Slashdot Mirror
Steven Spielberg to Produce Web Films
starlady writes "DreamWorks SKG and Imagine Entertainment apparently are trying their hand at Web movies. The
article says that the first will be shorts - but might we be seeing full-length movies soon if this first venture is successful?
"
When I was a kid my parents had HBO (illicitly, since HBO didn't feel that the Canadian market was worth the bother, not even the Canadian market that was all of 5 minutes from Detroit freely receiving their signals) and for the most part I didn't see the point. You could watch 'first run' movies that were over a year old and had already been out in the newish videocassete rental market for quite a while.
What I did occasionaly find entertaining were the shorts between movies. These were short films, most of them only a few minutes long, made by independant film makers. There was animation, claymation, puppetry, live action and probably others that I don't remember or didn't recognize. A lot of it didn't entertain me at all, but some of them were very entertaining. I've seen a couple of them rebroadcast on the Cartoon Network, unfortunately I don't remember titles, though one may have been called "The Cat is Back".
The reason that they were entertaining was that they took advantage of the short and relatively cheap format to experiment with things that you could never get financial backing for in any other media. I would hope that rather than trying to make mini-Star Wars that SKG would try and do something unique, something that they could never do in a larger format.
I don't know that the time is quite right for this venture. To keep the publics interest you're going to need a decent frame rate and resolution and I'm not sure that the bandwidth available to the average internet-connected public is available.
If it were, and if cheap content creation tools were available I'd love to see what the more artistic element of the general public could do. There would be a lot of crap and a lot of stuff done just for the shock value but my bet is that this is where the next ground breaking work would come from.
Who knows, maybe one of us could be the next Stanley Kubrick.
Now, from my perspective it looks as if Mr. Katzenberg had more money than anyone would ever need before he'd left Disney. But he's certainly run a vendetta against them since he's left, with zero regard for the little people who get hurt in a clash of titans. Not just the little people working with Disney, but collaborators of SKG who got caught in the cross fire.
There's even been talk about evil characters in Prince of Egypt that were drawn to resemble Disney executives. I can't say if any of this is true, but I hear so much of it and it seems consistent.
I sure don't mind being out of the movie business.
Bruce
Bruce Perens.
Being an Internet video producer, I have a feeling that POP.com will be a flop. We've already seen DEN's attempt to try to figure out what people on the Net want to watch (and "Frat Ratz" isn't it!). Pseudo does a bit better job, but their long-form live shows do not translate well into view-on-demand.
You can't just put anything up and expect an Internet audience to watch it. Net video content has to be relavent to the viewers. We're talking about shows with fierce independence, intellectual and emotional openess, free expression of often strong views, investigatory shows, and it can't be too corporate.
That's why we approached Slashdot to do Geeks in Space, even though we can't afford to make it a video show today, it is something that people want to listen to. People listen to GIS because it is relavent to them, the nerdy/geeky/hacker/open source population.
If you can watch it on TV today, you don't need it on the Net. It looks a hell of a lot better on TV. However there are plenty of opportunities to do cool video shows on the Net, you just have to have some clue about what Net viewers want to watch.
What scares me is that if POP and DEN don't work out, the entire Internet video industry could look really bad. I'm hoping that before that happens some money flows into the people who are making cool Internet video.
Now I can watch Spielbergian cinema-quality video in a 2-inch square, in brilliant mono 22Khz audio! I can marvel as little specks shoot from one side of the square to the other, and shoot monopixel lines at each other! A centimeter tall Jar-Jar Binks will bumble around hilariously at a blazing 3 frames per second! Truly this is a marvelous age we live in.
-lx
Takes about 1Mbyte/sec for DVD-quality mpg2 playback. That's a titch high for even DSL and cable modem users, and at 1Mbit/sec, more in line with what those users can swallow (on a good day, phase of the moon just right, servers aren't too badly loaded), you're going to need to play that back on one darn small window.
:)
If SKG wants to explore production on the web, I recommend taking a shot at fully modelled 3D animation, a la Pixar but way less geometric, lighting, and animation complexity, and instead make it real-time by requiring cheap but fast 3D accelerators. This hasn't been done professionally before, and as anyone who has watched a grainy, barfy little 320x200x256color Quake movie can attest, even "amateurs" have created dramatic, funny, awe-inspiring content. Imagine what the pros could learn to do, and with a budget, and with today's technology!
But it takes lots of talent to do it right and a lot of modifications to directing techniques to understand its strengths and limitations as a medium. So if they want to be there for the next big thing on the web, I think this is where they should be sinking the bucks and time. Unlike so many other web ventures, you could actually turn a profit selling good flicks for your PC, and there are some nice bennies:
1. You can re-use your character models,
textures, and basic animations.
2. You can re-use your world textures, possibly
parts of the geometery ("sets").
3. Colored lighting techniques are very cheap.
4. Those hyper-expensive spin-shots usually
done with a battery of cameras are now free.
5. You can re-use sound effects.
6. No expensive shoot. License actor skins in
several costumes for the movie, get their
lines in a foley studio. Then use
variations on stock animations for the
cast's movement instead of dragging big-name
and big-budget actors through the tedium of
mocap.
In other words, you get not only re-use within a production, but between productions, and in distribution, too. You just can't say that about platters of film or even DVD's. That could be a big, big deal.
Here's hoping SKG (or someone else wielding Mbucks of st00pid money) gives it a shot.
There is a gotcha. Unless they do some neat stuff, they will prolly still have to hock up a healthy 64kbits/sec stream for the soundtrack, and downloading those first textures and models is gonna smart a little. On the bright side, the user could always start watching without textures and watch them "res in" as the textures come down the pipe. (teehee)
Still, these are neat problems to have, unlike the one of how to make RealVideo look and sound better than pigs making bacon in what looks more like an icon than a window.
I've been less than impressed with Speilberg of late, what with those two awful dinosaur movies. I was intrigued, if not ecstatic, to hear that he'll be doing AI. As for this... it was inevitable, really. SKG already do theme rides, so it's not like they're mired in film.
I have my doubts about these; how will they charge, for example? I doubt they'll be free (after the first one or two, anyway).
I quote directly:
It's being financed by Vulcan Ventures Inc., the investment arm of Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen.
It must be bad!
This company must be the embodiment of Satan in the form of animated entertainment!
Chill, those of you who have to say "Microslop" and "Micro$oft". It's okay. Really.
I hope I caught this before the anti-Microsoft crew kicks in.. surely we can give 'em a break on this one, eh?
Notice how they DID NOT mention that the title of their first film is "Bill Gates: Man or God"? That's because it isn't. Take note, ye of little faith.
Well, hell, these days most movies are digital at some point in the process anyway, people have demonstrated their willingness to brave long download times for entertaiment, and the capitalists are fast coming up with ways to charge for it. It had to happen sooner or later, and The Great Speilberg decided on sooner. Long live the Animaniac.
fh
Maybe they should take a hint from the failure of that NetAid nonsense. Not the part about generation Y not giving less about charity, but that any high profile webcast is doomed to fail.
I mean, Real player? Who wants to watch something made by Spielberg on a 100*100 dot updated at about 5 fps. And while you and I know that this is because our Internet connections suck and might try to have patience, 99% of the viewers just get pissed off.
Until enough people have serious broadband capability and ip multicasting takes off, the Web is a lousy medium for film. Which is ok. It doesn't have to be everything. So if only Spielberg would let the hype be and go do what he is good at for a medium that deserves it instead...
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