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LucasFilm Combines Video Games and Movies To Eliminate Post-Production
llebeel writes "Lucasfilm is currently prototyping the combining of video game engines with film-making to eliminate the post-production process in movies. 'Speaking at the Technology Strategy Board event at BAFTA in London this week, the company's chief technology strategy officer, Kim Libreri, announced that the developments in computer graphics have meant Lucasfilm has been able to transfer its techniques to film-making, shifting video game assets into movie production. Real-time motion capture and the graphics of video game engines, Libreri claimed, will increasingly be used in movie creation, allowing post-production effects to be overlayed in real time. "We think that computer graphics are going to be so realistic in real time computer graphics that, over the next decade, we'll start to be able to take the post out of post-production; where you'll leave a movie set and the shot is pretty much complete," Libreri said.'"
So Machinima with motion capture instead of controllers.
Lucasfilm has been able to transfer its techniques to film-making
Games are typically designed with ultra-high res textures and ultra-high poly or NURBS models which get transformed into something which will run on PCs. For textures this is a relatively simple resize (I say relatively because many of them actually get it wrong!), and for models this means generating bump/tessellation maps, etc.
It doesn't make any sense for them to make multiple sets of these high-quality assets because whichever has lesser quality (games) can be generated from the one with higher-quality.
Pick any two (except this is Lucasfilm, "better" isn't part of the vocabulary.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
This will never work. ;)
Cause I'm sure someone out there said that at some point, we would not longer be spending days, weeks, months, or even years in the studio to get a final product, and yet it still takes typically months for most projects*. Just because it's possible that that will happen, doesn't mean it will work for everyone.
*I emphasize most projects. Hiphop/rap/what have you are notorious for making sure that they get their next record out the moment sales dip from their previous one...perhaps that's why their songs are almost never memorable.
"Don't meddle in the affairs of a patent dragon, for thou art tasty and good with ketchup." ~ohcrapitssteve
Get to the end of the movie, the big climax, and Toad says "sorry, Mario, the princess is not in this castle."
That or we get a Gozilla flick where the monster looks remarkably like Bowzer.
Laughter is the Spackle of the Soul.
In the next Star Wars movie the rebels will fling themselves at the stormtrooper pigs with a giant slingshot.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
Since a lot of videogames are now being done for cellphones, this means vertical games and vertical movies.
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Dead or Alive Xtreme Volleyball models, in swimsuits, in all the future movies!
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Think of all the movie quality 3D assets that could possibly be included in games now. This has great potential for hilarity on YouTube. And my guess is that it has happened already at least once with Dreamwork's Shrek.
...which just continues to flush the toilet until everything is completely gone.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
The graphics are so awesome it takes you almost a full minute to notice they still let George write dialogue.
Someone has to do all the effects. It'll just have to be done before the film is shot.
It just transforms post production into preproduction, even if the composition of effects can be done concurrently with filming actors, you still have to actually produce the effects. And in this case, you have to rely more on the actors syncing correctly with the effects instead of adjusting the affects to match the actions of the actors.
"We think that computer graphics are going to be so realistic"
LOL.
Only if they plan on finally implementing CORRECT and realistic gravity and inertia models. Look at Gollum in Lord of the Rings, or the hundreds of apes in Planet of the Apes, etc.etc. Not one of them move realistically, not one of them has a realistic gravity or inertia model, so they are obviously CGI. Why is this? Why do the movie studios go to the huge effort of making them look incredibly realistic in still frames, but deliberately make the gravity and inertia models incorrect?
Most likely because when they DO use CGI to fool you, you actually think it's real...
Given George Lucas's history, Zork's going to involve ring-shaped explosion wavefronts.
Oh, and the Grue will have turned out the lights first.
And I was right - more unrealistic gravity and inertia models, when he kicks the crates! Absolutely pathetic. What exact formulae are they using, and why are they incorrect, and thus unrealistic?
Post-production work can be cut with this approach, but it means more pre-production work. The background art and animation produced in pre-production has to be good enough for final output.
Take a look at Before VFX, which shows how little of what appears on screen today exists in the real world. The latest Star Trek was almost all green-screen, of course. But movies which don't seem to be "effects movies", like The Great Gatsby, were done that way. If no actor touches it, it's probably CG.
Now to get rid of the actors...
Get to the end of the movie, the big climax, and Toad says "sorry, Mario, the princess is not in this castle."
So we've seen Mario's origin story (a recap of the events of Yoshi's Island and some of the sports games featuring Baby Mario) through the first world of the main quest, and Mario ended up rescuing one of the Toad Brigade from one of Bowser's adopted kids.
-- Thank you, Mario! But our princess is in another castle!
