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Lucas Returning to Digital Animation
deadwood writes "It seems Lucas is creating a Digital Animation studio as a subsidiary of ILM, according
to this Yahoo! article.
Lucasfilm Animation is created roughly 17 years after George Lucas sold Pixar to Steve Jobs. I wonder if Episode VII-IX would be a good choice as first projects?"
Lucasfilm Animation is created roughly 17 years after George Lucas sold Pixar to Steve Jobs. I wonder if Episode VII-IX would be a good choice as first projects?"
Director Lucas Forms Digital Animation Unit
Mon May 12, 6:21 PM ET
LOS ANGELES (Reuters) - Following the path of Pixar Animation Studios, Dreamworks and other filmmakers, "Stars Wars" creator George Lucas (news) is forming a new group to make computer-animated films, a spokeswoman said on Monday.
The unit, called Lucasfilm Animation, is an offshoot of his special effects company, Industrial Light & Magic, that has been a pioneer in the field of digital effects and works on Lucas' own "Star Wars" films.
Lynne Hale, spokeswoman for his San Rafael, California-based Lucasfilm Ltd., said the new unit was "still in its beginning stages" and did not even have a project to talk about.
As a result, details were limited. Hale confirmed that Lucasfilm Animation will be formed from a nine-person team housed with Industrial Light & Magic. The new division will be headed by senior vice president Patty Blau.
Lucas is a vocal proponent of using digitally produced and computerized special effects in the movies. His companies have been active in designing new cameras for shooting digital films, and his most recent "Star Wars: Episode II -- Attack of the Clones" was shot in the digital format.
Until now, however, he has lacked a production company dedicated to making computerized animation movies such as "Shrek," "Monsters, Inc." or last year's "Ice Age."
Those three films have been smash hits with combined global ticket sales of $1.36 billion. On its own, "Monsters, Inc.," which was produced by Pixar and The Walt Disney Co., raked in $529 million in global ticket sales.
Lucas is no stranger to digital animation. Indeed, Pixar had been Lucasfilm's computer graphics division 17 years ago before Lucas sold it to Apple Computer's Steve Jobs (news - web sites) for $10 million.
Pixar now has a market capitalization of roughly $3.2 billion
Lucas, too, has tried to mount efforts to make digitally animated movies, such as a version of "Frankenstein" that was scrapped by Universal Pictures in 1999.
already stated that there is no episode 7, 8 or 9.
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While people are busy grousing about Star Wars, there's plenty of other material Lucas already has access to that would make a great movie. Anyone who has played the LucasArts adventure game Grim Fandango would agree it would make a kickass feature film. Glottis > Shrek. ;)
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In the mid 1980s Pixar was basically a computer hardware company making nifty graphics accelerators for volume visualization. Since this was not the core business of LucasFilm either Pixar would would have to compete with the parent company for development capital and perhaps one or both would be shortchanged. So Lucus spun his computer divisions off hoping they could making money expanding to other markets like medical imaging, oil exploration, etc. However, in the mid-1980s UNIX graphics workstations like Apollo, HP and Sun were caught up to Pixar's hardware. The crucial insight of Job's purchase was that Pixar's graphics expertise was unparalleled, so the hardware was dumped and they never looked back.