere. Acquiring a camera, a
computer and editing software is by the far the costliest aspect of
the process, but they are all single expenditures that will not
need to be repeated – once editing software is acquired, no more
money need be spent on that area. Every other aspect of production was done with
practically a zero-budget. The software to create the 3D CGI was discovered on the
front of a magazine – it was very simple but, with a little perseverance, some adequate
results could be achieved.
28
A couple of months after completing the film, we discovered the AlamDV program
and decided that Muffy and Jebediah would benefit from a slight overhaul. It was at
this point that the huge benefits of the digital realm really became clear, as we were
able to go back to our original digital files and seamlessly integrate the new effects
layers so that they appeared to have always been present, and at the same time we
remixed the entire soundtrack, adjusting the levels for a better performance. This level
of re-editing would have been near-impossible prior to NLE; the idea of attempting
such detail and technical sophistication using the traditional low-budget method of
connecting two or more VCRs is ludicrous, and even in the professional world of film
it would have been a difficult and arduous task.
Episode two stretched our capabilities yet further,
introducing an entirely computer-generated character.
Whilst our character is incredibly simplistic, especially
when compared to the technical marvel of The
Phantom Menace’s Jar Jar Binks, it nevertheless
proved that the concept was possible: the very idea of
having a CG character interacting with real actors in a
no-budget student film would have been absurd just a
few years ago.
When it came to getting the film seen, the power of modern digital technology truly
became clear. An amateur student film would ordinarily be seen only by a handful of
colleagues, friends and family. However, having used AlamDV for some of the
effects, we were able to upload episode one to the internet, where it was hosted on the
AlamDV website. In just eight weeks it had been viewed by nearly 5000 people, quite
a remarkable number for a short film with so little promotion. These websites enable
films to find an appreciative audience that understands the work that goes into
amateur productions. There are also many websites that show more professional
productions and run competitions and festivals.
The interlinking and networking nature of the internet can often lead to a much wider
audience than expected. Word-of-mouth can spread very quickly and very easily.
When a couple of USC graduates released their affectionate short parody George
29
Lucas In Love (taking the structure of Shakespeare In Love and applying it to the Star
Wars creator’s youth) on Mediatrip.com they found themselves enjoying an
unexpected level of success, with over 100,000 downloads, talk of an Oscar
nomination and future filmmaking deals with Dreamworks (reportedly both Spielberg
and Lucas thoroughly enjoyed the film when they stumbled across it).
Whilst Hollywood may still not appreciate the future potential of internet distribution,
the lower-budgeted and amateur/fan productions know its power. Never before has
there been such a willing audience for the work of enthusiasts and students.
30
Digital Evolution
A Future
There is a dream of a possible cinematic future. In this dream there will be a great
filtering-down of digital technologies, from the most technically advanced Hollywood
studio to the smallest of independent low-budget filmmakers. Digital cameras will be
smaller and cheaper whilst still offering unrivalled image quality; expensive reels of
film and development costs will be a thing of the past; editing will be done via
computers, negating the need for elaborate and complex traditional analogue
equipment; bluescreen studios will become more widespread and affordable, cutting
down on set and location costs; special effects will be accomplishable on home
computers with easily affordable software; distribution will be on the internet or via
satellite linkups to cinemas, no longer depending on the replication of thousands of
prints.
The technology pioneered by Hollywood will threaten its very survival. With amateur
film enthusiasts able to replicate the epic visions of Cameron, Lucas and Spielberg in
their own bedrooms, Hollywood will no longer be able to rely on technical superiority
to maintain its leading position in the Western film world. There will be a great
levelling, with budgets no longer restricting the creation or distribution of films. All
that will matter in the production of a film will be the talent of the individual
filmmakers. No digital technique can turn a bad actor into a good actor, or an
excitable fan into a professional director, or a computer user into a visual effects
artist.
The traditional budgetary constraints will no longer hamper a film’s development –
where money would once have been absorbed, now it can be redirected into hiring a
good crew and cast. Even the cost of a crew will be minimalised, as digital
technologies easily allow a single person to perform multiple skills, coming closer to
the model of production imagined by Gary Demos after working on The Last
Starfighter.
31
This will probably lead initially to a general drop in quality, as every garage
filmmaker attempts to show the world their latest blockbuster. Once the dust settles,
there will be a clear dividing line – not due to production values, but due to the overall
quality of the finished film: an artistic division rather than a financial or technical one.
