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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.
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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...which just continues to flush the toilet until everything is completely gone.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
I think graphics hardware capabilities are the bigger bottleneck here. Game assets are often produced at very high quality levels during design but need to be scaled down to actually fit on the playing machine.
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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.
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.
putting on costume and makeup is a major part of an actor's transformation process. Andy Serkis seems to get it though.
Ever watched good actors? They don't need costumes. It's really pretty scary, they can get into character in seconds and if you're not ready for it it's quite a shock.
Faster! Faster! Faster would be better!
Looker (1981) is getting closer and closer.
Cant wait for the first movie made and acted entirely by one person (or an AI).
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Sir Ian, Sir Ian, Sir Ian...
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
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.
Scary? Bah. There's larping nerds who can do the same thing. That's way scarier.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
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
William's hasn't written an original piece of music since Star Wars (and even that is up for debate), so you can just auto-insert any of his previous "work" and then append is name to the movie credits.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
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.