[PT] Jim Rygiel
Jim was the visual effects supervisor on Lord of the Rings. He’s got a looong list of credits, LOTR is enough for me. “I could do Lord of the Rings on a laptop right now,” he says. It would take longer — they had 6,000 CPUs on LOTR — but you could do it.
He shows clips of the animation process. He says that he doesn’t expect digital effects to replace actors, except for stunts. [Last year at PopTech, one of the Pixar guys said that they won’t replace actors because acting is an art that actors do better than animators.] He shows the big elephant battle from LOTR III (I know that’s not what Tolkien called ’em, so just back off), variously exposing the layers of digital effects. It is a crazy-ass piece of footage, and seeing the layers was amazing. I went back to see the movie a second time when it first came out primarily to see that scene again.
He shows side-by-side clips of Andy Serkis and and Gollum in dramatic moments, closeups, to make the case that Serkis should have gotten a Best Actor Oscar.
He says that the industry is holding off putting in digital projectors because when that happens, anyone can make a movie and have it shown in a theater. The audience applauds.
Categories: Uncategorized dw
David: I don’t understand your last paragraph. I regularly go to theaters where they offer digital projection. And as far as the economics are concerned, here’s a quote from a Forbes piece that was discussing Lucas’ decision to create a digital version of “Clones” [a waste of good 1’s and 0’s, IMHO]:
“It’s a play [Lucas’] to fuel demand for digital projection, aimed at breaking an industry standstill over how and when movie theaters will convert to digital projectors. While it’s widely agreed that the results of digital projection are stunningly impressive, the industry is struggling over how to cover the costs of converting more than 36,000 screens in the U.S. alone.
“A single digital projector and the server used to store the huge digital movie files can easily cost $250,000, too high for perpetually financially strapped movie theater chains like AMC Entertainment, Loews Cineplex Entertainment and Carmike Cinemas, two of which are emerging from bankruptcy protection. The chains say it should be the distributors–which in the end will save most on converting to digital–that should shoulder conversion costs.”
This is from March, 2002, so I think these chains were able to financially justify this hurtle into digital.
With film, the movie maker has to pay a ton of money (I have no idea how much) to make a print. With digital, you just plug in your laptop.
I don’t know about the costs of digital projectors, but I assume that once theaters start switching, the costs will come down. Even if they don’t: Moore’s Law and all.
But the theaters have begun switching. And, why would these theaters attempt to recoup the cost of these projectors with some film student’s class project? Sorry, still don’t understand your point.
David,
I think you’re flat-out wrong about the costs of digital projection.
It’s heavy, and has a huge overhead for the individual theatres to get into, making it a not-so-cost-effective mechanism that doesn’t actually buy all that much for the theatre itself. The big winners in digital projection are the owners of the film itself – as they can move to completely digital mediums for their distribution system, reducing theft, including watermarking in the films for each group, and really dropping the infrastructure costs with just moving all that celluloid arond.
Combine that with the fact that many of the theatres in the US are owned by only a few companies, and now you’ve got buying leverage. The production studios are desperately trying to get them adopted, because it decreases THEIR costs – but there’s currently a stalemate between the two groups economically.
Joe, thanks for the info.
BK, I believe the idea is that some home-made films will actually be commercial hits that can route around the studio system.