Eventually only the original studios that are able to adapt to the new model, and the
most talented of the new breed of film-literates, the DVD generation, will be left. Epic
blockbusters will no longer be confined to the resources of the biggest studios, whom
will no longer be able to rely on the huge profits of the summer popcorn movies.
Eventually there will be a gradual increase in quality across the board, as that will be
the only qualifier remaining. With production values so high in all forms of digital
filmmaking, what will matter will be the writing, the acting, the filming, the directing
of movies in general. The genuine talent will shine through, unobstructed by financial
limitations. Filmmakers will be able to enjoy an unprecedented level of response to
their creations, with the internet linking the audience with the artists. This is already
happening in some cases, with actors and producers frequenting internet forums and
keeping the fans informed of what is happening.
All this, though, is only a dream.
Conclusion
Some parts of this future are already here, others are on their way. There is no
doubting that digital technologies have aided and enriched the filmmaking process,
and will continue to do so. Whether the full potential of the digital future is realised
depends greatly upon the corporations and studio executives; the technology may be
deliberately held just out of reach of the lower-budgeted productions in order for the
studios to retain their power.
This is where newer companies such as CSB Digital have a part to play. Whilst they
are inevitably driven by profit, and must be in order to survive, they also have a
commitment to their users, to provide them with the tools they need without causing
32
insurmountable financial difficulties. This kind of business practice is a dangerous
one – NaN Technologies, the creators of the 3D software Blender that we use for
many of our productions, recently filed for bankruptcy – they had been attempting a
new strategy of giving Blender away free for personal use, and only asking for money
when it was to be used professionally.
All new developments inevitably bring with them negative consequences. The shift to
digital technologies will render many traditional skills and jobs. Change always
causes a certain amount of turmoil, forcing people to rethink strategies and learn new
skills. Those willing to evolve alongside the technology can bring their old skills to
bear on the new opportunities. Projectionists can transfer to operate the new
computer-controlled equipment. Stop-motion animators may no longer be in demand
for special effects, but their animation skills translate remarkably well to the computer
environment, and there will always be a demand for stop-motion movies such a
Chicken Run (2000, Peter Lord and Nick Park) and The Nightmare Before Christmas
(1993, Henry Selick). If change was avoided due to a fear of losing out-dated and
inefficient techniques, then cinema itself would never have been invented. Those with
the courage to embrace the new will find themselves the leaders. Some changes are
inevitable, such as the switch to digital projection, which provides a financial
incentive29. Others will have to be forced through if they are to happen, due to their
essentially artistic basis, rather than financial.
The effect of digital technologies on independent productions can already be seen,
with relatively low-budget films such as Donnie Darko (2001, Richard Kelly) and The
Devil’s Backbone (2001, Guillermo Del Toro) featuring effects and digital
manipulation that previously has been confined to the big Hollywood movies.
The continuing shift to digital filmmaking is the most important change for cinema
since the introductions of sound and colour. It has opened up a new visual palette, has
given filmmakers more freedom with which to recreate their imagination on the
screen, and is continuing to ensure a high quality of presentation at all stages. The
29
It is estimated that the major studios spend $800 million a year on film prints, without even covering
shipping costs. Whilst the initial set-up cost of digital transmission and projection will be large, the
operational costs will be miniscule in comparison.
33
future promises to bring entirely new ways of viewing movies. The 21st century will
most likely see new forms of cinema, and more interactive experiences.
Whilst digital technologies may never be noticed by the general public as much as
colour and sound were, they nevertheless are changing every aspect of filmmaking.
The digital age is very much upon us.
“…the world of cinema is becoming democratised
and is becoming more available for more people.
Even the more sophisticated computer animation
aspects of this can be done by almost anyone. We’re
entering an era where more and more people are
getting access to the medium.”
