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Report From The Land of SFX
prostoalex writes "MIT's Technology Review takes a look at the world of digital special effects, the industry worth half a billion dollars per year, according to the authors. It talks about the role of SFX in movie production nowadays and comes to the connclusion that while might not 100% computer-created in the future, we'll see more of realistic-looking special effects in future titles."
I totally agree on "Out of this World" -- one of the very few games I was upset to see end. Extremely compelling, no dialog other than "ow!"
I can see a movie being made with no dialog, all action and only implicit script. Look at Aeon Flux. That is essencially what Alea is talking about, right?
--Peter
"We call them 'invisible effects,'"
And that is exactly where they should stay (barring of course the Pixar style total 3d animation stuff).
Why is this? Look at Star Wars EP2 for the obvious answer. Even with Lucas Arts churning out some of the best 3d in the movie business, there are still some amazingly obvious 3d effects (Anakin getting on and riding the creature... where Anakin becomes a 3d model getting tossed like a rag doll). And this obviousness seriously hinders the overall movie experience. Anything that pushes the viewer from the imaginary world back to realising he/she is in the theater is a bad thing, and in this case, I found myself thinking, "That doesn't look real," and bang i'm back in the theater.
So what am I say? Well, 3d should stay in the background. Until they can make it look exactly like the actor and have it move exactly like the actor, they shouldn't put it in the center of the action in a film made with real people. It is far too obvious. Though sometimes this is done pretty well.. such as Spiderman, the costumed one. The part with him in his hooded sweatshirt is also pretty obviously 3d.
But all these amazing secondary effects are just incredible, such as the backgrounds in Cast Away. Sometimes you have no idea, and that is the point of the game. Not that you can look and say, damn Lucas Arts has just made some cool 3d stuff, but to do a double take 2 months down the road when someone tells you it actually was 3d in the first place.
So basically, in the world of realistic 3d... the less recognition they get, the better they did their job.
It's not just a matter of quality. Digital projection improves the distribution process dramatically. Film is a serial medium; reproducing the film platters has a time footprint that will not shrink very much by throwing more technology at it. Furthermore, they're *heavy*... which makes shipping both more expensive and more difficult to do quickly. At the same time, the movie industry is not a whole lot different from the software industry in being constrained by release dates that have more to do with marketing concerns than how long it takes to generate the finished product. Films are often being cut right up until the last possible moment to send them for reprinting and distribution (i.e. maybe 48 hours before they premiere at "a theatre near you.")
The number of hard drives it takes to save "Attack of the Clones" is not "small," I'd wager, but compared to the size of the film platters, it's tiny. Furthermore, writing data can be done relatively rapidly compared to running prints of a film. With the right RAID setup, you can read and write different sectors to the same disk simultaneously. There's an issue of diminishing returns, but it does respond to throwing more money at it. Furthermore, you can be making multiple copies at one time; a copy of a copy of a copy isn't any different from the master. Most importantly, though, eventually the movie studios won't have to create the media *at all*... they can send the movies via secured broadband feed directly to the theatres.
Unfortunately, you and I probably will never really notice the results of this, so your point is still valid. It does give the theatres greater motivation to upgrade, though.
Don't you wish your girlfriend was a geek like me?
On the other hand, Rosen doubts that artists or audiences will soon want to give up the unique sensory qualities of film. "If we look decades ahead, people will come to realize that digital [photography] is another way of doing things, but film will give you a different organic look," he says. "It's like oil paint and acrylic. Digital has a different texture."
I disagree with this argument. If digital videocameras and especially the projectors continue to improve it is only a matter of time before audiences prefer digital to film. The current bottleneck is the Texas Instuments projectors which are limited to 1024 or 1280 lines. Lucas filmed Episode 2 at a higher res than that but is limited by the projectors.
While film could 'fight back' by going to 70mm or using the excellent Maxivision 48 system, I think it is a loosing battle because projectors will still have jitter, and prints will continue to wear and fade.
Larger film requires more storage space as does digital. Luckily for digital, storage capabilities continue to improve as hard drives cram ever more data into their platters.
In the long view costs will come down for digital, which is another current drawback. This is assuming digital becomes popular enough for economies of scale and competition to kick in. A complicated chicken and the egg situation indeed.