-- That's-a fine. We're gonna need a lot-a more manpower to tackle Bowser.
-- But who?
-- You head to Giant Land and rescue Toadette, Luigi'll be by the beach fetching Yvan, and I'm off to the desert to get Wolley.
The sequel hook is placed.
They didn't even take second takes. If this is the quality we can expect from Lucas in the future, they are going to crash and burn, (the parts that are left after the last few crash and burns).
The Anime studios have been integrating the same assets and effects in their films and movies for well over a decade.
Just in the last two years there has been plenty of successful examples by multiple studios in getting fluid and life-like movement in feature films on medium and small budgets.
In fact, full CGI films are it's generally consider trivial in many Japanese studios now and days. The only obstacle being the time it takes rather then the production cost since that is offset by a smaller staff working over a longer period.
Sadly, the film and game industries world wide been very unwilling to take any risks in the last couple of years. But, production speeds are still slowly reaching weekly series. Once that happens I fully expect many games and films studios to merge.
Correction: This is just realtime pre-vis, I.E. hopefully close to what the final effects will look like overlaid on the scene the director is shooting so the director can get a better idea of what they're shooting in realtime instead of having to wait until weeks or months after the shot to see what all the FX look like.
It's pretty much what Cameron was doing for Avatar, but it sounds like they just made it better because, hey Moore's law and video games look better all the time. Of course leave it to a tech ignorant journalist to completely misinterpret what's going on and then /. to post that article with the same headline.
The biggest advantage I see here is it lets you fully improvise on the set, and immediately see what it will look like in the finished product. That's a pretty awesome innovation because it will allow for more creativity, experimenting, and hopefully better storytelling.
The major weakness is actors actually interacting with their physical environment. Having the actor kick CGI crates is nice, but the actor is kicking air and it looks like he's kicking air.
Oh, and actors trying to perform in those costumes can't be easy. Putting on costume and makeup is a major part of an actor's transformation process. Andy Serkis seems to get it though.
It's adorable that you think you just now came up with a "joke" that dates back to about ten minutes after the company was founded.
Looker (1981) is getting closer and closer.
Cant wait for the first movie made and acted entirely by one person (or an AI).
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
So... they just announced Star Wars 1313 is still in development!
Great news.
So what, they'll also put Williams' orchestra and Burtt's team behind stage too?
I've seen so much Z flicker in modern video hardware (especially AMD) it's almost like playing stuck in 16bpp with Voodoo-based hardware again. Same goes for the 24-bit precision regarding the depth for shadow map accuracy. Do you really want to see flicker and shadow jagginess along angles in feature films?
That could prove interesting - create a game that's actually the post processing of the movie.
If builders built buildings the way programmers wrote programs, then the first woodpecker would destroy civilization.
Luke will put a Hamptser in the microwave in star wars seven. Censors to go crazy!
What you said, definitely. DVD extras (the best part of Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith) show preproduction steadily evolving. Nearly all movies are story-boarded before production, and animation houses have always made animatics showing the key frames and shifts of the camera. Nowadays effects-heavy movie scenes are pre-visualized on a computer: someone builds a 3-D world for the scene, puts some 3-D character models in it, animates the models, and then moves a virtual camera around to create a computer animation of the sequence of shots. The result is a clunky computer videogame cut-scene version of the sequence.
Which raises the interesting prospect that as computer graphics continue to improve, film makers will stop at the pre-visualization and declare victory. Why make a movie at all when it already exists? Five years ago after watching the "making of" featurette for the effects-heavy movie Hancock I wrote
So record the actors at the table reading of the script, lip-sync the existing character models with their voices, and you have the movie. Perhaps if the real-world actors can do a better job emoting than the pre-viz animators (a big "if" for some actors!), film them and composite into the existing movie.
=S
Others have commented how this will lead to dumbed-down movies with videogame features and Mario/Angry Birds franchise tie-ins, such as
Dead or Alive Xtreme Volleyball models, in swimsuits, in all the future movies!
... all with the face and voice of Jar Jar Binks ...
But this would actually be fantastic if if the movie watcher got to control the remix. There are cut-scenes in Red Dead Redemption that are rival anything in a movie (Marston's last encounter with Bonnie, so polite, so suffused with longing!) and then you can enter the world as one of the characters. Why limit your favorite characters to one setting, legal threats from George Lucas notwithstanding?
In a marvelous talk 10 years ago to the Director's Guild of America (read it!), William Gibson explores the long past of movie-making as storytelling, and predicts the future of it.
=S
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Great. Now we can look forward to even more fakerer bluescreen acting and even MORE packed and MORE dense scenes to cover up the complete lack of quality dialogue or plot that George Lucas is so good at creating.