George Lucas, May 200230
30
From a talk given by George Lucas to Star Wars fan filmmakers at the CelebrationII event, May 3-5
2002. Full details at http://www.starwars.com/community/feature/20020503/indexp6.html.
34
Bibliography
Books
Ed. Derek Mercer, Chronicle of the 20th Century (1998, JL International Publications,
France)
David Bassom, Creating Babylon 5 (1996, Boxtree, London)
David Bordwell and Kristin Thompson, Film Art: An Introduction (1997, McGrawHill, London)
Richard Maltby, Hollywood Cinema (1999, Blackwell Publishers Inc, Oxford)
Ed. Noel Buchanan, How Is It Done? (1990, Reader’s Digest, London)
Rachel Aberly and Volker Engel, The Making of Independence Day (1996, Titan
Books, London)
Don Shay and Jody Duncan, The Making of Jurassic Park (1993, Ballantine, New
York)
Paul Sammon, The Making of Starship Troopers (1998, Little, Brown & Co., London)
Ed. John Pym, Time Out Film Guide (2001, Time Out Guides Ltd, London)
Ed W Marsh and Douglas Kirkland, Titanic (1997, Harper Collins Publishers, New
York)
Magazines
Empire (particularly no. 146, August 2001 and no. 154, April 2002)
DVDs (dates apply to the theatrical release, not the DVD release)
The Fast and the Furious (2001, Rob Cohen)
Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001, Hironobu Sakaguchi)
Jaws (1975, Steven Spielberg)
The Matrix (1999, the Wachowski brothers)
Star Wars: Episode One: The Phantom Menace (1999, George Lucas)
Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991, James Cameron)
Toy Story 2 (1998, John Lasseter)
Websites
Ain’t It Cool News
http://www.aintitcoolnews.com
Art History Resources on the Web
http://witcombe.sbc.edu/ARTHLinks.html
35
Babylon 5
http://www.babylon5tv.co.uk
BBC Online
http://www.bbc.co.uk
(Treasure Hunt)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/treasurehunt
(Walking With Dinosaurs)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dinosaurs
BBC News Online
http://news.bbc.co.uk
The Cave of Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc
http://www.cultue.gouv.fr/culture/arcnat/chauvet/en/index.html
Dark Horizons
http://www.darkhorizons.com
Dictionary
http://www.dictionary.com
The Digital Bits
http://www.digitalbits.com
(specific widescreen section)
http://www.digitalbits.com/articles/anamorphic/aspectratios/widescreenorama.html
Disctronics
http://www.disctronics.co.uk
(DVD overview)
http://www.disctronics.co.uk/technology/dvdintro/dvd_intro.htm#DVD%20History
Disney
http://www.disney.com
(TRON section)
http://Disney.go.com/disneyvideos/liveaction/tron/tron01.html
The Force.net
http://www.theforce.net
Google
http://www.google.com
A Historical Timeline of Computer Graphics and Animation
http://www.accad.ohio-state.edu/~waynec/history/timeline.html#1980
The Internet Movie Database
http://www.imdb.com
36
Kansas State Historical Society
http://www.kshs.org
Mediatrip
http://www.mediatrip.com
Star Wars
http://www.starwars.com
TechTV
http://www.techtv.com
VFXPro
http://www.vfxpro.com
Vintage Calculators Web Museum
http://www.vintagecalculators.com
Webopedia
http://www.webopedia.com
Widescreen Museum
http://www.widescreenmuseum.com
37
Illustrations
Page 4
Top-left – Hillaire Chamber, Panel of the Engraved Horse at the Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc
http://www.culture.gouv.fr/culture/arcnat/chauvet/en/index.html
Middle-right – Chauvet-Pont-d’Arc cave painting
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/sci/tech/newsid_1577000/1577421.stm
Bottom-left – Still from L’Arrivee d’un train en gare de La Ciotat
http://www.pavonerisorse.to.it/museocinema/prefilm.htm
Page 5
Middle-right – Cinemascope ticket
http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/wingcs1.htm
Page 6
Top-left – Still from The Matrix (1999, Wachowski brothers) DVD
Middle-top-left – Promotional art (altered) from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968,
Stanley Kubrick)
http://movies.warnerbros.com/2001
Middle-bottom-left – Still from ‘Editing for the MPAA’ featurette on The Fast And
The Furious (2001, Rob Cohen) DVD
Bottom-left – Still from Muffy And Jebediah: Episode One (special edition) (2001,
Simon Jones)
Page 8
Top-left – Promotional art (altered) from 2001: A Space Odyssey
http://movies.warnerbros.com/2001
Middle-right – One of the earliest calculators
http://www.vintagecalculators.com/html/canon_pocketronic.html
Bottom-right – Still from Jaws (1975, Steven Spielberg)
Page 9
Top-left – Still from Return of the Jedi (1983, Richard Marquand)
Bottom-left – Still from TRON
http://www.accad.ohio-state.edu/~waynec/history/tree/images/tron.jpeg
38
Page 10
Background image – (altered) Promotional art from TRON
http://www.vfxpro.com/article/mainv/0,7220,21407|1,00.html
Page 11
Background image – (altered) A spaceship from The Last Starfighter (1984, Nick
Castle)
http://www.vfxpro.com/article/mainv/0,7220,22938|2,00.html
Bottom-left – Still from ‘Luxo Jr.’ (1986, John Lasseter) on the Toy Story (1995, John
Lasseter) DVD
Page 12
Top-left – Still from Terminator 2: Judgment Day (1991, James Cameron) DVD
Middle-right – Still from Starship Troopers (1997, Paul Verhoeven) DVD
Page 13
Top-right – Promotional still from Babylon 5 (1994-1998)
http://www.babylon5tv.co.uk/imagecorridor.html
Page 14
Top-middle – (altered) Dinosaur from Walking With Dinosaurs (1999)
http://www.bbc.co.uk/dinosaurs/fact_files/volcanic/tyrannosaurus.shtml
Middle-left – Still from Toy Story 2 (1999, John Lasseter)
Middle-right – Still from Final Fantasy: The Spirits Within (2001, Hironobu
Sakaguchi)
Page 15
Top-left - Still from ‘Editing for the MPAA’ featurette on The Fast And The Furious
DVD
Middle-right – Still from The Beginning documentary on Star Wars: Episode One:
The Phantom Menace DVD
Page 16
Top-left – Still from ‘Here We Go Again’, a web-documentary
http://www.starwars.com/episode-ii/video/making/making1.html
Top-right – Still from the ‘Clone War’ Star Wars: Episode Two: Attack of the Clones
(2002, George Lucas) trailer
39
http://www.starwars.com/episode-ii/video/trailers/clonewar/
Middle-left – Still from ‘Here We Go Again’, a web-documentary
http://www.starwars.com/episode-ii/video/making/making1.html
Middle – A selection of film reels
http://www.bbc.co.uk/cult/treasurehunt/formats/index.shtml
Page 17
Middle-left - Still from ‘Here We Go Again’, a web-documentary
http://www.starwars.com/episode-ii/video/making/making1.html
Page 19
Top three – Stills from the ‘Clone War’ Star Wars: Episode Two: Attack of the Clones
(2002, George Lucas) trailer
http://www.starwars.com/episode-ii/video/trailers/clonewar/
Page 20
Top-left – Still from The Beginning documentary on The Phantom Menace DVD
Page 21
Background image – Direct scan of a disc
Page 23
Middle-left – Screengrab of The Matrix website
http://www.whatisthematrix.com
Middle-right – Screengrab of Star Wars website
http://www.starwars.com
Bottom-left – Screengrab of Blade 2 website
http://www.blade2.com
Page 24
Background image – Screengrab of Ain’t It Cool News website (April 3, 2002)
http://www.aintitcool.com
Montage top – Review of Batman & Robin on the Ain’t It Cool News website
http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=1635
Montage middle-left – Billy Wilder’s death on Ain’t It Cool News website
http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=11866
Montage middle-right – Review of Blade 2 on Ain’t It Cool News website
40
http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=11793
Montage bottom-left – Ain’t It Cool News dealing with the real world
http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=10160
Montage bottom-right – Early (unsanctioned) review of Attack of the Clones
http://www.aintitcool.com/display.cgi?id=11796
Page 25
Top-left – Still from Muffy And Jebediah: Episode One (special edition)
Middle-right – Screengrab of Adobe Premiere 6.0 editing software
Bottom-left – Screengrab of Blender, 3D modelling and animation software
Page 26
Top-left – Screengrab of Cinema4D, 3D modelling and animation software
Middle-left – (altered) Explosion effect from AlamDV2
Page 27
Middle-left – Still from Muffy And Jebediah: Episode One (special edition)
Bottom-right – Still from Muffy And Jebediah: Episode One (special edition)
Page 28
Middle-left – Still from Muffy And Jebediah: Episode Two (2002, Simon Jones and
Stephen Davis)
Page 29
Bottom-centre – Poster for George Lucas In Love (1999, Joe Nussbaum)
CD-ROM glossary
Top-left – A blu-ray disc
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/entertainment/new_media/newsid_1829000/1829241.
stm
Bottom-left – Manipulated still from The Robe
http://www.widescreenmuseum.com/widescreen/wingcs2.htm